And like everything else regarding Trump in the media coverage, it's two parallel universes.
Trump is (if possible) attempting to engage and create a working relationship with Russia. The alternative is Defcon 5 against the world's largest nuclear arsenal, I would think Democrats could understand that. Buchanan says here , as said previously in his books, that Russia and the U.S. while not friends, have shared strategic interests. And the last thing we want to do is drive Russia into a closer alliance against us with China.
Against the hysteria in the liberal media, Trump is doing what's in the best interest of the U.S. in playing hardball regarding trade with China and Europe. The average tariff to bring goods into the U.S. from Europe is about 2%. The average tariff to bring U.S. goods into Europe is about 10%.
That's why U.S. items, such as cars, are prohibitively expensive and don't sell much at all in Europe. Trump just wants to even the playing field, so that it truly is free trade.
Decades ago after World War II, we had lower tariffs on goods from Europe to help them rebuild after the war. But that was accomplished before 1960, and at some point we should have evened out the tariffs. Likewise Japan. Likewise China.
As Buchanan and Ingraham discuss, Russia has a shrinking population with about a 1.3 birthrate of children for every 2 parents. Russia's population is imploding, their economy is imploding, and they lost 33% of their land and half their population in the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union. In the last 2 decades, they even struggled to keep places like Chechnya and to keep two breakoff provinces Russia seized from former-Soviet Georgia in 2008. For whatever intent, the Russian military is exhausting itself even in these places, and eastern Ukraine. The only real threat Russia has to the rest of the world is their arsenal of 5,000 to 6,000 nuclear weapons.
And just 5 years ago, the Democrats saw acknowledged this (Obama in 2012 to Romney: "The 1980's are calling, they want their foreign policy back" in response to Romney citing a threat from Russia.) That while Russia is a threat, China is the greater and rising threat. And I would rather we re-negotiate trade deals now with China, while China is still relatively weak economically and dependent on the U.S. buying their manufactured products, than in 20 years when China has developed their own middle class and they no longer need the U.S. as buyers, and at a time when China has used the 400 billion in annual trade surpluses over 20 years to build themselves into the unchallenged world's greatest superpower. 400 billion a year in U.S./China trade deficit. And another 600 billion a year in Chinese intellectual property theft stolen from thr U.S. That if left to continue will not only fund their military, but allow them to surpass us in technology. Those two combined give them the cash to outpace our military over the long run.
So with China, and with all these nations, Trump has arrived just in time, to eliminate these trade deficits before we are too economically weak to resist them. All Trump is asking for is truly free trade with equal tariffs. And right now, the U.S. is still the dominant market, and the U.,S. has the strength to win, if there is a short-term economic trade war. If it comes to that.
But like everything else, don't expect European leaders or the liberal media to ever give Trump credit for that. For many decades, the U.S. could afford to be slowly bled to death by trade deficits with nations around the world. We no longer can. Imagine if those deficits were eliminated, and all that capital could be applied to pay down and eliminate our 21 trillion-dollar federal debt.
Securing U.S. borders, better U.S. trade deals negotiated, serious negotiations with Korea and China to "de-nuclearize the Korean peninsula" (if Korea does as it promised, and serious pressure if they don't), slashing federal business regulation, returning jobs, factories and growth to the U.S. All this, and still Trump is bashed in the media as if he were incompetent. At some point they will have to acknowledge this is a president whose accomplishments match or surpass those of Reagan or FDR.
