Blue State Blues: How Trump Stopped Putin — and Why Bush, Obama, and Biden FailedJoel B. Pollak 25 Feb 2022
Donald J. Trump was the only U.S. president in the past two decades to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin. The others — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Joe Biden — all saw Putin seize foreign territory by force during their terms.
The reason is simple: Trump was polite but tough, and unpredictable; while Bush, Obama, and Biden all attempted to appease the Russian leader, on the theory that past American assertiveness was the real problem, and Putin’s reaction was understandable.
In 2008, while a weakened and unpopular Bush was in Beijing, China, to watch the Olympics, Putin invaded Georgia. In 2014, after Obama had promised Putin that he would have more “flexibility”in his second term, Russia infiltrated Crimea and later annexed it.
And now, in 2022, after Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and removed sanctions from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Putin has invaded Ukraine.
In every case, Putin responded to American weakness with aggression.
Trump was accused, falsely, of “collusion” with Russia, and was frequently criticized for being too polite to Putin in public. A press conference in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, where Trump accepted Putin’s public word that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 American presidential election, was said to be a disaster.
Yet during the four Trump years, Russia did not attempt to expand its earlier territorial gains in Ukraine, nor did it seriously threaten to invade any other country on its lengthy borders.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/02/25/blue-state-blues-how-trump-stopped-putin-and-why-bush-obama-and-biden-failed/
