The Los Angeles Times reported today,

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision to skip a NATO meeting in Europe next month and later travel to Russia has raised fresh questions about the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

State Department officials said Tuesday that Tillerson will not attend a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels on April 5-6 so that he could take part in President Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Palm Beach, Fla., on April 6-7.

…Critics argued that Tillerson shouldn’t skip the Brussels meeting because it will lay the foundation for a NATO leaders summit in late April that Trump has said he would attend.

The message, according to former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, is “China and Russia are more important to us than our most important democratic allies, with whom we have stood shoulder to shoulder since 1949,” when the NATO treaty was signed.

“It is quite remarkable and unprecedented,” said Daalder, now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

The Christopher Steele dossier states that in return for all the information stolen from the Democratic National Committee Russia leaked through WikiLeaks the,

Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defence commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from the Ukraine, a priority for Putin…(p. 8).

Putin does not want a unified NATO focused on Russia’s intervention in Crimea.  Tillerson helps Putin achieve this goal by visiting Russia before he visits NATO after the U. S. intelligence community concluded that Russia engaged in comprehensive counterintelligence program to influence the U. S. election.  This sends a sign to the Russians: thanks for the help.  In case the Russians missed it, during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit Donald Trump tweeted, “…vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!”(@realDonaldTrump, 18 March 2017)  Spaseeba!