Trump Was Right About Russia

Sorry, this is absolute lunacy. I like and respect Trump, but like almost everyone else, he makes the same mistake about Russia, thinking "they are just like us, we need to treat them just like us and they'll behave like us." NO - Russia is different, and still behaves like countries did 200-300 years ago. I know Russia, and the overwhelming majority of the readers of this will never have been to Russia at all, or at best will have had a tourist stop in St. Petersburg for a few days and have been entirely fooled by the nice people that they met. And no doubt, Russians you meet there are nice, pleasant, interesting people. I have many friends and former colleagues in Russia. It took me about 7-8 of my 10 years of spending months traveling all over Russia, visiting many smaller cities in the far east, and even very small towns in central Russia and Siberia doing business setting up cooperative scientific research projects with American companies. Russia never fully went through the long change process which occurred in Europe, especially in England in the 1200s through the 1600s where a large class of free men, guildsmen, skilled artisans and tradesmen and middle class entrepreneurs slowly developed. And in England, their military reliance on the longbow men as an integral part of their army required a reworking of the relationship between the ruling elites and the common men.....to let them own a weapon which could kill an armored knight, and have them regularly train with these 100+ lb longbows by providing tournaments and prizes to encourage the years long process to build strength and accuracy with this difficult weapon. This reworked the relationship with the ruling barons, dukes and kings fundamentally. In Russia, they never very substantially developed these skilled craftsman and free artisan classes, this large, broad and deep middle class who got used to managing their own affairs, and not being told what to do by their czar. In Russia, right up to the 1917 revolution, there were the ruling elites, plus a small intelligentsia and merchant class who were sort of minor royalty and then the great class of serfs. There were very, very little in between. When Peter the Great wanted to build grand buildings, churches and ships....he had to import almost all of the skilled workmen from the rest of Europe - Russia had very few. Russians went directly from serfdom under the czars to serfdom under the Bolsheviks and they still culturally prefer to be told what to do. Certainly not anything like 100% are like this, but the broad majority still prefer and are most comfortable with a strong dictator, or a czar, to run the country and feel little deep seated need for "freedom" or "liberty". Russia is different culturally and it took me many years of trying to piece together the little clues I ran across when visiting people in their homes, and talking with them, especially after plenty of vodka and understand what I was seeing. And once I had my hypothesis, I had several years more of working there to validate it. Anyone with an open mind, interested in actually understanding what is going on in the world, and getting better informed....watch this interview with a British Russian expert. He gets it, and he is right. I assure you that this video is time well spent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbHLrH9Q_E4

Well, I don't have any travel experiences in Russia or before that, the USSR. So the Russians are not like us - true to a point for many reasons, And the Chinese are not like us. Or the Japanese or French or any other nationality. Please tell me exactly what has Russia done under Putin that they should be our number one enemy? Spare me the invasion of Ukraine. Their military is not nearly as large or threatening as the Chines/PLA, but it's Russia Russia Russia.

For a moment, I thought #1 was describing America. Btw, Russia doesn't have LGBTQHRYZ, BLM, ANTIFA, NAACP, SEIU, CAIR, Teacher's Union, ACLU, and the DNC. And that's a huge plus for the Russians.