In LobeLog, a highly credible anti-interventionist world news blog, Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran analyst of the CIA, asks a key question:
The security services that are supposed to guard against such subversion must answer to elected political leaders, lest such services become threats to democracy themselves. But what happens when elected leaders are the ones suspected of being instruments of foreign influence or implementers of authoritarian tactics? How should one react to news that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump and the possibility that he had been working on behalf of Russia against U.S. interests?
Source: Subversive Politicians and How to Protect Against Them – LobeLog
Pillar makes an important general point
Conformity between U.S. policy and the preferences of a foreign state is not ipso factobad. U.S. interests neither totally agree nor totally conflict with those of other states. The question to ask is “cui bono?”—who benefits?
And he makes it specifically about Russia. Just because Trump’s policies have favored Russia doesn’t mean they are illegitimate.
In the case of Russia, Vladimir Putin was not necessarily wrong when he said that Trump had “done the right thing” by announcing a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. In Syria and in some other places, Russian and U.S. interests are not zero-sum. But many other postures and policies of Trump, resulting in a shredding of good relations within the Western alliance and a plummeting of global trust in the United States, are clearly harmful to the United States and just as clearly to the liking of Putin’s regime. Many details of the Trump-Russia relationship have yet to surface, but the expanded version of the “cui bono?” question already has been answered.
