Patching It Up With Putin
President
Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin --
with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the
Russian president's face over his hacking in the election of 2016.
Hopefully,
Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among
the reasons Americans elected him to office.
What
president, seeking to repair damaged relations with a rival
superpower, would begin by reading from an indictment?
President
Eisenhower did not begin his summit with Nikita Khrushchev by
berating him for crushing the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956 -- a
more grievous crime then hacking the emails of John Podesta.
President
Kennedy did not let Russia's emplacement of missiles in Cuba in 1962
prevent him from offering an olive branch to Moscow in his widely
praised American University address of June 1963.
President
Nixon, in first meeting Leonid Brezhnev, did not denounce him for
extinguishing the Prague Spring. Were Trump to start his first summit
with Putin by dressing him down, why meet with him at all?
Trump
would do better to explore where we can work together, as in ending
Syria's civil war and averting a new war in Korea.
Moreover,
when it comes to interference in the internal politics of other
nations to bring about "regime change," understandably,
Putin might see himself as more sinned against than sinning.
Should
Trump bring up the email hacking in 2016, Putin could ask him to
explain U.S. support for the violent coup d'etat that overthrew a
democratically elected pro-Russian government in Ukraine, a land with
which Russia has been intimately associated for 1,000 years.
Consider
the behavior of post-Cold War America, after Moscow gave up its
empire, pulled all its troops out of Europe, let the USSR dissolve
into 15 nations and held out a hand in friendship.
We
gathered all the Warsaw Pact nations and three former Russian
Federation republics into a NATO alliance targeted at Russia. We put
troops, ships and bases into the Baltic on the doorstep of St.
Petersburg. We bombed Russia's old ally Serbia for 78 days, forcing
it to surrender its birth province of Kosovo.
Among
the failings of America's post-Cold War foreign policy elites are
hubris, arrogance and an utter absence of that greatest of gifts that
the gods can give us -- "to see ourselves as others see us."
Can
we not see why the Russian people, who saw us as friends in the
1990s, no longer do so, and why Putin, a Russia-First nationalist,
has an 80 percent approval rating on the issue of standing up for his
country?
Looking
about the world today, do we really need any more crises or quarrels?
Do we not have enough on our plate? As the Buddhist saying goes, "Do
not dwell in the past ... concentrate the mind on the present
moment."
Americans
are rightly angry that Russia hacked the presidential election of
2016. But what was done cannot be undone. And Putin is not going to
return Crimea to Kiev, the annexation of which was the most popular
action of his long tenure as Russian president.
As
D.C.'s immortal Mayor Marion Barry once said to constituents appalled
by his latest episode of social misconduct: "Get over it!"
We
have other fish to fry.
In
Syria and Iraq, where the ISIS caliphate is in its death rattle,
Russia and the U.S. both have a vital interest in avoiding any
military collision, and in ending the war. This probably means the
U.S. demand that Syrian President Assad be removed will have to be
shelved.
Consider
China. Asked by Trump to squeeze Pyongyang on its nuclear missile
program, China increased trade with North Korea 37 percent in the
first quarter. The Chinese are now telling us to stop sailing
warships within 13 miles of its militarized islets and reefs in a
South China Sea that they claim belongs to them, and demanding that
we cancel our $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan.
Hong
Kong's 7 million people have been told their democratic rights,
secured in Great Britain's transfer of the island to China, are no
longer guaranteed.
Now
China is telling us to capitulate to North Korea's demand for an end
to U.S. military maneuvers with South Korea and to remove the THAAD
missile system the U.S. has emplaced. And Beijing is imposing
sanctions on South Korea for accepting the U.S. missile system.
Meanwhile,
the dispute with North Korea is going critical.
If
Kim Jong Un is as determined as he appears to be to build an ICBM
with a nuclear warhead that can hit Seattle or San Francisco, we will
soon be down to either accepting this or exercising a military option
that could bring nuclear war.
Trump
cannot allow this Beltway obsession with Putin to prevent us from
closing, if we can, this breach. If we do not bring Russia back into
the West, where do we think she will go?
https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2017/07/07/patching-it-up-with-putin-n2351539?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
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