I'm sorry for the lack of structure in this story, it is mainly a bunch of associations I wanted to jot down with one message: nothing is as it seems.
In my last few posts, the theme of power always reappears. It is a fascinating topic that sociologists have studied, the best-known example being "The Power Elite" by Charles Wright Mills. His argument is that the elite in different fields of power, tend to connect.
Surely this is true. We know that the media are controlled by businesses, and that through the media, politics is controlled. However, it also feeds back: politician create the rules of the economic game, and play the media. Some interesting research of a friend demonstrates the tight connections in my country.
As an introduction, this is abstract and vague. Here comes the reality. In the world today, there are four blocks that matter to us in the west: the US, Russia, the EU, and the middle east. Meanwhile in Asia and Latin America there are most likely simultaneously movements going on, which are - for now - slightly more remote. However, I do not have to explain the involvement of the CIA in manipulating regimes in Latin America, and the traditional grip of Russia on China and Korea are well-known. Further, the superpower of India, and the area of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which can be seen as a battleground, will be connected to the global story. Except that this is not what the fuss is about now.
The question today is whether or not Donald Trump is a puppet of Putin. The first being a flamboyant businessman, the second a calculated statist. It is easy to believe they cannot be more different. Also, as the evidence is out that Trump got elected with a helping hand from the Kremlin, we might believe he is indeed the puppet on a string to Russia. It is said here:
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/trump-is-little-more-than-russia-s-puppet-20180719-p4zsco.html
And here:
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/16/opinions/clinton-trump-puppet-opinion-hossain/index.html
People are readily opinionated about the global politics and the characters of their leaders. My argument is that nothing is as it seems, and we would have to look for explanations at different levels of meta-politics. For this, we need to understand wherein lies the power of each of the blocks.
But first let's be clear that Trump is not your average Yankee. To begin with, his wives are both from Eastern Europe. Secondly, he did get support from Russia during the elections. Thirdly, he has business ties with Russia since at least the late 1980s, when he also started to share their world view. This is documented in an impressive essay, including a chart of all the connections between the actors in the story, you find here:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html
The story goes that Trump visited Russia numerous times, lied about the whereabouts, and most likely got wired. Also, back in the US, Trump passes as a jetset lord who organised parties with underage girls and cocaine. More on this here:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-donald-trumps-one-stop-parties-attendees-recall-cocaine-and-very-young-models?ref=scroll
So yeah, Trump appears like a liability to the US, and an asset to Russia. But let's see what the interests of each actor are: Trump, as a businessman, wants maximum wealth and status. He has lived accordingly, and although businesses happen to collapse occasionally, he is certainly wealthy.
Putin, as a statist, wants control and prosperity. As a secret service agent, he does not care about the means. A few interviews you can find on Youtube show the development of his ideas. We do not know what he was involved in as a KGB agent (it might as well have been the Trump case), but on some occasions it shines through that the work of the KGB consisted of information gathering and making newspaper cuttings. In my country, that is as far as they go too. In that sense, it is easy to see the connection with the modern-day hackers of FancyBears. However, he did not particularly like the communist system, even if he studied Leninist literature and his father was an admirer, and cook, of Stalin. He probably did not like it because of its weakness: by only trying to be powerful, and neglecting the economical basics, Russia became weak and the USSR disintegrated. He was clearly on the side of Gorbatchev, but unlike the great leader, he is not a democrat. The western puppet Yeltsin then lead Russia through the difficult 1990s - which were difficult for all former socialist countries - that ended with a crisis of the Rouble and his defeat.
Putin got in chargen, and exactly thanks to the weak Rouble combined with increasing global demand for fossil fuel after the dotcom collapse of the early 2000s, the economy caught on again, and this led to fifteen years of growth. Putin himself is very aware of this, and in interviews always maintained an understanding of the west, even if it presented Russia as a threath and enemy. Putin consistently calls this 'no news', and 'electoral rhetorics' with local motivations. In the real world, he supports the southstream pipeline for the balkan, and the northstram pipeline for Germany and western Europe. Indeed: this is the economic hinge Russia depends upon.
