President Trump rolled out the red carpet and other trappings of diplomacy last week to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin to U.S. soil for what were largely unproductive talks about ending the Ukraine war.
During his time with Putin, an accused international war criminal who in 2022 launched an unprovoked armed invasion of Ukraine, Trump referred deferentially to his guest as “Vladimir” and hailed “a fantastic relationship” he claimed to have with the Russian dictator.
The Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska contrasted sharply with another presidents visit this month – that of Karin Keller-Sutter, president of Switzerland. She hurried to Washington, D.C., to trim or forestall a staggering, 39% tariff ordered by Trump on most Swiss exports to the United States.
Unlike Putin, Keller-Sutter received no red-carpet treatment, no effusive welcome. She didnt even see Trump, conferring instead with Secretary of State Marco Rubio before returning home empty-handed. The 39% tariff, one of the steepest U.S. levies in the world, took effect August 7.
Trumps behavior during the respective presidential visits was asymmetrical – but unsurprising. He has a tendency to cozy up to powerful leaders while, at least on occasion, insulting or ignoring leaders of smaller, weaker, more out-of-the-way countries. The Swiss-tariffs episode is an illustration of that impulse – and its hardly the only such example.
During his first presidential term, Trump referred privately to Haiti, El Salvador, and African states “shithole countries,” according to the Washington Post. More recently, Trump derided the tiny south African state of Lesotho as a place “nobody has ever heard of.” He boasted early in the year that countries were “kissing my ass” to land trade deals with his administration.
Trump “has grown all too accustomed to people he perceives as weaker bending to his will, which is something that Putin does not do,” Ben Rhodes, former adviser to President Barack Obama, recently told the Guardian newspaper.
Trumps tariffs blindsided the Swiss, who had dropped duties on nearly all U.S. imports last year. Notably vulnerable should the elevated duty remain in place are signature Swiss exports such as industrial machinery, high-end chocolates, cheese, and luxury watches of a kind popular in the United States among Gen Z.
Switzerland is a tidy, wealthy country, about twice the size of New Jersey. The Swiss are quite aware of their countrys compactness. They refer to it reflexively. They are never very keen to mix it up much in the tougher, wider world. Switzerland long has been politically neutral, a policy that has served the country well; it was last in an armed conflict in 1847, a civil war that lasted about a month.
But it is no secret the Alpine state tilts reliably toward the United States in global affairs. Geneva was the venue for bilateral, U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in the 1970s and 1980s. It was the venue for bilateral summit meetings between U.S. and Soviet or Russian leaders in 1985 and 2021.
More recently, Geneva was the meeting place for two days of discussions between American and Chinese trade negotiators. Switzerland, moreover, has long looked after U.S. interests in Iran, given the absence of diplomatic ties between Washington and Tehran. Scott Bessent, U.S. treasury secretary, has referred to Switzerland as “a sister republic” of the United States.
While neutrality is nominally important to the Swiss, they are more comfortable with American Democratic politicians than Republicans. They never were at ease with Ronald Reagan, whom many Swiss privately derided as an ill-informed cowboy, reckless in international affairs. They certainly are befuddled, and little amused, by the hardball ways of Donald Trump, whose persona is without equivalent in Swiss political life.
In tariff negotiations, Swiss news outlets reported that Trump out-maneuvered Keller-Sutter. In a telephone call at the end of July, Trump said the Swiss should pay higher duties given that the country of 9 million people was running a $48 billion trade surplus with the United States. That imbalance is pumped up by exports of gold bars to America, which are refined in Switzerland and exempt from Trumps tariffs.
The late-July telephone conversation deteriorated to what the Swiss newspaper 24 Heures described as a “fiasco,” as Keller-Sutter had no backup plan to offer Trump.
The failed negotiations dismayed the Swiss, who remain vaguely hopeful that the tariff can be trimmed, perhaps to 15%. That was the duty Trump negotiated with the European Union (of which Switzerland is not a member).
Negotiation and mediation are leitmotifs in Switzerland, tenets that help explain the countrys enduring political stability. Switzerland is, after all, a landlocked collection of German, French, and Italian-speaking states known as cantons. And German-speaking Swiss prefer expressing themselves in regional dialects that are almost incomprehensible to compatriots elsewhere in Switzerland.
Despite its unusual demography, Switzerland has prospered – ever mindful of, but traditionally unaligned with, its larger neighbors in Western Europe. If nothing else, Swiss unity, and a shared sense of anxiety for the near-term economic future, have intensified this month in response to Trumps giving the back of his hand to a small but reliable U.S. trading partner.
W. Joseph Campbell formerly reported from Switzerland as a newsman for the Associated Press. He is a professor emeritus at American University in Washington, D.C., and has written seven solo-authored non-fiction books.
