Recent letters to the editor condemning President Trump’s friendly meeting with North Korea’s homicidal autocrat Kim Jong Un and his conference with Russia’s equally venomous Vladimir Putin are short-sighted and irresponsibly foolish.

One need not be an eschatological Christian like myself, or since childhood have esoteric military schooling in the horrific magnitude of thermonuclear weapons, like myself, to conceive the sudden end of humanoid world as a horizon reality. Any mediocre scholar exerting casual effort is capable of comprehending the extraordinary ease by which the human race can be exterminated. The cynical maxim, “Here today gone tomorrow,” is a terrifyingly literal possibility for us all.

By first excoriating his brutal contemporary heads-of-state but then reversing course to extend a friendly hand and invitations to “talk turkey,” Trump nobly emulates the examples set by his predecessors John F. Kennedy, who ramrodded the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and Ronald Reagan, who masterminded the Cold War’s termination. Their “curse-then-befriend” Machiavellian strategies ultimately blessed mankind with the last several decades, period.

Critics damning the pragmatic philosophy of bargaining with vile deadly enemies being preferable to mutual destruction are blinded by political prejudice. They’d benefit by introspectively re-examining their priorities.

Martin Crane

New London