Vladimir Putin. Photo via Wikipedia

Counting Down the Seconds Until Putin Betrays Trump There’s no way this ends well Andrew Dobbs Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 3, 2017 by ANDREW DOBBS Late-December 2016 news coverage of the diplomatic conflict between the United States and Russia has made repeated reference to a game Russia is better at — chess. If we were using chess notation to record the incident, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s move declining to retaliate to U.S. president Barack Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomatic officials and imposition of new targeted sanctions would be marked with at least one exclamation point. Actually, Obama’s more of a basketball guy. So maybe this metaphor is more apt — Putin shook his man so bad he broke his ankles. The game isn’t over, of course, but Putin has reframed the United States’ retaliation for Russian meddling in the recent U.S. presidential election not as an escalating conflict between national interests, but rather as an act of petulance from a sore-loser lame-duck president. Everyone, of course, expects things to improve for the Russians once Donald Trump is inaugurated. Trump’s fondness for the Kremlin contains serious contradictions. Russia’s primary interest is in weakening the United States’ imperial power. Trump’s interest is in extending it — that is, “Making America Great Again.” Furthermore, Russia’s most important strategic alliances are anathema to U.S. imperial interests — none more so than Russia’s relationship with Iran. How can Trump possibly resolve this? Sign up for Defiant’s daily newsletter Perhaps no other contradiction in Trump’s inconsistent vision is more significant than this one is, because it threatens the United States’ fundamental place in the world, and some of the timelines twisting out from it end in nuclear war. It demands analysis and understanding. The first step in reaching this understanding is dispelling the notion that Russia is a “rival” of the United States and seeks to supplant us as the leading global superpower. This is a vestige of Cold War coverage of the rivalry between the Soviet Union — which was much bigger than Russia — and the United States. In fact, Russia has no meaningful capacity to contest the United States as a global power. Our economy is 55 times the size of theirs is. Our military budget is roughly 14 times the size of theirs. Hell, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spends more than twice as much every years as the Russian military spends. Our navy has nearly three times the personnel and more than 10 times the naval aircraft. And while the United States has 10 large aircraft carriers, Russia has exactly one. Russia controls 18 foreign military bases. The United States controls more than 800.

A Russian Su-34 bomber. Russian state media photo

Still, expansive U.S. power cannot long tolerate even regional alternative centers of power. Eventually our ambitions will run up against their power and either we will submit to them — or we will overpower and supplant them. The first option is an invitation to global resistance and the end to the imperial project altogether, so the only regional powers we tolerate are those who serve as lieutenants to the U.S. empire. Russia is unwilling to act as such, an outrage to our sense of supremacy, and thus a “threat to our national security.” The media and mainstream experts explain Russia’s regional ambitions in mystical or idealistic terms of “traditional spheres of influence” — terms which Russia themselves and their network of Russophile allies in nearby countries echo. All of this, however, is a cover story for the basic material fact that Russia’s economy is export-driven, dominated by energy resources and other raw materials — and that these exports are primarily consumed by nearby European and Asian economies. Support the American Civil Liberties Union

www.aclu.org Getting these exports to market means transiting the surrounding countries of their “traditional sphere of influence,” and these economies thus have a symbiotic economic relationship with Russia — the Russian Federation is typically one of their primary trading partners. This creates a network of interests that make this region of acute concern to Russia’s economic elites. Hence their drive to establish regional primacy. Russia could conceivably establish its regional dominance on terms acceptable to the United States and pass on economic and military benefit to the empire as we demand it, but the nature of Russia’s export economy and the changing shape of the global market is such that they simply do not have the margins to afford such capitulation. Neither are the Russians in a position for direct confrontation with us, so they move in asymmetric and circuitous manners, using tools including cyberwarfare and quasi-covert confrontations with potential U.S. regional allies such as Ukraine. And of course they have the ultimate equalizer at hand — a massive nuclear arsenal that requires that we both tread carefully with them and give them prominence in international dialogues. Regardless, even with a relatively modest military, the Russian military is still the world’s fourth-largest force, and despite the Russians’ energy- and raw material-focused export economy, they still have one of the world’s most advanced systems of industrial production.

An Israeli soldier attacks a Hezbollah bunker in Lebanon in 2006. Photo via Wikipedia

Michael Flynn. Photo via Wikipedia

It also bears remembering that the president-elect is a known, admitted sexual predator, that he has made sexualized comments about children and violated the boundaries of minor girls, that Russia has both a notorious sex tourism industry and an entrenched surveillance state and that Trump has made extensive, in part unaccounted for travels to Russia. While there is no evidence that the Russians have sensitive footage of Trump engaging in illicit sexual behavior, it is in his character and might explain his loyalty to a regime that runs contrary to the interests he has promised and will soon swear to serve. If the United States does not flip on Russia, the options from there are further limited. Russia could, for one, flip on Iran and Syria and side with the United States and our regional allies. Russia and Iran, however, are about to win in Syria and there seems to be little reason for them to abandon the strategic alliance that has extended their power to grow closer to the losing side. This scenario would also by definition benefit U.S. and Western imperialism, which is not just a threat for Russia in the Middle East. Their major interest is in restoring their economic power in Eastern Europe, including with the Balkan States — members of both the European Union and NATO. Empowering the most powerful elements of these rival alliances runs contrary to Russian national interests. I Broke Up With Family Over Donald Trump — And I Don’t Regret It

