Amerika

Trump met Putin in Helsinki, said some complimentary things, and the world lost its mind.

Well… not the whole world, exactly. Our press did, and all the “experts,” and the politicians. No one else seemed to care.

This group has consistently under-estimated Trump and he has specialized in trolling them. A typical Trump day involves doing one thing with his right hand, while concealing it by having the left hand bash out an inflammatory Twitter post or stirring leaks with a hint to the less-faithful staff in the White House.

Trump has made this a bit more complicated, in this case, by appearing to apologize, which as Papa John’s founder John Schnatter discovered, is never a good idea. If you do not apologize and force them to fire you, then they take the blame if something goes wrong; if you apologize, that’s the end of it, and no one else has any skin in the game.

However, the basic elements of a Trump Troll remain: he went to meet the forbidden leader, since the American Left now fears a more traditionally-oriented Russia, and he made some statements that we all knew were true, then went home to let the Left and its lapdog media stew.

For example, Trump told us that he does not trust intelligence agencies. No kidding… really? The same guys who rubber-stamped the cooked-up dossier funded by the Clinton campaign, failed to investigate her extremely dubious email server, and validated a Russian phishing attack on both the DNC and RNC as election interference?

The Left complains that this hands victory to Russia:

President Donald Trump handed Russian President Vladimir Putin an unalloyed diplomatic triumph during their summit here Monday as he refused to support the collective conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Trump’s warm rhetorical embrace of Putin, who he said had given him an “extremely strong and powerful” denial that Russia assaulted America’s democracy, marked an extraordinary capstone to the first formal meeting between the current leaders of the world’s nuclear superpowers and sparked trepidation and horror among many in Washington and around the globe.

In other words, Trump did not support the Leftist conclusion that the Russian election interference in any way swayed the election, or that it was anything other than business as usual for the Kremlin, who attempted to hack the GOP but did not succeed. The clearly Left-leaning intelligence agencies do not mention that often.

Those intelligence agencies have been at the throat of the presidency for as long as this writer can remember. In the 1960s, the CIA wanted more leeway to go wild across the globe fighting Communism; while the effort was noble, the methods were varied, some being brilliant and many being dubious.

Some even think the CIA or another American intelligence agency had something to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While they deserve a medal for helping remove a die-hard Leftist as well as Irish immivasion of the USA, this same enmity remains fifty years later.

What a banana republic we live in! A president is assassinated, and most of the country still does not trust the official reports. Almost none of us trust the media or social media, which is turning out to be the cheaper and less grounded version of the old media. We certainly do not trust each other across political lines.

But, back to your CIA and NSA and whatever third agency is now taking the role those two did in turn, intelligence agencies like armies are always competition for whoever is in charge. They have their own mandate; this often clashes with diplomatic reality.

Trump went to Helsinki and told us all what we needed to hear: the charges of Russian collusion are fake, and any parts of The Establishment which have endorsed them are in fact traitors. Instead, the Left called Trump a traitor for approaching Putin in a spirit of mutual cooperation.

They have not studied the Trump Method. Having spent a lifetime navigating around corrupt and unreasonable people, Trump knows well how to make a deal. He comes in seeming almost dumb, being very positive, and then he casually sets up the situation so the other person needs to do something to demonstrate similar good will.

Putin almost certainly realizes that the ball is now in his court, and he has to live up to the Trumpian diplomatic potlatch. Russia must now make a gesture of goodwill, or compliance, in order to be seen as anything but a third-world tin-pot dictatorship which is oblivious to the subtle game of diplomacy.

By treating Putin fairly, Trump established a firm reset of international relations. Instead of pushing other countries out of the circle of powerful nations, Trump wants them at the table so that they experience no sudden surprises and are accountable for what they do.

We are farther from nuclear war than at any time previous under this plan because Trump has opened not just military channels, or even political ones like the infamous Moscow-Washington phone line during the Cold War, but diplomatic ones. He is telling them that they are accepted, but that conditions will follow.

Whether explicitly stated or simply implied, conditions are following.

This fits within the Trumpian Doctrine of treating every foreign nation as a self-interested party, and offering them a share of the business so long as they maintain the correct behavior. Work with me, and I have your back, says Trump. Turn on me, and I become a Mafia don, and you do not want to see that side of The Donald.

Trump did not cuck to Russian power. When Russia intervened in the middle east, he blew up two hundred of their mercenaries. He has criticized both wimpy Obama and gangster Putin over the seizure of Crimea, applied sanctions, and said that he does not trust Putin to be anything but what he is.

Even more, Trump has shut down Russian criticism of America by demonstrating diplomatic good faith while maintaining an aloof cynicism (from March 30 of this year):

Russia’s ambassador threw down the gauntlet Friday morning, telling NBC’s “Today” show that it’s time for the United States to decide where it stands with Russia. He even invoked the prospect of a new Cold War.

“It seems to me that atmosphere in Washington is poisoned; it’s a toxic atmosphere,” said the ambassador, Anatoly Antonov. “It depends upon us to decide whether we are in Cold War or not.”

Trump ended the Cold War and upgraded its status to diplomatic tussle. Putin now has to live up to his promises: if Russian hacking is found, Putin becomes a liar; if Russia fails to responsibly discuss Crimea and MH17, Putin becomes a bad guy. Trump has brought Putin to the big table, but with that come big responsibilities.

As always, the Left lies about everything they can in order to advance their narrative of everyone but Leftists being bad. Trump has rebutted this Leftist aggression by insisting on seeing every party as self-interested and none as selfless, noble, and egalitarian, which discredits the fundamental mythos of the Left.

We enter a new era with the fading of liberal democracy, faith in bureaucracy, and consummately ideological government. Trump is replacing it with a wary and seasoned realism, based in knowledge of human nature, and his Russia gambit is a triumph that fits within that framework, as we will see in coming months.

Tags: cold war, donald j. trump, helsinki, russia, vladimir putin