If President Trump wants people to stop saying he’s a stooge for Russian’s Vladimir Putin, he should stop serving Putin’s interests.
Trump gave Putin two major gifts in the last two days alone, one substantive and one propagandistic. Neither gift was remotely warranted. Both gifts harm U.S. interests.
The substantive gift was the removal of thousands of U.S. troops from bases in Germany, while the public relations donation involved policy in Afghanistan. Let’s take the latter first.
The latest of many propaganda victories Trump has afforded the murderous Russian dictator came in an interview he did July 28 with Jonathan Swan of Axios on HBO. While Trump deflected numerous questions about whether Russia had offered “bounties” to the Taliban to kill American personnel, Swan specifically noted the uncontroverted reports that Russia did supply arms to the Taliban, regardless. As the Taliban has repeatedly attacked U.S. forces, Swan asked, shouldn’t Trump at least object to Putin about that? Bounty or no bounty, isn’t Russia’s arming of the Taliban a direct affront to U.S. interests and to peace?
Astonishingly, Trump excused Russia’s perfidy, essentially by saying the United States was just as bad.
“Well, we supplied weapons when [Afghanis] were fighting Russia too,” Trump said.
This is inane. When the U.S. supplied weapons to the proud mujaheddin, who certainly were not co-extensive with the Taliban, by the way, it was to help Afghanistan expel brutal Soviet forces working to conquer Afghanistan for communist hegemony. There was no good reason for Russia to be there, murdering Afghanis by the thousands.
The U.S., on the other hand, entered Afghanistan while defending itself and the world from Islamist terrorists. Whatever this wisdom of still being there, we are there not for conquest but in defense, while at the same time assisting a legitimate government and massively aid that country’s civil society. Our goals are profoundly moral, while the Soviet’s goals were evil. Russia’s current embrace of the Taliban, too, is evil: The Taliban is one of the world’s most vicious regimes.
Yet Trump seems always willing to provide Putin’s Russia with moral equivalence to the U.S. He has done so repeatedly, most famously when he responded to Bill O’Reilly saying that Putin is “a killer” by saying, “We have a lot of killers … you think our country is so innocent?”
This isn’t America First; it’s America debased. It amply serves Putin’s immoral diplomatic goals. And when the U.S. forfeits its own moral authority, its own diplomatic effectiveness suffers. Indeed, without moral authority, President Ronald Reagan never would have been able to succeed in leading the Cold War victory over the same Soviets who birthed Putin.
Yet if propaganda is important, the readiness of military force can be more important still. That’s why the even more damaging bequest this week from Trump to Putin was Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will remove nearly 12,000 of its roughly 36,000 troops from bases in Germany. Trump said he is doing it to punish for Germany for not meeting its full NATO commitment of defense spending, but Trump’s predicate is gravely wrongheaded. Trump said our troops are “there to protect Germany, and Germany is supposed to pay for it,” but that’s ridiculously simplistic.
Yes, protecting Germany is, of course, part of the job of American troops there, but it’s not as if the U.S. is doing the Germans a favor. The U.S. is in Germany not because of misbegotten altruism, but to serve key U.S. needs.
For one thing, Germany’s location makes it valuable as a hub for U.S. operations, both air-based and military-medical, over a broad swath of the globe. The even more important interest, though, is to deter Russian aggression. It is precisely because Russia remains such a malignant force that the U.S. must maintain a vigilant presence in central Europe. The cost of keeping forward-operations capability near the old Iron Curtain is far less than the future cost would be to restrain a Russia that became successfully resurgent.
That’s why opposition to Trump’s move has been genuinely bipartisan.
Perhaps the best summation came from Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “U.S. troops aren’t stationed around the world as traffic cops or welfare caseworkers — they’re restraining the expansionary aims of the world’s worst regimes, chiefly China and Russia,” Sasse said in a release. “The President’s lack of strategic understanding of this issue increases our response time and hinders the important deterrent work our servicemen and women are doing.”
Moreover, “Maintaining forward presence is cheaper for our taxpayers and safer for our troops. Chairman Xi and Vladimir Putin are reckless — and this withdrawal will only embolden them. We should be leading our allies against China and Russia, not abandoning them. Withdrawal is weak.”
Yet when it comes to dealing with Putin, that’s Trump’s standard posture: weak. It’s also an abject surrender of U.S. interests, not to mention American dignity.
