The scandal that the Republican establishment is making out of Trump's embrace of Vladimir Putin is yet another sorry attempt to paint the GOP as more moral and principled than it actually has been in practice. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans alike have a long history of embracing left-wing and right-wing authoritarian regimes, respectively, as "friends" or even "allies"; dictatorship itself is never the cardinal sin as far as Washington is concerned - opposition to typically partisan US interests is.
Just as Republicans during the Cold War wholeheartedly supported right-wing paramilitary thugs and murderous reactionary juntas in Latin America as "freedom fighters" against the existential threat of international communism, their Democratic counterparts were equally enamored with the violent Marxist or Maoist insurrectionists that fought against them, whose own records of governance and human rights whenever they did seize power were anything but benign.
In fact, Trump's dalliance with Putin merely exposes the naked self-interest of our foreign policy without inhibition - with democracy and human rights only secondary concerns - which our political establishment has for so long tried to hide. As with everything else this election year, they just can't cover it up any longer, and that's why they're in a tizzy.
For instance, we have an entire cottage industry in the defense and
intelligence establishments that has been in cahoots for decades with
the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Saudi Arabia - a government and
society that can only be described as undemocratic, unrepresentative,
and in important ways less socially progressive than Putin's Russia or even rival theocracy Iran. But
don't expect anyone in the political and economic establishment on either side of the partisan divide - from
Hillary Clinton herself to all our standard congressional Republican
defense hawks who rely on customers like the Saudis for their local
pork-barrel weapons-making jobs - to complain much about the Saudis'
notorious second-class treatment of women (which has admittedly marginally improved in recent years).
Similar things can be said about our relationship with China, although as with Russia, China's inherent geopolitical incompatibility with our global dominance means that its authoritarian excesses are likewise more scrutinized than those of a close ally like Saudi Arabia.
In fact, Russia is politically and socially freer than China, yet because we're not as economically intertwined with it, it's more of an adversary than China; China in turn is politically about as closed as Saudi Arabia and socially more liberal, yet because the Saudis are our main proxy in the Middle East and rely on our protection, we simply don't have the strategic and defense cooperation with the Chinese as we've had with the Saudis since the 1970s.
In the new post-post-Cold War era, Republicans in particular should be breathing a sigh of relief that we're finally coming out of a self-stifling period of trying to be what we can never be on the world stage: a referee governed strictly by our highest idealistic principles. The truth is, we've never secured the freedoms we cherish by siding only with those with identical or even generally like values as ourselves. The real world has never worked that way. Trump's realism with respect to Putin - even if mixed with an uncomfortable personal affinity with a foreign strongman - is another blast of fresh air.
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