President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin — with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the Russian president’s face over his hacking in the election of 2016.
Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected him to office.
What president, seeking to repair damaged relations with a rival superpower, would begin by reading from an indictment?
President Eisenhower did not begin his summit with Nikita Khrushchev by berating him for crushing the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956 — a more grievous crime then hacking the emails of John Podesta.
President Kennedy did not let Russia’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba in 1962 prevent him from offering an olive branch to Moscow in his widely praised American University address of June 1963.
President Nixon, in first meeting Leonid Brezhnev, did not denounce him for extinguishing the Prague Spring. Were Trump to start his first summit with Putin by dressing him down, why meet with him at all?
Trump would do better to explore where we can work together, as in ending Syria’s civil war and averting a new war in Korea.
Moreover, when it comes to interference in the internal politics of other nations to bring about “regime change,” understandably, Putin might see himself as more sinned against than sinning.
Should Trump bring up the email hacking in 2016, Putin could ask him to explain U.S. support for the…