If you're deeply invested in the thin narrative that Trump and Putin have been in cahoots all along, then there's only one way to take this: Boy, they're really laying it on thick!
A lot of Trump voters wanted a disrupter of the status quo, someone who wasn't afraid to upset the way things had normally been done and upset the protectors of the norm along the way. Don't think for a moment that Putin isn't one of those protectors, and it's surely not a welcome development that he has to get used to a new president who is going to do things in new and probably not predictable ways.
There was even some question, after the Syria attack, whether Putin would still receive Rex Tillerson as scheduled this week. He received him all right, but made it clear things are not hunky dory between the one remaining superpower and the old one that still hasn't accepted the new reality:
Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday trust had eroded between the United States and Russia under President Donald Trump, as Moscow delivered an unusually hostile reception to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a face-off over Syria.
Any hope in Russia that the Trump administration would herald less confrontational relations has been dashed in the past week after the new U.S. leader fired missiles at Syria to punish Moscow's ally for its suspected use of poison gas.
Just as Tillerson sat down for talks, a senior Russian official assailed the "primitiveness and loutishness" of U.S. rhetoric, part of a volley of statements that appeared timed to maximize the awkwardness during the first visit by a member of Trump's cabinet.
"One could say that the level of trust on a working level, especially on the military level, has not improved but has rather deteriorated," Putin said in an interview broadcast on Russian television moments after Tillerson sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an ornate hall.
Putin doubled down on Russia's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, repeating denials that Assad's government was to blame for the gas attack last week and adding a new theory that the attack may have been faked by Assad's enemies.
Moments earlier, Lavrov greeted Tillerson with unusually icy remarks, denouncing the missile strike on Syria as illegal and accusing Washington of behaving unpredictably.
"I won’t hide the fact that we have a lot of questions, taking into account the extremely ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideas which have been expressed in Washington across the whole spectrum of bilateral and multilateral affairs," Lavrov said.
I don't think it's the job of the U.S. administration to be "predictable" for the benefit of Moscow. Barack Obama was predictably weak and lacking in any sort of resolve on behalf of U.S. interests, the interests of our allies and the cause of freedom. He would utter tough-sounding statements if that was necessary to get him through a news cycle, or an election season. He would not back up his words with actions. Putin got to know this pattern very well and enjoyed being able to predict what Obama would do.
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Trump is unpredictable in the sense that it's hard to read what he really believes about the U.S. role in the world - having sounded at times like an isolationist but having acted as president like he accepts America's world policeman role - but also in the sense that he doesn't think it's his job to always restrain himself from what needs to be done just to avoid upsetting Putin.
Remember when Obama first took office and cancelled the Bush commitment to install missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic? That was based on one thing and one thing only: Obama's decision to prioritize appeasement of the Russians over defense of our relatively new allies in eastern Europe. That set in motion a pattern that persisted throughout Obama's presidency. Only when Democrats thought they had a campaign issue against Trump did they suddenly decide to feign concern about Russia.
Of course, the left doesn't recognize any of this. They're invested in the Trump-as-Putin's-puppet narrative for not better reason than having repeated it so much during the campaign, and now trying to insist there's anything to this idiotic investigation that has thus far turned up exactly nothing to back it up. And this is the sort of theory that's unfalsifiable. If Trump makes nice with Putin, it proves they're in cahoots! If Trump comes into conflict with Putin, they're just putting on a show to fool us!
It was a long time ago, but the Democrats used to be capable of functioning as a serious opposition party on matters of international affairs. That really went south in the '80s when they made a habit of showing up in the company of Latin American dictators and showing their support for them vis-a-vis Ronald Reagan. By the time of the Bush 43 administration, they were unwilling to even admit the reality of radical Islamic terrorism. Now they're so far gone they're imagining international conspiracies while serious matters are being dealt with, and we could really use some bipartisan sanity in Washington.
Oh well. Putin may be expressing unhappiness with Trump over the Syria bombing, but Putin's real problem is with Bashar Assad. Let's see how long he continues to believe it's in Russia's interests to back this monster, even as America has chosen a new leader who is not going to sit back passively and let atrocities happen.
