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William Otis's avatar

There are explanations, yes, but there are no excuses. "Trolling" is something done by airheads with too much time on their hands, not, one would hope, by a President of the United States.

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DAVID DEMILO's avatar

I believe the last analysis (Susan Glassner's) is correct. Ukraine IS a pawn in a global power contest, spheres of influence around the three global superpowers DO exist, and Taiwan IS in China's sphere of influence.

We may not like it, but those are facts, dictated by geography and circumstance.

You cannot change geography, but you can mitigate spheres of influence and raise the cost of aggression.

Anyone who can read a map can understand why Trump (and those around him) view consolidating US control of waters and airspace from Panama to the arctic circle (Greenland) could be strategically game-changing. Yet not a peep from the foreign policy experts in Washington.

Russia and China have for years been extending their dominion to the arctic for the same strategic reasons, while the US has done very little to counter their presence there.

China has extended its military forward-basing into the South China Sea, where it can not only launch planes and ships, but also exert control over critical shipping lanes used in inter-continental trade, and through their Belt-and-Road initiative they have established functional naval bases in South and Central America and have positioned themselves to control both ends of the Panama Canal.

Is it that hard to see what's going on here?

This is not about whether or not Trump "likes" Putin; this is not junior high school. This is a geopolitical negotiation, not about who gets Donbas. As Kissinger used to day, geopolitics is a rough game; it has nothing to do with justice, fairness, right and wrong. It is a contest of positioning, containment and dominance - pure power struggle. It is the mafia, not the Senate.

And since when do you gain the edge in a negotiation by calling your interlocutor nasty names? That was Joe Biden's approach; he didn't even talk to Putin on the phone for three years. We get it: Putin is a rat bastard. But so are Xi, Kim Jong Il, Maduro and others. Yet they exist.

It is a common tactic in finance negotiations to reduce the number of players at the table to two. The players who bring money are the ones who get to call the shots. In this case, Zellenskyy, the unelected President of a country that cannot defend its borders without massive foreign aid, doesn't get to be a player. Trump is merely making that clear.

Trump took the same approach in the Abraham Accords, for which he gets little credit. While the experts in Washington insist that no progress is possible in the middle east without a "two-state solution," Trump pushed the noisy and useless Hamas and Palestinian Authority to the sidelines and brought the monied players to the table to make a deal against a common enemy, Iran.

What does each party in this conflict need to stop a war that is costing all of them in business terms? Putin needs a way to save face if he signs a deal, Zellenskyy needs a way to stay out of exile or Russian jail and ensure there remains a sovereign Ukrain and the US needs to extract itself from an unnecessary and expensive war with a nuclear power to focus its resources on a much more serious threat in the Pacific and improve its strategic position against future aggression.

It is true that Putin is not a reliable treaty partner. Neither is the CCP, but that hasn't stopped the US from doing business with them. We needn't blunder into the same mistakes we made with China but we do need to accept the fact that a hostile Russia exists, will exist, has its own security interests and needs to be effectively contained. Ukraine is not the key to this; leverage over the Russian economy, its relationship with China and its ability to launch hypersonic missiles into the US is.

Lots of Russian and Ukrainian blood has been shed over this war for three years. One of Trump's objectives is that not one drop of American blood should be shed over Ukraine, and I agree with that.

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