Authored by Jim Jatras via The Ron Paul Institute

“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” – Winston Churchill, 1942

Many Americans, even a lot who never much cared for Donald Trump, voted for him in part because they believed – or at least hoped – that he would be, relatively speaking, a peace candidate compared to the hideous Biden-Harris record. To his credit, Trump’s first term was the only US presidency since Jimmy Carter’s not to get us embroiled in a new conflict, though he failed to extricate us from Afghanistan or Syria.

Such hopes need to be balanced against other aspects of Trump’s earlier tenure in office. Notably, on Ukraine, he oversaw provision of lethal aid to Kiev that had been denied by Barack Obama. Put another way, it was under Trump that Ukraine built up a NATO army in all but name, setting the stage for the February 2022 escalation of the conflict that had been brewing since the 2014 coup midwifed by Victoria Nuland.

Trump has said he would end the Ukraine conflict in 24 hours, indeed, even before he takes office. While never unveiling anything resembling an actual plan, he has indicated that his “art of the deal” trademark bluster and threats would be applied to both Ukraine (terminate all aid if Kiev refuses to negotiate!) and Russia (vastly increase aid to Ukraine if Moscow refuses to negotiate!). The supposedly “transactional” President-elect is seemingly unflustered by little details like how, if both Russia and Ukraine balk at talks, he could simultaneously increase and cut off US assistance. Five-dimensional chess indeed!

While the thought of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence is balm for every peace-loving soul, the rest of Trump’s announced second-term team is anything but reassuring: Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Michael Waltz as National Security Adviser, with supporting roles at the NSC by Sebastian Gorka and special envoy for Ukraine-Russia Keith Kellogg, all of whom have a record of the standard bellicose chest-thumping with respect to evil, evil Russia and our cuddly “democratic” “ally” Ukraine.

As Trump prepares to take office next month, one thing should always be kept in mind: like Winston Churchill with respect to the British Empire, Donald Trump has not returned to the Oval Office in order to preside over the liquidation of the Global American Empire (the GAE). Rather, all indications are that he seeks to disengage the US from the Ukraine conflict in a way that avoids total, humiliating defeat for NATO (and, probably, that organization’s long-overdue dissolution) in order to “pivot” to the Middle East and a looming war with Iran following a return to his “maximum pressure” policy. The encore will be the Really, Really Big Showdown with China. Hence Trump’s call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.

What of the other side? Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and other top Kremlin and Duma figures have made it clear that Moscow has had enough with “non-agreement capable” Washington after repeated Western deceptions: on NATO expansion (“not one inch eastward”), the status of Kosovo (UN Security Council Resolution 1244 providing for its autonomy within Serbia, trashed by the US-sponsored unilateral declaration of independence in 2008), the February 2014 power-sharing agreement in Ukraine between then-President Viktor Yanukovich and his opposition (a dead letter before even one night had passed), the February 2015 Minsk 2 agreement on the status of the Donbass that was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council (but later admitted by Angela Merkel and other western leaders to have been a ruse to allow time to build up Kiev’s forces for a Blitzkrieg), and the failed April 2022 Ukraine-Russia agreement initialed at Istanbul (torpedoed by Boris Johnson with US backing).

Accordingly, the Russians have made it clear that they will accept no temporary truces, no ceasefires, no more promises made to be broken like piecrusts, no pauses as cynical tricks to get the Russians to forgo their current and growing military advantage. (Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, even suggested recently that new regions could soon be added to Russia. Putin recently re-floated the concept of Novorossiya, “New Russia,” a region of Imperial Russia that included Odessa.) No, they insist, there must be either a genuine, definitive, binding settlement that ensures a lasting peace based on mutual security, or Russian forces will press on until their objectives – notably “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine – are achieved militarily. Such an outcome would mean at least replacement of the current regime in Kiev and, more likely, the end of Ukraine’s statehood.

For the West, this would constitute a total debacle of Afghanistan-like proportions effectively signaling the end of US hegemony in Europe, the GAE’s crown jewel. What can Trump offer the Russians to avoid that?

Moscow’s latest peace proposal was voiced by Putin in June 2024, in which he specified that he’s willing to negotiate at any time but will not halt military operations until Kiev withdraws its forces from the four oblasts that, in addition to Crimea, Moscow claims to be part of Russia: Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson, Notably, this would include the cities of Zaporozhye and Kherson, under Kiev’s control as of this writing. (In fact, contrary to propaganda from the usual suspects, Putin has never rejected talks, unlike Ukrainian former-president-but-still-playing-the-role Vladimir Zelensky, who in October 2022 issued a decree forbidding talks with Russia as long as Putin is in office.)

Putin’s June proposal was dismissed out of hand by Kiev and its western backers. Given Moscow’s rejection of a ceasefire at the conflict’s line of control, things are at a seeming impasse.

But are they?

With the rapid and accelerating advance of Russian forces, the physical distinction between the military line of confrontation (a freeze line rejected by Moscow) and the constitutional limits of the four oblasts (evacuation of which Moscow demands) becomes less every day. That is, the territorial question – which Russia has never stated to be paramount in its goals for launching its “Special Military Operation” (SMO) in the first place – becomes less of an issue.

Rather, the real question for the Trump Administration becomes a political one of how much wiggle room there is in the Russians’ stated determination not to rely on more promises of the sort that have been repeatedly broken in the past. Put another way: if Trump-Lucy wants to avoid utter defeat in the European theater of the worldwide confrontation between the GAE and BRICS-Eurasia, so he can get on to mixing it up with Iran and China, can he dupe Putin-Charlie Brown into taking another run at the football?

I think he at least has a good shot at it. Keep in mind that, despite the ubiquitous narrative, Putin is neither a dictator nor a hardliner toward the West. Regarding the former, he’s a balancer in a system that still retains many (too damn many, in my opinion) western liberals dying to see the day they can again send their snotty kids back to elite western universities and their fat wives and svelte mistresses shopping at Harrods, while saluting a rainbow flag raised over Lenin’s Mausoleum. As to the latter, as lately demonstrated by his restrained response to ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles launched into pre-1991 Russia by NATO personnel from Ukrainian territory, Putin has shown a dogged determination to come to an understanding with his Western “partners” long after it became clear to everyone (except him, evidently) that they have no intention of ever getting along with him or Russia but are hell-bent on destroying both. (“Hello, Volodya? It’s me, Bashar. I’m out front of Resurrection Gate, near Zhukov’s statue …)

Far from the “shock and awe” demonstrated by the United States in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, etc., or Netanyahu’s in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, Putin’s light military footprint in Ukraine – the limited size of the incursion force, declining to destroy the Dnepr bridges, limited (but now increasing) attacks on infrastructure, the pullback of Russian forces from Kiev as a good will gesture before the 2022 Istanbul talks, not eliminating Kiev regime leaders who’d kill him if they could – all point to a strategy based on accepting a reasonable deal if one might be presented, not on settling things by force of arms, 1945-style. (It’s largely forgotten now that at the outset of the conflict foreign embassies decamped from Kiev and moved to Lvov in the far west, and consideration was even given for the Zelensky regime to abandon Ukraine entirely and establish a government in exile, in the expectation that Russia would quickly overrun the whole country – then face an Afghan-type insurgency that would bleed Russia white, leading to regime-change in Moscow.) Unexpectedly, the Russians didn’t behave as the West had anticipated. Instead, it’s clear their approach was “pedagogical” from the start: show the West they mean business so they’ll come to the table. It is also suggested that a deal, not a military resolution, would be preferable to Putin’s BRICS partners, whose opinion he can’t afford to ignore.

