Simpleχity;1065825626 said:
Trump is already in Putin's vest pocket and has completely ignored the Kremlin's illegal actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
I am sorry, this is an extremely prejudicial show piece of "journalism." A "NATO Supreme commander" is always going to comment on anything deemed as anti-Russian (anti-Eastern.) What the General did not comment on (or at least was not covered by the article) is we *are* in a new round of Cold War with Russia made possible by both sides that seem determined to make it happen.
All the evidence is there some of which the article talks about.
How the "west" responded to the issues in the Ukraine, how the "west" handled Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, the US's position on Syria (because of their alliance to Russia) in relation to our hypocritical and confusing Middle East policy, the US's position on Russia testing various NATO / EU nations with engagements, the US's position on the fiasco of Asian Island claims by various parties, etc. Very little discussion of the actual current President Obama, but tons of fear mongering in talking about mostly Trump with a passive ending comment about Hillary.
We turned our attention, and intelligence efforts, to dealing with various Muslim nations and literally forgot that Putin / Russia were still operating in a mindset of protecting their interests.
Trump does present a problem for foreign policy but odds are his rhetoric will not match what he would be like in office (assuming this nation is stupid enough to elect him.) Trump may still fire from the hip with various comments but it would be foolish for Trump to engage in a policy that places the EU or NATO interests in harm's way.
Our bigger issue is irregardless of Russia's actions across the globe there is no effective higher authority to run off and complain to about it. Don't bother mentioning the UN or International Court, those political establishments have been useless for a very long time now.
So it does come down to one of two paths. Diplomacy (which means negotiation,) or today's round of costly "Cold War" mentality aggression. Perhaps we should be re-thinking our interests at westernizing nations right next to Russia's border. More importantly than that, we should be talking about who really benefits from a new round of renewed Cold War with Russia. It sure is not the population of these nations (any of them in fact.) Seems to me we are ultimately talking about a war machine across this globe who have a manufactured vested interest in conflict, even if in passive aggressive terms. And that includes another relic of Cold War thinking... NATO.