Great idea. We need to erase the disastrous Obama years from US Foreign Policy. This would be a good place to start
Russia and the Russian people are not our enemies. Radical Islam is. Time for this manufacture hostility to Russia in the US Political class, being pushed with Saudi money, to be neutralized.
At worst, Putin can be an irritant to the world body politics better if we can find a way to make him an ally. He has neither the economic, nor military, strength to be a real threat to the West. He can, however, be a ginormous pain in the butt for us in the ME. It would be better to have him in the ME policy tent rather then outside throwing rocks at it. Right now the DC clown posse, on behalf of their Saudi paymasters, have pushed Putin out of the tent. That is idiotic.
We face the same problem now that we faced during WW2. We have an existential threat to our existence (Islamic Fascism) that is also the enemies of the Russians. The Russians will never be our ivory pure clean as snow perfect friends but they are, potentially, our allies in this fight.
Of course he does. To say otherwise is whistling past the graveyard. OTOH he isn't Khrushchev.