The frustration this approach has caused in the Russian military and in large sectors of the public is well known. That said, as observed by Moscow-based John Helmer, Putin may deem that his high levels of public support allow him to accept a settlement that falls short of, or at least redefines, his SMO goals as originally stated. It’s an open question whether that support could be sustained when (inevitably, in my opinion) the West contemptuously disregards its obligations under whatever is agreed-to.

Some say Putin has finally learned his lesson about the West. Others say not, that he would jump at any remotely reasonable transaction proffered by Trump & Co., Inc. We will soon see.

Looking at the longstanding pattern of Putin’s Kremlin and the smoke signals from Washington, mediated by the good offices of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the contours of a kind of Minsk 3 or Istanbul-double-plus-good “deal” are already discernable:

1. A ceasefire in early 2025: Ukrainian forces would evacuate whatever shrinking part, if any, of the four oblasts they might still hold, plus of Russia’s Kursk region if any Ukrainians are still there. A Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) would be established. (Some ad hoc arrangement might have to be reached on the cities of Zaporozhye and Kherson, if the Russians hadn’t taken them yet. Perhaps they would remain under Ukrainian administration inside the DMZ, “claimed by Russia.”)

2. Moscow would continue to regard the areas it holds as sovereign Russian territory. The rest of the world would still deem them Ukrainian under temporary Russian occupation, similar to how the US regarded the Baltic Republics of the USSR. Both sides would tolerate a rough balance between Zaporozhye and Kherson cities (claimed by Russia but under Ukrainian administration) and the rest of the oblasts and Crimea (claimed by Ukraine but under Russian administration).

3. As Trump has suggested, supposedly non-NATO European Union peacekeepers would be deployed on the Ukrainian side of the DMZ (with Moscow’s agreement, contrary to astute observers’ insistence that the Russians would never allow it), subject to strict limits on numbers, weaponry, etc. These limits, of course, would not be honored (see Lucy and Charlie Brown, above).

4. NATO membership for Ukraine world be deferred indefinitely. This is an obvious Lucy lie that Moscow would pretend means permanent neutrality. In fact, rump Ukraine would be treated as a NATO state in all but name but not receive formal membership.

5. Security guarantees: the US, NATO, Russia would sign an updated version of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (possibly in the form of a treaty, which the original Budapest Memorandum wasn’t) enshrined in a Security Council Resolution, guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity (taking into account “provisional arrangements”), its neutral status, and a bar of foreign troops on Ukraine’s territory (except those permitted in this agreement); parallel provisions would be put into the Ukrainian constitution. It goes without saying that these Lucy assurances would not be honored by the West any more than were past formal commitments on Kosovo, the Donbass, and other topics.

6. Demilitarization “guarantees”: Strict limits would be placed on the size and composition of Ukraine’s military and placement of foreign forces and weapons on its territory. More Lucy lies.

7. Denazification “guarantees”: Parties and movements with specified “extremist” ideologies would be legally banned. More Lucy lies. Elections would be held in rump Ukraine. All sides would pretend the resulting regime is democratic, legitimate, and “moderate.” Banderist neo-Nazi groups, formally illegal, would retain their guns and wield a permanent veto over any Kiev regime.

8. Kiev would commit to protections for the Russian language and Russian culture, the canonical Orthodox Church, etc. More Lucy lies.

9. The West would promise a phased lifting of sanctions and the return of frozen/confiscated Russian assets. “You can trust me this time, Charlie Brown!” Consider how long it took Russia to be removed from 1974 Jackson-Vanik sanctions only to then be immediately slapped with new Magnitsky Act sanctions.

The bottom line is that Moscow would pretend to have substantially if not entirely achieved its SMO goals, giving up its immediate military lead in exchange for false promises: déjà vu all over again. Pretenses aside, it would accept a “quarter of a loaf” truce that preserves NATO to fight another day and sustains an anti-Russia Ukrainian rump state as a de facto NATO platform, as opposed to a clear military victory – which at the very least would have to include annexation of Odessa and Kharkov, and probably Kiev, plus either liquidation of the Ukrainian state entirely or, at worst, creation of a minimal rump Ukraine that’s effectively a Russian satellite and a member of the Union State with Russia and Belarus.

The latter outcome would shatter NATO and probably NATO’s concubine, the European Union. That’s precisely what the Washington Swamp can’t afford, Trump or no Trump. Thus, even if Trump were entirely sincere in promises to Moscow made on behalf of the United States (a very big “if” in my opinion), his ability to deliver on them would be at best highly questionable in light of an Executive Branch packed with neocons (what’s new?) and the implacable bipartisan hostility toward Russia in Congress. Then, even if, by some unbelievable miracle, Trump were able to ensure US and NATO performance on their commitments for the balance of his tenure, there would be no binding effect once he left office.

Granted, the above is just one possible scenario but one I submit is all too conceivable based on past performance of those concerned. If things go this way, not only does the GAE get a new lease on life and NATO live to fight another day, it would usher in heightened danger of war in the Middle East and the Western Pacific and, in due course, set the stage for renewed and possibly uncontrollable conflict in Europe in the not-too-distant future. Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov recently warned that his country needs to be ready to fight a war with NATO within the next decade, and he’s almost certainly right – especially if he and his boss allow that organization to slip out of its well-deserved fade into oblivion, almost ensuring that war will come a lot sooner than in ten years.

In laying out this possible near-term scenario, I would dearly love to be proven wrong by events. However, I have vanishingly small hope that the foregoing could resonate with any reader with agency on the American side. Perhaps chances are slightly better on the Russian side. As for the Ukrainians and the Europeans – what they think doesn’t matter to anyone, not even to themselves.

by John Helmer, Moscow via Bears with
@bears_with

In the English-language media markets it is impossible for any journalist, editor, publisher or owner to be more corrupt, more of a liar, more of a fraud, and more of a success at selling all three than Rupert Murdoch.

That was until the mass media at which Murdoch excelled were superseded and outread by the alternative media. They call themselves the alt-media, but the alternatives they offer are no more than ideological variants of the same basic market laws which Murdoch has observed and demonstrated. That’s to say, making money at serving state force, fraud, and subversion.

