Trump calls for Russia to be reinstated to G-7, threatens allies on trade

[Skroe]

Trump doubles down.



"Would you do me a favor?"

(deep breath)

(long sigh)



This is the Nth example of Trump claiming "if we take away the penalties they got for doing all the bad stuff they did, they'll stop doing the bad stuff" as good dealmaking.

I continued to be stunned, even though I shouldn't be, by the Trumpkins silence on Trump's pathetic and bizarre fawning of Russia and Putin.

Trump's weird obsession with being freinds with Russia makes him a man alone in America, and most of the west. The general consensus is, that the only thing we should be doing, is finding creative new ways to assault Russia from every angle.

We should kick them out of SWIFT.

We should expel them from every international organization there is.

We should expel prominent Russians in America.

We should seize assets of powerful, connected Russians in the US and Europe.

We should ignite unrest within the Russian hinterlands, always Russia's achilles heel.

We should give even more and better weapons to Ukraine.

We should be deploying anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines across the European / US border.

We should put Tomhawk Cruise Missiles with nuclear warheads on ships in the Baltics and Black Sea, as a precursor to returning land based ballistic missiles to Europe.

Most of all we should be killing Russian hackers and trolls in their beds. You want to drain that particular swamp? Off a few dozen of them, have mom and dad find them strangled to death, and make sure their hacker friends know about it. You'll find Russia's pool of willing volunteers for it's asymmetric cyber operations dries up fast.

For what they have done and are continuing to do, we should do "Maximum Pressure Times Ten", until they break. And Russia will break. The Russian state is weak and in decline. Hell it only attacked Ukraine in 2014 because it knows it will not survive sandwiched on a supercontinent between a strong European Union, a strong China, with America everywhere. Where is Russia in such a world? Not even Russian leaders thought anyplace good.



Hell, this is from Mattis, a few months ago.

https://www.defenseone.com/politics/...rorism/145305/



Every aspect of American power is cycling up to bleed Russia to death except.

Donald.
Fucking.
Trump.

[Crispin]

Far from it, that description suits banana republics n middle eastern countries.

We have a winner!

[caervek]

Trump's weird obsession with being freinds with Russia makes him a man alone in America, and most of the west.

It's so surreal that we've gotten to this point, I was clearing out some stuff from the attic last night and came across a load of my old military magazines from the 90's and early 2000s, looking back I couldn't believe how much the West/Russia relations have changed in the last 15 or so years all thanks to Putin's desire to bring back the USSR.

Back in the Clinton/Yeltsin era and early Bush/Putin era there was so much hope for the newfound friendship/relations between Russia and the west, hell I even found one issue of Air Force Magazine from 2002 with an interview with Lockheed's head of the F-35 program where he was bigging up their partnership with Yakovlev and talking about how the Russian STOVL system used in the F-35 was the reason the X-35 had beaten the X-32 in the JSF program as it was so much better than the British STOVL systems Boeing used in the X-32 and Harrier.

It's so sad to think how far things have degenerated in such a short (relatively speaking) time

[Skroe]

It's so surreal that we've gotten to this point, I was clearing out some stuff from the attic last night and came across a load of my old military magazines from the 90's and early 2000s, looking back I couldn't believe how much the West/Russia relations have changed in the last 15 or so years all thanks to Putin's desire to bring back the USSR.

Back in the Clinton/Yeltsin era and early Bush/Putin era there was so much hope for the newfound friendship/relations between Russia and the west, hell I even found one issue of Air Force Magazine from 2002 with an interview with Lockheed's head of the F-35 program where he was bigging up their partnership with Yakovlev and talking about how the Russian STOVL system used in the F-35 was the reason the X-35 had beaten the X-32 in the JSF program as it was so much better than the British STOVL systems Boeing used in the X-32 and Harrier.

It's so sad to think how far things have degenerated in such a short (relatively speaking) time

It's disappointing for sure, but let's be frank, this has to do more with Western egocentrism than anything else. We can't really blame the Russians, or even Putin, for doing what they do, being what they are. Russia has been a police state run by a succession of authoritarian regimes for 300 years. Oh sure the management and ideology has fluctated a few times. But at it's core, ti's been one idea: a centralized state, run by a centralized clique, that was the leading power in Eurasia, as far east and West of St. Petersberg (then Moscow) as possible. That has ALWAYS been Russia. It may ALWAYS be Russia.

