"The president displayed both perspicacity and political courage"

In PJ Media, Spengler writes,

President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said, and he is entirely correct. By this, I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader. Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia.

...Unfortunately, the delusion that the United States would remake Russia in its own image persisted through the Bush and Obama administrations. I have no reason to doubt the allegations that a dozen Russian intelligence officers meddled in the U.S. elections of 2016, but this was equivalent of a fraternity prank compared to America’s longstanding efforts to intervene in Russian politics.

...Nonetheless, it was America that made a mess of relations with Russia, and President Trump’s tweet this morning was right on the mark. You can usually gauge the merits of this president's public statements by the decibel level of the protests.

Postscript: To restrain Russia, we should immediately begin an R&D program with Manhattan Project intensity to neutralize Russia's state-of-the-art air defense systems (S-400 and soon the S-500). We know in theory how to do this, for example with drone swarms, but implementation involves non-trivial programs. The Trump administration has failed to address the erosion of America's edge in military technology in a number of fields, and this is one of them.

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