Things Have Changed

One of our members has a blog with the same title as this post, and Bob Dylan's song made the expression famous.

Articles about the upcoming Trump-Putin summit made me think of how things have changed over the course of my lifetime between the leaders in the specific relationship between Washington and Moscow. This includes: Roosevelt-Stalin, Kennedy-Khrushchev, Reagan-Gorbachev and now Trump-Putin. Things have changed.

I was just starting elementary school when we became unlikely allies with Moscow in the fight against Hitler's Germany in WWII. I was in a US Army Strategic Army Corps unit stationed at Fort Bragg and on high alert for almost two weeks in October 1962 when Kennedy-Khrushchev settled that dispute over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. I was a senior career executive in the Treasury Department when Reagan told Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in a speech written by a Ricochet founder and followed shortly after by the collapse of the USSR. Now we have Trump-Putin.

What has changed? America emerged from WWII as the world's leading economic and military power, ending the war with Japan with nuclear weapons not used since. Soon after, the USSR had nuclear weapons which led to the confrontation in 1962 and have been an important component in diplomacy and treaties since. In the following three decades leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe, Japan and South Korea completed major economic recoveries from wartime effects and China made major economic advances. Other nations have made big economic leaps as well.

Two very new things also began to show: terrorism and globalism. These developments are part of what influences thinking today and will be part of what goes into any proposed solutions to today's conflicts. All of us wonder where things will go from here. I know that I have a different view from a number of others here. I'm going to say what I think, acknowledging I have no specialization or expertise in diplomacy.

I think these two leaders are both focused on their own nation's sovereignty and what it takes to protect that over the long term. Trump considers America to have been severely affected economically by trade terms and has been acting to change that. Trump has been noted many times as being transactional, and military conflict is not conducive to peaceful trade relations, notwithstanding the so-called economic benefits of warfare.

Putin, with long experience in situations with his nation under duress, thinks first and foremost territorially and has been acting on that. Many, including the EU countries and NATO, have lived a long time reflecting on how to defend against aggression from the Soviet Union and now Russia, and Russia has exactly the opposite concerns.

I see these as the basic mindsets of Trump and Putin as they meet, and maybe I'm totally wrong. Also, it's important to note how different this is from the Biden Administration approach, in which there was never even any discussion of meeting -- even after it was known that Putin was preparing for a special military operation.