Donald Trump: the Vidkun Quisling of the new cold war?

Donald Trump's bromance with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has been hard to miss. The mutual admiration society between the two authoritarian bullies isn't news.

But the truly fascinating thing is the degree to which Little Donnie's foreign policy serves Russia's national interest. Not so much ours, mind you. But Russia's.

Gutting NATO and alienating our allies serves nobody's interests as well as those of the man who praises Trump's "healthy American isolationism" and whose servile media sings his praises almost as it sings those of Vlad himself. Now, I'm not suggesting that Trump is a conscious traitor; I don't think he's smart enough a student of world geopolitics to even realize what he's doing. But as the article linked to above bears out, the correspondence between what passes for a Trump foreign policy and the program Putin has for Russia's expansionist power-grabbing dovetail remarkably well.

So the question is worth asking: even if unintentionally, is Trump the new cold war's version of Vidkum Quisling? Quisling, for those who don't recall their World War II history, was the puppet the Nazis put in charge of Norway when they took over there. The Norwegians tried him for treason and shot him after the war.

Hopefully, it won't come to that with Little Donnie. But shouldn't a president's foreign policy aspire to advance the interests of his own country, rather than those of its chief geopolitical adversary? And doesn't it make you just a bit nervous to compare not only Trump's and Putin's oddly complementary foreign policies but their soberingly similar thoughts on how to run a country?

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