Murdoch was even a success at selling outdoor advertising placards on Russian city streets until he was forced out of that market by men whose crookedness wasn’t greater than his, but who exploited their local political advantage in exactly the same fashion as Murdoch does. The outcome was that in 2011 Russia had the only government in the world able and willing to do real damage to Murdoch – and throw him out. That year Dmitry Medvedev was president; Vladimir Putin, prime minister. By them Murdoch was forced to sell his street signs and radio stations for less than a sixth of his asking price.

Murdoch swore violent revenge for that; he’s been at it against Russia ever since, from The Times to the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to Catherine Belton’s book.

Thirty years ago, as he was dying, Dennis Potter, the British screenwriter, said “I call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press, and the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life.” Now that Murdoch is almost dead himself, and his family is cracking up over – what else? – the money, the cancer he represents in the mainstream media can also be recognized in the alt-media — and in the corner of the alt-media focusing on Russia and the war in the Ukraine. The Ruperts in this corner have names like Seymour and Gilbert.

If watching or reading them can be brain sapping, is there any remedy, and if so, what is it? These and other reader questions are answered in this Direct Line.

President Putin thinks mnemonically and politically; this doesn’t mean he thinks strategically. This is the reason he is susceptible to making mistakes of anticipation, and repeating them.

Putin is a prodigy at memorizing and reciting data; that’s to say, he has the mind of a mnemonist. The first clinician to analyse what this means was the Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria (1902-77). First published in Russian in 1965, then in English in 1968, Luria’s work, the case study of S., one of Luria’s Moscow patients, is titled The Mind of a Mnemonist; read it in full.

Although their prodigious memories seem to be similar, mnemonists aren’t cognitively the same in their methods of recall or psychologically the same in their personalities. According to Luria, his patient S. couldn’t readily understand poetry. Abstract ideas were also a problem for him to follow – his thinking was graphic, not logical nor strategic. Also, “the big question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn to forget.”

Luria didn’t generalize from his single case. Because the mind of the mnemonist is so rare, he acknowledged the impact of the mind on the personality is something “we know least about, is probably the most interesting.”

If Putin hadn’t performed his memory feats for record lengths of time in public – records no significant politician in the rest of the world can match – he would not have invited attention to them. And yet neither in his Russian biographies, nor in the foreign ones – friendly and hostile, balanced or unbalanced — can a section on his memory be found. In First Person, the authorized self-portrait prepared for Putin by three Moscow journalists in the year 2000, Putin’s fifth-grade schoolteacher was quoted as remembering “he had a very good memory, a quick mind”. She didn’t remember him as a prodigy.

His first wife, Lyudmila Putina, came closer. “Volodya always had a good memory,” she said. “It was the first time I saw him in action [St. Petersburg mayoral press conference]. I sat there open-mouthed. He talked about politics, the economy, history, and the law. I listened, and I kept thinking, ‘How does he know all this?’” Click to read more.

Putin also thinks politically; that is, on every topic which comes to him for decision he listens to or reads a wide range of views. To his interlocutors he appears to be attentive and to agree with them. In fact, he can appear to agree with several different and contradicting courses of action at the same time. He also agrees; decides; then changes his mind; issues a new, superseding decision. In this process, he tries to strike a balance between options and between those arguing their competing cases. Thinking politically in Putin’s case is balancing; it can look like equivocation, vacillation, indecision, confusion.

Case studies of this are rare because much of the evidence is missing. In Sovcomplot, the book on Putin’s decision-making in the Russian shipping industry, the evidence is in the vast court files of a 15-year litigation in London by the heads of the Russian state shipping company Sovcomflot and their predecessors, plus interviews with the Russian principals engaged. From the evidence in this story, Putin’s method of deciding by balancing between individuals, lobbies and factions becomes clear. So too, the cost in money, in the reputations and fortunes of individuals, in damage to the state.

Left: Alexander Luria; centre, his book published in Russian in 1965, then in English in 1968; right, Sovcomplot published in 2023.

Thinking politically is short term. Long-term thinking, with anticipation of what adversaries and allies will do in the future – this is thinking strategically. Putin has said that when he was a child, he thought it would be good for him if he played chess, but that was a game he admitted he didn’t play. Asked by journalists during the Direct Line broadcast of 2021 what games he liked as a child, he replied: “I really want to say chess, but unfortunately not. Just like everyone probably played hide-and-seek and tag in Leningrad courtyards back then. In some places they also call it salochki — we used to play tag.”

Putin has acknowledged that chess is valuable training in strategic thinking, and he has recommended state support for the game in municipal and regional budgets. Just once he has commented on an international chess match – the 2016 world championship between Sergei Karjakin of Russia and Magnus Carlsen of Norway. “We are certainly proud of our chess school and the outstanding grandmasters of our country,” Putin said. “We have specially created this direction at the centre for gifted children in Sochi, where these classes are organized at the appropriate level. But we need chess to develop all over the country…Karjakin really played great, he was just great. Magnus is an outstanding grandmaster of our time, and Sergei adequately represented Russia, our chess school. He is a fighter, and I am sure that victories are still ahead for him.”

There is no record of Putin playing chess himself.

The unique combination of these methods of thinking produce very different outcomes in the record Putin makes. The Syrian case is an example of his thinking politically, not strategically. This explains the political calculation.

The case of Putin’s protectiveness of Israel isn’t mnemonic, nor political nor strategic thinking. It’s sentimental, and it’s been with Putin since Leningrad courtyard days. It’s to be explained another time.

The poison spray attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the English town of Salisbury in March 2018 was a British operation involving the intelligence and security services, the Defence Ministry, the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, and senior officials up to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Theresa May. Their narrative – that President Putin had ordered an assassination by Novichok – has never been challenged in British or American public opinion, media or parliament. It was a powerful mobilizing step on NATO’s road to war against Russia, and it remains so.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been imprisoned for the past six and half years, almost totally silenced; Sergei Skripal is probably dead. They have served the British purpose. Nothing said or done on the Russian side has made any difference to their fate. Not a single British lawyer of note has spoken in their defence. The Russian media ignored the public hearings on their case which took place in London this past October and November. The Skripals are casualties of the war before the Special Military Operation began; there have been many more casualties since.

Julian Assange’s case was an Anglo-American and Swedish operation to silence Wikileaks, to stop whistleblowers and leakers from communicating their state secrets, as well as to deter journalists from reporting those secrets. Assange suffered five years of imprisonment but he was not silenced at the time, and in June of this year he was released. His lawyers were able to make an articulate, public case for his freedom, and they, together with the mainstream media, managed to expose the fabrications and illegalities in the prosecution of his case. But Wikileaks has been neutralized, not least by the terms of the plea agreement Assange signed on June 22, 2024.

