One of the many bad raps hung on the Trump administration by grotesquely dishonest media was that President Trump was subservient to Vladimir Putin’s desires. It didn’t matter if he sent lethal aid to Ukraine (which was refused by the Obama regime), sanctioned Russian diplomats and oligarchs, demolished the ability of a Russian ally, Syria, to use chemical weapons on civilians, abrogated unfair arms treaties with Russia, or slaughtered Russian mercenaries, to the hyper-partisan press, either these actions did not exist, or they were portrayed as Trump being a dupe of Putin.

Foremost in Trump’s actions were removing the United States from legacy treaties that disadvantaged the United States and advantaged Russia. This is all the detritus of the way the George H. W. Bush administration, adrift after the end of the Cold War stripped it of any intellectual underpinning, tried to prop up Russia as a successor state to the USSR in order to preserve as much of the status quo ante as possible (Russia on the UN Security Council? Really?).

One of the treaties that President Trump withdrew from was this mouthful: the Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, also known as the New START Treaty. What the treaty does is lock the US and Russia in at a parity:

• 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments;
• 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments (each such heavy bomber is counted as one warhead toward this limit);
• 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments.

And it maintains a verification regime that the Russians will surely evade, and the fiction that Russia is a peer competitor of the US and not merely a Third World failed state that happens to have a 30+ nuclear weapons stockpile that is not particularly well maintained (shocker, right?).

What does the Corn Pop administration do? It begs Russia to extend the treaty:

President Joe Biden has proposed to Russia a five-year extension of a nuclear arms treaty that is otherwise set to expire in February, the White House said Thursday.

Biden proposed the extension even as he asked the intelligence community to look closely into Russia’s cyberattacks, its alleged interference in the 2020 election and other actions, press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Russia has said for some time that it would welcome an extension of the New START treaty, which limits the number of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons. The Trump administration made a late bid to extend the treaty, but its conditions were rejected by Russia.

U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, are sure to applaud Biden’s proposal, which also provides an early signal of his intent to pursue arms control,

Psaki noted that a five-year extension is permitted by the treaty and it “makes even more sense when the relationship with Russia is adversarial as it is at this time.”

The rationale for this is bonkers. There is no reason for the United States to have any arms control treaty with Russia. If the treaty existed in a vacuum it would be of no consequence, but it doesn’t. It exists in a geopolitical environment where China flexes its muscles and is signaling that it will start enforcing its current propaganda demands by military force within a very short time horizon. The “New START” assumes that Russia is our only security threat and limits our weapons stockpile to what is needed to deter them. It completely ignores China.

And China approves:

#US & #Russia extending #NewSTART treaty will be conducive to safeguarding global strategic stability and international peace & security. We hope the US will continue to work with Russia to ensure a successful extension of the treaty. pic.twitter.com/2uYHdrREbA

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) January 22, 2021

There are institutional reasons for this. The arms control community is wholly-owned and operated by Americans who loathe America and have made it their life’s work to limit American power. From their perspective, any unfair treaty is a good idea so long as the United States is disadvantaged. They are still smarting from the Trump administration sidelining them, and they are having one final OrangeManBad orgasmatronic event.

But I think there are other reasons that bear much closer watching. As has been documented in excruciating detail, Joe Biden has used his influence to enrich his idiot, drug-addled, stripper-boinking son, Hunter (by the way, I didn’t see his new grandson at the inauguration). Hunter Biden had a sweetheart deal with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma which still hasn’t been fully explored. But you know who does know the details? The Russian FSB operates pretty freely in Ukraine. Hunter has also made a crap-ton of money off deals with the ChiComs. The inner workings of those deals, like the one with Burisma, are obviously corrupt, and the people who have the inside knowledge of how money was distributed to which member of the Biden Crime Family are officers in the intelligence services of nations hostile to the United States.

Imagine the outcry had President Trump, who provably had no connection with Russia, had offered Russia a deal that compromised US national security and had the Chinese ecstatic. That has just happened. Crickets. Just crickets.