Memo to Sen. Mark Warner, D.-Va. and Rep. Adam Schiff, D- Ca. — if  President Trump is colluding with Russia he has an odd way of showing it. He unleashed America’s energy resources, most recently in Alaska’s ANWR, which puts downward pressure on oil prices, which is the only thing Putin’s Russia has to sell. Then he revives missile defense including a pledge to Poland to deploy missile defenses there.

Now he has announced plans to reverse the policy of the Obama administration, which stood silently when Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea and attacked Ukraine, and sell the Ukrainians lethal defensive weaponry, including anti-tank missiles designed to destroy Putin’s Russian tanks in the hands of separatist rebels:

President Donald Trump is expected to announce his approval of a plan to sell anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian government, a move that would mark a significant escalation in lethal U.S. military support for Ukrainian forces battling Russian-aligned forces in the border region, four State Department sources tell ABC News…

The sale of anti-tank missiles, which could possibly include the U.S.-made Javelin system, provoked a strong reaction from Russia on Saturday, saying it “crossed the line,” and could threaten to derail Trump’s calls for better relations with Moscow.

This hardly fits the narrative of a Trump Administration in thrall to the Kremlin and once again begs the question of why Putin would have wanted Trump to win over Hillary. Hillary would never have sold anti-tank weapons to Ukraine though she was quite willing to sell Russia 20 percent of our uranium.

President Trump, unlike President Obama, is well aware that it is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expressed view that the demise of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest disasters of modern times. His actions in Ukraine in conjunction with massive Russian rearmament show his desire to reassemble the old Soviet Union.

In his annual address to parliament in 2005, old KGB boss emeritus Putin made the grotesque claim that the “demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the century,” demonstrating a nostalgia for what he considers the good old days.

Back in 2012 when Romney put Russia at the top of the geopolitical threat list, President Obama gave a mocking response more worthy of a former community organizer rather than the leader of the free world. As Investor’s Business Daily noted:

“You said Russia. Not al-Qaida. You said Russia,” Obama rebuked him regarding our biggest threats. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because… the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” said the president who promised the Russians more flexibility as he disarmed the United States.

If the Cold War was over, somebody forgot to tell Moscow, for their belligerence towards Ukraine is straight out of the playbook of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. They ruthlessly repressed with Soviet armor the 1956 Hungary rebellion and the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.

Putin’s approach is perhaps more subtle, arming so-called “separatists” rather than sending in Soviet armored columns, but it is a distinction without a difference. Grave concerns and sternly worded letters carry no weight with Putin, whose stated ambitions are clear. President Obama did less than nothing, sending only supplies worthy of a Boy Scout Jamboree rather than a sovereign nation resisting Russian aggression. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 warned Congress that Russian actions in the Ukraine were the start of a new Cold War and that President Obama’s actions were inadequate:

On Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko gave a 40-minute speech to a rare joint session of Congress alerting lawmakers to the plight of his country under Russia’s creeping “Anschluss.”

Poroshenko once again pled for meaningful aid, including an affiliation with NATO, and warned that a new Iron Curtain may soon descend as Vladimir Putin tries to reassemble the Soviet Union whose demise he has publicly mourned….

In March, Ukraine asked for arms and ammunition, intelligence support, aviation fuel and night vision goggles. The Pentagon agreed only to provide the Ukrainians with supplies of U.S. military rations known as Meals Ready To Eat, or MREs.

This time Ukraine did not get much more than that — just some peripheral gear such as night-vision goggles and helmets. But once again it received no lethal aid that Poroshenko’s country desperately needs, such as requested anti-tank weaponry.

Just as Obama failed to aid Iran’s “Green Revolution” in Iran in 2009 when it might have brought the mullahs to their knees and nipped Iran’s nuclear threat in the bud, Obama allowed Putin and Russia to take the first steps toward rebooting the old “evil empire” President Ronald Reagan worked so hard to defeat. Thanks to President Trump Ukraine’s long-desired anti-tank weaponry is on its way.

