Open Skies is done

[fridi]

I know the following might sound to some like a string of rhetorical questions, and even if it doesn't, it's most certainly going to fall on deaf ears - at least as far as the supposed recipients are concerned. But I'll still direct it to whatever Trump supporters might or might not be lurking around.

Trump Exits Open Skies Treaty, Moves to Discard Observation Planes
"Without specialized aircraft and equipment, Biden administration would have difficult time re-entering post-Cold War pact"

Now, Trump supporters are going to have to explain to me how Trump moving forward on removing the US from this treaty isn't the least patriotic act ever done by any sitting US President in modern history?

How, when you add to it, that he is doubling down on it as he walks out the door, by destroying the aircraft the US uses to do this monitoring of Russia's military movements so that Biden, when he assumes office, can not reinstitute the monitoring, isn't giving Putin precisely what he wants at the cost of US military preparedness and intelligence gathering?

Now, additionally, they'll have to explain how this, coupled with the US pulling out of the "Intermediate Ballistic Missile Treaty" ban, isn't a one-two punch that, as the US loses their ability to do precisely the monitoring that would tell them if Russia was rolling out newly developed, upgraded, or existing intermediate ballistic missile systems, allows Russia to implement a whole new level of militarily based influence and control on all of Asia and Eastern Europe? How this doesn't negatively impact the entirety of Asia and Eastern Europe, and the US as well? After all, the US aren't the ones interested in intermediate ballistic missiles. They aren't planning nuking Canada or Mexico - their deterrent is in intercontinental ballistic missiles?

Then, to this add Trump's actions that weaken NATO, and tell me how this isn't a TRIPLE WHAMMY that specifically benefits Russia and Vladimir Putin specifically? How it is not proof beyond reasonable doubt that Trump is solidly in Putin's hip pocket?

Of course, if we're to be perfectly idealistic here, they'll have to answer without whataboutism, without shifting to anyone or anything else, without telling me what "Obummer" did. Just a straightforward answer to the direct questions stated as to Trump's actions by refuting the supposition that Trump's actions don't give Russia and Putin a leg up in Eastern Europe and Asia, why Trump would want to end a program that gives the US permission to observe Russian military movements in a closer than satellite range, reopen the Cold War on the intermediate ballistic missile front, while weakening NATO and how that would ONLY be done by a US POTUS in Putin's employee?

Comments

[johnny9fingers]

Shh!

Otherwise I'll start feeling vindicated... just a smidgeon.

[mahnmut]

He's just trying to create hell for Biden because he's a bitter old loser, that's what he is.

These are gonna be the longest two months in recent US history.

[dewline]

Making Putin happy while frustrating Biden...why wouldn't he do both with one set of actions if he can?

And yes, he is a bitter loser and an autocratic wannabe.

[dancesofthelight]

Trump clearly has an even smal-bigger Russia boner than the GOP has had for him since he made his bones massacring the Chechens in a time honored Russian tradition. I still cannot quite see that a state that can't seize the Donbass from the ramshackle Ukrainian state and its still more ramshackle army could orchestrate the geopolitical capture of the United States and its government into its column so neatly as that when it hasn't gone boom as totally as it should purely by selling its future to the Chinese.

Russia has seen itself flex its muscles with NATO candidate states and start the first wars in Europe since the Balkan Wars with NATO proving a damp fizzle that outside the USA remains too cheap to arm soldiers with rifles as opposed to brooms. If someone is happy to start a war measured by cities obliterated, they aren't going to fear the mighty broomsticks of the Heer and the Germans have an army that on paper remains one of the best in Europe.

If less likely to prove adept at big war than the French or the British, who haven't exactly been covering themselves in glory lately.

So if Putin wants to flex his muscles, what will NATO do to stop him? More angry letters?

[johnny9fingers]

Will anyone really have the money for a war? I know it’s economics by another name but given the present geopolitical economic situation after Covid-19 a period of retrenchment and rebuilding would seem to be the path of sense, and one, I think, the Chinese would like to ensure provided a new stability for their own onward march. And China has the money to subvert any destabilising tendencies even of crafty old Uncle Vlad should they see the need.

I think it’s going to come down to money. If Uncle Vlad manages to corral any other large deposits of natural resources in his greater Russia project then there’s profit; but he has the defrosting tundra to exploit without a wartime body count.

I always ask “what advantage?” Whatever else Putin is, he is not mad. He is clever, plays to his advantages, and has won an incredible intelligence victory over the U.K. and US from which the U.K. will take decades to recover; the US recovery will be quicker, fortunately. He doesn’t have to press his advantage to its detriment by, for example, uniting and rearming Europe, or getting China to apply financial pressure, or alternatively aid, to Russia’s enemies/internal pressure groups/opposition, or tying up Russian forces in their theatres of operation.

Putin is too clever for over-reach. But we can hope.

[dancesofthelight]

Nobody did in 1914, and there was a book written about it in 1912 that said economic rationality made war unfeasible and impossible between Great Powers.

Mr. Angell had a great thesis if humanity was a rational species.

Of course looking at what started two years later and didn't fully finish until 1945.....

[johnny9fingers]

Well the next war will escalate fairly quickly. We are in danger of going beyond the old proxy-war model used until now; and that's just a bit problematical given the weapons now available to the major players. Nuclear Drones next, no doubt, with encrypted tight-beam laser communications. It's all so horrible.

And we were almost getting civilised; with hiccups in the process, obvs. That Ozymandias dude certainly acts as a metaphor; easily converted into a synecdoche.

[dancesofthelight]

Well, to be fair, war is also working out pretty well for Russia minus that Godzilla-scale fine print on what that actually means for it. People who find success in a method seldom really bother to stop using it as long as it works. And that circles right back to why Russia is expected to fear a EU that can't pay for rifles and expects to stop guns with broomsticks.

Without the USA all Europe has is the British and French nuclear arsenals. Insofar as the weapons there actually work. Russia retooled its entire arsenal bottom to top expenses be damned. I'd be shocked if you Brits did, let alone the French.

[johnny9fingers]

Russia retooled its entire arsenal bottom to top expenses be damned. I'd be shocked if you Brits did, let alone the French.

Of course we didn't. We've been cutting defence spending for decades. The fact that the US, China, and Russia can blow up the world many of hundreds of times each doesn't change the fact that the UK, France, Israel, can each blow it up a couple of times.

If, on the other hand, Russia has developed an accurate and failsafe defence mechanism against ICBMs, then, in accordance with your thesis, the tanks will be on the Left Bank of the Seine within months. I can't see it myself, but it may be the case.

IIRC correctly Russia upgraded its nuclear arsenal because in the chaos post the fall of the USSR it was rotting and leaking radiation thither and yon. It took management teams from the US to help assess the problem and US dollars went to help the decommissioning of those nukes past their sell-by date. France has kept its nuclear arsenal au courant AFAIK. So maybe with China and the US, Russia has the most modern nukes on the planet.

The exposure of Russian troops in the Middle East may have given Putin pause. He can do much more damage to the West through cyberwarfare without exposing more Russian troops to needless death abroad. And it's all about advantage rather than territory, surely? Territory is almost incidental in the age of the internet. (Unless that is Uncle Vlad is going to take a leaf out of BoJo's infant fantasies and decide to crown himself King of the World; in which case I might suggest to him that China and India will be tough nuts to crack.)

But Uncle Vlad with a "Napoleon complex" is an amusing idea.