What we did to Russia after 1992 is what we did to China after we brought them into the WTO.

The US and Europe are status quo powers. We are both very reluctant to make waves of any sort, and we are always inclined to resolve disputes by the least disruptive means, because we are so much the beneficiaries of the global system - from security to trade to the very concept of "human rights" as we think of them, which is a Western creation. As the saying goes, the first rule of being a doctor is "do no harm". For the US and Europe, the first rule of foreign policy has been "we hold a winning hand in most everything that is important, don't throw it away at the first sign of trouble".

And we didn't. In fact, we did the opposite, we tried to bring Russia and China in as positive, productive "stakeholders". In retrospect this is stupifyingly arrogant and Western centric. How arrogant are we to assume that two countries, two cultures whose very foundational nature of the superiority of their own compared to their neighbors, would lay aside hundreds of years of powerful indoctrinated beliefs to life in an international house that other powers, that they consider inferior, had built?

Or to put it another way, with the end of the Cold War, we, for some reason, convinced ourselves that Russia (and China) were going to be the first powers of a beaten competitive model in history to happily and willingly assent to doing things our way. How absurd.

We saw in Russia, and China what we wanted to see, because it made life easy for us. It allowed Bill Clinton to cut back defense spending. it allowed Europe to demobilize its armed forces and spend more on social spending. It allowed Bush to go fight Iraq and terrorists. Even a few years ago we saw this. Until it became clear that Russian troops weren't going to leave Ukraine within a few months, and that Putin had carved territory off of it for good, Obama and his inner circle clung to this delusion of demobilizing more of what the US utilizes to fight wars against great powers and focusing on cheaper "counter terrorism" missions. Famously, in 2016, Obama played with the idea of making unilateral nuclear weapons cuts, and retiring the USS George Washington aircraft carrier halfway through its 50 year life, rather than refuel that. Can you imagine that? With everything China is doing at sea, and Obama wanted to cut a carrier!

I hope 70 years from now, at the end of the Next Cold War, Westerners learned the lesson from the end of this one. Just because you won the victory, doesn't mean we secured it. The Soviet Union crumbled, but Russia didn't, and it spent 20 years trying to fix itself while we told ourselves "no, they aren't like that", because the cost of confrontation was so high.

And it's even worse with China. For sheer greed and short term financial gain, we have allowed them to rape and pillage their way around the world.

Can we blame them? No not really. Both are acting squarely within their interests. The problem is the US and Europe, still by far the greatest powers on the face of this Earth, have forgotten it's power to shape events and become fearful of consequence. Fearful, without grounds to be. Because the US and Europe have never, once, in the past 30 years pushed back hard against Russia or China in a way that made clear "you will go no further". If we did, I think we'd see a much improved international security situation. Both would come up against the hard limits of their power, and be forced to deal.

No. What we do instead is come up with creative explanations on why we shouldn't do that. About how we can buy them off, as if that's worked at all the past 20 years.

And so it will get worse, before it gets better, because the West has utterly forgotten it's strength, and has become so delusional as to lose sight of the fact that not everybody wants what we want in this world.

[tyupia]

Running through all Skroe's endless posts is his messianic "we are the saviours of the world" bullshit, the US equivalent of Stalinist propaganda. It is nauseating. No one believes it outside the US and increasingly few within it.

The US is not some kind of world police. It is a morally bankrupt country run by greedy self-aggrandizing countries, with a long record of atrocities in numerous countries that to this day backs up numerous barbarious dictatorships and is widely despised around the world by the citizens of other countries for that reason. The "beacon of hope and liberty" crap works well on its own citizens but outside the US the sentiment is universally considered laughable even among its allies, it is seen as just one of many competing colonial powers looking to strip as many assets as possible.

Russia and China are no better of course, both are vile barbarious dictatorships/kleptocracies, but they do have the added benefit of relative stability and predictability as neither is in danger of being taken over by religous lunatics. They also aren't as much in debt.

