Maybe Trump's Partly Right

President Trump is being hammered with criticism from both left and right for his apparent acceptance of Vladimir Putin's assurance that the Russians didn't meddle in the 2016 election despite the assessment of our intelligence agencies that they did. He's also taking a lot of heat for his tweet that poor relations with Russia are the fault of past clumsiness in the crafting of United States foreign policy.

I would have preferred that he not have made either of these claims, or if he had, that he employ the qualifier "largely" in the second one, but even so, David Goldman at PJ Media makes a compelling case that Trump was "largely" correct in what he said about American policy toward Russia.

This is not to absolve Russia which is led by brutal, amoral men, Mr. Putin chief among them, but as Goldman argues, the United States has, going back to President Clinton, repeatedly interfered in Russian politics and repeatedly sought to undermine the Russian government.

I should mention that whether Goldman's argument is sound or not he's not a Putin fanboy. He writes that,

I'm no Russophile. I'm an old Cold Warrior. I don't like Putin. I don't even like Dostoevsky (he invents improbable characters to suit his theological agenda) or Tolstoy (Pierre Bezukhov and Anna Karenina bore me). I don't especially like Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky. I don't like drinking Russian-style (get as drunk as you can as fast as you can). I like a lot of individual Russians -- they have guts, and tell you what they think. I'm so leery of Putin's machinations in Europe that I prefer Angela Merkel to the Putin-friendly German right wing.

Nonetheless, it was America that made a mess of relations with Russia, and President Trump’s tweet this morning was right on the mark. You can usually gauge the merits of this president's public statements by the decibel level of the protests.

Despite losing a ton of credibility with me for his opinion of Dostoevsky he nevertheless makes a convincing case about Trump's claim about American policy toward Russia. Here are a few excerpts:

President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said, and he is entirely correct. By this I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader.

Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia.

Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying member of the neoconservative cabal that planned to bring Western-style democracy and free markets to Russia after the fall of Communism.

...Unfortunately, the delusion that the United States would remake Russia in its own image persisted through the Bush and Obama administrations. I have no reason to doubt the allegations that a dozen Russian intelligence officers meddled in the U.S. elections of 2016, but this was the equivalent of a fraternity prank compared to America’s longstanding efforts to intervene in Russian politics.

The United States supported the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine and the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in the hope of repeating the exercise in Moscow sometime later.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland pulled whatever strings America had to replace the feckless and corrupt Victor Yanukovych with a government hostile to the Kremlin. She didn’t say it in so many words, but she hoped the Ukraine coup would lead to the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.

Evidently Nuland and her boss, Hillary Clinton, thought that the Ukraine coup would deprive Russia of its Black Sea naval base in Crimea, and did not anticipate that Russia simply would annex an old Russian province that belonged to Ukraine by historical accident.

The Maidan coup was the second American attempt to install a Ukrainian government hostile to Moscow; the first occurred in 2004, when Condoleezza Rice was secretary of State rather than Hillary Clinton.

As I wrote in Asia Times a decade ago, “On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president - now premier - Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding 'Orange' revolution in Ukraine. ‘They lied to me,’ Putin said bitterly of the United States. ‘I'll never trust them again.’ The Russians still can't fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West."

Russia is in crisis, but Russia always is in crisis. Russia has a brutal government, but Russia always has had a brutal government, and by every indication, the people of Russia nonetheless seem to like their government. If they want a different sort of government, let them establish one; what sort of government they prefer is not the business of the United States. America’s attempt to shape Russia’s destiny, starting with the Clinton administration’s sponsorship of the feckless, drunk and corrupt Boris Yeltsin, had baleful results.

So did the State Department’s attempt to manipulate events in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.

There's more from Goldman at the link.

Mr. Trump's comments certainly seem to be unfortunate even were they technically correct, but before jumping on the outrage bandwagon, I'd like to know what was said in the private meeting between the two men. The tone could have been very much different, for all anyone knows. Perhaps both men agreed that henceforth they would refrain from surreptitious political interference in each other's countries and for the present they'd put the current unpleasantness behind them. If so, that would be a good thing.

Whether this is what happened or not, certainly the president, as The Federalist's Megan Oprea writes, has been tough on Russia policy-wise, and those actions are far more important than his words, which are not infrequently more misleading than edifying anyway.

In any case, one of the more amusing aspects of the hostility Mr. Trump has incurred for his statements implicitly disparaging our intelligence agencies and blaming America for our tattered relationship with the Russians is that so much of it comes from the progressive left which has historically been hostile to our intelligence agencies and arrantly prone to "blame America first" for whatever evils are afoot in the world.

You'd think that the left would be praising the president for his statements which diminish our own intelligence service and blame America for a truculent Russia rather than castigating him for it, but consistency is not a virtue held in high regard among leftists. It's rather jarring to see the left wrap themselves in the flag and make patriotic noises.

It seems that whatever this president says or does, a lot of people will happily abandon whatever principles and positions they formerly held in order to adopt a stance in direct opposition to him.

This being so, perhaps if President Trump wants to defeat the Democrats in November he might consider announcing that he's going to join the Democratic Party. Upon hearing that news the entire left in this country would promptly flee the party and rush to the polls to vote Republican.