Source: https://x.com/bears_with/

But even without the court cases against Assange, Wikileaks, and their sources, the impact of this journalism and of Assange himself on the objects of their reports — on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Ukraine, for example — has been brief and marginal. The public demonstrations for Assange in the UK, US and Australia have engaged far more supporters than have appeared against the war with Russia. Indeed, Assange’s well-known lawyers support the war against Russia.

The success of the Novichok narrative in the Anglo-American media is proof positive that next to nothing has been achieved by the Assange case in the very same media.

I was declared persona non grata by the Foreign Ministry in September 2010, and the ban has been confirmed to last fifteen years until November 2025. This was an action taken, not by the FSB or SVR which reported they had no security concern, but personally on the order of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Originally, the ban order was requested by the aluminium oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whose personal relationship with Lavrov and with other officials of the Foreign Ministry I and others had been reporting for years. My requests to Lavrov’s spokesman and head of press, Maria Zakharova, to reopen the file and reconsider the ban have been rejected without reply. Requests by oligarchs in the oil and mining businesses to invite me for short trips to meetings at their companies have all been refused. In July 2023 Lavrov personally refused to suspend the ban temporarily to allow me to accompany my wife’s body home to her funeral and burial in Tomsk. Judge for yourself what reason an individual has to behave like this continuously over fourteen years. I don’t know it.

President Putin has made many mistakes of strategic anticipation. The Kiev putsch of February 2014 which overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and threatened the Russian Navy’s bases in Crimea was one; the defeat of the counter coup in Kiev at the Battle of the Antonov Airport of February 2022 was another; confiscation of $300 billion in the sovereign assets of the Central Bank in March 2022, another; the invasion of Kursk on August 6, 2024, was a recent one.

Putin doesn’t recognize the mistakes until afterwards; sometimes not even then. Occasionally he reckons they weren’t mistakes so much as costs for his thinking correctly, according to his political calculation based on balancing the assessments he had listened to.

For the time being, the president has convinced himself there are higher priorities for Russia’s defence and for its warfighting capacities than his order, several weeks ago, to the Russian General Staff and the army commanders in Syria not to defend the Assad regime, and to stand down while the Turks, Israelis and Americans partitioned the country. Even those Moscow military and political analysts who disagree – albeit in silence – acknowledge that that in the short term the Russian military could not have waged an effective counter-offensive. Whether (and when) Putin had already signalled to Ankara, Tel Aviv and Washington that he would not deter their plan to take over Syria is another matter – there is no public answer to this question, and the official debate is over and done with, in secret.

Just how done with, Putin explained to the officer corps at the Defense Ministry on December 16. He made no mention of Syria. There were implied references. “Bloodshed continues in the Middle East,” Putin told the military audience, “they conduct hybrid wars and implement containment policies against dissenting states, including Russia.”

He explained that in his decision-making the bottom line is political – too many demands, too little money. “I will repeat what has just been said: 6.3 percent of GDP is spent on increasing and strengthening defence capability. We cannot increase this expenditure endlessly, because all components of the country’s life such as the economy, the social sphere in the broadest sense of the word, science, education, healthcare have to develop, too. I am saying this so that everyone understands: the state, the Russian people are giving everything they can to the Armed Forces to fulfil the tasks we have set. Our task is to ensure the security of the Russian nation, our people, and the future of Russia.”

A Moscow source explains: “Putin is doing the Indian rope trick – sending the boy, then the magician up the rope and disappearing, to leave the audience gasping in amazement.”

Left: Putin at the Defense Ministry on December 16.
Right: how the rope trick worked.

“He can get away with whatever happens in Syria”, the source continues. “For the short term, he might get away from what happens in Ukraine by citing economic and inflationary pressures on the economy. He might announce, I don’t want to hurt your pockets for too long so I made a deal. He is saying to the generals that the people have ‘bled enough’ and you did not finish the job. He won’t tell them, you didn’t finish the job because I wouldn’t let you fight. We will not see any challenge to his authority — no candidates, no media or blogger will go against him. So there is a status quo for the next decade unless he retires at the end of this term [2030]. We should expect that the internal discussions, disagreements, or the ‘democracy’ within the system will result in a strong outcome. The outcome is looking very strong in how the economy and industry have been transforming. There are complete transformations in Irkutsk, Nizhny Novgorod, and Murmansk. Moscow is the most efficient and functional city in the world. We have a lot going well for us and we have to pull together to prepare for a big war. They were just not ready for what they have faced.”

I understand that Dr Doctorow was very upset at having to debate the evidence for the views he propounds, based, he says himself, on watching Russian television talk shows. He was so upset he almost walked away from his microphone in his Brussels house. I don’t know what he did later with the podcasters, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, behind the scenes. They subsequently cancelled a podcast they had commissioned with me on the Skripal case and they have banned me altogether, without explanation.

To understand what motivates Doctorow, it’s unusual for him not to publish a career profile of the academic curriculum vitae type or even a Wikipedia profile. What that blank space conceals is the time he took between his university degrees and between graduation and recorded employment. In my experience of others, especially of trainees in the Russian language in the US and UK, when two years or so are missing, the graduates have been working with or been trained by state agencies they wish to keep private. What Doctorow has allowed to be publicly known through a 1999 email of his is that after he graduated from Columbia with a doctorate which took eight years to complete, he went to work for the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). This organisation was established to promote academic exchanges between the US and the Soviet Union. It was indirectly funded by the CIA; if that was suspected by the KGB, it has been corroborated by US researchers and confirmed by Doctorow himself. He then says he moved to Russia for “the relatively cleaner business of strong drinks.” He became a Russian sales manager for a London-listed company called United Distillers, which subsequently turned into Guinness and then Diageo. During the Yeltsin administration, Doctorow says he was “Mr Smirnoff, Mr Johnnie Walker”. “Very congenial business”, he called it: “also very politicized business”.

What he doesn’t reveal is whether he is still in that line of Russian business – whether he has turned into a consultant advising Diageo on how to keep selling into Russia their whisky, rum, gin, vodka and Guinness stout. If so, Doctorow may be maintaining the “politicized” company he used to keep. That included Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa group which was a shareholding partner in Diageo’s Russian business, as well as a retail outlet for its drinks through Fridman’s supermarkets.

Diageo claims to have left its business in Russia when the Special Military Operation began. In the two years since, its share price and market capitalization have dropped by 36%. Winding-down costs in Russia amounted to $64 million, according to the company’s financial reports. Asset value writeoffs and impairments were accounted at $146 million. But Diageo’s alcohol brands keep coming into the Moscow market, often through schemes of sanctions-busting parallel imports through Dubai and other ports of convenience.