Doubtless Skroe will continue to write these novellas but I don't want any one to be under the illusion that his ugly imperialist drivel is in any way truthful or recognizeable outside of a narrow cirlce of nationalist zealots within his own country.

[Skroe]

Running through all Skroe's endless posts is his messianic "we are the saviours of the world" bullshit, the US equivalent of Stalinist propaganda. It is nauseating. No one believes it outside the US and increasingly few within it.

The US is not some kind of world police. It is a morally bankrupt country run by greedy self-aggrandizing countries, with a long record of atrocities in numerous countries that to this day backs up numerous barbarious dictatorships and is widely despised around the world by the citizens of other countries for that reason. The "beacon of hope and liberty" crap works well on its own citizens but outside the US the sentiment is universally considered laughable even among its allies, it is seen as just one of many competing colonial powers looking to strip as many assets as possible.

Russia and China are no better of course, both are vile barbarious dictatorships/kleptocracies, but they do have the added benefit of relative stability and predictability as neither is in danger of being taken over by religous lunatics. They also aren't as much in debt.

Doubtless Skroe will continue to write these novellas but I don't want any one to be under the illusion that his ugly imperialist drivel is in any way truthful or recognizeable outside of a narrow cirlce of nationalist zealots within his own country.

Hi Theo. Starting a bit early today aren't we?

No it's just yhe circle of most American voters, who support these positions, the bi-partisan foreign policy conensus, which dominates every pillar of power except the Presidency, and the entire American business world.

And the US is absolutely the world police. How could it not be? It's been the architect and underwriter of the rules based geopolitical order since World War II. That world police bit represents the most hairbrained, untruthful humblebrag in the world today.

You don't need a 12 carrier, 350 ship fleet, backed by 100 stealth bombers, 65 army combat brigades, and 3000 stealth fighters, for territory defense. You don't need $800 billion in annual defense spending for territorial defense, or hell... in the best (and most wrong) excuse ever, to subsidize the "Military Industrial Complex" (which is an overly consolidated shadow of what it was 15 years ago). No. To be blunt, for 70 years America has largely run Earth and the Human Race. The lot of you just live here.

But you're absolutely right about one thing. I will keep posting.

[caervek]

We can't really blame the Russians, or even Putin, for doing what they do, being what they are. Russia has been a police state run by a succession of authoritarian regimes for 300 years.

I'm not sure I really agree with that, firstly prior to the 1917 revolution and the formation of the USSR it was ruled by a monarch but so was practically every other country in Europe. Hell when you look at the events that transpired with their ruler dissolving the parliament, war breaking out, ruler deposed, authoritarian government put in place it's almost a perfect parallel of the English civil war of the 17th century. I agree the USSR was bad however before that Russia wasn't exactly bad, hell the reason the USA owns Alaska today instead of Canada is because Russia sold it to you guys as buyer of preference because you were friends with them (at least more so than Britain was).

Historically speaking though, prior to the 20th century there wasn't a country on the planet that could be considered good/decent by today's standards (Britain and the USA included) so it's a bit skewed to point to historical negatives from over 100 years ago when every country had them.

Secondly, I wouldn't class their run in the 90's and slightly into the early 00's as police state/authoritarian either, after democracy came and Yeltsin was elected it really seemed like their country was moving along and that's because it was, when the former Soviet hardliners and military launched a coup in 1991 it failed even though they had the tanks because the people wouldn't stand for it. The return of an authoritarian government and state TV broadcasts in place of free media wasn't something they were willing to tolerate so the coups supporters had to back down and let Yeltsin resume control. With that in mind it's a real shame that Putin has effectively achieved the coups goals by moving slowly, Russian media is once again controlled by the state, many of the freedoms of the 90's are gone, etc.

One saving grace we can be hopeful off however is that Putin will not be in power forever and the majority of Russians do still seem to be as outward looking as they were in the 90's, there's every chance that once Putin goes his Russia will go with him and the country can resume it's place on the world stage.

[Deja Thoris]

Running through all Skroe's endless posts is his messianic "we are the saviours of the world" bullshit, the US equivalent of Stalinist propaganda. It is nauseating. No one believes it outside the US and increasingly few within it.

