Wisdom on Trump-Russia From an FBI Asset

Stefan Halper, now confirmed as the intelligence asset apparently used to tease out possible ties between the Trump election campaign and Russia, probably wouldn’t approve of the politicized behemoth the Trump-Russia investigation has become. Some of his academic work was about similar episodes in U.S. history, in which what he called the “rational center” failed and big, simple but wrong-headed ideas prevailed.

The world knows Halper now as a person the Federal Bureau of Investigation had covertly tasked with contacting Trump advisers, apparently to sound them out on Russia connections. But before the current controversy, which has Republicans and Democrats debating the legitimacy of his mission and the implications of its belated disclosure, Halper, a politics professor who had worked for several Republican administrations, was largely known as a critic of recent U.S. foreign policy. An early supporter of President George W. Bush, he was disappointed by the decision to send troops to Iraq. Later, he was on record warning against the illusion, popular during the Obama years, that China was democratizing as its economic prosperity grew. China, Halper argued, instead presented a variation on the authoritarian model that could successfully compete with U.S. values and worldview.