How Trump got his party to love Russia - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...p-got-his-party-to-love-russia
trump russia foreign policy subversion conservative anti-Communist
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In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.
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A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.
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82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.
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Now that Russia has dropped its official atheism and anti-capitalism, claiming to be the protector of traditional values and Christendom, a growing number of American conservatives are receptive to Trump’s Russian rapprochement.
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Pro-Russian converts on the American right appear to take two forms. The opportunists simply want power and are willing to sacrifice principles in pursuit of it. The ideologues, meanwhile, see Russia as nothing worse than an occasional nuisance, if not a potential ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.
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last summer, while rationalizing Trump’s unprecedented vow not to defend NATO allies unless they “pay us,” Gingrich said of tiny, vulnerable Estonia (one of the few NATO members to meet the alliance’s recommended defense budget threshold) that he was “not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
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The need to defend Trump’s victory at any cost has induced conservatives to praise a virulently anti-American anarchist, who is probably in cahoots with Russian intelligence, and whose head they once called for.
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Though the opportunists outnumber the ideologues, it’s the true believers who could pose the greatest damage to U.S. foreign policy over the long term. Their proposed strategic realignment with Moscow, predicated upon shared opposition to vaguely defined “Islamic terrorism,” is seductive but wrong: Far from being a potential partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism, Russia does much to stoke it.
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In an interview recorded more than 30 years ago, Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov revealed the KGB’s counterintuitive approach to recruiting. “This was my instruction: Try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media. Reach . . . cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruit-able people, people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or suffer from self-importance.” Say this for Bezmenov: He knew his mark.