The US is not some kind of world police. It is a morally bankrupt country run by greedy self-aggrandizing countries, with a long record of atrocities in numerous countries that to this day backs up numerous barbarious dictatorships and is widely despised around the world by the citizens of other countries for that reason. The "beacon of hope and liberty" crap works well on its own citizens but outside the US the sentiment is universally considered laughable even among its allies, it is seen as just one of many competing colonial powers looking to strip as many assets as possible.

Russia and China are no better of course, both are vile barbarious dictatorships/kleptocracies, but they do have the added benefit of relative stability and predictability as neither is in danger of being taken over by religous lunatics. They also aren't as much in debt.

Doubtless Skroe will continue to write these novellas but I don't want any one to be under the illusion that his ugly imperialist drivel is in any way truthful or recognizeable outside of a narrow cirlce of nationalist zealots within his own country.

I like his posts. Even if I don't agree with everything he says he has great insights and well written posts.

You on the other hand are just a shit talking sad salty cunt on a ban evading alt account hoping to come across as anything other than pathetic.

You dont

[tyupia]

You don't need a 12 carrier, 350 ship fleet, backed by 100 stealth bombers, 65 army combat brigades, and 3000 stealth fighters....

Do you masturbate while you write this stuff? It is like reading the military hardware equivalent of EL James.

Actually that might work as a money-spinner now I think of it.....

- - - Updated - - -

Secondly, I wouldn't class their run in the 90's and slightly into the early 00's as police state/authoritarian either, after democracy came and Yeltsin was elected it really seemed like their country was moving along and that's because it was, when the former Soviet hardliners and military launched a coup in 1991 it failed even though they had the tanks because the people wouldn't stand for it. The return of an authoritarian government and state TV broadcasts in place of free media wasn't something they were willing to tolerate so the coups supporters had to back down and let Yeltsin resume control. With that in mind it's a real shame that Putin has effectively achieved the coups goals by moving slowly, Russian media is once again controlled by the state, many of the freedoms of the 90's are gone, etc.

You ignored the part where Yeltsin ended any pretense of democracy, by sending tanks to the Duma to suspend a communist comeback, after having driven the country into ruin in the space of a few years.

But y'know lets ignore the fact that capitalism failed after two years in Russia when a morally bankrupt Soviet authoritarianism had collapsed in 70. Let's ignore all those freemarket advisors the US sent over who were part of the whole descent into chaos. Because, you know, discussing the possibility that the western economic model, much less the US itself, might somehow be partially responsible for the horrible mess that ensued isn't "politically correct".

[Skroe]

Do you masturbate while you write this stuff? It is like reading the military hardware equivalent of EL James.

Actually that might work as a money-spinner now I think of it.....

No. It is informative and put's the magnitude of the investment into context. Or to put it another way, do you think we need all that stuff just to defend ourselves? We could keep the Military Industrial Complex afloat just by building a lot of high-end Coast Guard cutters. A defense dollar is a defense dollar.

No. We built that stuff... the stuff you, because you aren't interest in facts, just feels... so the US could fight wars and expand its interests in other people's lands and not our own. We have talked about that at length in these forums. It's the forward defense versus territorial defense discussion.

If the US weren't enthusiastic about World Police, it's armed forces would look a lot like the United Kingdom, which has seen its global role contract since the Iraq War was launched. Instead of a 1.4 million manned armed forces, we could make due with 400,000. Instead of carriers, we'd build a lot of lightly armed frigates. Instead of stealth bombers and stealth fighters, we'd just buy a lot of F-16s to do patrols. And hey, a fully decked out F-16 is about as much as an F-35, so it's not like the M.I.C. would be getting screwed.

I say that stuff because it demonstrates what the US actually has and contrasts it against the necessity of having it if things were different. And I mean, if you want to have another two scoop helping of facts this fine morning Theo, you just have to look at the 2019 budget debate going through Congress now? To just underscore my point even further, Congress is very likely to buy two carriers at the same time (for cost saving purposes) for the first time since the 1980s with the currently extant Nimitz carriers, and accelerate carrier procurement from 5 years to 3 years (which would accelerate first dollar spent to delivery from about 14 years to about 10).

