Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

Russia appears to have been involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. The deeper issues, however, go beyond partisan politics.

At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Secretary of State at the time, James Baker, assured the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not absorb former Warsaw Pact states. The most recent NATO summit was held in Warsaw. We plan to deploy advanced weapons in Poland.

While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, the United States was involved in an intense political crisis in Ukraine, which had been a republic of the now extinct Soviet Union. Ukraine’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovich, an unsavory leader by any standards, was close to Moscow. Washington supported a revolution by Yanukovich’s political opponents, Western-oriented free market advocates. They prevailed. Ukraine’s pro-Russian eastern population revolted, and Russia then seized Crimea and interfered in eastern Ukraine. Five thousand Ukrainian forces — anti and pro Russian — have been killed, along with 2,000 civilians.

Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, was caught on tape designating one Ukrainian leader as “the guy”; he became Prime Minister.

To be sure, both the U.S. and Russia have interfered in many countries, but when it comes to former Warsaw Pact states and especially to former Soviet republics, the moral issues of democracy — or hypocrisy — are overshadowed by extreme risk.

As the West incorporates former Soviet republics into NATO, as it has the Baltic states, it becomes obliged to defend them with nuclear weapons. In turn, Russia is moving toward nuclear launch on warning, with greatly increased danger of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. The next President will need to manage tensions with Moscow to avoid a new arms race.

For Speak Your Mind, this is David Keppel.

You don’t have to admire a foreign leader to think the Hitler comparison is irresponsible. Hitler was a genocidal dictator bent upon world conquest. Neville Chamberlain’s celebration of the 1938 Munich agreement as “peace in our time” lives in infamy. If someone is really Hitler, the only answer can be total war.

Surely Hillary Clinton does not really believe that Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which in 1954 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, is a first step toward Russian invasion of Europe all the way to the beaches of Normandy. I trust she also does not think the U.S. should fight Russia, since such a war would unleash a nuclear apocalypse.

Casually comparing an opponent to Hitler not only blocks needed diplomacy; it also cheapens the darkest lesson in human history. The traumas of the First World War, humiliating terms of Versailles, and the Great Depression led a civilized nation into stark pathology. We have also seen genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Rather than call adversaries Hitler, we should take care to avoid the shocks and stresses that can push any society to madness and murder.