Trump Projects Strength. Biden Projects Weakness: Perceptions Guide Actions
Putin's nuclear blackmail has been very effective in constraining NATO response, so that the war in Ukraine has been prolonged. "Supreme excellence in warfare is to win without fighting." - Sun Tzu
“Ukraine said on Friday that Russian oil refineries were legitimate targets, in a rebuke to the United States. Officials in Kyiv insisted they would continue blowing up energy facilities, despite reports that the US has been warning them to halt drone strikes amid fears they could hinder Joe Biden’s re-election chances. The White House had urged Kyiv to stop attacking refineries, depots and storage facilities inside Russia because they could cause petrol prices to rise or prompt an escalation from Moscow.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/03/22/russian-oil-depots-legitimate-targets-ukraine-joe-biden/
Biden just tipped his hand and showed Russia that he’s weak - by calling on Ukraine to cease its most effective strategy, by hitting at Russian logistics. Tanks and BMPs and BTRs and trains need diesel fuel to run, they can’t run on crude oil. What stopped Patton in his drive to Germany in World War II is that his tank forces ran out of gas, if Patton had gotten adequate fuel supplies, he could have stopped the war before the Battle of the Bulge - and of the Allied generals, Hitler feared Patton the most. And by bombing the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, as well as refinery facilities in Germany and occupied countries, the Allies foreshortened the war. Germany was forced to run its tanks on inferior synfuels from wood alcohol, and those refineries were targeted as well. If Russia runs out of diesel, gasoline, and aviation kerosene, the war is over.
Biden has been guided in his prosecution of this war by the threats of his enemies - and Putin and Xi are the enemies of NATO and the US - and has dribbled aid and support to Ukraine in such a manner that Ukraine cannot win. And Putin and Xi see this and are encouraged in their aggression. Biden projects weakness, and has been doing so for the past two years, and the situation now is the direct result - he takes the counsel of his fears, and that counsel is often disastrous. Thus, Biden is a dangerous President, because he encourages foes to continue their aggression. Placating bullies is a losing game, we found that out with Hitler with a terrible cost in lives and resources. We are on the verge of repeating some very unpleasant history if we don’t change our course. We need a leader to represent the United States - and the West - who projects strength and power - and if you look at Trump, as Sasha Stone has written below, he’s that person.
Trump has said that Putin wouldn’t have dared to invade Ukraine if he’d been President, and I think he’s spot-on correct. I think that Putin’s perception of Trump was that of a person not to be messed with. And perceptions guide actions, especially if there is uncertainty - and war is the most uncertain thing. If you can get your opponent to think twice, and hesitate, you can win without fighting. Putin has been very successful at getting people like Biden to think twice, and hesitate, and honor Putin’s “red lines” - which means Biden has been fighting this war by the rules set by his opponent. If you fight using your opponent’s rules, you will invariably lose, because your opponent’s rules are designed not to give you any advantage or possibility of success. And up until recently, Biden has been able to con Ukraine’s government to follow his bad leadership, but that’s at an end.
We’ve been in World War III for about a year now; the hesitation by the West in making a decisive response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - and the wholesale broadcast of Russia’s information warfare by such notables as Tucker Carlson, Russell Brand, and Neil Oliver, as well as Rod Dreher of the American Conservative (now an American expat living in Hungary) and other conservative sources taken in by Putin’s deception campaign - has made a bad situation very much worse, by encouraging Putin and his siloviki to go forward with their plans for conquest, eventually landing up on American shores.
For, make no mistake about it, that’s their intention. Just like Hitler, who, if he had been able to conquer the UK in 1940 - and by using the America First forces to get the Roosevelt Administration to cut off Lend-Lease, and forcing the UK to sue Hitler for peace and in effect, surrender - he definitely had his eyes on the conquest of the US. Hitler had his own prospective fifth column here in the US, with the Deutsches-Amerikanisches Bund, in chapters across the country; twenty thousand members of the Bund paraded through Brooklyn in 1939, flying swastika flags and the rest, then across the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan, over to Madison Square Garden, where they held a huge rally. And Putin’s mentor, Dugin, makes this enmity with the US quite plain (and if you read Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics, Putin’s plans are laid out in detail, plans which Putin has been following since 2007):
“How is a revived Eurasian--Russian empire to bring about "the geopolitical defeat of the U.S." (260)? An appropriate response to the looming Atlanticist threat, Dugin contends, is for the renascent Eurasian-Russian empire to direct all of its powers (short of igniting a hot war), as well as those of the remainder of humanity, against the Atlanticist Anaconda. "At the basis of the geopolitical construction of this [Eurasian] Empire," Dugin writes, "there must be placed one fundamental principle--the principle of 'a common enemy.' A negation of Atlanticism, a repudiation of the strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values--this represents the common civilizational basis, the common impulse which will prepare the way for a strong political and strategic union" (216).
One way in which Russia will be able to turn other states against Atlanticism will be an astute use of the country's raw material riches. "In the beginning stage [of the struggle against Atlanticism]," Dugin writes, "Russia can offer its potential partners in the East and West its resources as compensation for exacerbating their relations with the U.S." (276).
This last bit has been clearly seen in the German addiction to Russian natural gas, one half of which transits Ukraine through Gazprom’s pipeline from Sumy to the Western border of Ukraine, oddly enough. The US still buys a billion dollars’ worth of Russian low-enriched uranium for nuclear power - that accounts for one quarter of the US’ requirements for that fuel source - and that’s quite a lot of leverage. And the US is still apparently dependent on Russian oil and distillates, otherwise Biden would not be calling for Ukraine to halt their bombing of Russian refineries, in order to keep US gas prices down, to help Biden get re-elected. And certainly this energy blackmail has been very effective in hamstringing Germany’s response - Putin has Scholz by the balls, and all Putin has to do to get Scholz to not supply Ukraine with needed armaments in to give just a little twist and a jerk - “Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will surely follow” is the maxim being applied, and it’s working quite well. The US and Germany and other countries dependent on Russian resources to prop up their economies are like people trying to ride two horses at the same time - eventually they end up flat on their asses in the dust. Even in the short term, it has proven to be a very bad strategy, because it has increased risk of a more widepread war, and it has bankrolled that more widespread war - including bankrolling Russia’s Iranian allies, including Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen.
To induce the Anaconda to release its grip on the coastline of Eurasia, it must be attacked relentlessly on its home territory, within its own hemisphere, and throughout Eurasia. "All levels of geopolitical pressure," Dugin insists, "must be activated simultaneously" (367).
This prescription, first set out in 1997 by Dugin, is precisely what Putin has been following since 2007, and has been allowed to intensify by the West’s - and Biden’s - anemic and weak response to the Ukraine invasion, not to mention Obama’s failure to uphold US responsibilities under the Budapest Memorandum to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity when Russia was allowed to walk into and occupy Crimea (which set the stage for the attack on Ukraine 8 years later, by creating a vital supply link and base of operations for later use). If the West and Biden had responded by putting US and NATO boots on the ground - and F-18s and F-35s in the air, and helping to drive the Russians out and beating them militarily, there’s a good chance that Putin and his siloviki would have met their end, and Russia would be a different and potentially far better country, for its citizens and the world. The US and NATO abdicated this responsibility, and we have the situation we have today - and Putin is still following Dugin’s playbook.
Dugin goes on to write: “Within the United States itself, there is a need for the Russian special services and their allies "to provoke all forms of instability and separatism within the borders of the United States (it is possible to make use of the political forces of Afro-American racists)" (248). "It is especially important," Dugin adds, "to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements-- extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics" (367).” https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
(I suggest a close reading of this latter reference - as I’ve been doing for the past two years - but I keep harping on this for a reason, because this reference kicked me out of bed, so to speak, and after a bit of close study, showed me what was going on and what could be expected. For being written in 2004, it has proven to be remarkably prescient over the last two years.)
This last piece of Dugin’s plan - “encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements” - has been set in motion in the US since 2014, it’s a key piece of strategy. “If your opponent is united, divide him.” Sun Tzu. This has been done via the Trojan horse of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion indoctrination, and the incorporation of Identity Politics, which came out of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, into American corporations and government, and ending up in the American military, where unit cohesion is of utmost importance. A military fighting amongst itself, will be of very little value in fighting the enemy. The Chinese and Russians know this, thus DEI is part of the Chinese doctrine of Unrestricted Warfare, and has been used to good effect as well by the Russians.
