One of the many transparently stupid aspects of the Russiagate narrative was that it persisted in the face of clear evidence that Trump’s behavior as president was not pro-Russia. In fact, au contraire, as Victor Davis Hanson points out here in a different context:

Putin…had concluded that Trump was dangerously unpredictable, and perhaps best not provoked. After all, the Trump administration took out Russian mercenaries in Syria. It beefed up defense spending and upped sanctions.

The Trump administration flooded the world with cheap oil to Russia’s chagrin. It pulled out from asymmetrical missile treaties with Russia. It sold sophisticated arms to the Ukrainians. The Russians concluded that Trump might do anything, and so waited for another president before again testing America.

But as Hanson also points out, Biden and those around him “seem determined to upset the peace they inherited.” That’s true of so many things; they seem determined to do the opposite of Trump even in the many areas where his policies were working. I wrote about that phenomenon recently in this post.

This is what Hanson sees the Biden administration doing to court disaster with Russia and China (additions in brackets mine):

If Biden is seeking to provoke a nation with more than 6,000 deliverable nuclear weapons, he is certainly not backing up his rhetoric [such as calling Putin a “killer”] with force.

Biden may well decrease the Pentagon budget. He also seems to have forgotten that Trump was impeached for supposedly imperiling Ukraine, when in fact he sold Ukraine weapons.

While Biden was talking loudly to Putin, his administration was being serially humiliated by China. Chinese diplomats dressed down their American counterparts in a recent meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. They gleefully recycled domestic left-wing boilerplate that a racist America has no moral authority to criticize China.

If Trump was unpredictably blunt, Biden is too often predictably confused. And he appears frail, sending the message to autocracies that America’s commander in chief is not fully in control.

Biden has not, as he promised, demanded from China transparency about the origins of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan. By summer, that plague may have killed 600,000 Americans.

More disturbing, as Russia puts troops on the Ukrainian border, China is flying into Taiwanese air space, testing its defenses and the degree to which the United States cares.

For a half-century, American foreign policy sought to ensure that Russia was no closer to China than either was to the United States. Now, the two dictatorships seem almost joined at the hip, as each probes U.S. responses or lack thereof. Not surprisingly, North Korea in late March resumed its firing of missiles over the Sea of Japan.

Much more at the link.

These things are not accidental; they are very much a continuation of the Obama years, and there are even members of the same Obama team onboard. Biden – in my opinion – is not in charge, but neither is he utterly senile and for the most part he is in favor of what’s happening, too, just as he was during the Obama years.

I doubt there’s anyone in the administration who has America’s well-being at heart. Their priorities are somewhat opaque to me, but I believe that some actually are far leftists, some are merely incompetent, and some are playing to international interests in which they might have a monetary stake.