It is better to talk
Russia is not America’s friend. But we can converse.
With their usual unholy, and unintended, alliance, President Donald Trump and the elite American press have distorted and utterly obscured what should be the takeaway of the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit.
The point is not that Russia meddled in the last U.S. presidential election. (We know that Russia did.)
It is not that Mr. Trump refused to say Russia did so in front of Mr. Putin. (That would have been asking a lot, even of a more conventional politician. Presidents sometimes critique regimes in a public speech when visiting a country. Ronald Reagan did. But not during a summit press availability.)
It is that it is better to talk, and talk frankly, with our foreign allies and our enemies.
It’s fair to note that Mr. Trump has an easier time criticizing our friends than Mr. Putin, who is, let us be clear, our enemy. But it does not negate, nor does hysteria about Russia negate, the point of the summit: the restoration of diplomacy.
As Mr. Trump said after the meeting, in the joint press conference of the two leaders: Diplomacy is to be preferred, always, to war, including cold war.
And as the president also noted, even during the actual Cold War, there was diplomacy.
This is a point the American left made, correctly, for 50 years. It is common sense and history verifies it. The American right traditionally opposed this view and this policy. Russian was an “evil empire.”
But two of the greatest Cold Warriors and Russian demonizers of all time became the great American agents of detente at the end of the last century. Richard Nixon, the infamous red hunter, and Ronald Reagan, who liberally employed, if he did not coin, the phrase evil empire. Both became proponents of the simple truth: It is better to talk.
Now it is the left that says Russia is simply too evil to talk to. And only a part of the right disagrees — the part that likes Donald Trump.
But many, especially Republicans, are wary because Mr. Trump is supposed to be, according to the far-out left, and far-out press, a Russian dupe or a Russian spy.
There is little evidence for the first notion and none for the second. It’s crazy. But both notions are plant edin public consciousness. And the president feeds the mania when he refuses to admit that Russia meddled and that Mr. Putin isnot his friend.
Given the depth of Russian-Trump paranoia, the president was brave to have the meeting.
Given that paranoia, the president should have been more careful and more circumspect. We all know what Russia did. And we know it did not work — let that be said. The American public did not and will not have its election stolen.
We also all know who Mr. Putin is — an autocrat, a tyrant, a killer.
It is still better to talk. Just as it better to engage in diplomacy with the regressive and oppressive regime in Cuba and the brutally totalitarian regime in China.
Diplomacy helps prevent war, but it also, in time, opens closed societies to the dream of human liberty and the promise of capitalism.
Liberals and lefties were right about Russia in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: Talk and co-operate where possible — never putting blinders on. Mr. Trump is right in substance today, even with blinders.
Does he really trust Mr. Putin more than the FBI? That seems doubtful. But, if so, that, too, would be crazy.
The president navigates by a different political calculus, and sometimes he seems determined to say the wrong thing, though he knows better.
No matter. We do know who and what the Putin regime is, and we know it is still better to talk.
Our two countries are talking again, really, seriously, for the first time in almost 10 years. This makes no fundamental problem go away and is not a paradigm-shifting accomplishment. But it is not negligible either.