Is Trump In Control?

Last night I raised the question of whether Trump’s abilities have slipped due to advancing years, to the point that he’s not functioning as he needs to do in dealing with other serious world leaders. I stated that Trump appears in some ways to be a caricature of the former Trump, with certain personality traits—the bombast, the tendency to threaten, to make assertions that he ends up backing away from—becoming more prominent than they were before. These considerations arise, of course, in the interconnected conflicts of our times—the war on Russia, the Jewish Supremacy Project, and the war on China. I have maintained that Trump’s vision—MAGA—has been for years:

• A Russia that is cooperative with the US but subordinate to US interests, with US corporate interests enjoying a great degree of influence and control over Russian resources—and politics, as a necessary concomitant.

• A Jewish state in the Middle East that exercises supremacy over the region in connection with the US as the dominant world hegemon. That translates into control over the regional energy resources and trade chokepoints.

• Those two considerations lead to the third, which is a China that is subservient to US interests, both economic and military.

Note that Trump’s MAGA ambition differs little from earlier Neocon versions of the same scheme in essentials. The major difference seems to be that Trump believes he is The One who can pull this off—in relatively short order, using his ability to broker deals. The BRICS nations—and preeminently Russia, China, and Iran—understand this and are determined to resist at all costs. The question that arises is twofold. First, are Trump’s ambitions realistic, given the changing geopolitical and economic realities of our world? Second, is Trump floundering in his efforts and thus leading the world into a serious danger zone? The appearance of floundering could be explained by lack of strategic understanding and/or fading abilities that lead to misjudgments. I have tended to answer the first question: No, and the second question: Yes.

A contrary view, perhaps best represented by Gilbert Doctorow, is that Trump is at the height of his powers and is playing a multi-dimensional form of geostrategic chess, shaping the world to his will—but with the willingness to recognize interests other than US interests and thus to become the Great Peacemaker. Again, yesterday I made the case that Trump is making little actual headway with regard to his goals as I set them out above—an important caveat.

With regard to Russia, far from Trump reaching an accommodation with Putin, we see Russia winning its war with NATO, leading to increasing political and economic disarray among the US’s European vassal states. Far from lessening tensions with Russia, Trump continues to support Ukraine with war materiel and to allow the US military to conduct highly provocative military exercises in areas that had previously been models of stability—especially in the Baltic region. Putin has proven steadfast in adhering to his positions—positions that he set out nearly a decade ago during Trump 1.0. At that time Trump did nothing to alleviate the building war tensions and, since then, has continued to boast of his role in bringing about the current hot war.

With regard to the Middle East and the Jewish Supremacy Project, the origins—at least the most proximate origins—again can be traced back to Trump 1.0 and the Kushner Abraham Accords. That was a plan to sideline the Palestinians with separate accords with major Arab oil state, which in turn would free Israel to conduct its long planned the ethnic cleansing of all Palestine. What that led to instead was the Hamas military raid into Israel on October 7th. Since taking office for the second time, Trump has shown himself to be utterly incapable of bringing order out of the resulting chaos. Instead he has presided over a genocide that the world has watched in real time; he presided over a military humiliation at the hands of the Houthis in Yemen; he has also presided over the destruction of the Syrian state, which Marco Rubio is now warning is maybe weeks away from "full-scale civil WAR of epic proportions." A war in Syria would draw in the entire region.

Finally, and most importantly with regard to the Middle East, Iran remains steadfast against joint US - Israeli threats. Here, I agree with those commentators who maintain that Israel is simply incapable of carrying out its threatened attacks on its own—that these threats are part of the Trump “negotiating” strategy. Further, the assistance that Trump is providing to Israel serves only to exacerbate tensions by increasing Iranian distrust. That risks major Iranian retaliation in the event of any attack. Nor have Trump’s tactics led to Saudi Arabia breaking off relations with Iran or normalizing with Israel. Trump’s smoke and mirror “deals” in the region—the numbers don’t add up, and haven’t helped the US credit rating—won’t change these dynamics. I see only major danger ahead, with serious blowback at home for Trump if he makes a misstep.

Briefly with regard to China—the country Trump’s DoD appointees have designated as our #1 enemy. China has not backed down on the tariff issue, seeing this as part of the buildup to the long threatened US war on China. China knows that Trump’s overtures to Russia’s Putin and to Iran are designed to isolate and weaken China. In response, China has stepped up its rhetorical war. It must also be buoyed by the performance of its weapons in Pakistani hands—which should give not only the US but all East Asian countries pause to consider before siding against China.

And yet, in the face of what look like serious setbacks and danger signals, Trump maintains his course. Obsessively, one might say. Complete with threats, which are tending to be reduced to sanctions after the debacle in the Red Sea. Is this the sign of stable genius, or of declining powers? Gilbert Doctorow argued, on Judge Nap’s show this morning, for stable genius. I want to be fair to Doctorow’s viewpoint, so I’ll quote him at some length. In what follows I quote Doctorow’s responses to questions from the Judge, who repeatedly poses the issue of whether Trump really understands what he’s doing, or whether he is being pulled this way and that by advisers with wildly differing views:

Prof. Gilbert Doctorow: Trump/Putin: Who Has the Upper Hand?