Diageo, like its competitors, is keen to know whether it will be able to return legally to the Russian market when the current war is fought or negotiated to its end. The terms of that outcome are likely to be of commercial as well as of political interest to Mr Johnnie Walker. So, to rephrase the question and counting about $200 million in Diageo’s losses and costs from the war, what options to recoup might Mr Johnnie Walker continue to advise? What “politicized” friends might Mr Johnnie Walker be keeping still in Moscow for the future? Would Mr Johnnie Walker disagree with the “politicized” line they advise, compared with the line of the General Staff he calls “suspect”?

Doctorow was asked for comment or correction “in the event you detect error of fact or analysis in relation to the report on your business in Russia for IREX and then United Distillers (Diageo).” He replied: “I write to you only to assert that you have maliciously distorted every aspect of my professional career within the possibilities of someone who has not researched it beyond reading the back cover of my Memoirs of a Russianist Volume II. If you had spent a few Australian dollars to purchase and read my Memoirs, you would know something about who I was and what I did. Instead by your intellectual laziness you are just disseminating empty malicious lies. I will not do you the honor of a public response.”

Diageo’s investor relations and press representatives in London were asked whether “your group of companies maintains an advisory, consulting or communicating relationship with Dr Gilbert Doctorow, once the group’s direct employee as a Russia sales manager in Moscow?” There has been no reply.

U

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say. In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read. There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation, life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory, as peasants do.

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top). There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said] Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: https://www.rulit.me/

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses.

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded, he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft. To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil — as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off. The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion. Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image, to reorder it so that you inhabit the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on November 3, 1931, to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”. The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries. “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey, Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master. Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home is reciprocal: that one doesn’t just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Paula Erizanu via The Guardian

Paula Erizanu is a Moldovan journalist and writer based in Chișinău

Many liberal Russians shelter in states once part of the Soviet Union. It’s time that they learned to respect the cultures and languages their nation has so long suppressed

One day in the 1990s, I was playing with my cousin in a local park in Chișinău, the capital of Romanian-speaking Moldova, when two little girls from the Russian-speaking minority asked us what our names were. We told them: Mihai and Maria Paula. They immediately rebaptised us: “Misha i Masha!” To them, we were all Russians after all.

In 2024, such expressions of cultural imperialism are still rife in Putin’s Russia, but you wouldn’t expect to find them among Russian liberals, an estimated million of whom left their country after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

And yet there are still moments like these, such as at a Chișinău concert earlier this year by Russian cult band Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), whose founder Andrey Makarevich has been branded a “foreign agent” by his home country over his criticism of the invasion. When the crowd was slow to pick up on Makarevich’s attempt to cue up a sing-along, he tried to talk them up: “This is what our nation is like, we never get things right the first time round.” There it was again, that old reflex: “our nation.”

In this particular case, perhaps age can explain, if not excuse, such deeply ingrained attitudes: Mashina Vremeni was founded in 1969, when Moldova was still forced to share a nation with Russia through the Soviet Union.

But the younger members of the supposedly liberal Russian diaspora seem just as prone to revealing slips of the tongue. Tatar pop-rock singer Zemfira, who has also been labelled a foreign agent and has lived in exile since the start of the war, made her debut on the music scene in the late 90s. Yet in the middle of a performance in Chișinău in June, she told her audience that after touring Europe, she felt “at home here because I am a Soviet person”.

Hearing those words from within the crowd, I couldn’t believe that the artist I admired did not realise that her feeling of “home” – probably inspired by the architecture of a city destroyed in the second world war and most Moldovans’ fluency in Russian – was the direct result of Russia once having occupied my country.

Lithuanian philosopher Viktoras Bachmetjevas had a similar experience at a concert by Russian rock musician Boris Grebenshchikov in March last year. Blacklisted in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, and again in Putin’s Russia since 2022, there is little doubt about Grebenshchikov’s dissident credentials. But did he understand that even he, as a Russian citizen at odds with the regime, could still be held accountable for his country’s actions?

“I kept waiting, wanting him to make an anti-war gesture, but he did not,” Bachmetjevas recalls. During the concert, the stage was lit in blue and yellow colours, which the philosopher perceived as too timid a statement of solidarity with Ukraine. “Now is not the time for subtle gestures.”

Bachmetjevas is one of a growing number of intellectuals in central and eastern Europe who propose that we think about post-invasion Russia in the same ethical category as Nazi Germany. While war and other crimes should be persecuted on an individual basis, he argues, responsibility for the country’s conduct in Ukraine cannot be completely offloaded to its political elite. “By definition, political responsibility, which individuals carry as members of their political community, is a collective one,” he says.

Does the fact that the Russian state is a dictatorship not negate the argument for collective responsibility? Bachmetjevas argues that Russia’s citizens allowed democracy to wither away into tyranny, giving up their freedoms in exchange for promises of prosperity and national greatness. “No Russian citizen is single-handedly culpable for what happened and is happening – it is precisely a collective failure.”

Many of the Russians who have left their country since the start of the invasion have settled in Georgia, Armenia, Serbia and Turkey, in the Baltics or other EU states. Yet within the post-2022 Russian diaspora, “very few put in an effort to learn the languages and understand the context of the country they moved to”, argues Armenian anthropologist Lusine Kharatyan. Typically, she says, Russians try harder to integrate in the EU or the US rather than in countries of the former Soviet bloc, where Russian is often still spoken as a second language due to its history of occupation and migration.

Even some members of the liberal Russian diaspora espouse “a nostalgia for a lost ‘greatness’”, Kharatyan adds. Invited to a Russian-in-exile gathering in 2022, the Yerevan-based author said she felt as if she was mostly talked at rather than talked to. Some migrant activists tried to “teach the locals” about urban or environmental issues with little attempt to learn about previous local initiatives, something that Kharatyan attributes to a Russian superiority complex towards “backward and traditional” Armenians.

“While we are supposed to read all those great Russian classics,” she says, Russians volunteering to read Armenian classics was “rarely the case”.

Kyiv-based novelist Andrey Kurkov agrees that notions of Russian cultural supremacy and its political imperialism have become inextricably intertwined: “Pushkin statues in Ukraine are not about literature but about marking Russian territory,” he says. “To prove that they don’t merely want a ‘redecorated Russia’ with one tsar replaced by another.” Kurkov adds that members of the Russian opposition need to “give up on the idea of their greatness”.

There are some positive examples of Russian intellectuals denouncing the imperialist discourse. Journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote his 2023 book War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance to tackle seven persistent myths used to justify Moscow’s colonisation of Ukraine.

“Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war,” Zygar writes in the introduction. “It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour … We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, ‘great Russian culture’ belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.”

When Berlin-based Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, author of the terrifyingly prophetic dystopian novel Day of the Oprichnik, came to meet his Chișinău readers in April earlier this year, he kept mentioning his Romanian translations, respectfully acknowledging the difference between Moldova and his native country.

