We are roughly at the half-year mark of President Donald Trump’s administration. I am quite sure that if one did a content analysis of mainstream news media reporting on American politics since January, one would find an overwhelming percentage of coverage devoted to the Trump-Putin, U.S.-Russia relationship. Hardly a day has gone by without some mention of this matter, usually on the front page and at the top of the newscast, no matter whether there was actually any firm new development worth reporting.

Much of the story has been about the story itself. One might call this metanews, if not fake news. 

I am not saying it is a “nothingburger,” that there is nothing there, only that, at least up to now, there has been more speculation and rumor than hard, weighty facts. The jury is still out, and meanwhile the constant churn of accusations has made it difficult for our political institutions to function. We have had government by investigation, and the Ship of State has had more leaks than the Titanic. 

We hear how Putin has undermined our democracy, but we are doing a good job of it ourselves, between the misdoings of the Fourth Estate and the other three branches.

My take on all this boils down to four propositions. 

First, there is little doubt that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, based on substantial evidence. That Vladimir Putin was behind this is also unquestionable, given the fact that what was said about Louis XIV of France (“L’Etat c’est moi”) is just as true about Putin; his fingerprints are everywhere in Russia.  

That said, as former CIA director James Wolsey has noted, there is nothing unprecedented or shocking about Russian efforts to try to influence foreign elections, including U.S. elections, through hacking or other means. The United States itself, of course, has been known to interfere in other countries’ domestic politics.

Second, we should be rightly concerned about this and the potential harm it could do to our democracy, and we should make clear to Russia our indignation and willingness to rachet up retaliatory actions should it continue. However, there is no evidence that Russian involvement in 2016 altered voting results or fundamentally changed the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. 

When Donald Trump said during the campaign that he might not trust the election results, he was roundly criticized by the Democrats and the media; yet those same critics have spent the past six months refusing to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election. Regardless of how incompetent Trump may seem – certainly he often comes off as unpresidential with his outlandish tweets and unorthodox behavior – he deserves to be given the opportunity to govern. 

Even were he to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and persuade North Korea to cease its nuclear weapons program, the “resistance” seems incapable of acknowledging any positive accomplishment of his, however impressive it might be.

Third, to the extent that Russian interference occurred, there has been much suspicion of “collusion” between Trump or his associates and Russian agents. Everyone from Trump family members (Jared Kushner, Donald Jr., etc.) to campaign officials (Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, etc.) have been named as possible conspirators, even though as yet there is no clear proof that any law of any consequence has been violated, at least none that would seem to justify the over-the-top rants by some Democrats calling for impeachment of the president and condemning him for committing “treason.”   

A special prosecutor has been appointed and lengthy investigations are underway, yet in the current overheated political environment, few are willing to allow this process to run its course before rendering a verdict. So much for innocent until proven guilty. The process may or may not find culpability, but history will record the Democratic Party and the mass media as an embarrassment for rushing to judgment long before the evidence was all in. 

They have engaged in daily speculation, desperately trying to give the story legs, often requiring them to seize on minutia, such as whether Trump’s 30 minute “second” conversation with Putin  at a G20 summit gathering in full view of all the dinner guests was a “secret” meeting or not. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats are silent about their own possible “collusion”: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s former counsel is the attorney for the author of the discredited “Trump dossier,” the hit job released during the 2016 campaign by an opposition research firm based on anonymous Russian sources. 

Fourth, why should we be surprised that Trump is giving a lot of attention to Russia? There is arguably no more important foreign policy relationship the United States needs to cultivate, given Moscow’s possession of thousands of nuclear weapons, its possession of veto power on the U.N. Security Council, and its overall capacity to help or hurt our interests abroad. 

Former President Barack Obama’s administration was right to want to “reset” our relationship with Russia; the inability to do so, including deterring Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for the Assad regime in Syria, was one of its greatest foreign policy failures.  

Trump may or may not succeed in his attempt at a reset. But he should not be blasted for trying. He has been criticized for cozying up to a dictator, never mind that Obama made nice to the mullahs in Iran and the Castro regime in Cuba, and never mind that Trump has maintained sanctions against Russia and threatened additional ones should efforts at rapprochement fail. 

The same Left in America that often projected weakness toward the Kremlin during the Cold War now accuses Trump and the right wing as being too soft toward Russia and not appreciating how evil its leadership is. (The Left has always been partial to totalitarianism more so than mere autocracy.) 

As threatening as Russia is, it is not as dangerous as it was during the decades it was stoking communist revolutions across the globe. There are shared interests in fighting terrorism and addressing other mutual problems that we should be trying to build constructively on. Just as Rambo Reagan saw possibilities for improved relations in the 1980s, Trump is aiming for improvement today. Putin is hard to figure, but one would hope that there would be bipartisan support for exploring a new “détente.”

Although many observers six months ago worried about Trump as a loose cannon who would reverse over a half century of American foreign policy, in rejecting alliances, free trade, democracy-building, and other core elements of the post-World War II liberal international order we had helped build, he has given some excellent speeches affirming Western values and commitments and generally represented the United States well abroad, supported by a strong foreign policy team headed by Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and others. 

Elliott Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations has said that “Trump might not be a conventional president, but so far, his foreign policy has been remarkably unremarkable,” even calling Trump a “traditionalist.”    

Meanwhile, Trump is not far from the truth when he characterizes the current hysteria over his Russian connection as a “witch hunt,” one that would do Joe McCarthy proud.