Putin, Trump, Obama and Our Shared Interests with Russia

The current insanity over the Russian hacking of DNC emails, not yet proved in my opinion, is another tempest in a teapot.  It has merely provided Obama another opportunity to demonstrate his petulance and contempt for Trump.  It's ironic that the hacks, as revealed on Wikileaks, demonstrate just how corrupt the media and Democratic party are.  Their collusion is only surprising as to the vastness of its extent.

Worth considering is the extent to which our nation's interests align with Putin's.  This is not the same as admiring Putin, who is a dictator and likely murderer.  But he is also the leader of a singularly important nation, whose interests have changed since the cold war.  Full disclosure, I am a former officer in the U.S. Submarine force, but that doesn't influence my thinking here.

First and foremost, both Russia and the U.S. have an interest in isolating and defeating Islamic extremism.  Russia is ringed by Muslims 'stans on its southern border.  Their experience with the Chechens demonstrated the need to contain the spread of extremism.  The U.S. interest in this matter is actually less clear, but certainly, our security from terrorism has to top the list.  With this common interest, cooperation with Putin on defeating ISIS in Syria, keeping the Sunnis and Shiites divided to contain extremism makes sense.  For the record, I don't think that the Arab Muslim world can ever be democratic due to the high rates of consanguineous marriage; Steve Sailer laid this out over a dozen years ago.

The other conundrum with Russia is the confluence of continued warfare in the Middle East and the Russian violation of the Ukrainian border and seizure of Crimea.  One of the key sources of conflict in the Middle East are the asinine borders that do not respect natural geographic feature or traditional tribal regions.  The rise of ISIS stems from the fact that Sunni tribes in both eastern Syria and western Iraq feel greater kinship to each other than to Shiite governments in Damascus and Baghdad respectively.  A redrawing of the borders is necessary to end the incessant warfare and migration crises.  But the U.S. is wedded to a policy of strictly maintaining the sanctity of borders worldwide.  We believe that a failure to do so would allow mischief to break out along Chinese, Indian, or other regions.  This is where Russia comes in.  Their seizure of the Crimea was just, in my opinion, given that it was stolen from the Russian federation in the 1950s by Khruschev.  Were we to grant the legitimacy of some border changes with Russia, they might be amenable to a deal where we redraw Middle East borders, as a one-time exception to the sanctity of borders policy.

I believe that the future of Europe has been put in danger by Muslim migration.  Dealing with the root causes, other than Merkel's fecklessness, is in our long term best interest. Only Europe and the Anglosphere share our values, so helping to save them from themselves is in the U.S. national interest.

The final way in which our interests align also involves Europe.  For various political reasons, Putin has postured as the only defender of traditional Christian values.  I doubt that he is sincere, but his example in promoting these values stands as a contrast to the current European model of attempting to destroy Christianity within the borders of Western European nations.

So I applaud Trump for his tweet.    

Russians are playing @CNN and @NBCNews for such fools - funny to watch, they don't have a clue! @FoxNews totally gets it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

He knows he has time to deal with Putin.  Putin smartly decided not to retaliate against Obama's petulance, which was the alpha male move.  A relationship based on mutual respect and recognizing shared interests will serve the U.S. well when it comes to Russia.  Since Russia abandoned international Communism, our interests can often be aligned.