What Isn’t Being Discussed About Helsinki?

FEATURING RAHUL MAHAJAN – President Donald Trump has returned from his high-level summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to face harsh calls from both parties at home. At the summit in Helsinki, Finland, Trump publicly denied US intelligence agencies’ findings of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election and claimed that he believed Mr. Putin instead who has denied any wrong doing. Democrats were of course up in arms but this time it was Republican lawmakers that joined in with choruses of disapproval. And, some commentators even used the word “treason” to describe Trump’s actions.

What is not getting much attention are substantive issues such as US-Russia relations in the on-going Syria war. On Monday as Trump was apparently making progress toward ending the war in his talks with Putin, Russia was bombing civilian targets in Syria.

Rahul Mahajan is the US Foreign Policy and Empire Correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali. He’s the author of two books on the Iraq war: Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond and The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism. He also teaches sociology at University of Wisconsin, River Falls.