Putin would eat Trump’s lunch

Putin would eat Trump’s lunch

By Jackson Diehl Deputy Editorial Page Editor August 7 at 8:02 PM

So let’s stipulate: Donald Trump is not Vladimir Putin’s willing agent, and it’s not certain if or to what extent Putin is trying to elect Trump president. The real issue is that Trump and Putin share the same nihilistic approach to international relations. Together, they could transform our world.

Putin already has fostered a current of ruthless, cynical and utterly unprincipled opportunism in what, before his arrival, was thought of as an increasingly cooperative and rational international community. The Russian president has embraced and perfected the use of lies for geopolitical advantage, pursued and murdered his opponents in foreign capitals, invaded neighbors openly as well as by stealth, intervened in other countries’ elections, and flouted the rules governing international trade and sports.

For the most part, he has gotten away with it, thereby establishing a model of lawlessness and mendacity that other regimes have begun to follow. Having noticed that one of Putin’s prime opponents, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in the heart of London without meaningful consequences, China has taken to abducting dissidents outside its borders, including a British citizen seized in Hong Kong. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s would-be Putin, hasn’t yet killed or kidnapped a foreign critic, but he bluffed Germany into authorizing legal action against one of its own citizens who insulted him.

Putin has succeeded in putting blatant falsehoods on a par with documented reporting in explaining international events. For example, Moscow says U.S. intelligence operatives, and not the Ukrainian people, were responsible for the ouster of Putin’s client, former president Viktor Yanukovych (who once employed Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort). And Hillary Clinton somehow ordered up the mass anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow five years ago — thereby, perhaps, earning the payback of Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee.

Putin may well believe these lies himself, or he may suppose they are no different than the stories peddled by Western politicians. Either way, he has managed to create an alternative reality. There is the world the West knows, and there is Putin’s. Viewers of international satellite channels can take their pick.

This, too, is something other regimes are learning. More than perhaps ever before, thanks to the Internet and satellite television, the world is awash in state-sponsored conspiracy theories, most of them anti-American. The United States has a secret plan to divide Egypt into pieces, says the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sissi; no, it is too busy sponsoring a military coup in Turkey, says Erdogan. Nonsense, says Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: U.S. plotting is focused on overthrowing him via a military invasion.

For all its partisanship and poison, U.S. politics mostly avoided these pathologies — until the rise of Trump. Trump may not match Putin’s use of violence. But his unreserved embrace of falsehoods, cynicism and the amoral pursuit of narrow interest is as pure an American expression of Putinism as we are likely to see. That raises the ominous question: What would the world look like if they were both in power?

Start with alliances and multilateralism. For a century and more, the closest U.S. foreign bonds have been founded on shared values. In a Trump presidency, the United States, like Russia, would have no allies, only clients. Washington’s message to Estonia would echo Moscow’s to Belarus: Pay for the superpower’s support, deliver what is demanded, or be abandoned.

Like Putin, Trump would create his own global reality. Never mind that more Mexicans have returned to their country than have immigrated to the United States since 2009; in Trump’s world they flood across the border, mandating the construction of a wall. U.S. and Russian lies may well overlap — Trump and Putin concur that there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, even if they are still killing Ukrainians on a near-daily basis.

Who will defend truth? Maybe Sweden.

Trump would likely grant Putin’s most cherished wish, which is to sit as an equal with the U.S. president, dividing up the world into spheres of influence. The results would be catastrophic for a string of countries in Eurasia and the Middle East. Trump could be invited by Putin to surrender Ukraine and Georgia, and maybe Egypt and Jordan, and he may well agree. After all, the businessman may conclude, there is no money to be made in those places.

Trump pictures himself striking tough deals with a like-minded strongman. He surely underestimates Putin’s ruthlessness and is ignorant of his conception of U.S.-Russia relations as a zero-sum game. After 15 years in power, Putin is skilled at the arts of deception, betrayal, sabotage and tactical aggression. Trump, by comparison, is a dilettante. So the consequence of a Trump-Putin world would not just be the triumph of amoral statesmanship; it would be the rise of Russian influence at America’s expense.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...856_story.html

Oh my God!! Jackson Diehl, you're insane. It's really hard to imagine someone who would write such an article of Fantasia Rubbish as this could be a Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the once-respected Washington Post.

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Who will defend truth? Maybe Sweden.

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Well, it certainly won't be the Washington Post whose writers are seriously brain-damaged from methane gas poisoning from eating too much of their own crap.

If anyone in the Washington Post or any other Media concern in the United States knew anything about Russian History, you would know that the people of Crimea never wanted to be part of Ukraine, they are RUSSIAN, they have been part of Russia since 1783.

Do you know why they were part of the Ukraine? Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine by an executive order, like a gift to a Republic of the Soviet Union that he liked a lot. His wife was from the Ukraine. He worked there in the mines and grew up a Communist in the Ukraine. It was a gift to offset the suffering from a great famine under Stalin. Of course Khruschev didn't know the USSR would be dissolved one day, which of course changed everything from bad to worse. Crimea is Russian, not Ukrainian. Crimea belongs in Russia, not the Ukraine.

Look at it this way. One day we have a government, probably it would be Democrats, who want to make nice with Mexico, and the Democrat President decides, oh I love Mexico, these people are so nice and their drug dealers pay me so well, I'd like to do something nice for them, so I'm going to give them .... Texas .... by Executive Order. THAT is exactly what happened to Crimea. How would Texans feel about that? Would they feel that they're back home as Mexicans or would they be rather upset and want to be back home with America? While Texans consider that, I'm going to assume they would want to be back as part of the United States because they are Americans, not Mexicans.

