The
Risk of Baiting Trump on Russia
In the drive to damage President Trump, American
liberals have seized on his desire for more
cooperation with Russia, baiting him as “a Putin
puppet,” a dangerous strategy.
By Norman Solomon
Four weeks
into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman wrote that “nothing he
has done since the inauguration allays fears
that he is in effect a Putin puppet.” The
liberal pundit concluded with a matter-of-fact
reference to “the Trump-Putin axis.”
Such
lines of attack have become routine, citing and
stoking fears that the president of the United
States is a Kremlin stooge. The meme is on the
march — and where it will end, nobody
knows. Actually, it could end with a global
nuclear holocaust.
The
incessant goading and denunciations of Trump as
a Kremlin flunky are escalating massive pressure
on him to prove otherwise. Exculpatory behavior
would involve setting aside possibilities for
detente and, instead, confronting Russia —
rhetorically and militarily.
Hostile
behavior toward Russia is what much of the U.S.
media and political establishment have been
fervently seeking. It’s also the kind of
behavior that could drag us all over the brink
into thermonuclear destruction. But c’mon, why
worry about that?
For countless media commentators and partisan
Democrats including many avowed progressives —
as well as for some Republican
hawks aligned
with the likes of Sens. John McCain and Lindsey
Graham — the benefits of tarring Trump as a
Russian tool are just too alluring to resist.
To be clear: For a vast number of reasons, the
Trump administration is repugnant. And the new
president’s flagrant violations of the U.S.
Constitution’s foreign and domestic emoluments
clauses are solid grounds for impeaching him.
I’m glad to be involved with a nationwide petition campaign
— which already has 890,000 signers — urging
Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. We
should go after Trump for well-grounded reasons
based on solid facts.
At the
same time, we should refuse to be stampeded by
the nonstop drumbeats from partisan talking
points and mainline media outlets — as well as
“the intelligence community.”
It wasn’t mere happenstance when the Director of
National Intelligence, James Clapper, openly lied at
a Senate committee hearing in early 2013,
replying “No sir” to a pivotal question from
Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type
of data at all on millions or hundreds of
millions of Americans?” The lie was exposed
three months later when Edward Snowden made
possible the release of key NSA documents.
Yet now we’re supposed to assume straight-arrow
authoritative honesty can be found in a flimsy
25-page report “assessing
Russian activities and intentions,” issued in
early January under the logo of Clapper’s Office
of the Director of National Intelligence. That
report has been critiqued and demolished by one astute
analyst after another.
As investigative journalist Gareth Porter noted,
“In fact, the intelligence community had not
even obtained evidence that Russia was behind
the publication by WikiLeaks of the e-mails [of
the] Democratic National Committee, much less
that it had done so with the intention of
electing Trump. Clapper had testified before
Congress in mid-November and again in December
that the intelligence community did not know who
had provided the e-mails to WikiLeaks and when
they were provided.”
More broadly and profoundly, many cogent
analyses have emerged to assess the
proliferating anti-Russia meme and its poisonous
effects. For instance: “Why
We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump”
by Stephen F. Cohen at The Nation; “The
Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From
a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook”
by Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept;
and “The
Did-You-Talk-to-Russians Witch Hunt”
by Robert Parry at ConsortiumNews.
The
frenzy to vilify Russia and put the kibosh on
the potential for detente is now undermining
open democratic discourse about U.S. foreign
policy — while defaming advocates of better
U.S.-Russia relations in ways that would have
made Joe McCarthy proud. So, President Trump’s
expressions of interest in improving relations
with Russia — among his few lucid and
constructive statements about anything — are
routinely spun and smeared as corroborations of
the meme that he’s in cahoots with the Russian
government.
Many organizations that call themselves
progressive are culpable. One of the largest,
MoveOn, blasted out an email alert on February
10 with a one-sentence petition calling for a
congressional investigation of Trump — flatly
declaring that
he has “ties to the Russian government.”
Trump’s
Views on Russia
Consider these words from President Trump at his
February 16 news conference:
—
“Look, it would be much easier for me to be
tough on Russia, but then we’re not going to
make a deal. Now, I don’t know that we’re going
to make a deal. I don’t know. We might. We might
not. But it would be much easier for me to be so
tough — the tougher I am on Russia, the better.
But you know what? I want to do the right thing
for the American people. And to be honest,
secondarily, I want to do the right thing for
the world.”
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
—
“They’re a very powerful nuclear country and so
are we. If we have a good relationship with
Russia, believe me, that’s a good thing, not a
bad thing.”
— “By
the way, it would be great if we could get along
with Russia, just so you understand that. Now
tomorrow, you’ll say ‘Donald Trump wants to get
along with Russia, this is terrible.’ It’s not
terrible. It’s good.”
Rather
than being applauded and supported, such talk
from Trump is routinely depicted as further
indication that — in Krugman’s words — Trump “is
in effect a Putin puppet.”
And how
could President Trump effectively allay fears
and accusations that he’s a Kremlin flunky? How
could he win cheers from mainstream newsrooms
and big-megaphone pundits and CIA headquarters?
He could get in a groove of decisively
denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin. He
could move U.S. military forces into more
confrontational stances and menacing maneuvers
toward Russia.
Such brinkmanship would occur while each country
has upward of 4,000 nuclear warheads deployed or
stockpiled for potential use. Some are attached
to missiles on “hair-trigger alert” — which, the
Union of Concerned Scientists explains,
“is a U.S. military policy that enables the
rapid launch of nuclear weapons. Missiles on
hair-trigger alert are maintained in a
ready-for-launch status, staffed by
around-the-clock launch crews, and can be
airborne in as few as 10 minutes.”
Those
who keep goading and baiting President Trump as
a puppet of Russia’s government are making
nuclear war more likely. If tensions with the
Kremlin keep escalating, what is the foreseeable
endgame? Do we really want to push the U.S.
government into potentially catastrophic
brinkmanship with the world’s other nuclear
superpower?
Norman Solomon is the coordinator
of the online activist group RootsAction.org and
the executive director of the Institute for
Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen
books including
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing
House.
No
evidence yet of Trump team, Russia contacts: key
lawmaker;
U.S. intelligence officials had not yet
presented the committee with any evidence of
contacts between Trump campaign staff and
Russian intelligence.
