Mick Hartley

More on the same old topic, Trump and Putin. Michael Totten:

The president-elect seems to find it a shame that we can’t get along with a white Christian country with its capital in Europe at a time when we’re both facing threats from radical Islamists. It is exasperating, but everyone needs understand something. Yes, Russia is Christian and white, and the smaller part of that country is on the European continent, but it does not belong to the West. Russians have defined themselves against the West for longer than any of them have been alive. When they say “the West,” they are referring to us, not to themselves. In the Russian mind, the West is a hostile Other.  

Our next president won’t be any more successful resetting America’s relations with Russia than the last two presidents were, and it won’t be his fault. “Russia does not aspire to be like us,” writes Russia expert Molly McKew in Politico, “or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its leaders want the West — and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.”

Russian propaganda has been among the most effective in the world for at least a century. The communists used it (along with money, advisors and guns) to export their deranged revolution to Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, and to this day some their tropes still poison the minds of far-leftists all over the world.

The Kremlin’s propaganda in the 21^st century is less brazen and obvious. It’s more insidious because it’s less overtly ideological….

The purpose of the Kremlin’s disinformation is not to export Putinism to the rest of the planet. Its purpose, instead, is “to erode our values,” McKew writes, “our democracy and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.”

At some point, Vladimir Putin is going to stab Donald Trump in the front. He’s a scorpion, and that’s what scorpions do. He doesn’t have much of a choice. He’ll have to stab Trump in the front or reverse Russia’s national interests. He’d have to pitch his entire worldview over the side, a worldview that was nurtured in the Soviet Union and hardened in the KGB’s Directorate S. Which do you think is more likely?

American politics is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. It seems an almost quaint notion nowadays, but we need to find our way back. Donald Trump and his Republican allies should always unite behind the Democratic Party against a hostile foreign actor like Vladimir Putin for one simple reaon. Because the Democratic Party is ours. Likewise, even the most strident anti-Trump progressives need to rally behind the incoming president when the choice is between an enemy and one of ours.

Russia is using an ancient strategy against the United States—divide and conquer, or at least divide and disrupt.

Resist.