Max Boot: Trump wants to Finlandize the United States
Source: Washington Post
Trump wants to Finlandize the United States
By Max Boot
Columnist
June 30 at 5:00 PM
Finlandization. Noun. The process whereby a country is induced to favor, or refrain from opposing, the interests of a more powerful country, despite not being politically allied to it.
It is entirely fitting that the Trump-Putin summit will occur in Helsinki. Plucky Finland, which had fought the Red Army to a draw in 1940, thereafter accepted a quasi-vassal role. It remained a free-market democracy, but it entered into a “treaty of friendship” with the Soviet Union, compromising its principles and even its sovereignty so as not to provoke the bear next door.
President Trump, for reasons we can only guess at, seems bent on the Finlandization of Europe — and even the United States. It is an unlikely development because, whereas Finland was much weaker than Russia, the United States is much stronger. Yet Trump — who was elected with Russian help and continues to question the consensus judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia interfered in the election — appears determined to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to the Kremlin’s imperatives.
His animosity toward U.S. allies was barely veiled during his first year in office, when he was restrained by the “Axis of Adults.” But now secretary of state Rex Tillerson, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and economic adviser Gary Cohn are gone, Chief of Staff John F. Kelly is on the way out, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is marginalized. There are no longer real restraints on the president’s Trumpiness.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-is-pushing-the-atlantic-alliance-to-the-breaking-point/2018/06/30/c054f0dc-7c8e-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html
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