Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

If you're wondering what Putin got out of Monday's Helsinki meeting with his star employee Donald Trump, the answer is delicious, delicious real estate that will suddenly become available in the Balkans.

President Trump, who rattled U.S. allies at a NATO meeting last week, voiced concern in a television interview broadcast Tuesday night that sending troops from the alliance to defend an “aggressive” Monte­negro could result in World War III. 

Trump was asked about Monte­negro, which joined NATO last year and has a population smaller than the District of Columbia, during a Fox News interview with host Tucker Carlson. 

Carlson pressed Trump on the purpose of the alliance, which was created in 1949 to protect the United States, Canada and a host of Western European nations from Soviet incursion. The organization calls for member nations to come to the aid of any ally that is attacked. 

“Why should my son go to Montenegro to defend it from attack?” Carlson asked in the interview, which was recorded Monday following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin in Helsinki.

“I understand what you’re saying, I’ve asked the same question,” Trump responded. “You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people. … They are very aggressive people, they may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III. But that’s the way it was set up. Don’t forget, I just got here a little more than a year and a half ago.”

Understand that this is Trump, a day after coming back from a two-hour closed door meeting with Russia's president, now saying that he doesn't believe America should answer its Article V NATO responsibilities in case a NATO country is say, I don't know, annexed by Moscow or something.  You know, no big deal, right?

Also, this is the same day Trump came back from Finland after meeting Putin and said that he looks forward to working with Russia militarily.

Russia announced it was ready to pursue agreements reached by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump "in the sphere of international security," though the White House and Pentagon would not confirm any agreements had been made or offer any details. 

Trump and Putin met for about two hours during their summit in Helsinki with only translators present. It is still not clear what the two men discussed or agreed to during their meeting. 

"The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation is ready for practical implementation of the agreements reached between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in the sphere of international security achieved at the Helsinki summit," Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a Russian military spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday. 

The Russian military "is ready to intensify contacts with the US colleagues in the General Staff and other available channels to discuss the extension of the START treaty, cooperation in Syria, as well as other issues of ensuring military security," Konashenkov said. 

The National Security Council would not confirm what Trump had agreed to in the one-on-one with Putin. A spokesman for the NSC told CNN on Tuesday that they were still "reviewing the discussion."

Russians are all ready to jump into this agreement with Trump, but we don't know what's in it.  The NSC doesn't even know, because nobody told them.  Trump didn't tell anybody, it seems.

So once again, we have Trump saying "screw NATO" and "Here's our new military agreement with Russia".  You don't have to be a think tank fellow to see the implications here, especially when you factor in Russia's little adventure in taking Crimea from Ukraine, which everyone seems to have accepted as geopolitical fact now.

So yeah, if you're wondering what Putin is getting out of this?  A whole row of green lights from America.  And our response?  Well, the Washington Post is certainly outraged, but as long as Trump's approval ratings among Republicans remains at the 85-90% level it is now, nothing will change.  maybe that means Mueller drops a nuke, maybe that means the GOP gets clobbered in the midterms so badly that they turn on him, but most likely this leads to Mueller being fired and the fight that follows.

We'll see.

Sounding The Torn-NATO Warning

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan reminds us as Donald Trump heads to Russia to check in with Vladimir Putin next week that the European Union remains in real trouble, and the NATO alliance is on the brink of fracture and has been for some time.

The transatlantic community was in trouble even before Trump took office. The peaceful, democratic Europe we had come to take for granted in recent decades has been rocked to the core by populist nationalist movements responding to the massive flow of refugees from the Middle East and Africa. For the first time since World War II , a right-wing party holds a substantial share of seats in the German Bundestag. Authoritarianism has replaced democracy, or threatens to, in such major European states as Hungary and Poland, and democratic practices and liberal values are under attack in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. France remains one election away from a right-wing nationalist leadership, and Italy has already taken a big step in that direction. Meanwhile, Britain, which played such a key role in Europe during and after the Cold War, has taken itself out of the picture and has become, globally, a pale shadow of its former self. The possibility that Europe could return to its dark past is greater today than at any time during the Cold War. 

