What Is Trump Most Likely To Give Putin In Helsinki?

Early this morning we looked into the lumbering ape's idiotic foray into Great Falls, Montana. Totally left out that part about North Korea and Kim Jong Un. "We signed," said the imbecile, "a wonderful paper saying they're going to denuclearize their whole thing. It's going to all happen." Maybe he's so popular in Great Falls because the verbal school level is pre-school? Off maybe because the people there like feeling smarter than "the president." First of all, apart from mimicking the verbal skills of a mid-level chimp, he's flat out lying that North Korea has agreed to denuclearize and that "it's going to all happen." There wasn't a binding sentence on "the wonderful" paper he and Kim signed in Singapore, just a p.r. stunt for the two of them who are still at cross-purposes. Infact, last week spy satellites discovered that North Korea is constructing something at a ballistic missile site. Did no one inform Trump? Or did he just leave it out of his idiotic speech so he could play coy?

On person he hasn't fooled is George Will, a conservative critic of the fake president's who's freaking out about what Trump is liable to do when he meets Putin in Helsinki next week, after he (Trump) fucks with NATO to show Putin how loyal he is. "If he does as badly," wrote Will, "in his July 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Finland as he did with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the consequences could be catastrophic." Catastrophic? That's a big fraught word. Well, remember Singapore. What's worse, catastrophic or disastrous?

An exceptionally knowledgeable student of North Korea, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt, writing in National Review (“Kim Wins in Singapore”), says the one-day meeting was for the United States “a World Series of unforced errors.” The result was that North Korea “walked away with a joint communique that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] ministry of foreign affairs.”

Kim, says Eberstadt, is “the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity.” Au contraire, said America’s president, who slathered Kim with praise: Kim, with whom Trump has “a very special bond” is a “talented man” who “loves his country,” which reciprocates with “a great fervor.” Trump called Kim a “very worthy negotiator,” which might actually have made sense if Kim had been forced to negotiate for the concessions that Trump dispensed gratis.

North Korea, Eberstadt says, is committed to what he calls its “racial socialism,” which motivates Kim’s “central and sacred mission,” which is “nonnegotiable”-- the unconditional reunification of the Korean Peninsula. This presupposes extermination of the South Korean state, which requires the policy Kim announced last New Year’s Day-- to “mass-produce nuclear warheads and missiles and speed up their deployment.” Eberstadt:

“Such a program would not be necessary for regime legitimation, or for international military extortion, or even to ensure the regime’s survival: All of those objectives could surely be satisfied with a limited nuclear force. Why then threaten the U.S. homeland?” America is the guarantor of South Korea’s security, and if Washington can be made to blink at a time and place of Pyongyang’s choosing, the U.S.-South Korea alliance will end, as will the U.S. security presence there. Hence the delusional nature of Trump’s belief: One one-day meeting sufficed to cause the North Korean regime to abandon its raison d’etre.

In addition to the legitimation supplied to Pyongyang by the pageantry of the summit for which Trump obviously hungered, the official record of the Singapore deliberations reveals no U.S. interest in Pyongyang’s atrocious human rights practices (“unparalleled in the modern world,” Eberstadt says) that raise doubts about the fervor with which North Koreans appreciate Dear Leader’s love for them. In return for Trump’s promise to halt military-readiness operations, Kim gave nothing-- no inventory of his nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, nothing beyond North Korea’s decades-old commitment to “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, an opaque goal that means only that Pyongyang is not clearly committed to anything-- beyond a pre-summit promise to decommission a no-longer-useable nuclear test site. The New Year’s Day vow has not been disavowed.

Singapore was, Eberstadt believes, probably the greatest diplomatic coup for North Korea since 1950, and a milestone on “the DPRK’s road to establishing itself as a permanent nuclear power.” And the sanctions that were the Trump administration’s strategy of “maximum pressure” will be difficult to maintain now that a “defanged”-- Eberstadt’s description-- Trump has declared the nuclear threat banished.

The most dangerous moment of the Trump presidency will arrive when he who is constantly gnawed by insecurities and the fear of not seeming what he is not (“strong”), realizes how weak and childish he seems to all who cast a cool eye on Singapore’s aftermath. The danger is of him lashing out in wounded vanity. Meanwhile, this innocent abroad is strutting toward a meeting with the cold-eyed Russian who is continuing to dismantle Europe’s geographically largest nation, Ukraine. He is likely looking ahead to ratcheting up pressure on one of three small nations, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia, each a member of the NATO alliance that, for the first time in its 69 years, is dealing with a U.S. president who evinces no admiration for what it has accomplished, or any understanding of its revived importance as the hard man in Moscow, who can sniff softness, relishes what Singapore revealed.

So... on to the question in the title up top. What is Putin most likely to get from Trump? A couple of possibilities, that actually could be called catastrophic, and that Trump probably owes Putin because of 2016 or in anticipation of November  and/or 2020:

• Recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea
• NATO breakup
• Weakening on the Baltic states' independence
• An end of the sanctions
• A guarantee that the U.S. won't interfere with Russian designs on Ukraine

What does Trump extract from Putin in return? The right for his company to build a hotel in Moscow? The right for Americans to adopt Russian orphans? A strategic discussion and some guarantees about the Senate seats and congressional districts the GOP needs a little help in this coming November? Putin's grandmother's recipes for Golubtsy, Okroshka and Öçpoçmaq?