David A. Andelman, visiting scholar at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, wrote an op-ed for KBZK.com about President Trump attending the Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While this summit in Helsinki, Finland, may not go down in history alongside the moment Franklin D. Roosevelt gave away Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta, it has to rank as the lowest ever in modern times. It’s the worst for all sorts of reasons: zero preparation, zero deliverables, zero understanding of the stakes and the horror it’s wreaked on the entire Western alliance, not to mention America’s intelligence community, who Donald Trump has now thrown definitively under the bus.
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What the Helsinki summit has succeeded in accomplishing, largely, is erasing the entire post-Crimea efforts of the West to isolate Russia and treat it as the pariah nation it clearly proved itself to be by seizing at gunpoint the territory of another country. That effort was clearly collapsing, of course, even before both leaders ever arrived in Helsinki.
Donald Trump has spent recent months doing his level best to welcome Putin’s Russia back into the fraternity of civilized nations and at the same time drive the hitherto united members of NATO far away from the United States. These countries, previously US allies, are the ones who had expelled Putin from their midst within days of his seizure of the Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine.