Trump’s Putin charade insults our intelligence

Donald Trump is snatching Western defeat from the jaws of victory in Ukraine. He is extending a lifeline to a struggling war criminal running out of ways to fund his mischief.

The Kremlin may “have all the cards” in Trump’s mind, but that is only true at the most superficial level and mostly not true at all. Russia’s deformed war economy is kept afloat by unsustainable hidden debts.

Putin and Trump meet in 2017.Credit: AP

Harvard professor Craig Kennedy says banks have been coerced into off-budget loans to defence contractors worth up to $US250 billion ($396 billion), disguising the true costs of the war and “creating the preconditions for a systemic credit crisis”.

Russia’s “rainy day” welfare fund is running out of gold. Its liquid assets are down to 2 per cent of GDP. Ex-finance minister Mikhail Zadornov said the country would be unable to prosecute the war within six months if oil prices fell further, which is highly likely as OPEC+ raises output into an incipient global glut. West Siberian light crude is already down to $US62.65 a barrel.

Putin has lost his regional ally in Syria. His mercenaries in the Sahel are overstretched and in crisis. He was unable to back his Armenian proteges against predatory ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan. He needs pre-modern North Korean troops and Iranian drones to fight his war.

He has conquered less than 1 per cent of Ukraine’s territory over the last year and has failed to capture a single town of importance. It is hard to exaggerate the strategic criminality of Trump’s pro-Putin pivot at this juncture.

Trump’s courtiers say his shrewd goal is to separate Russia from China and pull off a “reverse Nixon”, sacrificing Ukraine as a pawn in a larger game of great power chess.

Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, talks airily of “peeling off” the Russians, as if Nixon’s strategy of triangulation in the early 1970s has the slightest relevance to today’s circumstances.

The only peeling under way is that of Moscow achieving its 80-year objective of splitting the Atlantic Alliance and gaining a free hand to do its worst in Europe.

To the extent that Trump really has such a strategy – as opposed to a proclivity for authoritarian regimes in general, and Putin’s variant in particular – he is out of his strategic depth.

“It’s a geopolitical fantasy,” said Michael Clark from the Australia-China Relations Institute. He said none of the structural conditions that made Nixon’s gambit possible exists today, and those pushing the line “are either simply searching for an excuse or indulging in ungrounded geopolitical capering”.

Russia’s economy is on very unsteady footing. Credit: AP

Nixon did not have to separate the Soviet Union and China. The two proletarian brothers were already at each other’s throats. It was dangerous to be mistaken for a Russian at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

George Walden, a British diplomat and one of a tiny handful of Westerners in China at the time, said he was spat at and denounced as a Russian “revisionist swine” by gangs of fanatical Maoist youth on the streets of Beijing.

He recounts in his book China: A Wolf In The World? how he also learnt from visiting impromptu bomb shelters in the hutongs [narrow streets] that Mao Zedong was preparing for war with the USSR.

We now know that Chinese forces had ambushed and killed 60 Soviet troops on the border at the Ussuri River. The Russians brought in reinforcements armed with tactical nuclear weapons. Moscow then put out feelers to the Nixon administration: would the US object if the USSR knocked out China by launching a first strike against its nuclear weapons installations in Xinjiang? Nixon warned them off.

It became clear to both Nixon and his guru, Henry Kissinger, that a) they could play off China and the Soviet Union against each other in a triangular strategy of détente and b) better links to Beijing could help the US extract itself from the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

London’s The Daily Telegraph had its own cameo moment in the secret talks. Its stringer in Pakistan, MFH Beg, spotted Kissinger at Islamabad Airport being smuggled onto a Pakistani Boeing 707 with Chinese navigators and headed for Beijing. He put through a breathless call to the editor, who spiked the scoop of the year, thinking Beg must be drunk.

There are Russians who fear vassal dependency on China. “The East is not our friend,” once grumbled Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, but he nevertheless renamed Europe Square as Eurasia Square last year and loyally toes the line on China.

A whole generation now in key posts has internalised the Primakov doctrine, which deems American hegemony to be the permanent and overarching threat to Russia. Only by teaming up with China can the two together force a restructuring of the global order and defend themselves against liberal contagion.

Putin had some trouble persuading the collegium of the FSB security services two weeks ago that Trump’s overtures are a basis for anything durable.

“We understand that not everyone is happy with the resumption of Russian-American contacts. Western elites are still determined to stoke instability and will try to disrupt the dialogue. We see this. We need to take this into account,” he said.

The Russians know that Trump won the US election narrowly and that his hold on Congress is fleeting. “It is highly unlikely that Russia has any desire to separate itself from China,” said Angela Stent, a fellow at the Centre for the United States and Europe.

“There is a fundamental mistrust of the US among the current and probably future Russian leadership. They’re not going to squander this relationship with China built up over the past couple of decades.”

To the extent that Trump really has such a strategy – as opposed to a proclivity for authoritarian regimes in general, and Putin’s variant in particular – he is out of his strategic depth.

If Trump’s reverse Nixon play were authentic and were to succeed to any degree, it would inevitably throw China and Europe into each other’s arms, creating a de facto pact between two of the world’s three big economic blocs (with the UK back in the EU).

The US would swap its rich European equal for a poor Russian “petrol station masquerading as a country” to borrow from the late senator John McCain.

There is an even more horrible possibility that Trump will go in a different direction. While he has hit China with tariffs, he has eschewed a serious fight with Beijing so far. One can imagine another of his theatrical deals that effectively cedes the Far East to China.

He seems to see the world as a 19th-century concert of great powers – in his head, America, Russia and China – each with an imperial “droit de regard” over its own sphere. Europe has no place in this. It is for him the despised weakling and cultural degenerate.

One fears that it is not so much reverse Nixon as a reborn Metternich system of iron-fist reactionary powers colluding to hold back liberal ideas, this time on a global scale.

Nixon and Kissinger must be turning in their graves.

Telegraph, London

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