The peculiarities in the behavior of Donald Trump may be largely explained by his attempts to ward off--and to keep disoriented and away from his back--the strong opposition that he faces, of course, within all of the Democrats, within a portion of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and with all of the main leaders in the European Union.

OK, so this would be the “baffle ‘em with bullshit” tactic. Or, to put it slightly differently, the “keep ‘em guessing” tactic. One problem with this tactic is, as Doug Macgregor argued yesterday, that if you force people to keep guessing—including the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians—you may force them to take concrete actions based upon their guesses. And that could prove to be extremely unpleasant. As we’ll see, Doctorow’s counter is basically that the Russians understand and trust Trump but that Trump’s opponents somehow don’t get what Trump is up to—as Doctorow sees it. Hmmm.

I wouldn't worry so much about Trump being confused--spreading confusion is his game. That's his best policy against his enemies forming a united front and attacking him in a dangerous way. The fact that he has two different sets of views in his immediate advisers or assistants is obviously intentional--it's not accidental. He knew whom he was selecting and he selected people like Rubio for very clear understandable political reasons--to maintain his position in the Senate where anything in foreign policy would be heard. He is keeping his enemies off balance by letting them believe what you just said a moment ago--that he follows the recommendations of the last person to have his ear. I don't believe that there's anything more to it than precisely that.

This narrative flies in the face of what we know from the Yemen fiasco. Trump didn’t just keep people off balance—he launched into an extremely unwise foreign adventure at the urging of the very people who also have urged a hard line against Russia, China, and Iran. That debacle—accompanied by the usual bombast—at least led to the firing of Waltz, although Marco Rubio continues to build up an independent Neocon centric power base at USDS. It also led to Trump coming back in off the window ledge before taking the plunge into war on Iran. But none of this supports Doctorow’s notion that Trump is behaving in a calculated manner, rather than yielding to pressure groups, drawing back from precipitate actions at the last moment—but only sometimes. Not consistently.

[The Russians] are satisfied--Putin himself is satisfied--that Trump understands the situation and is sympathetic to their security needs, and they give him a long leash, so to speak, to do what he has to do to maintain himself. They believe that he has achieved something which we don't talk about so much ... The latest Russian analysis on the talk shows of how this talk between Putin and Trump went highlights the fact that Trump has kept the Europeans out of this game. They were all waiting to speak to him and they were greatly disappointed that after he spoke to Vladimir Putin he spoke to them all as a group--including in that group Zelensky. None of them had a chance to get his ear separately. Moreover, they seem to have acquiesced in the way the negotiations are going and which Trump addressed in his remarks following the talk with Putin by telephone--namely, that the sides the Ukrainians and the Russians are in deliberations directly without any intermediaries. ... For Russia, that is a very important achievement, which Donald Trump facilitated.

Color me skeptical that Putin is terribly impressed by Trump’s supposed achievement. Putin and other Russian officials have long been explicit about what they see as the strategic lay of the land. They have repeatedly stated that the only way to a comprehensive peace and the new security architecture that Putin has demanded—in his two draft treaties—is for the US and Russia to come to terms. For Trump to tell the yapping Euro vassal states to shut up is not unprecedented and, from an educated Russian perspective, not terribly impressive.

There's wide anticipation that Trump is going to remove himself--remove the United States--from this war. That's the current expectation and I believe it will be fulfilled. The Europeans are trying to deal with that fact without having to go into a direct attack on Donald Trump and Trump has managed to detoxify this decision. I have to take my hat off to it because I was quite critical of his not not dealing with this properly of his spreading confusion. Now I see that his tactic has achieved a certain result. The Europeans are backing off. They are gracelessly accepting the fact that the United States is going to withdraw. He's not doing it in a fit of anger, in a fit of confrontation with Mr Zelensky. He's doing it simply by saying, "Look these sides have many issues on the table that you and we don't understand and therefore best if we leave them alone to do it themselves." That is an enormous achievement, and we didn't see it coming!

I’m not at all convinced that Trump is simply removing the US from the war on Russia—that war is too fundamental to the entire MAGA project. BRICS is an existential threat to MAGA, and Russia is the sine qua non of BRICS. The war will continue via sanctions and via actions against Russian partners. If Trump drops sanctions on Russia, then the war will have ended—and so will the Anglo-Zionist empire and MAGA.

As for the Euros, they’re suffering what they must. They never would have got into this war but for the Anglo-Zionists running US policy, and now they’re being dumped—the latest in the long line of BFFs who have been betrayed by the US. They happen to be particularly difficult to sympathize with, so tears won’t be wasted. Is this betrayal in the face of the inevitable an “enormous achievement”? Eh, not so much. Anyway, this war isn’t over yet.

So we come to the nub. Is Trump in control of this process, or is he riding a tiger?