Pernicious State-Generated Provocation

"These actions [Moscow's aggressive interference programs] are persistent. They're pervasive and they are meant to undermine America's democracy on a daily basis, regardless of whether it is election time or not."
"[Russia and other countries continue targeting U.S. businesses, government, allied institutions] the warning lights are blinking red."
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats

"It's imperative we get to the bottom of what is going on so we can be prepared to protect ourselves in advance of the 2018 elections."
"My personal view: the Russians are at it again. BIG discrepancy [between warning by Coats and Trump's post-summit statement]."
Republican Senator Lindsay Graham

"Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with president Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this. It's called Trump Derangement Syndrome!"
"So many people at the higher ends of intelligence loved my press conference performance in Helsinki."
"We got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match."
U.S. President Donald J. Trump 

President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki

Reuters

Well, that's what we like to see: world leaders behaving well with one another, like reasonably intelligent people able to converse with one another, discussing world affairs and their nations' relationship as they probe one another for variables in the perception each holds. This is big ego time, with Russian President Vladimir Putin cultivating his image of himself as leader of one of the two super-powers world attention pivots toward, and Donald Trump asserting his belief in self as conciliator, charmer extraordinaire and solver of unfortunate misunderstandings.

The United States, they and the rest of the world occasionally tend to forget, has a long history of interference in the affairs of other countries whose politics they abhor and feel should more closely resemble the values and priorities of the United States. The CIA represents the long arm of American-style justice, its agents well schooled in the kind of violent reprisals that propaganda and reality leads the West to attribute to the old KGB operatives, now carried forward by the new agency dedicated to the same old techniques but with technological advances.

Perhaps the Russian Federation is more skilled in the use of proxies than the U.S., though both are well known to have extensively used private militias tasking them to perform vital work each would prefer to keep their federal military figures clear of, clearing the air of responsibility and leading to the denial of culpability since these were not state actors, so go ahead and prove otherwise. It's tough to feel too much sympathy for Washington furious over the Kremlin's manipulation of social media to advantage themselves in creating havoc at election time.

How many times, after all, has Washington instructed its CIA agents to indulge in suborning citizens of other countries in efforts to destabilize the political environment, including during elections, even while it sends election monitors to ensure that no double-dealing, corrupt measures are undertaken by the foreign government which the U.S. insists must respect the democratic rights of their citizens. American citizens practise their democratic right to freely elect candidates they feel are likeliest to govern as they would wish them to.

If a foreign government's apparatchiks have stacked the decks in favour of a candidate that they feel is an egotistic, unprincipled, incompetent and ignorant boor whose kick at the four-year cat of governance will create turmoil and turn the population toward a polarized enmity against one another then it is a frail democracy that has failed too many of its own to begin with. One can only suppose that Russians themselves enjoy the exploits of their very own egotistical, unprincipled, competently sinister autocrat, so it appears that they are not alone; a major segment of Americans do as well.

In Russia, dissidents and opponents of the government, journalists who write disparagingly and despairingly of the corruption and wreckage their government has made of human rights and basic civil entitlements, along with threats to global stability find themselves imprisoned with long sentences or very, very dead. In the United States opponents of any current administration froth and fulminate awaiting their turn to elect their own incompetent governments in a conscienceless, capitalist system that awards those who familiarize themselves with its opportunities.

It is the sanctimony of righteousness in lofting democratic values over the clearly autocratic ones of one's political opponents that reveal the hypocrisy of one system against another that makes no pretense of favouring human rights over the more appealing path of dictatorship under a cloak of democracy so favoured by elections geared to garner majority votes in favour of pitiless strongmen jealous of their power base which in fact has its counterpart in the appeal of a Trump promising that large swath of disgruntled voters he is their man.

And he is, as much as Putin is Russia's. Little wonder there is a personal magnetism they respond to, between them. The wonder of it all is that the general population of each country manages to survive their unfortunate choices as well as their lack of choice. Since it is the fate of all ordinary people lacking the ambition it takes to claw their way to the pinnacle of political power to mull events then get on with their lives as best they can. They can and they do.

President Trump and Russia's President Putin sit for a working lunch in Finland's Presidential Palace

AFP/Getty