My impression is that while there is no shortage of people in the US who are thinking quite strategically and seeking to influence Trump accordingly (overall those who have been significantly successful at this so far are pursuing objectives which are quite unpalatable from my perspective), Trump himself doesn’t have a strategy. If that impression is correct, then to pretend otherwise is to engage in sanewashing.
I also believe Trump isn’t the one truly directing U.S. foreign policy — that role lies with the so-called deep state, made up of unelected officials. Trump’s role, in my view, is to make certain strategic choices more acceptable to the public, for the sake of ensuring the survival and prosperity of Western civilization. In this particular case, that means using Ukrainians as a proxy force to deplete Russia.
You mentioned that those influencing Trump are pursuing objectives you find quite unpalatable — I’d be genuinely curious to hear more about what those objectives are, from your perspective.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment — I appreciate the way you laid out your view.
My impression is that a very major influence has been and still is from people who want to transform the US into a kleptocratic and fascist mafia state with themselves part of the ruling cabal. One of the most obvious of these was Musk who was quite clearly in this category until things broke down between Trump and him when it became clear to Musk that Trump did not faithfully “stay bought”.
Then I think that there are several streams of people who are in some ways small-minded and suffering from a kind of inadequacy complex, but who are still quite capable of thinking and acting strategically. They are advancing their own importance by means of crackpot ideas like anti-vaccination pseudoscience or that imposing lots of tariffs is somehow in the interest of the US.
Finally significant numbers of the actually sane, much more reasonable proponents of the kinds of ideas that used to direct US foreign policy are still around, even if they’ve become much less influential. I mean those ideas that were referred to by their proponents as the US “leading the free world” and by critics (including myself) as “US imperialism”. (Now that Russia is demonstrating what actual present-day imperialism looks like, I would probably revise my past criticism of what the US used to do — to make clear that although I still think that that was in many ways quite bad, it was still not nearly as bad as the actions of Putin’s Russia or the actions of the US in the first 6 months of the Trump 2.0 government.)
My impression is that while there is no shortage of people in the US who are thinking quite strategically and seeking to influence Trump accordingly (overall those who have been significantly successful at this so far are pursuing objectives which are quite unpalatable from my perspective), Trump himself doesn’t have a strategy. If that impression is correct, then to pretend otherwise is to engage in sanewashing.
I also believe Trump isn’t the one truly directing U.S. foreign policy — that role lies with the so-called deep state, made up of unelected officials. Trump’s role, in my view, is to make certain strategic choices more acceptable to the public, for the sake of ensuring the survival and prosperity of Western civilization. In this particular case, that means using Ukrainians as a proxy force to deplete Russia.
You mentioned that those influencing Trump are pursuing objectives you find quite unpalatable — I’d be genuinely curious to hear more about what those objectives are, from your perspective.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment — I appreciate the way you laid out your view.
My impression is that a very major influence has been and still is from people who want to transform the US into a kleptocratic and fascist mafia state with themselves part of the ruling cabal. One of the most obvious of these was Musk who was quite clearly in this category until things broke down between Trump and him when it became clear to Musk that Trump did not faithfully “stay bought”.
Then I think that there are several streams of people who are in some ways small-minded and suffering from a kind of inadequacy complex, but who are still quite capable of thinking and acting strategically. They are advancing their own importance by means of crackpot ideas like anti-vaccination pseudoscience or that imposing lots of tariffs is somehow in the interest of the US.
Finally significant numbers of the actually sane, much more reasonable proponents of the kinds of ideas that used to direct US foreign policy are still around, even if they’ve become much less influential. I mean those ideas that were referred to by their proponents as the US “leading the free world” and by critics (including myself) as “US imperialism”. (Now that Russia is demonstrating what actual present-day imperialism looks like, I would probably revise my past criticism of what the US used to do — to make clear that although I still think that that was in many ways quite bad, it was still not nearly as bad as the actions of Putin’s Russia or the actions of the US in the first 6 months of the Trump 2.0 government.)