CHAUTAUQUA–Sometimes worship services are striking in ways that go unspoken.

So it was with the Aug. 10 sacred-song service at Chautauqua Institution.

The service focused on “the family of Abraham,” and thus on the religions–Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–tracing their roots to Abraham and Sarah.

Taking part in the service were three young people: One Jew, one Christian, and one Muslim, each a participant in an interfaith program at the institution.

Let your imagination run regarding what went unspoken: Had these three young people been born in another place, been born at another time, had different upbringings, or had different experiences so far in life, they might have viewed each other quite differently.

But they don’t, partly because Chautauqua Institution charts a different course.

This foresight is simply brilliant. That is, the basic concept is so simple that it can take brilliance to bring it into existence.

It takes brilliance to cut through all of the clutter, all of the din, and see a simple truth: Bringing young people together and allowing them to share experiences before–before, mind you–problems start, and before they “learn,” so to speak, that they’re not “supposed to” like each other, can make them less inclined to be at each other’s throats in war.

Through such experiences, one can learn to look at the world through eyes other than one’s own. We’ll return to this aspiration below.

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Meanwhile, today in Alaska two presidents meet.

On the agenda is a war that one president maintains never should have started and which the other president may–or may not–wish he hadn’t started.

The war is, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began a few years ago, has continued on and off ever since, and which courageous Ukrainians have largely repelled, thereby preventing Russian forces from advancing much at all.

So much for the early predictions that Russia would easily coast to a quick victory.

It hasn’t been quick, and Russia has achieved no victory.

What it has been is a complete waste of humanity.

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Whatever Russia’s war goals have been, Russian President Vladimir Putin needs to hear today that Russia must end this war.

U.S. President Donald Trump is the right person to deliver this message in the right way.

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Russia can be a great country. Indeed, as Trump has pointed out, Russia has the resources to be a wealthy country.

Take, for example, the city historically called St. Petersburg, then called Petrograd, then called Leningrad, and now again called St. Petersburg.

Even when it was Leningrad, St. Petersburg was a stunning city, despite the horrors of its namesake. It’s on the Baltic Sea, has beautiful architecture, and has a museum akin to Paris’s Louvre.

Trump gets that Russia can be a great and wealthy country, partly because he can look at the country through the eyes of the real-estate developer that he had been for decades before coming down the now-famous escalator in 2015.

However, Russia has squandered its resources on statism since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Russia is unlikely to be great or wealthy as long as its leaders seek power, not ordered liberty.

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Now let’s return to the aspiration to look at the world through eyes other than one’s own.

One of the reported reasons for Russia’s invading Ukraine was that it didn’t want Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

Former Warsaw Pact allies and former Soviet republics had joined NATO, thereby almost boxing in Russia. Russia didn’t want what it perceived as an additional threat of Ukraine joining NATO too, so the argument went.

Understanding that perspective is valuable. Wouldn’t the United States have had similar misgivings about Canada joining the Warsaw Pact?

Yet looking at the world through others’ eyes doesn’t require giving up one’s own knowledge, much less one’s common sense.

So let’s recall that the United States and Russia have different goals.

Let’s recall further what Dr. Gordon Chang told an Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua audience 107 weeks ago: China and Russia view the world similarly in that both want to take down the international order.

Trump gets that too.

Does that mean we don’t look at any of this through Russia’s eyes? No, not at all.

It means that we be smart about it.

Now let’s see what happens in Alaska today and in today’s wake.

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Meanwhile, we can salute Chautauqua Institution for its good work.

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Dr. Randy Elf’s Aug. 20, 2020, ABC presentation, on “How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich,” is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ebymA7xOo