Trump claims he's avoiding new Cold War; everyone else accuses him of appeasing Putin

IT WAS not surprising that on the eve of the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, many of the columnists in the American mainstream media (MSM) and the talking heads on the television news shows went into a full-blown attack against the White House occupant.

Helsinki 2018 would end up like Munich 1938 (when the Western powers conceded Czechoslovakia to Germany's dictator Adolph Hitler) or like Yalta 1945 (where US President Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin divided occupied Europe between them), screamed the headlines, with some pundits predicting that Mr Trump would give away the store to appease another dictator and avoid a confrontation with a staunch anti-American adversary.

Some of the White House's critics have gone beyond just accusing Mr Trump of failing to protect US interests vis-à-vis the Russians, and in particular, of failing to criticise the Kremlin for hacking into the server of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and for dispatching Russian trolls to infiltrate Facebook and Twitter. Those moves are seen as part of a strategy to interfere in the 2016 US presidential elections and help the Republican candidate win the race.