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| What is better for Moscow: half-asleep Biden or impulsive Trump | ||
| 2024-01-25 | ||
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Georgy Bovt [REGNUM] A landslide victory in the second consecutive GOP presidential primary (in New Hampshire) is already leading many to talk about the likelihood of Donald Trump returning to the White House. Accordingly, America’s partners and adversaries are beginning to imagine scenarios called “Trump 2.0.” Simply put: what's in it for us? Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, like other representatives of this department earlier, said that Trump’s return to the presidency is unlikely to affect Russian-American relations, because the American authorities ignored a huge number of goodwill gestures from Vladimir Putin. There is nothing new in this reaction, however. This is approximately the standard reaction from Moscow to all sorts of presidential elections in America recently: they say, we don’t care. At the same time, this traditional “we don’t care” is, of course, not without diplomatic cunning, since Russian-American relations throughout the post-Soviet period, and even before, were personalized to the limit and depended to a huge extent on how Personal relations between the leaders of the two countries will develop. Let's say, at one time, Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush had good relations at first, which had a beneficial effect on interstate ties. Although now in Moscow they say that Bush deceived us too. But the relationship between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin did not work out from the very beginning - from the moment it became known that the American president openly spoke out against the return of Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin and in favor of a second term for then-President Medvedev. Apparently—we may someday learn about this in more detail—the meeting in Geneva in June 2021 between Putin and Biden did not go well either. This was an attempt to prevent a military conflict already brewing in Ukraine. And who knows, if Donald Trump had been in Biden’s place, perhaps history would have turned out differently. But Biden, especially considering the history of his son Hunter’s business relations with the Ukrainian company Burisma, as well as Biden’s supervision as vice president of all Ukrainian issues, has developed its own credit history, which may have had a decisive influence on how it later behaved America in the last weeks before the start of the North American War. From the experience of the Trump presidency, it seemed that, purely on a personal level, it was relatively easier for Putin to deal with Trump than with his predecessor Obama, and for Trump and Putin too. In addition, historically it has been the case that Soviet and then Russian leaders have traditionally found it easier to deal with Republican presidents than with Democratic presidents. First of all, because the Republicans were less inclined to impose their extensive humanitarian agenda on Moscow, including the topic of human rights in the American sense. However, it was during the reign of the Trump administration - and more precisely, after the coup in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 - that relations between Russia and the United States became less and less dependent on the relations between the two leaders; they, like an asphalt roller, rolled downhill. There were more and more differences and contradictions, and there was less and less desire for compromises at the expense, as it was believed in both capitals, of damage to their own national interests. In addition, the impulsive Trump,
But at first, Trump’s rise to power and his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton caused real applause in the State Duma. Now, of course, those applauding deputies would watch these footage with shame. And his reign ended with a rather harsh statement from the same Russian Foreign Ministry, when the Trump administration was accused of “systematically and purposefully engaged in the destruction of treaty regimes” and wanted to “achieve unilateral advantages for the United States in the military-strategic sphere by pushing through unilateral conditions that infringe on Russia’s interests.” At the same time, the Foreign Ministry expressed hope (and this is also a standard reaction to the arrival of any new US administration) that the Biden team would take a more constructive position. Moscow, just a few minutes before the 46th President of the United States took office, proposed to the new administration to extend the START-3 Treaty. The same one that expired in February 2021, which Trump finally refused to extend. Another thing is that now, already under Biden, the START-3 Treaty looks more dead than alive, and the prospects for negotiations on a new agreement on strategic arms control are more than vague. In this sense, the Biden administration is fully following the legacy of the Trump administration. Perhaps Moscow’s initial calculation was that Biden was not as impulsive a politician as Trump, he was older and would supposedly avoid making sharp decisions. In addition, he is remembered from Soviet times, when, as an influential senator, he took a completely dovish position on foreign policy issues. As for Trump, if he does win his rematch, then purely stylistically he is a much sharper politician than grandfather Biden, and in the current geopolitical situation, heated to the limit by the military conflict in Ukraine, it remains to be seen what is best for Moscow : “half-asleep” Biden or sharp, impulsive Trump, who can take rather unpredictable actions. Suffice it to recall how in 2018 Trump made an impulsive decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats in response to the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury. As the American press later wrote, the decisive role was played by the future director of the CIA, Gina Haspel (then she was deputy director), who showed the president photographs of children and birds allegedly injured by the poisonous Novichok. And then she whispered the right words about expulsion into my ear. Trump later even admitted that he got excited, but did not correct his mistake. US ELECTIONS COULD TRIGGER THE COLLAPSE OF THE GLOBAL LIBERAL SYSTEM
No less impulsive was Trump’s decision in the spring of 2018 to launch missile and bomb attacks on government forces in Syria, allegedly in response to the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime, which has never been reliably proven. There were also threats against Moscow then. In response to Russian warnings to shoot down American missiles, especially those fired at Russian military bases in this country, Trump then wrote: “Russia promises to shoot down any missiles fired at Syria. Get ready, Russia, they will arrive, so beautiful, new and “smart”!” Also, it was under Trump that the only direct clash between American troops in Syria and a detachment of the Wagner PMC took place so far. It was during the period of the Trump administration that the United States began to impose very serious economic sanctions against Russia, and the list of sanctioned persons belonging to the highest, including Russian, leadership sharply expanded. The Obama administration, although it formally responded to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, did not allow itself such harshness. Finally, it was Trump who, in the last months of his reign, decided to begin supplying Ukraine with American weapons, these were Javelin anti-tank guided missiles. In Ukraine, they believe that they greatly helped the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the first months of the military conflict, when other Western countries had not yet started supplying weapons to Kyiv. By analogy, Trump may decide, say, to sharply increase the supply of Patriot air defense systems, of which Ukraine currently has only two systems. While the United States alone has 1,200 such systems in service, and 16 other countries also have them. Recently, representatives of the Ukrainian military command stated that the country needs only 50 complexes to cover critical targets. True, they are quite expensive - together with ammunition, more than 1 billion dollars apiece (400 million for the launcher and another 690 million for the missiles themselves). Trump is first and foremost a businessman at heart, accustomed to negotiating from a position of strength, with pressure, often resorting to ultimatums. But if in business relations ultimatums, as a rule, do not lead to death, then in relations between states everything can be much more dramatic. He has already said several times that he is ready to resolve the Ukrainian conflict in almost 24 hours. It's hard to imagine how he can do this. Calling Zelensky and saying that either you sit down at the negotiating table with Putin, or I am depriving you of all support, and then calls Moscow and says: either you sit down with Zelensky at the negotiating table, or I give Zelensky all the weapons that he has. USA? Well, that's an option. However, no good options are visible for Moscow in connection with the upcoming presidential elections in America in November 2024. Because the point here is not about people, but about the fact that Russia’s confrontation with the West and especially with the United States has long gone beyond the boundaries of interpersonal relations. | ||
| Posted by:badanov |
| #3 ^De Santis. |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-01-25 09:40 |
| #2 Question should be what is better for the Russian citizenry? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-01-25 09:32 |
| #1 I vote for the Biden/Blinken/Austin nap team. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2024-01-25 07:22 |