[quote=“countingbeans, post:616, topic:218984, full:true”]
I don’t know about that so much anymore, on a macro level.
Besides, backing Clinton has plenty of implications of implosion in and of itself.
Please don’t take this as Trump support, it isn’t. I’m just saying I don’t know that Putin/Russian strategy is as simple as I’m reading your posts. “Trump bad, push for him.”[/quote]
(Prefatory note: Not taking anything as Trump support, I promise.)
I haven’t put it that simply. As I explained, there is no question that Trump has surrounded himself with people who are intimately tied to the Kremlin. These ties are not in dispute, and they are a matter of public knowledge.
Perhaps because of this (or perhaps because Donald Trump is extravagantly stupid and needs no encouragement to arrive ass-first at the wrong conclusion in every possible case), Trump has been overtly weak and warm on Russia in general and Putin in particular. While the FSB/GRU was (the evidence suggests) intervening in an American election on Trump’s behalf, he was publicly claiming that he would not necessarily honor Article V in the event of a Russian assault on a NATO member state.
You can’t make this shit up, and, really, it is dispositive. It settles our disagreement. Because such an appallingly weak and nonsensical and unprecedented policy as Trump has proposed vis-a-vis Russia – such utter idiocy – would upend the geopolitical order (not a good thing for the one who’s on top, mind you) and vitiate, to Russia’s overt benefit, what has been the defining instrument of American geopolitical hegemony for decades.
Of course Putin wants this, because, as I said earlier, all of the available evidence (and there is much) suggests that he and his inner circle are as aware as anybody that his interests diverge from American interests almost diametrically. Given this fact, and it is a fact to even the most casual observer of 21st century Russian affairs, Putin would still want Trump even if it weren’t for Manafort and all the squishy pathetic pro-Kremlin rhetoric…because Trump is a uniquely stupid, uniquely incompetent candidate who has made an itinerant circus act out of not understanding even the most basic things about world affairs and American government. He has repeatedly proposed, out loud, the ruination of American economic and military institutions. Be assured: anybody who fancies himself our rival is salivating at the prospect of a President Trump.