One of the longstanding goals of both China and Russia has been to ignite racial conflict in the US, and they have been hard at work in the universities, buying out academics to further their bad intentions - and we have been seeing the effects of this in American society for the past ten years. One of the signal accomplishments of Trump has been to actively fight this campaign of strategic division along racial and sectarian lines, his chief opposition has come from the captured institutions, in the universities, in corporations, and in the Administrative State, who have bought into - and who have been bought by - our opponents.
But many conservatives have also played along with Russia, they have been either fooled or coerced into playing along - like Rod Dreher in Hungary (which is far too close to Russia for comfort) - or like Tucker Carlson, whose videos are used in Russian schools to back up Putin’s politics:
“On March 11, schools and colleges throughout Russia began piloting an extracurricular program called “From Rus’ to Russia,” in which students are shown Vladimir Putin’s interview with American political commentator Tucker Carlson. The initiative was first reported in the media by “Not the Norm,” a Telegram channel dedicated to gathering information about the Russian government’s pro-war propaganda in schools. According to the channel, after watching part of the Putin-Carlson interview, students take part in a competition that consists of answering questions about the reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Minsk agreements, U.S. sanctions, and related topics. Meduza found reports about the new lessons on the websites of schools, lyceums, and colleges in the Chuvash Republic, Bashkortostan, Altai Krai, the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, and the Moscow, Rostov, and Novosibirsk regions, among many others.” https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/03/20/russian-schools-pilot-new-extracurricular-program-based-on-tucker-carlson-s-putin-interview
Perhaps if Carlson were to read the article on Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics mentioned above, he might have cause to reconsider what he’s doing…
What we need in the US is a combination of George Patton - who would have run for President in 1948 had he not died in Germany in 1946 under rather suspicious circumstances - and Theodore Roosevelt, who did not hesitate to project American military power to advance US interests, especially in creating a more peaceful world. He was able to negotiate a treaty between the Russian and Japanese Empires, to end the war between them, and received the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for that work. Both men exhibited exceptional moral and physical courage - and leadership - under fire, and both were exceptionally well read and intelligent. We have no one close to that standard in American political life - at least at the Presidential level - today - so we have to settle for the closest approximation. That man is not Biden, he projects fear and weakness and vulnerability, and that in turn is the image the US projects to hostile adversaries - and it invites their aggression and bad acts.
On the other hand, Trump seems to have given NATO a salutary kick in the butt:
and they for the most part, including France, have been kicked out of their slumber, and been forced to take real action to confront the clear, real, and present danger which Russia faces to them. The Russian reaction to France has been particularly ham-handed, which has only served to underline and emphasize the Russian threat. Russia’s moves towards Finland and Sweden have had similar effect, without this bit of controversy stirred up by Trump, their dangerous acquiescence no doubt would have continued.
In conclusion, we need a change in US leadership - not only in the Executive Branch, but also in the military, and in the universities and corporations - and last but definitely not least, in the Administrative State. We need to root out those who give aid and comfort to our enemies - China and Russia - and kick them to the curb, at the very least. And we need to make America great again, and stop losing to opponents who can only win if we don’t fight back. We need people to reignite the flame of moral courage and confidence in the good that Americans can do. Our present leadership isn’t doing so, we need leaders who can.
”If you watch Trump’s rallies, as I’ve been doing since 2020, you notice his upbeat spirit. He’s like a high school football coach who must inspire the players to go out there and win, even if the odds are against them. And really, that is the main job of the President of the United States. To be a great salesperson who can sell all of us on the can-do American spirit. By contrast, Biden sells nothing but fear. Fear of Trump, fear of MAGA, fear of losing Democracy. Who wants a leader who keeps telling the American people one riot at the Capitol meant the end of America? Really? I thought we were the most powerful country in the world. No? But that’s all Biden has. It’s a negative rather than a positive. After eight years, why would that be appealing to most Americans? They want to feel better, not worse. Trump projects strength. Biden projects weakness.”
_______