Trump's summit in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin went a long way toward achieving Putin's most cherished goal, which is to return his vast and complicated nation to the exalted geopolitical status it long enjoyed as part of the Soviet Union.
That should be a tall order. Russia's economy, measured by gross domestic product, is about the same size as that of Texas. Moscow retains a nuclear arsenal that enjoys mutually assured destruction status, but its conventional military forces no longer have the global reach of the Soviet years. Former president Obama once dismissively called Russia a "regional power" — a slight that Putin appears to have never forgotten.