Some of that has to do with the changing attitude of the United States in recent years. It’s little secret that President Barack Obama had no great interest in Europe. Obama, like Trump, spoke of allied “free riders,” and his “pivot” to Asia was widely regarded by Europeans as a pivot away from them. Obama rattled Eastern Europe in his early years by canceling planned missile-defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic as an inducement to Vladimir Putin to embrace a “reset” of relations. In his later years he rattled Western Europe when he did not enforce his famous “red lines” in Syria. Both actions raised doubts about American reliability, and the Obama administration’s refusal to take action in Syria to stem the flow of refugees contributed heavily to the present strain.

Obama was only doing what he thought the American people wanted. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the 2008 financial crisis, left Americans disenchanted with global involvement and receptive to arguments that the alliances and institutions they supported for all those years no longer served their interests. The Obama administration tried to pare back the American role without abandoning the liberal world order, hoping it was more self-sustaining than it turned out to be. But the path was open to a politician willing to exploit Americans’ disenchantment, which is precisely what Trump did in 2016. 

NATO has never been a self-operating machine that simply chugs ahead so long as it is left alone. Like the liberal world order of which it is the core, it requires constant tending, above all by the United States. And because it is a voluntary alliance of democratic peoples, it survives on a foundation of public support. That foundation has been cracking in recent years. This week was an opportunity to shore it up. Instead, Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

NATO's next big test against Russian military aggression, most likely in Estonia and its Baltic NATO member neighbors, may not be its last, but it will certainly be a far different outcome than Russia's invasion and annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine.

Of course the worst-case scenario is that the outcome isn't any different from Crimea: that the NATO Batlic states get new management and both the EU and the US realize that there's no political appetite to actually do anything about it, much like Crimea.

Of course that would be the end of NATO as we know it.

Maybe that's the goal.  It's certainly Putin's goal, at least.  The question these days is "Is it also Trump's goal?"

Evidence is pretty shaky that those aren't aligned.  We'll know more next week, I suspect.

The Neighbors Are Worried About Us

Europe certainly has enough problems to deal with right now with the EU disintegrating, a stagnant economic picture at best, and the rise of violent ultra-nationalism. Needless to say, the problems we have here in the US aren't helping them one bit, and our friends across the pond are spooked, particularly in Paris where the wounds of terrorism are still fresh.

French President Francois Hollande told a NATO conference on Saturday that the U.S. presidential election should not put into question transatlantic relations.

Hollande said a European defense separate from NATO would not make any sense.

Of course, Donald Trump calls NATO obsolete and as president, says he would consider pulling out of the organization completely, so guess what, Francois? The US presidential election will definitely affect transatlantic relations.

Savage asked, “What would your first priority be as president?”

Trump’s answer was that, “Number one would be knock out some of the executive orders from Obama.” He said he would “start Keystone right away” because “we need jobs,” regardless of the fact that Keystone XL won’t create any jobs, as has been well-documented. Talking points know no facts, however.

That’s when Trump launched into his plan to turn the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a pay-for-protection racket:

“I’d contact countries and I’d say, ‘folks, we love protecting you, we want to continue to protect you,’ but they’re not living up to their bargain. You know, you’re talking about billions and billions of dollars, Michael, numbers that you wouldn’t even believe. But they’re not living up to their bargain and you know we cannot continue to be the policeman for the world. Now, I don’t mind, but they have to pay, they have to pay. If you look at the NATO countries – 28 countries – they’re not living up to what they’re supposed to be living up to. They’re not paying what they’re supposed to be paying, which is very little by the way. So what are we supposed to get into World War III over a country that doesn’t respect us enough to even pay what they’re supposed to be paying?”

This alienating our allies, Trump assured Savage, will make “America a very strong country again.”

That’s right: Trump’s “What’s in it for me?” approach to life directed at foreign policy. At our allies. Nations with which we share a long mutual interest in security and a stable global economy. Republicans have long said the country should be run like a corporation, and Donald Trump intends to do just that.

Yeah, if I were France, I'd be pretty goddamn nervous too.