Trump Learned from Reagan about Dealing with Putin
Ronald Reagan climbed into national politics by espousing a far right vision of what the GOP should attain to. He was an anti-communist crusader during the Cold War and vowed to stop the momentum of the 1960s New Left as it united with mainstream media during the Vietnam War. In 1983 he labeled the USSR “the evil empire.”
Hyperbolic language was instinctual with Reagan, but he had none of the mechanical reflexiveness that we see in the Democratic Party’s support of political correctness today.
After meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at the first arms summit in Geneva in 1985, Reagan said 
that there was a “moral dimension in Gorbachev” that didn’t fit old formulas based purely on hatred. “There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.”
Two years later they had agreed to get rid of medium-range nuclear missiles. By 1989, Gorbachev was openly promoting the election of democratic governments behind the Iron Curtain. By 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 republics.
In his relationship with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump seems to have chosen Reagan as his mentor. Respect and friendship have more potential than the nastiness of hardliner rhetoric.
Putin is seen as no KGB operative committed to rebuilding the Soviet Marxist state, though he does remember how aggressively Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were recruited into NATO membership on March 12, 1999.
Was Putin wrong in not wanting NATO banging on Russia’s western doors, in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine? Peace only comes with territorial buffer zones and policies like the Monroe Doctrine. Would people in the Dakotas feel comfortable with Warsaw Pact-like forces along the Canadian border?
The lesson? Trump is showing real leadership in his relationship with Putin, and vice versa. There is little to gain from returning to the Cold War mindset. Western Europe by itself certainly has the military resources to turn back any aggression from the east. The world is too dangerous not to give Trump and Putin a chance to work together.