Russian actor Masha Mashkova, who condemned the invasion of Ukraine and now lives in the US, also added Romanian surtitles to the Chișinău performance of her new play, Nadezhdiny, based on the diary of her Chișinău-born great-great-grandmother, a printer and copy editor who married the Kharkiv-born revolutionary Evgeny Osipovich Zelensky-Nadezhdin. Now on a global tour, Nadezhdiny will also have Latvian surtitles in Riga in an effort to attract local audiences.

“As a Russian, I want to tell people in Moldova that I am aware of being a guest in your country and I respect your choice of language,” Mashkova says. “And I think my great-great-grandmother would have liked that.”

by Fyodor Lukyanov:

People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Penn Social on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. © Alex Wong/Getty Images via RT

The race for the US White House has been nervy and protracted, with the late forced withdrawal of President Joe Biden – seen even by his supporters as having little chance of winning – adding a twist during the summer. And episodes of political violence have been poisoning the atmosphere.

The political content has been poor – images and clichés instead of ideas. Towards the end, everything is reduced to crude personal attacks. Most observers and even participants realise that both candidates are, to put it mildly, suboptimal.

Kamala Harris was unexpectedly handed a lottery ticket that she has struggled to capitalize on. As vice-president, she has made little impact. Thus, at the heart of her truncated campaign was an attempt to convince voters that she had untapped potential. It didn’t quite work. It was conspicuous that the challenger has acted according to instructions, and that spontaneous reactions other than infectious laughter are thin on the ground. Her willingness to diametrically change views on key issues has failed to lend any ballast to the campaign, although the tactical calculations are clear.

Donald Trump has lost the flair of sensational novelty and does not exude the type of energy he did eight years ago. His narcissism, which used to be partly offset by a kind of lightness and enthusiasm, now often comes across as oppressive. And expectations that the former president would become more respectable with experience and take on the air of a wise statesman have not been fulfilled.

Whatever about the bona fides of the candidates, major political forces have rallied around them. Harris, who was not seriously considered in the spring, has united the most influential clans of Democrats. They joined the process less out of sympathy for her than out of fear of Trump. The latter, who once seemed like an eccentric freak whose antics made the Republican establishment cringe, now personifies his party and determines its direction. Despite the flaws of the rivals and their lack of coherent platforms, the choice Americans are making is clear.

The Democratic Party inherits a political tradition that received a powerful boost at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, on a wave of the successful conclusion of the confrontation with the USSR, American self-esteem rose sharply. This allowed it to set itself far more ambitious goals, not only in terms of global influence, but also in terms of transforming the homeland. The disappearance of the Soviet adversary unleashed ambitions as well as resources. International dominance offered new opportunities, including for domestic development, but also imposed burdens that gradually began to contradict key internal interests. Nevertheless, the position of hyperpower is perceived as natural not only politically, but also morally and ethically. Especially since progressives, who form part of the democratic core, see themselves as agents of radical social change at home and abroad. “City upon a hill” is interpreted in an expansionist way.

The Republican Party has had a more complex journey over the same period. Seeing itself as the victor over world communism (hello, Ronald Reagan), thirty years later it denounces perceived Marxist domination of the US itself, thus reacting to the left-liberal turn of the Democrats. The Republicans also went through a phase of fascination with foreign expansion, for a time heavily influenced by the neoconservatives. But then the appeal of these policies to promote American interests faded. The more traditional approach of not carrying too much extra weight and taking care of your own came to the fore.

If we simplify the description, while sacrificing important details, we get a menu of ‘liberal-globalists’ versus ‘national-patriots.’ For all its populist primitiveness, it does reflect the choice facing Americans. It is certainly not a crossroads where turning one way or the other means irrevocably choosing a path. There will be no linear movement, because the country is vast, there are many conflicting factors, the society is complex and it doesn’t fall in line on command.

Although there is a caveat to the latter. The US is a very special country. Alexis de Tocqueville, describing American democracy nearly 200 years ago, noted its theatricality and susceptibility to targeted campaigns. The American style of public policy is an illustration of this. Constant marketing as a manifestation of the spirit of capitalism has become intertwined with the processes of social transformation embedded in the original revolutionary nature of the American experiment itself.

Now there are unprecedented opportunities for manipulation through modern means of communication. Thus, some vested interests, who are capable of mounting sophisticated influence efforts, can substantially influence the overall direction of the country’s development.

The globalist part of the establishment has had a significant influence since the end of the 20th century. What’s up in the air now is the ideological bent that will prevail after these elections.

This article was first published by the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta and was translated and edited by the RT team

by John Helmer, Moscow

@bears_with

“The winners of the war are the Russian General Staff. Everyone in Russia understands that the Russian Army is winning and will win this war…I believe Gilbert is wrong on the history of the negotiations that have gone on since before this war began… It’s [Russian] military protection that guarantees [Ukrainian] permanent neutrality… Second, I think that Gilbert is wrong on the foundation of policy…The US policy does not date when Gilbert has put it from Madeleine Albright [US Secretary of State 1997-2001]…US policy since 1945 has been to destroy Russia and prevent Russia from ever forming a kind of partnership with Germany in Europe. If such a German-Russian partnership post-war were to develop, that would end US control of Europe… This is not a neocon invention. It goes back to non-Ukrainian, non-Jewish decision makers during World War II in the United States…Thirdly, Gilbert is wrong on method…What Gilbert is saying is that he watches Russian television talk shows… This is an absurd method for understanding either President Putin’s role in the command structure, or the General Staff’s role, or what the future security of Russia is required to be in a settlement…Who takes seriously the Rupert Murdoch approach to truth – you don’t read the London Times or Fox News to determine what is true. Therefore, the notion that we should watch Russian television with that group of talk show presenters as an example of what is the truth of Russian debate is inappropriate.”

“I’m sorry, Gilbert is well-meaning but we are not talking about Doctorow — we are talking about Doctor Zero…If we don’t settle the outcome of the war according to Russia’s security needs now, by the time there is the next [Russian] presidential election, there will be more war.”

“The issue isn’t what [President Vladimir] Zelensky says publicly. The major security threat for Russia is in the secret annexes [of the Ukrainian ‘Victory Plan’]…What went into the US secret annex in Greece [1981-87] was the deployment of US nuclear weapons aimed at Moscow…Secret annexes mean secret weapons, secret deployments, and dual-capable bombs, missiles and warheads…We know we are back in the world of nuclear targeting on Russia…That brings us back to the general problem – what’s US policy toward Russia? Can anything, anything a US administration ever offer Russia be trusted unless the Russian Army is in place? And that brings us back to the Gorbachev treason, repeated as the Yeltsin treason. No Russian president — no Russian president can repeat those two things. The Russian Army won’t tolerate it, and neither will the Russian people…Without the Russian Army, the signature of the US on an agreement is worthless.”

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

According to the Russian Constitution amendments adopted in 2020, Vladimir Putin can run for re-election in 2030 and win another term until 2036, when he will be 84. The contest over the presidential succession may thus be postponed for another decade.

