You cannot be smart if your ideas are from comic books.

It is amazing that the US has some of the top universities in the world, the largest number of Nobel Prize winners and a surfeit of well funded think-tanks and yet seems to have no clue as to the world outside its borders. Even those with PhDs from Ivy League universities have a black and white view of the world, in which the US is always good and anyone who disagrees is bad. Whether it is because they have grown up reading comics about cowboys and injuns, GI Joe and the gooks, Davy Crockett and Santa Ana we do not know, but education and travel should broaden minds and generate a greater understanding of other points of view. Christopher Smart, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, no less, writes that Putin is wrong to support Donald Trump in his bid to become the next president of the US, by encouraging Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton's campaign servers. " Russian leaders also have a long history of agitation and propaganda, or 'agitprop' as their Soviet predecessors called the overt and covert campaigns to shape public opinion in foreign countries," he writes. Quite forgetting an unprovoked US war on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, support for mujahideen in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of the Taliban, which gave birth to Al Qaeda and Islamic State, and the disastrous regime change in Iraq and Libya. " To be sure, Russia's interests also include political dominance over its neighbours, which is what drove the ham-handed intervention in Crimea..." writes Smart. Perhaps, he should read about US support for dictators in South America which is why left-wing governments in Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Brazil still have a jaundiced view of the US. As for Crimea, Russia only intervened after the extreme right wing government in Kiev, backed by the US and EU, started bombing its own citizens in the east of the country. Ukraine has turned into Europe's 'supermarket' for illegal weapons from where smugglers have to cross any border into Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic or Slovakia, all part of the Schengen area, and they can walk into Austria, Italy or Germany. Smart thinks that Trump's economic proposals may cause chaos in international markets, which may not benefit Russia. Russia's economy is suffering because of financial sanctions imposed by the Obama government over which Putin has no control. If there is chaos Russia maybe able to trade independently with individual countries. Putin has every reason to disrupt Hillary Clinton's campaign, if he can,because of her abusive language in the past. Calling him "ruthless, cynical and utterly unprincipled" is utterly stupid when the US is friends with Pakistan, a center of terrorism, is a key ally of Turkey, which is a member of NATO, and sucks up to China, which is at war with all its neighbors. If Putin is smiling, it maybe because he is lucky or because he knows what he is doing, having gone to school in the KGB.