Democratic Zealots Undermining American Foreign Policy

Frenzy upon frenzy… Stephen Cohen calls the constant drumbeat of news about Trump’s Russia collusion a “political-media cult.” Right he is. At a time when we are assailed by increasingly hysterical and hyperbolic attacks on Donald Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, it is worthwhile to step back, to take a deep breath and to submit the allegations and insinuations to a reality check.

Few are more qualified than retired Princeton and NYU professor Stephen Cohen. Better yet, Cohen is writing for The Nation, not, at last report, a branch of the vast right wing conspiracy. Thus, an expert without any pro-Trump bias... we should pay close attention to his idea.

The frenzied media and political elites have decided that Trump is conspiring with Putin:

The New Year has brought a torrent of ever more frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship—why mince words and call it “collusion”?—with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

The anti-Trumpers want only one thing: to end the Trump presidency… but to do it in the name of democracy. In other places, Cohen suggests, such words would be an incitement to a coup d’etat. Cohen suspects that Robert Mueller will not be able to demonstrate that Trump committed treason or worse. And thus, tellingly, the leaders of this coup have no interest in hewing to the facts:

Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller will not produce the hoped-for “bombshell” to end Trump’s presidency. Certainly, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, “The president must go,” his drop line exhorting, “What are we waiting for?” (In some countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.

Is there any credible evidence of Trumpian treason? Cohen says that there is not:

And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times’ own recent “bombshells,”published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials “began investigating whether [President Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those “agents and officials” almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases.

The fewer facts, the less evidence, the more strident the attacks. They have no basis in fact, but are, Cohen says, suspicions and allegations, often promoted by Democratic party hacks:

Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the “news” almost daily in the synergistic print and cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton’s top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution. According to Talbott, “We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker… . Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency.” In fact, we do not “know” any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated suspicions and allegations.

As for the threat that Russia poses, it is overblown. America’s most important international competitor is China, not Russia:

In this cult-like commentary, the “threat” of “a hostile Russia” must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth, Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.) For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. 

As for the issue of an American president negotiating with the Russian leader, history tells us that American presidents have been doing to for decades now:

Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened “threat” represented by “Putin’s Russia.” If true, we would expect the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because, according to The Washington Post, he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed the records of their private talks, sure signs of “treasonous” behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018.

But then, Trump’s detractors say, no one but a translator was present when Trump spoke privately to Putin. Is this exceptional? Not at all, Cohen says. It has been the rule:

It’s hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though probably both. In any event, the truth is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged “private time” for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev’s détente policies with Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump’s proclaimed goal of “cooperation with Russia.”)

That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the “secrecy of presidential private meetings…has been the rule, not the exception.” He continues, “there’s nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president’s private meetings with foreign leaders… . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not.” Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US “bureaucracy,” sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev’s translator was present.

Such meetings have produced some important benefits:

Nor should we forget the national security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In February 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, meeting alone with their translators, decided that all nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result, in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate range ones

As it happens, Congressional Democrats have become mindless zealots. They want to subpoena the translator who was present at the Trump-Putin meetings. This will render future diplomacy nearly impossible… and this, to Cohen, increases the risk of war:

And yet, Congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump’s meetings with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of nuclear superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years—and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book War with Russia? that anti-Trump Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.

You know and I know that Congressional Democrats are playing it for the political theatre. In so doing they are undermining America’s national interest and showing themselves to be unfit to govern.