The domestic reaction was almost universally negative. Republicans and Democrats alike chorused that the president had shamefully subordinated himself in tone and body language to Putin while siding with him against the assessment of the American intelligence community. Retired eminences of the security establishment such as John Brennan and James Comey have spoken of Trump being manipulated or influenced, and edgy commentators in Democratic circles have used words like "treason" and with memorable specificity even questioned whether Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.
This narrative is almost comically simplistic, and its dominance has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring realities about our realtionship with Russia that ought to be well understood by the public. Is it probably true that portions of the Russian government, directed by Putin, were involved with the hacks on the DNC and with ad buys designed to favor a Trump victory? Yes it is. But the gulf between that and the president being a paid agent of a foreign power is very large indeed.
The really central problem with the Trump-as-Moscovian-Candidate narrative is that its logical conclusion demands a ludicrous degree of hostility toward Russia as a major world power. People who hold or have held high office are comparing Russian activity in 2016 to the September 11 attacks. I need not remind the reader that the response to those attacks included but was not limited to two major invasions in the Middle East and central Asia.
This level of rhetoric, which has reached well into Democratic congressional leadership, has serious implications for our long-term relationship with Russia that deserve a great deal more consideration than they are being given. Trump got a lot of heat for saying that America is not blameless in the deterioration of relations between the two countries in the last decade, but even if it is for all the wrong reasons, in this instance he's right.
Vladimir Putin may be aggressive abroad and repressive at home, but he also didn't invade two Middle Eastern countries. He may be undermining the Ukrainian government, but our government is involved in a military and clandestine way against the ruling elites of two Russian allies, Syria and Iran. He may be threatening NATO members in the Baltic, but it was the United States government that chose to continue expanding NATO up to Russia's own borders following the Cold War - after by all accounts pledging not to.
None of this is to imply a qualitative moral equivalency between the Russian and American governments. But the difference to me is more like the one everyone recognizes between armed robbery and premeditated murder. One may be in fundamental ways worse than another, but neither of them is a particularly upstanding activity. When we complain of Russian opposition figures going missing or being killed, we ought not to forget the frequency or the impunity with which people of color in this country die at the hands of law enforcement. Why is it really that we hear fabulously wealthy Russians described as 'oligarchs' while their American counterparts are 'businessmen'?
The natural reaction of an opposition party is to seek anything available with which to bludgeon the party in power, so while I am significantly annoyed by it in the Democratic Party, I also expect it from them. The press seems to have learned nothing at all from its servile attitude toward the administration in the lead-up to Iraq. They make news out of absurdly bellicose comments, particularly toward Russia and North Korea, because those comments fit a negative narrative about Trump which is extremely lucrative. The consequences of that narrative for international relations aren't afterthoughts, because they aren't thought of at all.
I will say again here for the sake of clarity and because I know this is likely to be misunderstood, that the closeness between members of the Trump campaign and the Russian government is extremely disturbing and fishy. As far as I am personally concerned, whether that fishiness reached the level of a crime as technically described is less relevant than the fact that the Trump campaign was so eager to inquire about and encourage such help.
Yet while he has gone out of his way to be nice to Putin personally, many of Trump's policies are in opposition to Russian interests internationally. He has repeatedly threatened war against Iran, which is a key Russian ally, as is Syria, whose pro-Russian offical government has been repeatedly bombed by the Trump Administration. He has armed anti-Russian Ukrainians, something the Obama administration flatly refused to do.
What this implies to me is that Trump was quite willing to accept Russian help in the election to his own benefit, and now he is exercising his own power as he sees fit to expand American authority and by extention his own. If the price to be paid for that ability is being a little nicer to Putin than is considered reasonable by the American political establishment, so be it.
All of which suggests that while we ought to be horrified by and contemptuous of the sordid means the president was willing to employ to aid his bid for power, we should not permit that horror to be the foundation of a bellicose nationalism every bit as dangerous internationally as the one he represents. We are deluding ourselves if we fail to notice that the United States government has long been playing a political game with Russia that is about power and nothing else whatsoever.
Who rules in Ukraine is a question that certainly has a substantial moral component, but it has no dimension that seriously affects the well-being of the common people of the United States. Power politics is played for the powerful, and a party which claims to be the Democratic One ought to be more sensitive to that fact in its foreign policy pronouncements. It certainly shouldn't be promoting the rhetorical basis of a new Cold War for partisan advantage.
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