Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has become one of President Trump’s most effective defenders in Congress. However, this defense is completely predicated on the idea that President Trump has a different foreign policy vision than the mainstream Democrats AND Republicans have had for the last 20 years or so.
Instead of seeking confrontation and condemnation, President Trump seems to prefer negotiating. First, he negotiates in the media using his social media presence and the power of the Internet. Then when the social media circus brings a natural connection, President Trump uses the power of the presidency to connect personally with the people he had recently been tweeting about. Finally, he attempts to change the dynamic of the game by introducing new elements to the old international power struggles. He’s done this in Iran, North Korea, Russia, France, and he’s done this with the E.U. and NATO. The jury is still out on whether or not his methods work, but over his first two years he’s not involved us in any new wars and he’s successfully de-escalated some very worrisome problems in the Middle East and the Far East.
So, there’s reason to be optimistic.
The recent tumult over President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin had most of Congress in an uproar, but Senator Paul doesn’t seem to understand the problem.
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Here’s Senator Paul defending the President on CBS:
From Paul’s perspective, it’s good for world leaders to talk and try to find common ground. In fact, Paul argues that the only reason people are upset about Trump’s Helsinki meeting with Putin is because the media and the left have been driven mad by “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The Senator wasn’t just defending the President on CBS, he argued his case on CNN too.
I think engagement with our adversaries, conversation with our adversaries is a good idea. Even in the height of the Cold War, maybe at the lowest ebb when we were in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, I think it was a good thing that Kennedy had a direct line to Khrushchev. I think it was a good thing that we continue to have ambassadors to Russia even when we really objected greatly to what was going on, even during Stalin’s regime.
So, I think that it is a good idea to have engagement. And I think that what is lost in this is that I think there’s a bit of Trump derangement syndrome. I think there are people who hate the president so much that this could have easily been President Obama early in his first administration setting the reset button and trying to have better relations with Russia, and I think it’s lost on people that they’re a nuclear power. They have influence in Syria. They’re in close proximity to the troops in Syria. They are close to the peninsula of North Korea and may have some influence that could help us there.
The other thing that’s lost and people forget this completely, the Russians tried to help us stop the Boston marathon bombing. We actually did help them stop a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg because we were communicating and exchanging information.
All those things are good but these people hate Trump so much, all of that is being lost.
Here’s the full interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer:
I think engagement with our adversaries, conversation with our adversaries is a good idea. Even in the height of the Cold War, maybe at the lowest ebb when we were in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, I think it was a good thing that Kennedy had a direct line to Khrushchev. I think it was a good thing that we continue to have ambassadors to Russia even when we really objected greatly to what was going on, even during Stalin’s regime.
So, I think that it is a good idea to have engagement. And I think that what is lost in this is that I think there’s a bit of Trump derangement syndrome. I think there are people who hate the president so much that this could have easily been President Obama early in his first administration setting the reset button and trying to have better relations with Russia, and I think it’s lost on people that they’re a nuclear power. They have influence in Syria. They’re in close proximity to the troops in Syria. They are close to the peninsula of North Korea and may have some influence that could help us there.
The other thing that’s lost and people forget this completely, the Russians tried to help us stop the Boston marathon bombing. We actually did help them stop a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg because we were communicating and exchanging information.
All those things are good but these people hate Trump so much, all of that is being lost.
I would put it in perspective. So, for example, when you look at the intelligence community, the most recent leaders of the intelligence community, James Clapper and John Brennan, James Clapper perjured himself…
It does matter who was in charge of the intelligence. It does matter because they started up this and ginned up this whole thing that has gone after the president saying he’s committed collusion with Russia. No evidence of that and it continues to go on. Who are the people that started this?
James Clapper, who lied to the Senate, said they weren’t collecting our information and yet they were collecting all of our information and housing it in Utah.
John Brennan has now accused — let me finish. John Brennan has now accused the president of treason. This is John Brennan who voted for the communist party when he was a young man. John Brennan now thinks he’s holier than anybody else. But these people had the power to collect every American’s information and these are the people that I am concerned used their bias against President Trump and absolutely I’m with the president on this. The intelligence community was full of biased people including Peter Strzok, McCabe and dozens of others…
What I would say is I don’t think anybody doubts that the Russians got involved with leaking e-mail and hacking into e-mail. But there is a question of whether or not the election was legitimate and all of this is a sideways way for those on the left to try to delegitimize Trump and to say he didn’t really win the election. When the reality of the election was really about Hillary Clinton being unfit for office, being a dishonest person who enriched, her and her husband enriched themselves at taxpayers’ expense, and at the expense of receiving money from people like the Sultan of Brunei and Saudi Arabia.
So, it was really a much more complicated situation. But what’s happened is everybody now says the Russians, the only reason Trump is president is because of the Russians. You can see how he would take that personally and, frankly, I don’t think anybody from Kentucky — he got nearly 80 percent of the vote in the mountains, I don’t think anybody was influenced at all by anything that has to do with the Russians. They didn’t like Hillary Clinton because she wanted to kill the coal industry in our state…
I would put this in perspective, Wolf. Doug Levine looked at this from the Carnegie Mellon Institute and he looked at it from 1946 to 2000. And he found 81 times that the U.S. involved themselves and meddled in elections of foreign countries 36 times than the Soviet Union did.
It doesn’t make it right, but I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Any country that can spy does and any country that can meddle in foreign elections does. All countries are doing this. But we’ve elevated this to a higher degree and we have made this all about the sour grapes of Hillary Clinton losing the election and it’s all about partisan politics now. This is truly the Trump derangement syndrome that motivates all of this…
I think people have gotten over top on this and lost the big picture. The big picture is that we should be engaged with Russia. We should have conversations with Russia. We have serious conflicts in various parts of the globe. It would be a mistake not to have open lines of communication with them.
And I can tell you what I have told the Russians who were here in the United States when I conversed with them. Hacking into the election if they did it and all likelihood the evidence looks like they did, it has backfired because it’s made relations worse. And so, if they want to have better relations, there should be a great deal of incentive as time goes for them not to do it again because it’s made relations so much worse.
And so, my hope is that we will push the issue and that over time those incentives will be apparent…
I do see that many Democrats have come forward and they basically want a confrontation. They suggested that he not meet with Putin.
So, really, the question of to meet or not meet, almost every Democrat in Washington came on your program and other programs said he shouldn’t meet with Putin. That’s a kind of sort of I think simplistic thinking that leads to war. We should continue to have conversation even with our adversaries, probably most particularly with our adversaries.
Article posted with permission from EagleRising.com
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