Sizing Up Trump and Putin
Sizing Up Trump and Putin
Paul Craig Roberts
Sizing Up Trump
Approaching a year since Trump’s third election as president, how do we sum him up?
He has done good things. He has closed the border. He is attempting to deport some of the many millions of illegal immigrants that the Democrats brought into our country. He freed the January 6 protesters framed by a totally corrupt Biden regime “Justice” Department and a whore media. He is attempting to dislodge the DEI that has replaced merit throughout US society including the military. He has taken steps to reduce the anti-Americanism of the enormous federal bureaucracy and to stop the weaponization of law against Americans who have traditional American values. These are enormous achievements, none of which would have been delivered by a Democrat regime.
In light of these achievements, it is frustrating that in other important areas Trump is failing disastrously. He has supported a genocide with American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover. He committed an act of war against Iran at the urging of Netanyahu. He has relied on orders to the President of Russia in place of diplomacy. When his orders are not obeyed, he imposes punishments. The current order is for a cease fire in Ukraine without addressing the underlying cause of the conflict. The punishment is orders to India and China to stop purchasing Russian oil. In other words, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said of President George W. Bush, “he speaks as if he owns the world.” Trump’s sovereignty-denying behavior is the opposite of a peace-maker. He assaults the environment, thus insuring the hostility of much of America’s educated class who regard Trump’s opening of the pristine Alaska wildlife refuge to oil and gas drilling as a travesty. Clearly, the area cannot be both a refuge and an area of oil and gas exploitation. Environmentalists wonder how long before a bankrupt US government sells the national forests to timber companies. In his attack on Venezuela, Trump uses the claim of a war against drugs as a cover for a war to overthrow a country and resume US exploitation of its resources, just as George W. Bush used “the war on terror” to overthrow Arab states for Israel. What is the evidence that small craft in Venezuelan and international waters are loaded with drugs on the way to the US? How can any evidence be found when the boats are blown up and destroyed instead of boarded and inspected. What authority does the US have for boarding boats in Venezuelan and international waters? Trump’s policy is to destroy the craft and the people on them on suspicion alone without evidence or authority. If US police acted this way in the US they would be arrested for murder. A government cannot legally execute people without conviction for a capital crime. If there are Venezuelan drug runners, what is the evidence that they are connected to the government? How likely is it that Venezuela, which has been on Washington’s target list for years, would provide Washington with a drug excuse to overthrow the government and install a regime of its own?
The likelihood is that Trump is going to have America at war with Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China, and all who refuse to obey his orders.
As much as Americans needed Trump’s accomplishments, his failures are a large price to pay. America needs a strong president, because leadership requires strength. Leadership also requires moral and mutually acceptable solutions, not orders imposed by coercion. Trump does not own the world, and he cannot impose dictates on Russia, Iran, India, and China. Something is amiss that the Trump regime cannot see that this is an unsuccessful and dangerous policy.
Sizing Up Putin
Among Western foreign policy commentators there seems to be confusion about Putin and Peskov’s insistence that Russia remains committed to the Alaska agreement. What Putin and Peskov understand the Alaska meeting to have accomplished is obtaining Trump’s agreement that ending the conflict in Ukraine has to begin with resolving the conflict the West has chosen to have with Russia. What Putin means by the root cause of the conflict is the hostile attitude in the West toward Russia. It is this hostile attitude that brought NATO with US missile bases to Russia’s border, overthrew the Russian friendly Ukraine government, attacked the Russian population of Donbas and forced Russia’s military intervention. Most Western commentators continue to lie between their teeth that Russia is responsible for starting the conflict in Ukraine when it is clear that the West forced the Russian intervention. To force Russian intervention was the entire purpose of the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and subsequent deception of Russia with the Minsk Agreement, which turned out not to be an agreement.
In the Alaska meeting Putin concluded that Trump agreed that the root cause is the absence of a mutual security agreement denied to Putin by the Biden Regime, NATO, and the EU in January 2022, thus provoking the Russian intervention in Ukraine. First the root cause was to be addressed and then the cease fire. Putin was not agreeable to a cease fire that would result in Ukrainian forces being rebuilt while negotiations went nowhere.
As John Helmer and I pointed out, the Alaska understanding is inconsistent with Washington’s foreign policy goal of hegemony and with the expectation of billions of dollars in commissions to Western political figures from the sales to Europe of American weapons to continue the war in Ukraine. With Trump’s success in getting Europe to increase defense budgets to 5% of GDP, commission payouts gleam in the eyes of Western government officials.
