The Kremlin would have been thrilled with the happy snaps, but these were, in the end, purely that. History is an assemblage of misguided images and false assumptions. The pictures of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 remain rank, but brilliant for what modern gibberish-driven commentary terms “poor optics”. A pact featuring the signatures of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union made one British official claim that that all “isms” had become “wasms” as a result.
Since political commentators became amateur optometrists, the obsessions with how events are viewed has begun to populate columns. From across the political spectrum, there is a terror that the Trump train has done its next dramatic swerve, defying decades of practice towards old foes. Bad optics!
What should have been noted was the predictability of it all. One on level, the Lavrov-Trump meeting in the White House was dull. On another, it was a relief. Hostility between Russia and the United States has over the years proven to be a cottage industry for academics, specialists and theorists, in time ballooning into an entire industrial complex.
If swords can be made into ploughshares, well and good. Not so, for the optically deranged and suspicious. For a stricken Senator Dick Durbin from the Democrats, “President Trump in these pictures is shaking hands with Russians, and the Kremlin is gleefully tweeting these pictures around the world.”
It was certainly a chance for Lavrov to…