SUMMIT’S HEIGHTS
Trump productive in meeting with Putin
In a much anticipated faceoff between two global powerhouses, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met for the first time yesterday in a high stakes tete-atete at the G-20 summit in Germany.
With all the dire national security threats facing America — from North Korea test-launching a gamechanger ICBM on July 4, to the Syrian civil war, to the radical Islamist threat — President Trump knows that the U.S. is strategically better off establishing a positive working relationship with the Kremlin than the alternative.
It’s certainly better than letting Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and Iran form a powerful alliance against the U.S., leaving us dangling in the wind as North Korea continues its dangerous nuclear proliferation program. That would undoubtedly embolden Iran to do the same while Russia expands its geo-political influence in the Middle East and beyond.
A scenario like that could easily spiral out of control.
The Syrian civil war — a modern day genocide — has not only claimed the lives of over 500,000 civilians to date under the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime but continues to be a driving force in the global refugee crisis.
That diaspora has endangered our allies in Europe, given the fact that ISIS has encouraged radicals to exploit the porous refugee flow to wage jihad against the West.
A more productive option is the one we got from the summit — the U.S. working with the Kremlin to enact a partial cease-fire in Syria and pledging to eradicate ISIS. Our two nations are also jointly putting pressure on China to take decisive economic action against North Korea to defuse its rapidly advancing nuclear program.
Democrats and liberal media should think twice before defaulting to the usual extreme partisanship, and instead should begin supporting what’s in America’s best interests.
That means stop pressuring the Trump Administration to levy additional sanctions and other painful measures, which will only serve to alienate Putin and poison the diplomatic well.
It was an encouraging signal that the first meeting between Trump and Putin lasted almost two hours longer than originally planned. The more they talk, the better.
Voters should ask themselves this: If the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could famously attempt a “Russian reset,” why can’t the Trump administration?
Trump is smart to tune out the elitist D.C. echo chamber and just trust his gut.