Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?<\/p>\n
Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no.<\/p>\n
Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.<\/p>\n
During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin’s ally Bashar Assad alone.<\/p>\n
With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a “thug” or a “murderer.”<\/p>\n
Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.<\/p>\n
O’Reilly pressed, “But he’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”<\/p>\n
To which Trump replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”<\/p>\n
While his reply was clumsy, Trump’s intent was commendable.<\/p>\n
If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a “killer.”<\/p>\n
Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a “thug” and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.<\/p>\n
Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, “When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?”<\/p>\n
Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.<\/p>\n
When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the “Butcher of Budapest” for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?<\/p>\n
Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?<\/p>\n
While Nixon was in Peking, Mao was conducting his infamous Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that resulted in millions of deaths, a years-long pogrom that dwarfed the two-day Kristallnacht. Yet Mao’s crimes went unmentioned in Nixon’s toast to America and China starting a “long march” together.<\/p>\n
John McCain calls Putin a KGB thug, “a murderer, and a killer.”<\/p>\n