Merry Christmas, Vladimir Putin, from President Donald Trump.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.  

Last week, the Trump administration’s announced that the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv would move to Israel’s actual capital, Jerusalem. As the cognoscenti shrieked, some ten nations are now planning to do the same, in a snowball effect. According to the New York Post:

Israel is in talks with more than 10 countries — including some in Europe — about potentially moving their respective embassies to Jerusalem, according to officials.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely on Monday said the nations were interested in following President Trump’s footsteps and declaring the Israeli city the new capital in the wake of Guatemala’s recent decision to do so.

Pretty amazing what U.S. leadership will do. The U.S. move provided all ten of those nations plausible cover for moving their nations to Jerusalem after us. Prior to that, they stayed put.

But makes absolutely perfect sense for them to move. Here’s why.

Most nations want nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict and have no influence over its events. They aren’t players, nobody wants their opinion, and they don’t have the expertise or exposure, and it’s none of their business. They are nations however, and nations have interests.

What’s the interest of a tiny nation such as Guatemala or Honduras in the broader conflicts of the Middlee East? Nil. But they do want to develop their countries and draw foreign investment to ensure job creation and a rising standard of living for their locals. One of the best nations for this pursuit of national interest is Israel. Would it not make sense for them to get on Israel’s good side and move their embassies to Jerusalem? The Israelis would be delighted and they would probably bend over backwards to help these nations in achieving their goals.

Israel is such a good ally for any nation to have.

For starters, and little known to the media community, Israel is a high-tech powerhouse to rival Silicon Valley. Other places try to set up Silicon Valleys and flunk but Israel is one of the few places that have really succeeded – and like the original Silicon Valley, there was nothing centrally planned about it. Israel is such a success as a tech powerhouse that some say it is the “brains” of Silicon Valley, given the kinds of outposts all the big tech companies have set up in that country and the kinds of operations (design and software development) they are.

Besides tech, Israelis are also famous problem-solvers — on intractible resource issues such as water and natural gas. Israel, after all, is the nation that made the desert bloom. It’s the nation whose greenery outlines its borders from airline flights. It has no water problems – it exports water. What’s more, with energy an issue in the last decade and fracking and other technologies for extraction rising, Israel has mastered many of these technologies and is poised to develop its great natural gas fields offshore, too.

It’s the can-do country. Case in point: the water problems Ethiopia has been having are being resolved by the Israelis.

Here is some perspective from George Gilder whose book, The Israel Test, is must-reading for understanding why good relations with Israel benefits every nation.

“There’s a view that the Middle East faces an impossible water predicament,” author George Gilder told an American Freedom Alliance conference last week. “In reality, the water crisis is bogus.”

He pointed out that Israel resolved its water problems by using the talents of its entrepreneurs. “Since 1948 Israel’s population is up 10-fold, arable land threefold, agriculture output 16-fold, industrial output 50-fold, yet net water usage dropped 10%,” Gilder said.

The country recycles 83% of its own water, buys sewage from the Palestinians to turn into usable water, invented drip irrigation and is the world leader in desalinization. These have made Israel close to self-sufficient in water ever since it freed its economy in 1995.

And remember: water isn’t the only problem Israel is good at solving – they have top expertise in archaeological preservation, in energy development, in alternative-energy if a nation is interested in that, in medicine, education, science, culture and quite a bit more.

Why wouldn’t a nation such as Guatemala or Honduras (which is reportedly the next nation that will move its embassy) want something like that? A little piece of this great treasure trove for mutual benefit? Why wouldn’t they want to reach out to Israel and acknowledge its right to exist by moving their embassy to where Israel’s government really is? When word gets out about how intensifying friendship by moving embassies to Jerusalem benefits nations that extend their hands, you can bet there is going to be a lot more of it. An avalanche is already starting.