Now that Trump has fired most of the State Department diplomats and shown that he’s hapless at diplomacy (ref: North Korea), Russia has taken a hatchet to our relationships from their side. They’ve just expelled 755 US diplomats and forbid Russians from supporting the US embassy. The idea is to cripple the embassy, which it certainly will, and is frighteningly close to breaking diplomatic ties altogether.
Today, Putin says he is sending up to a hundred thousand Russian troops into Belarus for military exercises. That’s just along the NATO border. We’ll see how soon they go home. In the meantime, this is a threat, and US forces are on alert.
Both Russian actions are deliberate provocations that would generate a wave of responses from most administrations. Normally, a Republican administration would be extra hawkish and hard-line. Trump… well, you know. Nothing. Even Vice President Pence felt the gap, and decried something or other. Trump remains distracted and disconnected.
Not a surprise. Trump doesn’t value diplomacy. Well, more to the point, he doesn’t even understand the concept. He handles foreign commitments with the same enthusiasm he’d have picking up a dead squirrel’s carcass. He’s still fuming that he couldn’t outsource his North Korean diplomacy to China.
Russia is clearly testing us. The world is watching what America will do.
And the answer is that we barely notice. Trump and Putin have desensitized America so well, the Russian military story is a sidebar on the New York Times front page, and neither story is on the Washington Post front page at all.
