By Charles Lane:
There remains, however, one blindingly obvious, utterly true and, so far, insufficiently explained fact: Trump favors Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Putin favors him.
You hardly need a clandestine “Source A” to know that RT, the Kremlin’s global media network, has consistently apologized for Trump. Nor is there much doubt that the Putin regime hacked Democratic Party documents harmful to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and used WikiLeaks as a front for their release, as even Trump fleetingly and grudgingly conceded Wednesday.
Through it all, Trump has dodged the issue of Russian meddling in the election and changed the subject to the purported benefits of closer relations with Moscow, insisting Wednesday that “if Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks? That’s called an asset, not a liability.”
There needs to be more focus on why this bizarre bromance is so dangerous, even if its origins lie in nothing more sinister than the misguided foreign-policy musings of a celebrity real estate mogul.
Basically, the risks are the same as they would be in allying with any corrupt, dictatorial regime — magnified many times over by Putin’s geopolitical and ideological pretensions, which are ambitious indeed.
Whatever its other defects, the leaked document describes those rather well: Putin aims to “encourage splits and divisions in the Western alliance” so as to foster “a return to 19th-century ‘Great Power’ politics . . . rather than the ideals-based international order established after World War II.”
Trump’s big idea is an alliance with Moscow against the Islamic State, which his designated national security adviser, the Russophilic Michael T. Flynn, has promoted for years on the grounds that our “common enemy” is radical Islam.
The Full Story (January 11, 2017)
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