Trump’s Outreach Efforts to Russia Should Be Commended

Trump’s Outreach Efforts to Russia Should Be Commended
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold a joint press conference at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
7/27/2018
Updated:
7/28/2018
Predictably, the Trump-Putin summit and the presser after the meeting in Helsinki, Finland, sent American mainstream media, Democrats, and NeverTrumpers in the Republican Party into a state of collective hysteria.
Trump “engaged in treasonous behavior,” Thomas Friedman of the New York Times charged. If Trump’s comments about whether Russia hacked the 2016 election are “treasonous behavior,” Obama’s promise to Putin’s lackey Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” after the 2012 U.S. presidential election would have been outright treason. But I don’t remember that Friedman called Obama out.
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House Minority leader, told MSNBC the Russians “must have something” on Trump. It is a widely held belief among the Democrats, but it is pure garbage. The U.S. intelligence community and later Robert Mueller have been at it for one and half years. What have they found? Nothing.
The fact is we don’t know what Trump and Putin had discussed in the meeting. It is too early to judge if the summit is a success or if it will have real impact. But based on the facts we do have, it doesn’t take a PhD degree to see that a friendly Russia is better for the American people than a hostile Russia, that an improved U.S.-Russia relationship is in America’s best interest, and that U.S.-Russia cooperation, not confrontation, can make a positive impact on the peace and prosperity of the world. Not that long ago, these ideas were the consensus of the Obama administration. They should not be controversial at all.
Anti-Trumpers like to harp about Russian meddling in the U.S. elections. Mueller indicted  13 Russians and three Russian companies for internet trolling. Their crimes? Posting social media ads that nobody paid attention to. More recently, Mueller also indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers for hacking DNC’s email servers. However, so far no one has proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Russian meddling flipped one vote or changed the result of the 2016 presidential election.
But there was a critical U.S. election we knew that was rigged by meddlers successfully. The race was the 2016 Democratic primary. And the meddlers were the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC. Their goal was to throw the race in Hillary Clinton’s favor. The former interim DNC chairwoman, Donna Brazile, believed this was the truth. So did Bernie Sanders, the rival of Mrs. Clinton and the victim of the rigging. Sanders supporters sued. The DNC’s defense strategy is basically self-incrimination.  It said that it had the right to rig the Democratic primary because it is a private organization. Comically, the federal judge agreed with the DNC, and the lawsuit was dismissed.
There are tons of evidence that James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey and their henchmen all tried to interfere with the 2016 election on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. The Democrats have fought tooth and nail to impede the investigations.
I have no problem with the Democrats’ obsession with election meddling, But I do have a problem with their “Russian meddling bad, our meddling good” hypocrisy.
Liberals claim the Helsinki summit was an “easy win” for Russia and Putin. But how? Last time I checked, Trump didn’t loosen any sanction against Russia and Putin’s friends. Trump didn’t make any concession on policies that we know of. Trump didn’t fly a plane-load of U.S. dollar bills to Moscow to buy Putin’s cooperation. He didn’t order U.S. banks to deliberately violate sanctions so to help Russia recoup frozen assets, and then deny to Congress this happened. More importantly, Trump didn’t sell his verbal exchange with Putin as a treaty to American people.
Obama did all of the above when he negotiated the so-called Iran Nuclear Deal. With the worthless “deal,” the United States. essentially got nothing. Iran, on the other hand, regained over $100 billion in assets and faced no more international sanctions. The country’s secret nuclear programs were not disturbed. No wonder the Iranians took to the streets and celebrated all night.
It is a clear win for Iran. Yet no one in the mainstream media said it’s an “easy win” for Iranian mullahs. Au contraire, liberals proclaimed in unison that it’s a big win for Obama. Similarly, it was another win for Obama, according to the media, when he ended the Cuba embargo without getting any concession from the Castro regime. Cuba remains an oppressive country.
Putin is an autocrat. He enriched himself through power and rewarded his cronies handsomely. His political opponents regularly end up dead. With that said, I take engagement and dialogue with Russia over confrontation and belligerence any day. After all, the U.S. and Russia own over 90 percent of the nuclear weapons on earth, which are enough to kill humans a couple of times over. Descending into Cold War 2.0 with Russia would be a grave mistake. Trump’s outreach efforts to Russia should be commended, not berated.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.