Look carefully at the Donald Trump 'leaks' and you might find proof the US is in safer hands than you thought

Reliability, even reliable hostility, is something Russian leaders tend to prefer. There's reason to believe they may have preferred Hillary Clinton in the White House

Many have accused Putin and the Kremlin of trying to rig the US election in Donald Trump's favour (Getty)

Try a little gentle displacement. Consider how it might have felt to sit in the Kremlin these past few months, observing developments in the United States. You had never, in your wildest imaginings, believed that American voters would elect Donald Trump. Indeed, left to yourself, you had rather hoped they would not.

After all, you knew pretty much where you were with Hillary Clinton – you were on the opposing side. But with Trump, well, the upside of his professed desire to want better relations with Moscow also had a downside. He could turn from nice guy to nasty on a dime. Reliability, even reliable hostility, is something Russian leaders, like their Soviet predecessors, tend to prefer. Trump was, and is, unpredictability personified.

Of course, there were a few around you who joshed about the chances of a Trump victory, but only because they never dreamed it might happen. And, of course, your intelligence services had been trying to find out what was really going on in the US campaign, as well as trying to probe for exploitable weaknesses in the main candidates. That was what they were paid shovel-loads of taxpayers’ roubles to do.

Mostly, though, you were just waiting for 20 January, Inauguration Day, and extending some feelers – from conventional diplomacy to cyber, and back again – while trying not to destroy the prospect of better Russia-US relations before this unlikely Trump presidency had even begun. Then all hell broke loose.

First, all the talk of Russian covert support for Trump during the election campaign – talk you thought had gone away with his victory – came back with a vengeance. Like Trump, you tried to dismiss all the noise as the frustrated howling of Democrat losers. But the US intelligence services produced a document designed to show he was wrong. It found that the Kremlin had not only hacked into both main parties’ computers, but set out to manipulate the election in Trump’s favour.

Next, even as you were fielding your Kremlin spokespeople all over again to ridicule the idea of Russian election-rigging, another bombshell exploded. It turned out that, as part of their effort to convince Trump of Russia’s general badness, US intelligence had also drawn his attention to a salacious dossier containing Russia-related material designed to compromise him. Once again, you sent out your Kremlin spokespeople with ridicule and denials, but not before the whole thing had found its way, via the new media, into the public domain. Who knew what to think?

The one person who did was... Trump, who pre-empted any demolition job the Kremlin might have had in mind. He expressed fury that the scurrilous dossier had seen the light of day (whoever leaked it), and stood by his intention to court the Russians. “If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks, that's called an asset, not a liability!” he bawled. In the event that they did not get on, he added, he would be a good deal tougher on Putin than Clinton.

All of which was splendid knock-about stuff. Yet some of the questions that the mysterious Trump-Russia-US intelligence triangle has raised in recent weeks cannot but cast their shadow over the Trump presidency. And they are reinforced by what has become a little-challenged consensus in many – especially European – circles, to the effect that Russia and Trump are somehow linked in a way that bodes ill for the Western world.

This is not a view that I share, so here is another reading of the three-cornered slanging match that has so dominated the Obama-Trump transition.

First, was there Russian interference in the presidential election? It is important here to separate two exercises. Intelligence agencies the world over were surely doing their utmost to divine what was going on behind the scenes of the US election, as were diplomats and the media more openly. Actually trying to rig the election, though? Such things can happen – alleged Western involvement in the 1996 Russian presidential election is often cited as a case in point. But the idea that Russia set out to rig the 2016 election in Trump’s favour veers, to me, between implausible and absurd.

Nor has the US intelligence services report changed my view. The best they can offer in support of their contention that leading Russians were rooting for Trump is that a fringe Russian nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, talked about celebrating a Trump victory with champagne.

Having combed this document line by line, I find it simplistic in most of its analysis and its assumptions; some of its “facts” are long out of date, and it relies disproportionately on a vastly exaggerated assessment of Russia’s international broadcasting effort. Let’s hope the declassified version is more substantial, because if this is the best US intelligence can do, its problems go far beyond any threat that Russia might pose.

The report’s headline conclusions are also shot through with inconsistency. On the one hand, it claims that Russia set out – and in fact managed, given Trump’s victory – to rig the election. On the other, it insists that Russian intelligence did not penetrate the count. In a way, they had to say this, because there would otherwise have been grounds for a legal challenge and for the election to be rerun. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that the CIA wanted to cast doubt on Trump’s legitimacy as president, without actually impugning the US democratic process. I’m not sure, logically, that stands up.

Which brings us to the “dodgy dossier”. The veracity of this document, allegedly authored by a former British spy, remains contested. But it reads to me like any other report compiled by an ex-intelligence agent who has touted for commercial hire, with exaggerated claims to top-level sourcing and conclusions tailored to please (we became familiar with such reports during the Litvinenko inquiry last year.)

Veracity is not the only problem with this dossier, however. Another is that the “revelations”, designed to compromise Trump the businessman long before his presidential run, would seem to place the Kremlin on the other side – trying to undercut, rather than enhance, Trump’s prospects. Yet another is that along with standard Kremlin “kompromat” – bedroom scenes, and so on – the dossier also contains observations that work in Trump’s favour. None of the alleged attempts to lure him into “sweetheart” business deals succeeded, apparently; he declined them all!

So maybe the future of the United States is safer with Trump than is often thought. Maybe, too, the common view that Trump has been somehow induced – or even blackmailed – by the Kremlin to make better relations with Russia a campaign pitch is actually wrong. I, for one, cannot understand why he would need any inducement to pursue a policy that makes such eminent sense.

Better US-Russia relations could not only defuse a lot of other tensions, but foster a united front against Isis and other threats. It was a failing of Obama’s administration not to achieve his “reset” with Russia, and he left a policy gap crying out to be filled.

Just to stress: this is my take on what has been going on. It is a minority view. It is not what Trump’s many opponents the world over would have you believe. But it is not inconsistent with the evidence, such as it is. And you really don’t have to be in hock to the Kremlin to believe that an East-West thaw would be an improvement on what we have now.