Readers in America, where critics of President Obama’s foreign policy have for years painted him as feckless and disengaged from the world, might be surprised to learn that in Russia he is caricatured as exactly the opposite: an expansive and reckless President who has not been shy about throwing US might around in ways that have damaged Russian interests.
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Julianne Smith, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said Trump doesn’t seem to grasp the complexities of the us relationship with Russian Federation, reflecting both inexperience and a lack of strong advisers.
The hackers stole opposition research on Trump, information about Democratic donors and years’ worth of internal DNC emails before Crowdstrike cut off their access last month.
Russia’s suspected role in the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails “raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy”, Clinton said in her first interview with Fox of the 2016 campaign. Trump’s response, the source added, was to talk about the success of his American reality show “The Apprentice” and his knowledge of attracting mass media attention. The story noted that the move was at odds with the wishes of “almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington”.
United States cybersecurity experts said it raised questions about whether Russian Federation had attempted to influence the American campaign in Trump’s favour. However, the fact that Yanukovych was elected in a free and fair democratic election in 2010 seems to have mattered not a bit. The Clinton campaign released a number of attacks on Trump during the convention, including a press release decrying “Trump’s Kremlin Connections”. “Giving the candidate the benefit of the doubt that he did not mean to appeal to a foreign adversary to attack the U.S. and pervert an election (clearly not something you would expect from a Commander-in-chief) it still has the unfortunate effect of chilling the confidence allies will have in sharing intelligence with the USA and its candidate”.
Obama said he was basing his assessment on Trump’s own comments and the fact that Trump has “gotten pretty favorable coverage back in Russian Federation”. She took on all the tough pieces in the portfolio.
“You look at his wife, she was standing there”.
This echoes nearly exactly what Julianne Smith, a former high-ranking security advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden, told a group of fundraisers in Washington last week. U.S. presidents in the modern era have seen singular sentences and offhand comments define global perceptions on United States policies and leadership. Smith also credited Clinton with pushing Obama “to turn up the heat on Putin”.
We didn’t do it and stop blaming us.
Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence came to Trump’s defense Thursday, accusing reporters and pundits in Philadelphia of taking his remarks out of context.
“You know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russian Federation than where they were”.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign claimed that Russian Federation was behind the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers as part of an effort to undermine her candidacy. Following the release of the hacked messages, some Democrats suggested that Trump had colluded with the Russians in the hack and distribution of these emails. But, for Putin and those around him, the best thing about Trump is simply that he is not Clinton.
Panetta then pushed the narrative even further.
In doing so, she was implicitly rebuking her rival, Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has questioned the need for the Western alliance and suggested that if he is elected president, the United States might not honor its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military commitments, in particular regarding former Soviet republics in the Baltics.
Putin was outraged by US support for Ukraine and by USA military intervention around the world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton’s watch.
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The opinion of the author may not necessarily reflect the position of Russia Direct or its staff. “If the next American President wants to reconfigure relations with Russian Federation to make them more constructive, we are ready to meet him-or her-halfway”. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Now he is a Contributing Editor to The Nation.