They opposed my right to existmedium.com Another option is that the United States could stick with Russia and shift our regional alliance away from Saudi Arabia and Israel in favor of Iran and Syria. This is very unlikely and dangerous. First, it is one of the only political moves Trump could make that his base — personally loyal to him beyond almost any other value or interest — abandon him. Their hostility to Iran goes back nearly 40 years and has been cultivated by generations of authoritative reactionary ideologues. Abandoning Israel would furthermore be tantamount to apostasy for many of them. It also runs entirely contrary to every single one of his personnel appointments made to date. That said, Israel has often followed U.S. military policy in the region and they have settled differences with enemies before. Prior to the Camp David Accords, Egypt was Israel’s major military rival. The two have been at peace ever since. Whether Iran would suppress its proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas would be a key point of contention here, which would both be easier said than done and probably way outside Iran’s interests — these are two of their most significant assets for power projection, their capacity for countering Saudi Arabia’s ideological hegemony in Arab culture and politics. The opportunity to end one of the most vexing regional conflicts might interest the ruling classes of all the contending nations, however, and make a thaw profitable.

A Saudi F-15. Photo via Wikipedia

There seems little hope, however, of including Saudi Arabia in any such compromise. They are far too exposed in their political projects against Iran, the legitimacy of the Saudi state rests on a sectarian religious authority definitionally hostile to the Iranian regime, and the monocultural, hidebound, isolated, tiny and incestuous Saudi ruling class sees control of the Persian Gulf in particular as a zero sum game. Iranian advance is the Saudi elite’s defeat. A U.S. switch to Iran would also be crushing to the Saudi’s national identity — which is marked by their historic alliance with the United States — and this would lead to outcomes that are unpredictable in their specifics, but easy to predict in their broadest outlines. It would mean war. Such a war is a deeply serious matter. If long standing suspicions of a nuclear pact between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are true and the Saudis gain access to nuclear weapons it raises the stakes to the most dangerous levels. The United States turning towards Saudi Arabia’s rivals would pose an existential threat to the regime. They should be expected to respond proportionally to that threat. Nonetheless, the very isolation and narrowness of their ruling class poses persistent problems to their class allies in the United States and the West. If the Saudis’ usefulness on a regional basis has been eclipsed, there might be a strong push to trade them out for a more cosmopolitan conservative elite such as Iran’s if such a switch is politically feasible. After all this there is one more permutation possible. The United States could align itself with Russia while still opposing Iran sharply. As recent U.S. foreign policy indicates, there’s no requirement that alliances and strategies be coherent and consistent. Trump has no idea what the fuck he’s doing and many of the hardliners in his administration are naive ideologues and crackpots. Why not end sanctions on Russia and grow closer to their fellow reactionary autocrats while simultaneously maintaining their hostility to Iran and its allies and proxies in the region? Ring In the New Year With Russia’s Classic Romantic Comedy

‘The Irony of Fate’ brings joy to Soviet architecturemedium.com Russia would like this. The things the United States is likely to do in a Trump-led conflict with Iran are most likely to their benefit. Chief among these is Trump’s threat to tear up the nuclear deal with Iran. The “stick” of the deal is that if Iran violates it the previous sanctions regime is supposed to snap back into place. But if the United States unilaterally cancels the deal, there is no reason to believe that such sanctions would return. It seems decidedly unlikely that Trump will have the global influence and respect necessary to put such a challenging regime into place, especially when the sanctioning nations have no reason to expect that their actions will contribute to a lasting solution to the conflict. If the agreement is scrapped Iran has no limits on their nuclear program or other military advances and no limits on their economic activities, something that benefits its major military and commercial partners — including, of course, Russia. As for an actual U.S. war in Iran — something, again, that major administration figures have advocated — such an invasion would be far less successful than even the Iraq fiasco, with no meaningful base of popular support in the country. In fact, there would be a broad-based insurgency against such a crime. Iran also boasts a much larger and more treacherous terrain and significant proxies abroad capable of extending asymmetric resistance to U.S. forces and our allies. Even U.S. air strikes and other direct attacks short of full war could be met with proportionate Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and allies in the region, an escalation that has nowhere to go but this very no-mans-land of ground war in Central Asia. If the United States ends up down that path our capacity for imperial influence on the region will come to an end, possibly along with our empire altogether. Again — this has been Russia’s hope all along.

Donald Trump. Photo via Wikipedia