Is President Donald Trump "coddl[ing] dictators"? That was what Joe Biden said when Trump met with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un during the first Trump administration. And Democrats have begun rolling out the same lines of attack in response to Trump's summit last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska.
"The fact that this meeting even took place—at the invitation of President Trump, on American soil, without Ukraine present, and with zero concessions from Russia—is an undeserved reward for Putin, who has continued to bomb Ukrainian schools and hospitals, abduct Ukrainian children, and refuse to negotiate meaningfully about an end to the horrific war he started," House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (D–N.Y.) declared. "By quite literally rolling out the red carpet, Trump has legitimized Russia's aggression and whitewashed Putin's war crimes."
In other words, Democratic critics are treating the very existence of contacts between leaders as a surrender. And by doing so, they're boxing themselves into a dangerous, pro-war position. Of course, diplomacy should be judged by its results; both the North Korean outreach and the Anchorage summit were inconclusive. But if the president can't even deign to talk to foreign rivals, then it becomes impossible to avoid or end violent conflict.
