When an invitation from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the renowned Professor Alexander Dugin to visit them in Moscow arrived in my inbox, it was actually the culmination of a series of emails and telephone calls from Russian-American friends giving me a heads up. Still, it startled me.
So, last week, I flew to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and from there to Moscow. The sanctions President Joe Biden imposed on Russian persons and businesses — and kept in place by President Donald Trump — bar, among much else, direct flights to Russia from the West.
These absurd executive-ordered regulations, meant to punish Russia for its Special Military Operation in Ukraine, have neither caused a change in Russian military strategy nor harmed the Russian economy.
But they have deprived U.S. businesses of more than $330 billion in revenue in three years.
If you accept the Biden version of the conflagration in Ukraine — mouthed uniformly by mainstream media — then you think Russia wants to devour its neighbors.
If you move beyond Western propaganda, you know this war started in 2014 with a coup against a popularly elected president who sought neutrality for Ukraine.
The coup — orchestrated by the U.S. State Department in conjunction with the CIA and British MI6 — brought about a series of governments determined to attack their own Russian-speaking population in the east and to put NATO armaments on the Russian border aimed at Moscow.
If this doesn’t frighten you, just imagine Chinese long-range missiles in Havana aimed at Washington.
Moscow today is the city of lights. Its atmosphere is one of midtown-Manhattan hustle and bustle — but cleaner, happier and friendlier. Its older buildings around Red Square and its Doha-style gleaming skyscrapers in the financial district are nearly all lushly illuminated at night and packed with workers during the day.
The perception of Russia embraced by the consensus of Americans is stuck in the Cold War era of central economic planning, hungry workers, crumbling infrastructure and no relief in sight.
Today’s Russia is thoroughly modern, generally happy, devoutly Christian Orthodox and yearning to interact commercially, culturally and even politically with the West.
Trump’s intention to be the peacemaker in Ukraine is far more ambitious than just ending the war.
Though 180 degrees from Biden’s failed efforts to use Ukraine as a battering ram with which to dislodge Russian President Vladimir Putin from office, Trump understands that the SMO — though deeply violent and profoundly destructive — has united the Russian people, stimulated their economic development and independence, and reminded the U.S. foreign policy mavens of the virtues and values of realism.
Realism is the theory of relations between nations in which each nation recognizes the territorial sovereignty and legitimate security needs of all others.
Realism – best articulated in the writings of University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer and Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs — is the polar opposite of the U.S. foreign policy in the post-World War II era.
That policy is called exceptionalism. It presumes American cultural, historical, governmental and moral superiority, and it has driven all the post-1945 U.S. wars and the construction and maintenance of some 750 U.S. military bases and ports around the globe. It has been the chief engine of the federal government’s $36 trillion in debt.
Donald Trump rejects American hegemony and has stated that he plans to seek a Great Reset. This geopolitical theory of foreign policy — best articulated by the brilliant former British diplomat Alastair Crooke — seeks to unite the U.S. socially and commercially to Russia for the mutual long-term benefit of both.
Realism and Reset recognize that Communism in Russia — the old Soviet Union, the crushing of the grape of individual choices for the wine of party dictatorship — is gone. Out of the ashes of the USSR has emerged a society guided by free market capitalism, devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church and welcoming of the West.
You’d never know any of this if your knowledge of Russia has been generated in American government schools and animated by neocon elites whose mentality of hatred for all things Russian has choked Realism and rejected Reset based on ancient and unrealistic fears.
In my interviews with Foreign Minister Lavrov and Professor Dugin, I saw a real appreciation for Trump’s approach. These two intellects, both of whom were raised under communism, see its faults, celebrate its demise, and yearn for Realism and Reset.
And they are Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants.
Trump needs to know that the Reset he seeks will be earth-shattering. The European elites still labor under a 1980s mentality. When President Ronald Reagan called the USSR “an evil empire” in 1983, he was right. It was the height of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and Soviet expansionism.
Expansionism and exceptionalism are twin evils of the same breed. One occurred when the USSR sought dominance in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan to keep the West at bay. The other has been occurring all over the globe — from the Philippines to the Middle East to Africa and Latin America — as the U.S. used force and deception to tell other countries how to live.
If Trump could see the Russia that I saw, he’d bring about Realism and Reset tomorrow. The Russia I saw had barely a police officer on any street corner, banished woke and all its absurd fashions, embraced cleanliness and happiness, and enjoys an infrastructure that is smooth and highly functional.
And the Orthodox liturgy — packed to the gills on Sunday — is as faithful and beautiful as the traditional Latin Mass that the Pope has suppressed.
The Russia that Americans have hated no longer exists. In its place is our trading partner and friend. Trump knows this and doesn’t care what Europe thinks.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
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