Another important idea in Putins logic is that the economy should be free, but the state should have the last say. This is very popular in all right-wing movements: businesses rule, but the state keeps everyone in check. The main victim is the critical population or the non-state-entrepreneur. It is a system of nepotism that has the downside of innovative sluggishness (Russia is largely a development country), and the advantage of monopoly scales. It is probably not welfare efficient, but this system guaranteed growth for almost two decades, so the Russians swear by their strong leader, and the businesses are happy. This kind of favouritism was already in the toolkit of Putin when he was politically active in Saint-Petersburg, dealing with the port maffia.
The final idea for Putin is not so much to restore the Russian empire, even if he is sympathetic to tsarist generals such as Denikin, and continues the negativism around anarchists like Nestor Machno (saying he organised pogroms, which is false), but rather to weaken the world outside of Russia itself. This means the middle east cannot be American, the Ukraine cannot be European, the US should retract from the global scene and struggle internally, and China (there we have it, finally), should not be safe from North Korea. If everybody else is in trouble, and if you control their energy supplies, you will do well, and that is the strategy of Putin. He does not want to conquer, but he wants to rule, in order to generate the largest advantage. It is a very materialist, macchiavellistic strategy. Part of the way to weaken the others is to promote slavic nationalism, so that there is no new humanist culture, but very fragments, clashing civilisations. Nationalism (in Russia also populism), authoritarianism (based on knowledge, manipulation, and force), and materialism (including security on pensions) are the cornerstones of his ideology. Again, he doesn't attack anybody, but protects Russia. In that sense, the control over Crimea and the Donbass is a shield to the west, as under Obama, the Maidan was used to establish NATO control, which the EU didn't even want. A better solution, that Merkel is no doubt now organising, is to preserve the neutrality of Ukraine.
We've touched upon some other issues to come back to the story of the two men. After their meeting in July, the world thought Trump had finally fully submitted to Putin, calling his denial of the hacking and manipulation of the elections more credible than the US intelligence agencies. Yet what followed was all but a submission: he allowed the export of javelin's to Ukraine, continues tarrifs and trade blocks, and tries to block the northstream connection. We have seen that all of this cuts the main vains of the Russian economy and therefore Putin's rule. This argument was made by Al Jazeera:
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/trump-putin-puppet-180718073251949.html
The question therefore is: to what extent is the businessman a better poker player than the secret agent? By appearing weak, but acting strong, opponents may be set offside. It seems like a salesman that tricks you into buying something you don't want, and this is precisely the one talent Trump certainly has. It is also the reason why he uses dumb speech to the public, who is compelled to finish his sentences and follow his logic, entranced by the repetition of words as well as flattered by the rare complex words smuggled into the nonsensical gibberish, and finally it is why he uses sloganesk tweets and no debate whatsoever - a new strategy of undemocratic minds that do not even seek to justify their actions as it does not translate into votes and power. Trump does this like a master, probably instinctively, although some NLP training is likely. We would then think there is no conspiracy, and nothing can be held against Trump that is worse than what we already know or suspect. Check:
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/2/22/14697718/trump-putin-helsinki-meeting-hillary-clinton
And still that could be false. Even if it appears that the US is know on the verge of collapse, and the rhetoric is even used by Trump to fend off impeachment ("The stock markets would crash"), maybe there is an institutional safety net, as all intelligence services, and the department of justice, are objectively opposed to the president. Could it be that they control him, while he controls his business interests, and Putin only believes he makes the calls? I think that is very likely.
I haven't said much about the EU or about the middle east. Well maybe the EU, who remains out of the picture, is actually the smartest player. Even if disintegrating because of Brexit, civil wars with muslims, and a rise of nationalism that is supported by Russia as well as the Trump network, it still exists, controls major Russian bank accounts, is the monopsonist in the story, and may have intelligence services that do not try to make themselves world famous by going public. I am not sure about it, the evidence seems to run counter to that logic, but that would basically prove the point until everything vanishes. In the middle east, I can be short: the player there is less Israel, which may be the one painting the global picture (after all, Cyrillic is not too difficult, but who can read Hebrew writing?), but not with a specific interest in the region in particular. The free radical is Turkey, and its leader Erdogan is a businessman with views that combine the strategies of Putin and the dealmaking capacities of Trump. To the outside world, he is portrayed as a new Ottoman emperor, but like with the other two men, nothing is as it seems.
