During and immediately after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, recently held in Tianjin, Vladimir Putin felt emboldened enough by the circumstances to send some harsh messages to his American counterpart.
Putin’s messages have varied – from displaying a warm relationship with three leaders who do not hold back confronting Donald Trump (Xi, Kim, Modi), to statements suggesting (once again) that there are scant chances for a quick peace or for peace in general in Ukraine, followed up by the most extensive attack yet on Ukraine and its capital, when Russia not only launched a spectacular number of drones ((800), but equally spectacularly, bombed the a key building of the Government of Ukraine.
Essentially, in the wake of the euphoria felt by Russia by the progress of the Tianjin meeting, Putin “explained” to Trump the following: “you have no control over a significant part of the world (at least over the fraction represented by the states officially present in Tianjin); Russia still has friends of global caliber, which are ready to endorse it economically, perhaps at some point even militarily and finally, the peace process in Ukraine, and the dynamics of the war, in reality remain to be shaped by Russia, and not by America, by Putin, and not by Trump.”
And the truth is sinister: you can’t help but agree with the dictator. On the one hand, the three elements mentioned earlier are a palpable reality. Despite the triumphalist Trumpist rhetoric, the dynamics on the ground converge in the opposite direction. On the other hand, Trump’s reactions to Tianjin were at best a mixture some kind of timidity and a lot of ambiguity.
It’s true that the American president has been babbling of late about a certain second phase of sanctions against Russia, which he is open to. It is true that a message, apparently testosterone-filled, was given, on the same note, by the American Secretary of the Treasury. It is also true that Trump indicated, at the reception of the Moldovan ambassador in Washington, that a peaceful Moldova is essential for the security of the region.
But equally fair is the fact that the American president admitted, apparently resignedly that India was lost (by the US, obviously) into the arms of China, while reiterating – what do you want more bizarre than that? – that, in the end, he, Trump, and he, Putin, continue to have a good dialogue. Completely crazy again, beyond normal thinking!
America’s powerful leader may be strong when he sacks foreign nationals working in the U.S., many of them completely innocent, but at the same time he is soft as a milk-soaked muffin when it comes to his administration’s approach to the acute and structural problems on the international arena.
The fact that Trump is in this situation and thus dragging the free world after him in the chaos he has created, is and is not Putin’s merit.
It is Putin’s credit in terms of how the Russian dictator managed early on, through hybrid warfare, to influence the thinking of the American president, to shape the thinking of a part of American public opinion and to cultivate Russia’s intentional and unintended friends among an important segment of the American political spectrum.
However, it is not to Putin’s credit that Trump is striving day after day to torpedo America’s precious strategic alliances. In the end, this can be attributed to Trump, and not to Putin, that he does not understand the basic truth that no country in the world, even if it is the US, is powerful enough to project its influence and strength without a shadow of foreign aid.
The perverse but so real and realistic messages sent by Putin to Trump, from and after Tianjin, perfectly illustrate the not only moral but also geopolitical bankruptcy of Trump’s foreign policy.
America will also come to be the superpower that the Trumpist narrative lasciviously promotes on the ground only when, in a first step, Donald Trump accepts the failure of his approach, and in a second, he changes it 180 degrees.
The more the American president postpones that uncomfortable moment of truth, the more the perversity of the messages addressed directly to him by Putin will be amplified and the more Xi’s ability to extend large spaces of influence in the world for China, to America’s detriment of America.
Rottweilers with the little ones, poodles with the grown-ups, Donald Trump is risking more every to make America great only in the vain people and flatterers he surrounds himself with.
