Thread:
2/ Obviously it’s Trump’s war in Iran that is the issue. But Trump can’t accept that.
3/ So now Trump wants to give Putin a lot of money for Russian diesel, which won’t do anything to markets and won’t even help him in the midterms though I bet Putin told him it would.
4/ But since Russia and Iran are allies, the shift in US policy and any US taxpayer money that Trump gives Putin will help both the Russian war on Ukraine as well as the regime in Iran.
5/ Trump got his pocket picked as usual but the money is ours and the deeper price is the visible shift of US policy to support Russia’s war of aggression.
6/ In other words Trump makes the world more dangerous by extending two wars and gets nothing in return, not even for himself (unless there was a side deal, which can’t be ruled out).
More Snyder, from his latest article.
Weakness is dangerous, and Trump is dangerously weak. And, as weaklings do, he blames others for his own failures, and thereby makes everything worse.
World oil prices are high because of Trump’s Iranian misadventure and his strategic defeat. So, following the logic of his own character rather than the logic of events, Trump blames Ukraine. I spent much of last month in that country, where the injustice of these accusations was painfully palpable.
Russia was destroying Ukrainian power infrastructure with ballistic missiles and even Ukrainian gas stations with drones. The missiles are now getting through now because the Americans no longer supply interceptors, which they either fired pointlessly over Iran or refuse to give or sell. Ukrainians trying to get gas risk their lives. Meanwhile, Americans face higher prices at the gas pumps because their president has chosen to fight and lose a war in Iran.
Trump blames people who risk dying trying to get gas for the expenses that Americans face — when both problems are completely his fault, and his fault personally. If he had chosen to help Ukraine win, for which there were bountiful strategic arguments, instead of choosing calamitous weapon-wasting defeat in Iran, then Ukrainians would have protection from missiles and Americans would have lower gas prices. Instead Trump takes his failure in his war of whimsy and tries to bring down the Ukrainians down with him. In blaming them for what he himself did, he finds a pretext for helping his patron Putin — which is obviously what matters most to him.
From the beginning, for a decade now, the most obvious element of Trump’s weakness is his personal desire to submit to Putin. This was clear even in his first campaign for the presidency, back in 2016, and has been true ever since. For whatever reason, he rarely misses a chance to help the Russian dictator….
That Trump has put himself on the side of Russia without actually gaining anything for Americans — that can be taken for granted. But he hasn’t even gained anything for himself (unless, of course, he was paid). He has only helped Putin by ostentatiously breaking the principle that a war of aggression should not be rewarded.
Trump’s approach to Russia is a policy of pure submission….
Leave a Reply