Is Trump Rug-Pulling China on Russia?
No Sanewashing Tho
As the vague details of this [corrupt, abhorrent] Ukraine “aid and security for minerals” deal seep out, something occurred to me. Now, to be clear, I’ve never bought the idiotic “Trump is a 5D chessmaster” nonsense that basically just sanewashes his endless stream of cockamamie lizard-brained idiot-savant bullshit, but let’s just game this out as if some substitute American wannabe autocrat named ‘Drumpf’ actually was a 5D chessmaster.
Drumpf makes a corrupt deal with Putin to basically split the ‘winnings’ of ending the conflict in Ukraine. Europe is on their own, Putin is free to rebuild and regroup his military, and Drumpf rolls out the welcome mat for Russian oligarchs and corruption to personally enrich himself and his cronies, while pushing through some flashy symbolic projects like the Drumpf Moscow Hotel, as a bunch of corrupt American business interests vie to build industrial capacity in Russia under Putin’s watchful eye.
Now, although Drumpf has hideously sold out an ally along with all of our supposed democratic ideals at this point, what this also starts to look like is Russia pivoting from being a client state of China to being a client state of America. In an ironic reversal of roles, China’s leadership ends up trapped with certain ideological and practical foreign policy goals that they can’t simply walk away from1, while America’s leader is a craven operator willing to sell out our own national interest for literally anything. An expansion-oriented Putin sees far more opportunity on his western flank than by continuing to kowtow to Xi: (1) He can invade the Baltics with much less fear of reprisal than ever, (2) he can bide his time and weigh his next moves between Ukraine and the Baltics, preparing his forces accordingly, and (3) he can leverage a mostly heretofore-unexploited market of American foreign investment to rebuild his tattered economy.
And to boot, Drumpf would get what he wanted all along — with Europe in abject panic mode, they’d race to nuclearize Germany and build a European army that could slow any Russian invasion past the Baltics and hopefully stop them somewhere in Poland before they got to Germany.
I’m not saying any of these things are necessarily good. And I don’t remotely think that Trump is smart enough to pull off Drumpf’s master strategy — there are a million ways to botch the actual execution, not the least of which is that Putin and Xi are not nearly the morons that Trump is.
What this is, however, is merely just some food for thought. We don’t have to like any of it, in order to try and see what’s coming around the corner even in some rather cynical scenarios.
Similarly to how just recently the Biden Administration was likewise trapped.
If your speculation is true, a certain somebody didn't think it up. Maybe someone else did and he is the person meant to carry it out. It is just hard to figure who might have come up with this AND is able to guide El Jefe along this path. It is a nice idea but, geez, even if you lead that mule to water who knows if he will drink or just to stop to splash around.
This kind of short-sighted, transactional thinking opens the door wide for Putin. He sees a distracted, divided West and knows it’s his best shot at pushing into the Baltics. And yeah, Europe scrambling to arm up is exactly the chaos Drumpf thrives on. It should be fairly simple to notice this, I would think from what we already know.