Ukraine and Russia have reached a deadlock, or are about to. For days, Trump has cornered Ukraine into ending the war (which he did not start), first by insulting President Zelensky personally, then by cutting off military information sharing with his country. Meanwhile, he, his Vice-President and Foreign Minister have not stopped praising Russia. The whole world waited in anticipation for his words as a candidate, “When I am elected president, I will end this war before I even take office”, to come true at least a month after his inauguration.
Except for one person: Vladimir Putin!
Yes. Putin made the expected announcement; he even said he was expecting a phone call from Trump, but only after making Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff wait for 8 hours and receiving him after midnight for only half an hour! In the meantime, he had a long meeting with Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, which was not on the schedule at all, and after the meeting, at a press conference, he made it clear that he would sign a ceasefire with Ukraine only if he got something in return.
No wonder Trump’s special envoy, a real estate billionaire like himself, traveled all that way, waited for 8 hours and got no answer! As a matter of fact, in the two days that have passed, there has been no ceasefire, no peace… no progress between Ukraine and Russia, which Trump had announced for months that he would achieve.
And it couldn’t be, because Trump, perhaps willingly or perhaps through incompetence, has already handed the reins to Putin. Russia expects the US under Trump to reach much more structural “bad times”, as many geostrategists put it. Trump’s cuts in the staff of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), his almost complete dismantling of the fledgling cyber security apparatus, his killing of the US global data (i.e. intelligence) gathering networks, are, one can easily imagine, greeted with delight in the Kremlin.
Russia must be anticipating that its disagreements with the US and its allies and friends will not end with countries from Canada to Mexico, Denmark to the UK “combing their hair backwards” (to use the diplomatic phrase). Putin is not saying these things, but former Kremlin advisors like Aleksander Dugin are writing them down in no uncertain terms. Dugin even said in an interview over the weekend that “while we are at it, Trump will not stop until he has ensured the general weakening of the US military and destroyed its ability to maintain its strategic dominance.”
Add to this the geo-economic turmoil in Europe. It is not hard to imagine Russia’s delight when the Europeans responded to the US effort to end the unipolar world order by rolling up their sleeves for a “multipolar world” with mostly directionless and irrational statements in the absence of a common European strategy. Nor have the Europeans yet responded to President Erdoğan’s detailed assessment of Europe last week and his suggestions about Turkey’s importance for this New European Order.
Meanwhile, the national security challenge for the United States posed by the political and social instability developing in Israel must be another development that everyone in the Kremlin is gleefully passing on to each other. Alain de Benoist, a French political philosopher and founder of several ethno-nationalist think tanks and the Nouvelle Droite (France’s New Right), said that the expectation that Trump would “get along” with Putin was a “pipe dream”. He said Trump hopes to loosen the treaty of “unlimited friendship” between China and Russia announced in February 2022, adding that Putin will not surrender his country to “Western hegemonism”.
“And what will America do if all these calculations fail?” Dugin asks and answers: “The US is a giant, yes, but it is a Faustian experiment built on air, built on technocracy and speed, but without a soul.”
Is it? Couldn’t the captain driver have left the wheel for a short time?
Source: milliyet.com.tr