You think I'm, as you put it "masturbating" to that? No. So why do I mention it? Because it demonstrates the commitment of Congress, which spends our money, to finance the current approach deep into the future.

How deep? Well Carriers do last 50 years.

While you say what you say, Congress is about to drop $25 billion into what I'm saying, and that's just one example. It doesn't go into everything else the country spends money on, precisely to continue doing the "world policing" it's done for 70 years. That pretty much means you're dead wrong.

Want to change that? That's your right. Americans who want to change that have to win a lot more elections, and change a lot of people in places where elections have no currency (like the armed forces and business and universities and think tanks). But you don't get to pretend for a second it's anything other than exactly what I say it is. If it weren't, we wouldn't be making these enormous long term investments like we are. The best part is, ten years ago, we weren't. Not like today. The F-22 program? Canceled at 187. The "2018 Bomber"? Canceled. The Zumwalt class destroyer? Cut at 3 ships.

But we are now. And everything has changed.

[Deleted]

Russia wanted to join NATO. Was the US ok with that? No.
Would US have been ok with a competitor large country's mil ind complex? No.
Did USA ever stop fly heavy nuke capable bombers around Russian borders even though Russia stopped for years? No.

USA only wants satellites, weak satellites dependent, because USA is a market masquerading as a country (in fact there is no society to merit calling it that) n will stand for no competition where it matters.

While Obama did make a deal with cuba n iran, Trump with North Korea, it was the USA that for decades chose not to pursue such. Thinking everyone should fold, submit to Washington. The world could have been a lot further along if the US wasn't such egocentric folks.
US creates its own enemies, all of them, are a result of US way of handling situations...

[zorkuus]

US creates its own enemies, all of them, are a result of US way of handling situations...

I'm sorry but lots of countries consider Russia an enemy.
What is more likely? We all pissed them off or the other way around?

[Deleted]

I'm sorry but lots of countries consider Russia an enemy.
What is more likely? We all pissed them off or the other way around?

"Lots of countries" = NATO countries

I mentioned iran = us coups
cuba = us coup n decades embargo because of butthurt
north korea = us aggression n killed off half the populace n never apoligized

So yeah, US creates its own enemies.

War on terror? US created al qaida n later they are the enemy.

[zorkuus]

north korea = us aggression n killed off half the populace n never apoligized

Ahh, we're making lies and kiss kiss with North Korea already.
North Korea invaded South Korea. The rest of the story you can look up yourself. LIAR

[Deleted]

We should kick the US out of SWIFT and G7.

We should expel the US from every international organization there is.

We should expel prominent Americans from Europe.

We should seize assets of powerful, connected Americans in Europe.

We should ignite unrest within the American hinterlands.

We should give even more and better weapons to Iran and China.

We should be deploying anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines across the US border.

We should put Cruise Missiles with nuclear warheads on ships in the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic, as a precursor to returning land based ballistic missiles to Cuba.

Fixed that for you.

[Felya]

Fixed that for you.

That’s not a fix... how you feel is blatantly obvious.

[Deleted]

That’s not a fix... how you feel is blatantly obvious.

Both of those countries need to be bitchslapped into submission.

[Felya]

cuba = us coup n decades embargo because of butthurt

Please explain... I learned of the Cuban missile crisis in USSR and then again in US. Be it that there were differences, neither one claimed the above.

US occupied Cuba for a total of 8 years, ending in 1909...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seco...pation_of_Cuba

The Cuban Revolution was not caused by US, but was a communist revolution:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution

Cuba was Russia’s Afghanistan, before most in US knew what Afghanistan was.

Edit: Afghanistan as a millitary strategic point that was closest to Russia... not the Bin Ladin Afghanistan we know now. I needed to clarify...

- - - Updated - - -

Both of those countries need to be bitchslapped into submission.

What countries need to be “bitchslapped”?

[Deleted]

What countries need to be “bitchslapped”?

Russia and the US.

[Felya]

JFK on Cuba:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25660

Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years ... and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror. Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista—hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend—at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people, and we failed to press for free elections.

- - - Updated - - -

Russia and the US.

Where you from?