Maybe Trump was as incompetent and unreliable as a puppet or ally as he was at everything else, so there was no practical difference between his being soft on and hard on Russia.
I think so too
I’m pretty sure NATO exercises and arming Ukraine are just things Trump doesn’t have the attention span to think about and/or someone in the Joint Chiefs / Pentagon flattered him to get the policy they wanted without him understanding the impact on Russia or by convincing him he needed to show his amazing toughness to get Putin’s respect.
There’s no way that Trump was secretly intentionally undermining Russian foreign policy while doing everything we saw. Dude can’t pay attention for more than 40 second.
Like we know Trump loves sucking up to BIG POWERFUL GUYS and pretending to be their friends, like the Handsome Generals. We also know that Russia has internet projects aimed at destabilizing the US and this would have been a good enough reason in itself to prefer Trump over Clinton. We know that Trump would have accepted whatever help he was given, legal or otherwise. It seems like these facts by themselves explain about 95% of what happened with Russiagate, and the evidence from administration policy is that the administration was not pro-Russia behind the scenes.
Maybe Trump promised some sort of quid-pro-quo to Putin and then just reneged as soon as it was expedient, we have seen people who think Trump owes them something get chucked under the bus by him about 100 times over now. And maybe Trump thought that this cozy rhetoric around Putin would get him something from Putin. Trump has a tendency to believe he is going to get totally unrealistic shit from people because he has no idea how the world works. Recall the Kim Jong-Un affair where he seemed to genuinely believe he was going to solve the nuclearization of the Korean peninsula by having a little mano-e-mano chat and Making A Deal.
But anyway there just doesn’t seem to be any evidence to me that this rhetoric translated into any pro-Russian foreign policy. Like CNN has an article from 2019, 37 times Trump was soft on Russia, but I start reading it and here are the first five:
Trump has repeatedly praised Putin
Trump hired Manafort to run his campaign
Trump suggested Russia can keep Crimea
Trump aides softened GOP platform on Ukraine
Trump made light of Russian hacking
These are: rhetoric, campaign bullshit, rhetoric, rhetoric and rhetoric. The fourth one is especially funny because it starts like this:
Ahead of the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump campaign aides blocked language from the party platform that called for the US government to send lethal weapons to Ukraine for its war against Russian proxies.
And then at the end it’s like oh by the way:
(The Trump administration ultimately gave lethal arms and anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainian military.)
Like if you’ve gotten to 2019 and are still expecting what Trump says to be congruent with what he does idk what to say.
foreign policy is obviously tricky, because executive branch doesn’t get to do much with the senate, and russia sanctions passed veto-proof. but beyond having his hands tied on a few things, trmp exited the INF treaty, without any pressure on russia. it basically let russia off the hook for past missile development violations and gave them 3 years with no oversight. Rusal sanctions were lifted, which was a minor coup at the time. i don’t know how much other shit there is. russia created a naval incident in the sea of azov, and trmp sat by, even as nato could have done more to help ukraine at the time. obviously helsinki didn’t look great, but in general breaking up nato is very much on putin’s wishlist, and trmp did a lot to undermine nato, even as he technically signed off on sending arms to ukrainian army. could he have been softer? yeah sure. but he certainly wasn’t hard for putin to handle, and seemed at least concerned that russian online trolls could turn on him at any moment.
on the more ideological side, trmp refused to even comment on putin’s role in navalny poisoning, while most of europe was trying to get him out. besides navalny russia had been holding ukrainian soldiers and journalists as prisoners, absolutely zero talk or action on that from tfmp/pompeo.
2 Likes
the biggest win russia got out of trmp administration is that the State Dept was basically halved for 4 years. probably had nothing with trmp corruption, and everything with pompeo incompetence.
What most people think is that the reason for exiting the treaty was that China was not a party to it, which means that the US has its hands tied in a new arms race with China. Trump blamed Russian non-compliance because of course he did lol, what was he going to say, just “actually fuck this treaty, we want to build missiles”? I have not seen any actual evidence that Russia were not in compliance and they tried to get a General Assembly vote to call on the two countries to strengthen the treaty, and held a press briefing where they disseminated tech specs of new missiles in an effort to show they were not in violation. It very much seems to me that Russia were happy with the treaty, that the US wanted out so they were not restrained in the new Cold War against China, and that blaming Russian non-compliance is what Pompeo is going to do 100% of the time whether they are compliant or not.
He’s unreliable. But when there’s tangible benefit to Trump, the probability of congruency goes up. It’s why foreign governments bought space at his towers. It’s why people, including Ukraine’s Zelensky, stayed at his hotels. Ivanka got her trademarks, Trump lifted sanctions against a Chinese telecom. He promised the religious right judges in exchange for votes. He got the votes and he delivered. He promised the racists a wall for their support and, well at least he made a good show of it.
Putin’s mistake may have been that he didn’t cough up the Moscow hotel concession or whatever, while he could. Maybe he was hoping for even more favorable circumstances in a Trump second term. Now, in Ukraine, it looks like Putin’s choice is between backing down and biting off more than he might be able to chew.
https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1493444368593821699
Is Putin just trying to get rid of Zelensky?
I don’t pretend to understand twitter but is there any way to tailor my feed so when I search Ukraine news it isn’t 80% random people talking Trudeau being Hitler?
Whew 10k (out of 120k) troops supposedly leaving border, war cancelled
In general searching Twitter is pretty dicey. Better to find some good people to follow. Here are my recent Ukraine adds:
konrad_muzyka
OsadchukAndrii
ChristopherJM
ak_mack
olgatokariuk
kiraincongress
2 Likes
nah, putin kept making modifications to their missiles since the last inspection in the 2000s to effectively circumvent the treaty. it’s not clear it was ever fully tested, because their manufacturing is dogshit. but it’s putin’s yearly thing now to announce before new year’s that the army has commissioned and deployed a new missile that is supposed to protect even better than previous years’ missile. it’s a bit of dprk-like theater, but also falls squarely within his range as russia also kept developing and using novichok for at least 10 years. that was also banned and stockpiles supposedly destroyed. most of this effort is stupidly wasted of course. like it’s somewhat unlikely that whatever they were testing on kursk or the other sub would really tip the balance of power, so violating all those treaties was kinda useless. but
it’s also kinda putin’s thing to sign up for treaties where he has no intention of complying anyway. it slows down good-faith counterpart, and gives them false assurances.
i personally have not read deeper assessments on what china is doing for inf, but it’s sort of hilarious that trmp thought he could play both xi and putin at the same time. like he’s obviously the fish at the table and doesn’t realize it.
Is there a way for Putin to deescalate and not massively lose face at this point? I don’t get this supposed de-escalation, and think it might be trying to shape the narrative when some event happens that just happens to force their hand into invading.
edit:
shocker
Headfake.
this has been the question the entire time, although it wasn’t clear what propaganda was going to try to spin as a win. then just this morning the russian Duma decided to pass something that recognizes Luhansk and Donetsk as breakaway territories. i think it’s conceivable they will develop that narrative as another round of annexation, and because those territories are off-limits for ukrainian forces, the ukraine/us/eu coalition might declare that putin has been successfully contained as well.
iow, there are no radically new developments. /shrug
I still don’t understand what the USA and company is threatening Russia with if they do invade?
Gonna write some strong letters
3 Likes