Motus Mentis

How wearying it is to watch the reaction of the press, and of his political enemies, to President Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin. The hyperbole — “Treason! Pearl Harbor! Kristallnacht!” — would be comical if we weren’t already at about the halfway point on the road to civil war. (This is the same crowd, remember, who cried bloody murder when Ronald Reagan referred to the USSR as an “evil empire”.)

It would be a very good thing for us to find some way to get along with Russia. Not only would we be able, as partners, to exert a dominating influence where our interests coincide (and they coincide in many places), but the alternative — an escalating Second Cold War, with potential flashpoints in, to name just a few hot spots, the Baltic, Ukraine, and Syria — is the only external circumstance in the world at the moment that actually rises to a genuine existential threat. (The greatest threats of all, of course, are still endogenous: factional war, cultural collapse, and suicidal immigration policies.)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our policy has been to grind and provoke Russia in every way imaginable. We have meddled in their elections far more consequentially than anything they might have done to ours. We have fomented an anti-Russian revolution in Ukraine, abrogated arms-control treaties, and pushed NATO right up to Russia’s frontiers. In doing so all this (and more) we have spoiled every chance to form what could have been a mutually beneficial relationship.

I am old enough to remember the height of the First Cold War; there were moments when we missed mutual nuclear annihilation by a hair’s breadth, sometimes by nothing more than luck. We are in a situation now that is no less dangerous, and in many ways more so — and not least because any overture that might pull us back from the brink is denounced as treason, and as further evidence of Mr. Trump’s fealty to Mr. Putin.

President Trump is right to do what he can to restore sanity, and if possible even comity, to our relationship with Russia. He deserves our support as he tries to do so.