Now that the Russian Collusion Myth has been revealed to be a mendacious conspiracy by the Deep State, the Democratic Party and the media, President Donald Trump needs to move on with his election promise to improve relations with Moscow. That is a geopolitical and civilizational necessity.
It is essential to note that the same neolib-neocon conspiratorial cabal which manufactured the Collusion out of whole cloth also contains America’s morbidly Russophobic heart of darkness. In the print category, according to The New York Post’s list of media pundits who got it most wrong on Mueller, “the top seed is the never-Trump honcho Bill Kristol.” Last August he predicted that “Mueller will find there was collusion between Trump associates and Putin operatives; that Trump knew about it; and that Trump sought to cover it up and obstruct its investigation.”
As it happens, and as we occasional readers of the late unlamented Weekly Standard well remember, Kristol’s hatred of all things Russian is on par with Hitler’s hatred of all things Jewish. It is to be suspected that the unspeakable “pundit” would be happy to risk an all-out nuclear war just in order to see a hundred million Russians murdered, never mind the consequences for America. Personally I have no doubt that this is the case.
Kristol is closely followed by The Washington Post’s unspeakable Max Boot. They share the propensity to be wrong on everything, literally so, and the liking for every war, actual or potential, where America’s “engagement” may crack some Serb skulls (in Kristol’s memorable phrase, but Arabs, Persians, Russians etc. will do just as nicely).
With Boot we encounter a carbon copy of Kristol’s pathology: he loathes Trump with a passion and he hates Russia to boot. Last July he wrote, “President Trump’s mantra is ‘no collusion,’ something he says as if sheer, mind-numbing repetition can make it true.” He also routinely calls Russia an international outlaw, guilty of “unprovoked aggression in Georgia and Ukraine,” whose “meddling in U.S. elections and war crimes in Syria demand more punishment.”
The same Trumpophobic-Russophobic twin pathology applies to Anne Applebaum, Joy Behar, Hillary Clinton, Ed Lucas, Rachel “all-roads-lead-to-Moscow” Maddow, Michael “the US does not need Russia for anything” McFaul, Joe Scarborough, Benjamin Wittes . . . The list is long and predictable in its chief contours: All of these people want Trump dead and they also want Russia eradicated from the map, or carved up.
These people’s motives for hating Trump and hating Russia are rooted in rather similar forms of malevolent ideological obsessions. They hate all American deplorables inhabiting the flyover country because they are rather similar to most Russians: white, Christian, non-postmodernized, free from self-hate and morbid introspection, not ashamed of their ancestors, unwilling to surrender their country to alien multitudes, unobsessed by transgender bathrooms, microaggressions, and other “issues” indicative of a society’s moral and intellectual decrepitude.
In order for the real reset in relations with Russia to be possible—and this is, let me repeat, an urgent geopolitical and civilizational necessity—these people need to be fought mercilessly, now that they are down. Trump should go at them hammer and tongs.
The first task is to debunk the Russian Meddling Myth, the Collusion’s twin brother. Who better than Trump to admit that the government of the United States has been the Meddler-in-Chief for decades (Russia’s own elections included), to announce that this practice will stop, and to explain that Russia’s alleged “hack” into Hillary Clinton’s emails was an inside DNC job. Top retired CIA and NSA officials can explain why: among other things because of the speed of its transmission, and because a hack from Russia would have been picked up by NSA grid.
People spewing raw hate and fear-mongering—both on the character and motives of the President of the United States and on the character and intentions of his opposite number in the Kremlin—must be stopped. They are deranged and dangerous: we have not seen anything like the discourse they deploy even in the darkest days of the Cold War.
Over the past two years Trump may have been serious about the Reset, but as we’ve seen after Helsinki last summer the Deep State/media counterpressure proved just too great. A solid rejection front now extends even into his own team (Pence, Pompeo, Bolton . . . ) and has so far inhibited him from making moves that could have appeared influenced by “collusion.” It is time to discard that burden and do the right thing.
The realist assessment is clear: the U.S. and Russia have no “existential” differences, and share many actual and potential commonalities. As I have written before (see Chronicles, May 2017),
Russophobic mania prolongs the European civil war which exploded in July 1914, continued in 1939, and has never properly ended . . . not even with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It would be in the American interest, as well as Russia’s and Europe’s, for that conflict to end, so that the existential challenge common to all—that of resurgent jihad and Europe’s demographic crisis—can be properly addressed.
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