Brother Putin

As I write a Russian military transport plane the size of a small cruise ship and laden with medical supplies and equipment just crossed the Atlantic toward a stricken Third World country immediately north of the Rio Grande! The relief follows shortly after President Putin sent medical aid to Italy and Iran, two other countries the virus has hit hardest. President Trump has described Putin’s contribution to America’s health crisis as “very nice.” He knows, of course, that Moscow, and Peking, are busily trying to put over a global propaganda coup at the expense of the West. Further, Putin has just locked down Moscow, where Covid-19 has an even chance of killing half as many Russians there as the Bolsheviks did. Expecting the epidemic to spread across his country and wreak havoc there, he has taken this means to ensure that, when it happens, President Trump will reciprocate by sending American aid in return. (Just wait until hundreds of thousands of Russian perish from the “Chinese virus.”)

Trump can’t possibly imagine that Putin is acting from the goodness of his heart. But what difference does it make? The point is that in this instance he is behaving toward us in a friendly manner. The further, and more important, point is that he might have been doing so for more than three years had not Democratic operatives and the Deep State in Washington made it impossible for Donald Trump, after being sworn in as President in January 2017, to establish cordial relations with Moscow that would have benefitted the United States, Russia, and the nations of both Western and Eastern Europe—while depriving China of a militarily powerful and otherwise highly useful ally. Had Trump been free to act on his (very sound) geopolitical instincts, Russia could now be our ally—in many ways a more useful one than any of the European countries, save Great Britain. Instead, the Democrats’ wicked fabrication of the myth that Trump was “Putin’s candidate” in 2016 in order to sabotage his presidency and thwart his agenda made it politically impossible, for purely domestic political reasons, for him to adopt a policy of détente with Russia that the Democrats–who view Vladimir Putin as being as much an illegitimate president as Donald Trump–absolutely do not want, barring the Communist Party’s return to power.(The Democratic Party’s global dream team: Brezhnev’s successor in the Kremlin, Hillary Clinton –or Kamala Harris– in the White House.)

Trump’s acceptance of Putin’s contribution will be attacked and derided by the Left as cooperation in Russia’s propagandistic efforts, whether from political incompetence and naïveté, or more sinister motives (or both). The President should ignore all of it. He made the right decision, one that he ought to make the basis of his relationship with Moscow for the remainder of his term. No one believes the Big Lie about Russia any longer, and he has everything to gain by cultivating the Kremlin in a cautious and dignified manner, and nothing to lose.