The controlling interests in the West is for the conflict to continue. Trump’s “advisors” got this through to him, and Trump suddenly cancelled his meeting with Putin and changed his tune yet again. Now his tune is again that the killing has to stop first with a cease fire, and then the negotiations can begin. This, of course, serves no Russian interests except those of Putin’s “advisor,” Kirill Dmitriev, a spokesman for Russian business interests whose connections are in the West and not with BRICS. Dmitriev wants Putin to give up, as does Putin’s central bank director, so that American-Russian business interests can be mended and the profitable connections of Russian businesses with the West can be restored.
Why Putin relies on self-interested Kirill Dmitriev and pro-American central bank director Elvira Nabiullina, who set up $300 billion in Russian assets to be frozen and now possibly used to fund Ukraine’s continuation of the war for another three years, I do not know. It strikes me as the worst possible judgement by a leader who is trying to avoid WW 3.
Why Trump relies on Witcoff and Kellogg is equally puzzling. It is extraordinary that the two leaders who, we hope, are working to avoid WW 3, are relying on “advisors” who are working against them.
My conclusion is that money and US hegemony are more important than avoiding war. So it is likely we will get war.
Like John Helmer and myself, Gilbert Doctorow is outside the box of the official narrative. This means that the three of us are subjected to name-calling instead of engagement with our analysis. It is OK with me if I can be shown to be wrong–indeed, I would be glad of it as my conclusion is depressing–and I assume Helmer and Doctorow feel the same. Those few of us who are outside the box cannot afford to have thin skin.
Doctorow has raised the issue of how much longer Putin can hold to his hopes that Trump will flip back to the Alaska agreement between the two world leaders and perhaps this time stay there. Resolving the conflict is a far better solution than a major war certain to turn nuclear. To be clear, Doctorow, Helmer, and I admire Putin for his effort to avoid war. He is clearly a moral and humane person, unlike the money-grabbers in the West who put their profits ahead of the survival of humanity. When Doctorow says Putin shows cowardice, perhaps he means that this is the way Putin appears to the US, UK, and Europe. In other words, Putin’s good intentions are working against him.
Doctorow, who watches the state controlled Russian TV programs on which the war and foreign policy are discussed and who is currently in Moscow looking into the evolving attitude toward the war as best as he can, has noticed a growing impatience with the way Putin has been conducting the war for nearly four years. In foreign policy circles, if not within Putin’s own circle, the futility of attempting to negotiate with the West and Washington is recognized. Among Russian populations, their life is increasingly disrupted by long-range drone attacks that disrupt GPS service, airline flights, internet service, and prevent businesses from completing sales transactions, and there are the occasional civilian deaths far from the battlefield.
The rising criticism of Putin’s conduct of the war in foreign policy circles and the public reached a new level, Doctorow reports, when the main TV news analysis program’s host said that negotiations had failed and it was time to “destroy Ukraine” and quickly end the war. The deputy Russian foreign minister agreed as did, it seems, Lavrov, both of whom were contradicted by Kremlin spokesman Peskov. The program’s host is a protege of the director of Russian state TV. Neither he nor the deputy prime minister would have risked taking such positions unless there was much support behind them.
Why the contradiction by Peskov as the TV host and deputy foreign minister are obviously correct? The answer, it seems, is that Putin is holding on to hopes too long. A conflict that should have had a victorious conclusion for Russia within a matter of weeks is now almost 4 years long. The four long years are marred with endless undefended red lines that have convinced the West that Putin can be knuckled under. Consequently, the war has ever widened. Putin’s misjudgment is turning a limited conflict into a world war.
Here I will state the root cause of the problem as clearly as it can be stated for both Americans and policy-makers in Washington and Europe and for Russians and the Kremlin. War is profitable for the Western military-security complex. Ending conflict hurts those who profit from it, as President Eisenhower warned Americans in 1961. The doctrine of US hegemony expressed by the Wolfowitz Doctrine when the Soviet Union collapsed, thus removing the only constraint on US hegemony, is still operative. This doctrine allied with money interests is the basis for Washington’s hostility toward Russia. The Wolfowitz Doctrine and the profits of war are the obstacles to ending the root cause of the conflict.
US Decides Selling Weapons More Important Than Peace
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The United States supports the use by the European Union of Russia’s frozen assets to buy US-made weapons for Ukraine, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing US officials.
US officials have reportedly informed their European counterparts that Washington supports the EU using Russian assets to purchase weapons for Ukraine.
The Trump administration has also held internal conversations about leveraging Russian state assets that remain blocked in US bank accounts to back Ukraine’s military campaign, Reuters reported.
Another Reason Why Russia Doesn’t Want a Cease Fire
France is ready to send troops as early as next year as part of security guarantees proposed by Ukraine’s Western backers if a ceasefire is reached in the conflict with Russia, Army Chief of Staff Pierre Schill has said.
https://www.rt.com/news/626966-france-ready-to-deploy-troops/
