Friday, January 20, 2017

Trump isn't Putin's puppet—he's Putin's ticking time-bomb

Rss@dailykos.com (david Nir) · Monday, January 16, 2017, 4:07 pm

It’s easy to conclude that Donald Trump is merely a marionette whose strings are attached to Vladimir Putin’s longer but slimier fingers. Whether it’s because of Putin’s open flattery of Trump, or because Trump outright admires Putin’s bare-chested strongmanship, or because Russian spooks have assembled a file cabinet full of kompromat that makes whatever Trump’s hiding in his tax returns look as damning as My Little Pony fanfic in comparison, there’s no question that Trump has an uncanny penchant for saying or doing whatever Russia’s supreme leader would undoubtedly most prefer.

But what does Putin really want? Is it as simple as cultivating an unabashedly (and embarrassingly) pro-Russia America? Molly McKew, a foreign policy consultant who has advised leaders in the post-Soviet bloc, says no—that the true answer is far more complicated and far more dangerous, if such a thing can even be imagined.

McKew’s recent essay in Politico Magazine is exceptionally insightful, tying together all the threads that have come exposed over the last year. The entire piece is a must-read, and if you read only the excerpts below, you’ll be doing yourself an injustice. But the thrust of McKew’s argument should scare you:

Fourth, the diplomatic side of this non-linear war isn’t a foreign policy aimed at building a new pro-Russian bloc. Instead, it’s what the Kremlin calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, undermining the strength of Western institutions by coalescing alternate—ideally temporary and limited—centers of power. Rather than a stable world order undergirded by the U.S. and its allies, the goal is an unstable new world order of “all against all.”

Trump, therefore, is not Putin’s puppet so much as he’s Putin’s ticking time-bomb: to be set off whenever, wherever, and however Putin calculates Trump can do the most damage to the old world order and thus usher in the new one—the one, as McKew puts it, of “all against all.” If there comes a time when Trump-the-pliable-stooge is less useful to Putin than Trump-the-hand-grenade, Putin will pull the pin.

Read more
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/V-wGkgiVrGI/-Trump-isn-t-Putin-s-puppet-he-s-Putin-s-ticking-time-bomb

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