Информационное сопротивление

Donald Trump, defending his peculiar admiration of Vladimir Putin, has declared as though it were his own idea, “Wouldn’t it be nice if actually got along, as an example, with Russia?” In fact, it has been nice – for the United States and for Russia, and it has happened many times over the last 30 years. 

The United States and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev signed the most sweeping arms reduction agreements in history. Under Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, Russia entered the Group of 8 with American support and joined peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, while the United States supplied aid to the Russian economy. When Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin came into office in 2000, the relationship between Russia and the United States continued to be relatively close, although relations soured over NATO expansion and the invasion of Iraq.

Still, in his first administration, Putin was the first foreign leader to express condolences to President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, and vowed to help the United States in its war on terrorism. Under Putin’s successor (and then predecessor), Dmitri Medvedev, and the tenure of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, a “reset” in relations resulted in the New Start Treaty, further reducing nuclear weapons, and on the Northern Distribution Network, which enabled supplies to flow through Russia into Afghanistan for U.S. efforts there, and the American support of Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

But when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, cooperation with the U.S. ended. It was not the U.S. that declared game over, it was Trump’s friend. As the long history of cooperation demonstrates, there is no structural reason Russia and the U.S. cannot get along. They have and did for over 30 years. It was Putin’s offer of asylum to rogue U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, followed by his unanticipated demand that the U.S. Agency for International Development leave Russia the same year, harassment of the U.S. ambassador and other embassy officials since, and finally his seizure of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014 and support of a low boil conflict in eastern Ukraine that ended cooperation. The next U.S. president will inherit not a “Russia problem” but a Putin problem, which makes Trump’s position not only odd, but dangerous.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/10/25/is-trump-right-about-putin?