Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016?

Our foreign policy elite's answer appears to be a thunderous no.

Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia.

During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with Russia and cooperate with Vladimir Putin in smashing al-Qaida and ISIS terrorists in Syria, and leave Putin's ally Bashar Assad alone.

With this diplomatic deal in mind, President Trump has resisted efforts to get him to call Putin a "thug" or a "murderer." Asked during his taped Super Bowl interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly whether he respected Putin, Trump said that, as a leader, yes.

O'Reilly pressed, "But he's a killer, though. Putin's a killer."To which Trump replied, "There are a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country's so innocent?"

While his reply was clumsy, Trump's intent was commendable. 

If he is to negotiate a modus vivendi with a nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to end life as we know it in the USA, probably not a good idea to start off by calling its leader a "killer."

Mitch McConnell rushed to assure America he believes Putin is a "thug" and any suggestion of a moral equivalence between America and Russia is outrageous.

Apparently referring to a polonium poisoning of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, Marco Rubio tweeted, "When has a Democratic political activist ever been poisoned by the GOP? Or vice versa?"

Yet, as we beat our chests in celebration of our own moral superiority over other nations and peoples, consider what Trump is trying to do here, and who is really behaving as a statesmen, and who is acting like an infantile and self-righteous prig.

When President Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, did Ike denounce him as the "Butcher of Budapest" for his massacre of the Hungarian patriots in 1956?

Did President Nixon, while negotiating his trip to Peking to end decades of hostility, speak the unvarnished truth about Mao Zedong — that he was a greater mass murderer than Stalin?