Keeping our allies off-balance is a strange strategy

Donald Trump once tried to cast his bizarre behavior and inconsistent policy statements as virtues, saying that it would be  to our advantage to be "unpredictable."

Well, that's one way to put it. Speaking of Trump' anxiety to defend Russia and Vladimir Putin from charges of complicity in the hacking of the DNC's computers, The Cyber Brief quotes Gunter Gressel of the European Council of foreign relations as saying that as disturbed by Trump's attitude in the Russiagate affair as our NATO allies are, "it is more than distrust in intelligence, It is Trump’s erratic behavior and egomania."

The DNC hacking is making all of Europe, but especially France and Germany, nervous about the same thing happening to sensitive computer servers of their own, Gressel continued. Both have elections next year, and German intelligence believes that the same Russians who hacked the DNC's computers also hacked computers belonging to the German parliament a few years back, The Brief reports. The Russian motive? According to the Germans, it's to "elicit political uncertainty."

They appear to have an ally in the President-elect. Confusing your enemy is one thing. But confusing your friends is not necessarily a good thing when your enemy is also trying to keep them confused.