So for the United States or the United Nations to be taking issue with what happened with Crimea is just plain silly and stupid. Crimea should be part of Russia, not the Ukraine, because the vast majority of the people of Crimea are Russian, not Ukrainians.

Also, at the time Crimea was an Autonomous Republic. They are independent and can decide for themselves what to be a part of which they did, they had an election and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin their home country of Russia. Ukraine sent troops in there to defeat the will of the people of Crimea, so Russia sent militias in to defend them. Ukraine was having its own problems from its own revolution and the Crimeans obviously wanted no further part of it, instead wanted to go home, and so they did.

If Texas wanted to come home from Mexico, would we not go in and bring them back into the United States? Well, of course we would. And we wouldn't check with the United Nations for their permission either.

Here's an NPR article that explains part of this:

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Crimea: A Gift To Ukraine Becomes A Political Flash Point

February 27, 20142:37 PM ET
Krishnadev Calamur

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was Russian but felt an affinity with Ukraine. His decision to give Crimea to Ukraine is having consequences today.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was Russian but felt an affinity with Ukraine. His decision to give Crimea to Ukraine is having consequences today.
AP
This post was updated at 4:18 p.m. ET.

In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave Ukraine a gift: Crimea. At the time, it seemed like a routine move, but six decades later, that gift is having consequences for both countries.

The transfer merited only a paragraph in Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, on Feb. 27, 1954. The story was one long sentence and dense with detail. Here's what it said:

"Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring Crimea Province from the Russian Republic to the Ukraine Republic, taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic ties between Crimea Province and the Ukraine Republic, and approving the joint presentation of the Presidium of the Russian Republic Supreme Soviet and the Presidium of the Ukraine Republic Supreme Soviet on the transfer of Crimea Province from the Russian Republic to the Ukraine Republic."

And with that, a region that had been part of Russia for centuries was "gifted" to Ukraine.

"Gifted" because Khrushchev's transfer was ostensibly to mark the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's merger with the Russian empire. And he probably didn't think the Soviet Union would be gone less than 40 years later.

But, asks Lewis Siegelbaum, a historian at Michigan State University, "what motivated such generosity?" Writing on the website Seventeen Moments In Soviet History, he says:

"After all, Crimea, the rugged peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, had not become territorially contiguous with Ukraine all of a sudden."

Siegelbaum argues that Crimea's cultural links with Russia were far stronger, and, at the time, there were slightly more than three Russians in Crimea for each Ukrainian. (Stalin had expelled the entire local Tatar population a decade earlier.)

And, Siegelbaum says, the idea that Crimea and Ukraine had economic similarities, as Pravda noted, was a stretch, since the peninsula was mostly a tourist destination for the rest of the Soviet Union.

There were other reasons for the handover, though.

Ukraine's great famine, or Holodomor, was created by Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev's predecessor; millions died. Stalin died in 1953, and when Khrushchev took over, "the idea was that they really needed to democratize the system, to centralize it less," says Nina Khrushcheva, Khruschev's great-granddaughter and an associate professor of international affairs at The New School in New York.

"It was somewhat symbolic, somewhat trying to reshuffle the centralized system and also, full disclosure, Nikita Khrushchev was very fond of Ukraine," she tells NPR's David Greene. "So I think to some degree it was also a personal gesture toward his favorite republic. He was ethnically Russian, but he really felt great affinity with Ukraine."

As a teenager, Khrushchev went to work in Ukraine's mines. He then joined the Communist Party and rose up through the ranks. He married a Ukrainian woman and considered Ukraine "one of his native lands," Khrushcheva says.

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http://www.npr.org/sections/parallel...al-flash-point

See? So why does the Corrupt Media and Press in the United States want to lie about Russia and Crimea? What is in it for them to do that besides greasing the Democrats like Obama, Clinton, and Kerry who in reality will all be has beens in 5 months, with a line of failures behind them too long to list? Is it to keep up the nuclear weapons scams and perpetuate the stupidity of having nuclear weapons we're never going to use? All these countries have all these nuclear weapons that are very difficult to manage, very expensive to maintain, very dangerous in all their aspects. Are they afraid of a Trump Presidency where we might actually get rid of them across the globe and be rational people of Planet Earth?!

The Corrupt and Stupid Media doesn't understand what someone is asking when they question: why have them if you're never going to use them? That's not a question of why don't we use them, that's a question of why don't we get rid of them?

Is the Media such a bunch of uneducated uninformed biased corrupt dishonest liars that they would actually support a continuation of nuclear weapons when we have a candidate who would like to make peace with Russia, improve relations and possibly work towards a dissolution of nuclear weapons programs in all countries??!!

We have missile defense technology, we have the ability to defend our own nation from nuclear attack. We have that. I know because I lobbied the funding for it many years ago. The technology works, it knocks a nuclear missile out of commission in space and it blows up there. We might still get some fall-out, but most of it will be in space burning itself up in space instead of on Earth.

This is the time to set big goals, because we have a candidate for President who is prepared, capable and willing to help US fight for them. The hardest thing he's got to do is win this damn election. So we've all got to have his back, and support him through and through, to get him to the White House. With Trump in the White House, all types of dreams, goals and better days are possible including peace on Earth and yes, even the end of all nuclear weapons.