“I have been much tougher on Russia than Obama,” President Trump tweeted this week. “Just look at the facts,” he went on in his characteristic manner. “Total Fake News!”
Trump’s assertion is debatable, to say the least. Even assuming that their fevered theories of illegal Trump-Russia election conspiracies come to naught, his critics have a point when they note Trump’s creepily friendly attitude toward would-be dictator Vladimir Putin.
If Trump wants to prove himself tougher on Putin than former President Barack Obama was, he needs to begin by reversing his decision last month on Russian sanctions. His actions, setting aside Congress’s new sanctions, hearken back to the same disturbing Russophilia that suffused his 2016 campaign — an odious and naive attitude that we criticized repeatedly.
But we would be remiss in administering this just criticism without pointing out that Trump is not completely wrong in his tweet. For even if Trump’s failures are more immediate and give the lie to his boasting, it must also be admitted that Obama’s abject and inexcusable weakness toward Russia has been far more consequential than anything Trump has had time to do in office so far.
Trump’s critics are not all wrong, but they should probably examine their own motives before lecturing anyone on Putin, after they spent so many years backing a policy of appeasement toward him. When they thought they had something to gain from it for their partisan side, these same commentators derisively laughed at the idea of Putin as America’s No. 1 geopolitical foe. It is evident that Mitt Romney — the former Massachusetts governor turned Republican presidential candidate turned Utah Senate candidate — was dead right about this all along. His critics, dead wrong, destined to become the butt of history’s jokes decades from now.
Those who supported Obama’s obeisance and acquiescence to Putin should ask themselves just who enabled him to interfere so effectively in American and European politics as he does today. They should probably be showing more humility now, given the predicament in which they have put their fellow countrymen, their country, and indeed, their new president, whose bad instincts on Russia needed no encouragement from them.
The johnny-come-latelies of anti-Putinism were more than happy to show the diminutive oligarch the “flexibility” he needed to devour Crimea and invade Ukraine immediately after the last Winter Olympics. They also stood by and cheered as Obama let the Russians seize control of the Syrian chemical disarmament process. They shouted down all who doubted Obama’s reassurances, against the evidence gathered by his own intelligence services, that this disarmament had been successful. Surprise surprise, Obama was wrong, and with fatal consequences.
You could trace Obama’s Putin-coddling all the way back to 2009, when Obama delighted Putin by abandoning America’s plans for a missile shield in Eastern Europe.
The best metaphor for Obama’s approach to Putin was his response to Russia’s downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in July 2014. As Russian intelligence officers and their separatist allies waltzed through the wreckage of that airliner, removing evidence of their culpability, Obama responded by complaining that Russia had failed to “use its influence” over its forces fighting in eastern Ukraine. How could anyone imagine Putin not laughing at this?
The problem with so many newly awakened critics of this would-be emperor is that they put their party ahead of their country back then, yet suddenly they expect everyone else to display a selfless patriotism they never possessed. They are only upset about Russia now because they believe Putin, in addition to committing war crimes and assassinating his critics on Western soil, also committed the even greater crime of making Trump president.
In a spirit of forgiveness and amity, it is worth welcoming and congratulating belated left-wing converts. It’s about time they abandoned Obama’s naive attitude and started taking the Russian threat seriously. But as true as their criticisms of Trump now ring, it is very much up to them to demonstrate the sincerity of their new gospel. Every convert must first admit his old ways were wrong, and right now, there seem to be a lot more excuses than admissions.
As difficult as it is for many liberals to admit that Obama could be wrong about anything, they must now shrug ruefully and grimace at his once-celebrated joke about how the 1980s are calling and demanding their foreign policy back. For the 1980s are indeed calling, and they are wondering what it finally took, 30 years on, to get liberals to stop sucking up to Russian leaders.
It turns out that the answer all along was Trump’s election.
