American folly of appeasing Russia is traditional

From the Ledger-Enquirer / Yahoo!News:

"On Russia, Trump is just as foolish as Bush, Obama and Biden | Opinion

David Mastio, July 10, 2025

Donald Trump gets a lot of guff from his opponents and a lot of love from his followers for being a different kind of politician than those who came before. And he sure is. But in at least one way, Trump is standard-issue.

On Russia, Trump is amazingly conventional, following in the well-worn path of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, all three presidents who came before his second term.

Like his predecessors, Trump entered office wanting to give Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It really is amazing given the timeline of Russian aggression under Putin’s leadership, which began in 1999.

George W. Bush

When Bush first met Putin at a summit in Slovenia, he looked into the dictator’s soul and found something good there. “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said, “… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” 

Bush had hopes of reforming the former Soviet state and bringing it into closer alignment with the West. Putin had other ideas, continuing a brutal war to suppress the independence movement in Chechnya and later invading Georgia in 2008 on the trumped up concerns that Russians in two Eastern provinces of the former Soviet republic wanted to break away.

Barack Obama

The next year, Obama came into office with top foreign policy hand Hillary Clinton at his side. The Democratic duo thought the problem with U.S.-Russia relations was the Republican they replaced, so they sought the famous “reset” of relations. That was rewarded with the first invasion of Ukraine that included the capture of Crimea.

Joe Biden

When the most experienced president in 50 years, Biden, tottered into the White House in 2021, he was not foolish enough to say anything about a reset. He did think he could change the tenor of the relationship, “cooling off” the confrontation in his aides’ words. That was rewarded with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Donald Trump

Undeterred by the obvious pattern, Trump returned to office with plans to reach a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia within a day. That didn’t happen. Russia instead escalated its bombing of Ukrainian cities to new heights.

Now nearly six months into the new administration, Trump is frustrated and threatening to increase the supply of weapons to Ukraine’s defenders, a move his critics suggested long ago and that Republicans themselves had suggested during the Biden administration’s long, slow escalation of such aid to Kiev.

It is amazing to me that such an intellectually diverse group of men could each rationalize themselves into the same foolishness. Perhaps one possible cause is the nastiness of our politics, where each president starts to believe that the guy who came before him didn’t just have political differences, but instead was both evil and incompetent. Each in turn believed that the benighted fool who came before just didn’t have the skill or intention of getting policy right...

Trump came into office promising to keep the United States out of foreign wars. Arming the Ukrainians so they can do the fighting is the best way to do that. Hopefully Trump, like at least some of his predecessors, has figured that out."