Or else it is under way already. That’s one of the stakes in the present argument in Moscow over how the Ukraine war should end between the General Staff and the Kremlin – between unconditional capitulation of the regime west of the Dnieper River to the Polish border, and the east-of-Dnieper terms Putin proposed at Istanbul in March 2022, and repeated in a speech to the Foreign Ministry this past June.

The debate in Moscow over the terms of Istanbul-I and of Putin’s proposed Istanbul-II involves much more than future control of the territories east of the Dnieper and of the territories to the west. The question is whether the military trust Putin to administer the outcome of the war which Russian voters believe has been won by the General Staff. In his June 14 speech Putin admitted to his audience of senior Foreign Ministry officials what they all knew – that he and the General Staff had disagreed over the “preservation of the Ukrainian sovereignty over these territories, provided Russia has a stable land bridge to Crimea.” Putin’s “land bridge” and other territorial concessions were dismissed by the General Staff.

One candidate has already tossed a military style cap into the succession race: this is Dmitry Medvedev, the one-term president and currently deputy secretary of the Security Council; he is 59 now, 71 in 2036.

In his Telegram platform, Medvedev has been a consistent advocate of the General Staff line: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences [Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I]. After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”

Medvedev implies criticism of Putin but remains loyal in the hope of negotiating an amicable transfer of power between the two of them. At the same time Medvedev is signalling the General Staff that the military can trust him. But they don’t.

There is another succession candidate who is trusted by both the military and the voters, but who has not announced he is running. Putin is well aware of him; he has repeatedly tried to sideline him. This is Dmitry Rogozin, a presidential campaigner against Boris Yeltsin; Duma deputy and negotiator in Chechnya; ambassador to NATO; deputy prime minister in charge of the military industrial complex; head of Roskosmos, and now, after surviving a Ukrainian assassination attempt, senator for the Zaporozhye region in the Federation Council. Rogozin is 60; in 2036 he will be 72.

Rogozin is the son of a Russian Army general, grandson of a Russian Navy officer, great-grandson of a Red Army pilot, great-great-grandson of a general of the Russian Army in the war against Japan of 1904-05. Rogozin’s ancestors have been recorded in the Russian fight against the Teutonic Knights (13th century) and with Dmitry Pozharsky and Kuzma Minin in the war against the Poles (17th century). “That is to say,” Rogozin has written, “there have been some rather decent people in my family tree”.

In a recently published book, On the Western Front, Rogozin has said more explicitly: “The war against Ukrainian radical nationalism and Russophobia is not a confrontation between armies and military technologies, but our country’s response to an existential threat to our entire people, the entire Russian civilization. This is the restoration of historical justice. This is a common cause, in which the unity of the army, society and its political class must be manifested. This is the opportunity to kick out of the country (and not let back in!) the fifth column of traitors and globalisation-mongers. The war in Ukraine is a war for Ukraine and Russia, it is a holy war for the right of the Russian people to exist and reunite on their ancestral territory. This is a war against a much stronger and more resourceful enemy, a war to force the collective West, manipulated by the Anglo-Saxons and German revanchists, to recognize Russia’s right to a safe and independent future for our children. Therefore, there should be no ‘red lines’ for us in this war…I consider it fundamentally important to constantly show universal solidarity with our army. It is impossible to maintain the illusion that the army is ‘out there doing its job’, and we continue to live as before.”

A well-informed Moscow source explains: “I will agree that the General Staff have no friends in Kremlin. [Ex-Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu and Putin’s mismanagement is blamed on them. Once they win the war, they will hit back. Or if they are not allowed to win, they will hit back. Among politicians Rogozin will be the only one with their confidence. His presence in the war zone earned him the respect of officers and men. He distanced himself from [Wagner rebel Yevgeny] Prigozhin in time. So he is not damaged goods.”

“How and when he can leverage this isn’t obvious,” the source adds a caution, warning that Putin understands the Army is a threat to his succession and is recruiting military officers to become his political protectors in the succession. Putin announced this scheme in a Kremlin ceremony on October 2, calling it “The Time of Heroes”.

The Moscow source comments: “I will not exclude several officers of mid rank – those Putin calls the new elite – will come into politics through Rodina at local and regional levels. The potency and potential is in mid ranking officers. Generals will be given cushy retirements. They will not go against Putin or the successor. This all has bad omens for Rogozin.”

Talk of the presidential succession in Moscow is strictly private. There has been no discussion, not even a passing reference to Rogozin’s credentials as a presidential candidate, in the mainstream media, in the running commentary on war operations in the military blogs, or in the nationalist press like Tsargrad.

Those who support him acknowledge the danger of provoking the Kremlin. “I don’t see any signs Putin will allow him to rise to that level” comments a Moscow source. He understands the debate over Putin’s end-of-war terms and territorial concessions is also a test of domestic political power, a rehearsal for the next presidential election.

Rogozin’s writing deals explicitly, and with the assurance of a direct participant in many of the policy and partisan battles, with ex-presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, their rise and fall from power, together with their associates. He is scathing towards the Russian foreign ministers Andrei Kozyrev (1990-96) and Igor Ivanov (1998-2004). He is not less so towards the “devilish trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin”. “It has to be pointed out that the classics of Marxism and Leninism generally disliked Russia and the Russian people; therefore, the fact that socialism had been established for the long seventy years is to be regarded as a misunderstanding , a paradox and an irony of history. The contempt with which Karl Marx refers to the Slavic nations is simply astonishing.”

That quote is from Rogozin’s The Hawks of Peace, Notes of the Russian Ambassador, a collection of autobiographical essays published in English in 2013. The chapters reappear in the new Russian publication of 2023, On the Western Front, The Devil of Change.

Putin does not appear until Rogozin is more than half way through his book. “Young and energetic”, Rogozin acknowledged him at first. “[He] got down to business straight away…Frankly, I took a liking to ‘Putin the Hawk’.”

Left -- https://www.amazon.com/Hawks-Peace-Notes-Russian-Ambassador/ Right -- https://www.google.ru/books/

Rogozin chronicles his direct dealings with Putin with neutral precision on several issues – Russian engagement with the European parliament; the Chechen wars, the Beslan hostage-taking (2004) and negotiations with the Chechen leader, Akhmad Kadyrov; the status of Transdniestria and Kaliningrad; and domestic party politics and electioneering. “My previous personal experience of contacts with Mr Putin led me to believe that we held similar views.” He identifies the points on which Putin did not agree with him. He also hints that Putin would lead him to believe one thing, then do another.

“’Why don’t we combine ideas of healthy conservatism with the struggle for social justice in this country that is ripped off by corrupt thieves and oligarchs?’ I thought and decided for the time being not to attempt to unconvince Putin as to the potential ideological and practical objectives of a new project that we had come up with.” This was in 2004. In his retelling of his career in political and military administration since then – Rogozin has doctorates for two theses, “Philosophy and Theory of Wars” and “Weapons theory, military-technical policy, weapons systems” — Rogozin has challenged Putin’s constituencies but not Putin directly.

