Helsinki May Have Been "Trumps Finest Hour"

I read a handful of articles this morning on Trump's meeting with Putin in Finland.  Of course we can expect the left to be aghast at anything Trump could have done or said to Putin.

If he would have called Putin a "bold faced liar" and threatened him with more sanctions if he EVER meddles with US elections again, the left would have said, "This guy is crazy!!  What is he trying to do?...start WWIII?  Doesn't he know Putin has nuclear weapons pointed at us?"

Instead, Trump seemed to be very congenial with Putin.  He appeared to tell the world that since Putin said they didn't meddle in our elections that maybe they didn't meddle?  I can't believe that Trump really believes that, but maybe he was just finding a way to get along better with Putin?

Maybe that was a huge mistake?  Maybe he is an idiot?  Maybe he is leading America further down the path to destruction?

Check out this article in which the author believes it was Trumps finest hour.

Putin Summit May Prove to Be Trump's Finest Hour

What?  Did you just read that headline correctly?

Yes, you did.  Writing it I assumed people's heads would explode.  It's about as far as you can can get from today's conventional wisdom (i.e. what David Gergen thinks).  Virtually every member of the smart set from Pelosi to McCain to some ninety-five percent of the media, including several cowards on Fox News, to, alas, Lindsey Graham (who should know better) are going out of their minds excoriating Trump for being soft on Putin, even for being "owned" by the neo-Soviet strongman. John Brennan -- once a communist himself, so he should know -- accused Trump of treason.

Okay, time for that familiar cliche -- the thought experiment.  Suppose Trump had done the opposite, exactly what these people demanded -- verbally and viciously assaulted Putin for all his totalitarian tropes from annexing the Crimea to humiliating John Podesta for being so dumb as to fall for a phishing attack (all right -- I'll be fair. For invading the computers of Democratic Party operatives, allegedly to elect Trump) and so forth?

What would that have accomplished? The obvious answer is zilch.  Again the opposite would most likely have occurred.  Things, already bad, would have been set back further.  It's human nature. You don't have to be a personal acquaintance of Vladimir Putin to know that.  You only have to be breathing.

But... but...  then Trump shouldn't have held the summit in the first place.

Oh, really? Although Russia -- the largest nation on the planet -- is in many ways a failing state with an economy barely the size of Texas, it still has a huge percentage of the world's nuclear weapons, about equal with ours, and the capacity to deliver them (and to pass them along to unreliable non-state actors).  It behooves us to have a relationship with them for our survival and everybody else's, to keep our friends close and our enemies closer, as the Godfather would put it. The obvious goal in this is to limit nuclear proliferation and even to reduce, or at least stabilize, the nuclear arsenals as agreements come up for renewal.

If you look at Trump's actions in that context, what he says and what he does aren't so strange. His strategy should be clear by now to all those except those (unfortunately many) who deliberately don't want to understand it. I wrote about it earlier  in "Trump's New Foreign Policy: The Cooptation Doctrine."

He is, as Greg Gutfeld noted on The Five, his own good cop and bad cop all rolled into one.  The good cop part is what we saw with Kim Jong-un and now with Putin -- complimenting tyrants to an almost uncomfortable degree.  It's oddly a Christian love-the-sinner-but-hate-the-sin kind of thing.

The bad cop part is what Trump actually does concretely -- and, as Putin certainly knows, this is far more important than photo ops and press conferences with all the attendant words.  Trump's actions vis-a-vis Russia have been considerably more stringent than his predecessor's -- opening the energy spigots, increasing sanctions, arming the Ukrainians, ejecting 60 Russian agents, etc.  As Walter Russell Mead pointed out, if Trump is in Putin's pocket, he's doing a terrible job of it.

Here;  https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/putin-summit-may-prove-to-be-trumps-finest-hour/

Please remember friends, that Trump is not going to save America.  The divisions and problems have simply gotten too deep. Our immorality has dropped too low. Trump may have been put in place by God to give us Bible-believers a smile and a reprieve following 8 years of leftist idiocy...but Trump is not going to fix America.

Think about this for a second....maybe Trump was put on center stage by God to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and further make that city a "cup of trembling"?  Also, maybe Trump's meeting with Putin did nothing to further America but in fact elevated Russia on the world stage to further prepare them for leading the Ezekiel 38 coalition?

Pray for Trump but let's be clear that our ONLY hope is in Jesus Christ.  There will be no peace until the Prince of Peace shows up to usher in the thousand years.