This is an eyebrow-raising time to be going easy on Russia

 Russian dissident Alexey Navalny was clearly poisoned. Leaders around the world are speaking out about it:

Leaders around the world, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, offered strong condemnation and called for answers from the Russian government. But US President Donald Trump -- who has faced sharp criticism for his soft-handed approach to Russia -- has been virtually silent on Navalny's poisoning and the US response on Wednesday came from a National Security Council spokesperson.

How about the United States? What's its response?

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who delivered a news conference at the State Department after Germany's announcement, did not mention the news and the administration's response was limited to a series of tweets from the National Security Council spokesperson, John Ullyot.

"The United States is deeply troubled by the results released today. Alexei Navalny's poisoning is completely reprehensible. Russia has used the chemical nerve agent Novichok in the past," Ullyot said. "We will work with allies and the international community to hold those in Russia accountable, wherever the evidence leads, and restrict funds for their malign activities."

"The Russian people have a right to express their views peacefully without fear of retribution of any kind, and certainly not with chemical agents," he said in the tweets.

Trump's only public comments on the topic came shortly after Navalny was taken to hospital. 

"We haven't seen it yet. We're looking at it. And Mike is going to be reporting to me soon," Trump said when asked about the matter on August 20.

There are also a couple of direct provocations of the US that the VSG's administration is also notably silent about: 

Russia has grown more emboldened recently with military provocations to which there has been little to no response from the Trump administration: a Russian armored vehicle wounded several U.S. service members after an intentional crash into a U.S. vehicle in Syria. In two separate incidents last Friday, Russian aircraft intercepted U.S. Air Force bombers—in one case, flying dangerously near a B-52 over the Black Sea, in another case violating the airspace of a NATO member. 

And there's still not much but crickets concerning Russia paying bounties on US troops to the Taliban.

The sum total of these facts does not constitute merely a rival toying with us. Putin, much like Xi, strongly senses that the post-World War II era of an international order guaranteed by America's unquestioned leadership on the world stage is giving way to a new arrangement, one that provides opportunities to nation-states that base their actions on decidedly un-Western values. 

It's a shift that got underway during the Obama era and is continuing. The motivations under Trump are different. Obama had an agenda. He thought the US was too big for its britches on the world stage and needed to be brought back into some kind of "international community" in which its influence didn't outsize that of other member nations. Trump vaguely desires to see the US return to primacy "greatness" - but not at the expense of his kinky personal fixations on gaining the respect of tough guys. It gives him a thrill to think he's been sized up as a fellow strongman by Putin, Xi, Kim, Erdogan and their like. Heck, there may even be some deals to be made that could be good for business - Trump's, that is.