Our president’s statements after his meeting with Putin were appalling. He went further than Neville Chamberlain’s famous “Peace for our time” announcement after Munich, 1938. Trump also sounded like a 60’s teenage anti-war activist blathering moral equivalence. Remember the shouts from the time – we are just as bad as Ho, comrade Brezhnev, and the Belgians in the Congo? Chamberlain, though, to his credit would have recoiled at such rubbish. Nevertheless, Trump and Chamberlain end up at the same place: appeasement.
How can a Republican president, knowingly or unknowingly, sound like the radical SDS of yore? The mind-set could be the outcome of a pinched view of life solely reliant on personal experience. Like Chamberlain, domestic matters framed the near totality of knowledge and interest for our fumbling president. Lifetime efforts to go beyond through study and thought are absent, leaving behind only interests and knowledge accrued through business and relationships within an arm’s reach. Everything outside this box is given the first-thought-that-comes-to-mind treatment. This mental reflex makes it easy to be fooled by thugs whose rise up the “greasy pole” resembled the career pathway of a mafia don.
Business and politics in a developed country is decidedly different from the rabid dog approach to power and fame in many other countries, à la Stalin. People with a business background are disarmed when dealing with people who’ll coolly instigate a “Night of the Long Knives” (Hitler’s slaughter of Ernst Röhm and the SA in 1934) or “Great Purge” (Stalin’s massacre of party and military leadership of 1936-38). The Kim sadism and Putin gangsterism are modern versions of the same phenomena. Sitting down with them isn’t quite the same as haggling with planning commissions and union bosses. If you think otherwise, you are proving that you haven’t done much in your life beyond a momentary Google search.
Jonah Goldberg in his column of 7/18 makes much of the self-centeredness of Trump to explain Trump’s blarney after the Putin summit, and there’s much to the charge. But we Americans are particularly adept at choosing the naïve and ill-prepared when dealing with the key part of the president’s Constitutional job description: foreign affairs and national security. Woodrow Wilson was convinced his oratory would win over the Allies and Germany to his lofty moral internationalism; FDR thought he could charm the 500,000-corpses-per-year Stalin right up to his last breath; JFK was bitch-slapped by Khrushchev in Vienna; W was romanced by Putin’s eyes; and Obama pledged to be “flexible” if he succeeded in fooling the American electorate into giving him another 4-year lease on the White House (which he did). The pizzazz fizzled into the rise of fascism, the Iron Curtain and Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Russian military adventurism. Naivete fueled by ignorance has dark consequences.
Much of the world is a political cesspool, a far cry from having to deal with corrupt local politicos, mudslinging, and trumped up (pun not intended) oppo research. Compare that to group garroting and a bullet to the head down a lonely basement corridor — by the thousands. Vice-President Cheney had it right when asked about what he saw in Putin’s eyes. He saw a “KGB colonel”. An educated realism has been chronically missing from the résumé of many of our most recent chief executives, including this one. A sobering thought.
RogerG