ArcaMax

We know Assange has it in for Clinton because he thinks she's too pro-war.

And we know that Trump sounds so cozy with Putin whenever the Russian autocrat's name comes up that they should invite each other over for sleepovers.

Remember how little Trump could contain his glee when Putin reportedly described the Manhattan developer and reality-TV star as "brilliant?" Russian language experts later said the word Putin used is more often translated as "colorful" or "flashy." But Trump, as is his fashion, filtered out everything but the "brilliant" part.

Instead of disavowing Russia as Clinton said that he should during their debate, Trump responded with what I call the Beach Boys Doctrine, harking back to their 1960s hit, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"

"Wouldn't it be nice," Trump has said on the campaign trail and with similar words in this debate, "if Russia and the United States got along and knocked the hell out of ISIS?" Maybe, except that Putin has proved himself to be a deceitful partner, less interested in killing the Islamic State than propping up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's (and Iran's) murderous regime, which has killed more civilians than the Islamic State.

Trump also curiously and routinely has rushed to the defense of Putin, even when the high-confidence judgement of US intelligence found Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and used embarrassing emails to sow internal confusion.

"I don't think anybody knows that it was Russia that broke into the DNC," he said. "It could also be lots of other people." When things go wrong for Democrats, he complained, "they always blame Russia."

Oh? Here's another view: "Rejecting a fact-based intelligence assessment -- not because of compelling contrarian data but because it is inconsistent with a pre-existing worldview -- that's the stuff of ideological authoritarianism, not pragmatic democracy. And it is frightening." So wrote Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and of the CIA from 2006 to 2009, in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday headlined "Russia's useful fool."

Other disturbing signs include Trump's declaration in July that as president he would be "looking at" recognizing Crimea as "Russian territory," reversing current U.S. policy toward Putin's illegal incursion.

Trump's comfort with Putin may well be connected to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort's consulting work for the pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

Yet, as hazardous as a Trump presidency might be to the health of the international order that the U.S. has helped build and maintain since World War II, the movement that has grown up to put Trump into the White House is undaunted by such niceties. They're mad as hell at the status quo, they tell me repeatedly, and just want to "shake things up."

I understand. But the destruction of our delicate postwar balance of powers is, in my humble view, too big of a price to pay.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.