Rogozin has been consistently hostile to Putin’s economic policy advisors, Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin, the longest standing leftovers Putin has preserved from the Yeltsin administration; and to the oligarchs whom Rogozin has castigated as their paymasters. “Astounding it is how people like [Chubais] came to power”, Rogozin comments in his 2013 book. His tongue was in his cheek, and in check: Rogozin implies he knows exactly how Chubais (and his protégé Kudrin) came to power and how they kept it through 2022.

The Kremlin archive records Rogozin’s direct meetings with both President Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev over 22 years. Top: July 30, 2002 – Putin meets Rogozin, then chairman of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs and Putin’s special envoy to the Kaliningrad Region. Below: April 12, 2022 – Putin and Rogozin meet in Blagoveschensk when Rogozin was General Director of the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities. Putin signed a decree dismissing Rogozin twelve weeks later on July 15, 2022. The opposition platform Meduza reported from Latvia that “Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin is slated to join the Russian presidential administration in the near future, Meduza has learned from three sources close to the Kremlin and an acquaintance of Rogozin’s. Exactly what position Rogozin will take is still under discussion. According to one of Meduza’s sources, Rogozin is currently one of several candidates for chief of staff (the other candidates are unknown)… Another possibility, according to Meduza’s sources, is that Dmitry Rogozin will become one of the Kremlin’s supervisors for the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and the other Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. In that case, Rogozin would officially be a presidential aide or a deputy chief of staff, and would replace Dmitry Kozak.” In the outcome, Rogozin was passed over for Kozak’s post, and instead Putin replaced him with Vladimir Medinsky. For the significance of Medinsky in Putin’s end-of-war negotiations with the US, read this. For Kozak’s role in running the Ukraine portfolio, read this. Before Kozak on the Ukraine portfolio, there was Vladislav Surkov. Surkov, Kozak and Rogozin are unacceptable to the US; all three are sanctioned. Medinsky is acceptable to Washington and is not sanctioned. For seventeen months after Putin had removed Rogozin from Roskosmos, the president delayed before announcing Rogozin’s appointment as senator for Zaporzhye on September 23, 2023. The milbloggers saluted: “Today, the commander of the ‘Tsar’s Wolves’ is perhaps the only senator in Russia, or even in the world, who fights on the front line. Rogozin once said that his main goal was to liberate Ukraine from fascism.” Putin had decided to subordinate Rogozin to Medinsky, and keep him out of Moscow.

In the prologue to his latest book, Rogozin writes: “I tried to write this book as truthfully as possible, reproducing important dialogues and details of events from memory. Of course, my assessments of the behaviour of specific politicians of the modern Russian and European eras may seem subjective to you, dear reader. All right. After all, I was a direct participant in the events described in the book. To some, these assessments will seem overly emotional, to others – completely politically incorrect. I apologize in advance. It’s all our bad Russian habit: to call a scoundrel a scoundrel, and a hero a hero…”

“Unfortunately, the events of recent years have confirmed all my previous concerns about the possible development of the situation in Ukraine. I could not ignore this topic, just as I could not help but speak out about the behavior of our so-called ‘cream of society’ in a time threatening for the Motherland. With such ‘friends of the people’, we don’t need enemies either. Even now, during the period of the Special Military Liberation Operation [sic], which is objectively inevitable, given the threats emanating from the Kiev junta to exterminate the Russian population of Ukraine and the approach of NATO’s military potential to our borders, little has changed in our ‘elite’. What can this ‘elite’ offer to the people of Ukraine being liberated by our army? How is it better than the Kiev ‘elite’, which has brought Ukraine to the bestiality of Russophobia? How can you pretend that nothing has happened in the country and continue to drink champagne and eat éclairs at fireworks festivals at the very moment when tens of thousands of our soldiers, risking their lives, are performing a combat mission? Do our people really have a split personality? Or those who do not stop having fun even in the most threatening moments for our army.”

A search of the Russian press has found no review essays or analyses of Rogozin’s books or the views he has advocated in his political commands. The Kremlin-directed television talk shows and the internet media like Vzglyad ignore him.

On the platform left to him, Rogozin reveals between the lines that the present and pressing context is the end-of-war negotiations being conducted by the Kremlin with Donald Trump and others.

On September 16 — “[NATO secretary-general
just retired Jens Stoltenberg is] the rarest specimen
of the earth’s freaks… The skeleton of Goebbels,
or whatever else was left of that bastard, was
even sweating with envy. It’s necessary to say something like Germany is not a party to the conflict with the USSR if its planes bomb Moscow. Listen Stoltenberg, tell your wife fairy tales that you spent too much time in the NATO library in the evening. Lying scum. Air strikes by NATO countries on the territory of our country are a declaration of war. There will be no other interpretation of this act of aggression. If you keep lying, I’ll go back to Brussels and box your ears, you disgusting liar. And then I’ll string you up on one of those poplars I planted there.”

On September 26 — “Yesterday overnight, several colleagues who worked with me in Brussels informed me, without giving too many details, that now the most important question that is being discussed in NATO is: how many days after the appearance of NATO troops in Ukraine, Russia will use nuclear weapons against them. That is, what will apply suddenly dawned on everyone, the only question is exactly how many days will remain before the Apocalypse. They argue — some say in two weeks; others say it will take no more than 10 days.”

“[Putin] Thus, the draft Basic Principles expand the category of states and military alliances in respect of which nuclear deterrence is exercised and expand the list of military threats to be neutralised by nuclear deterrence measures. I would like to draw your attention specifically to the following. The updated version of the document is supposed to regard an aggression against Russia from any non-nuclear state but involving or supported by any nuclear state as their joint attack against the Russian Federation. It also states clearly the conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons. We will consider such a possibility once we receive reliable information about a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing our state border. I mean strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, UAVs, hypersonic and other aircraft.” Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/

In the Security Council Putin had spoken of a draft of the revised nuclear deterrence to include non-nuclear states like Ukraine, Romania, Poland and Germany acting under US control; the implication in the Kremlin communiqué was that the president was delaying his personal approval of the “updates…proposed in terms of defining the conditions for using nuclear weapons.”

In Rogozin’s view, the Russian decision to use nuclear weapons against the non-nuclear states allowing the US to store, install and aim their nuclear weapons at Russian targets is a collective military decision, and that it has been made.

“This time, reports on the results of yesterday’s meeting of our Security Council were perceived in Brussels not as bluff and empty threats, but more than seriously. In the corridors of the Brussels headquarters of the North Atlantic Alliance, after reading the embassy dispatches from Moscow, the fear of losing everything in the imminent and rapidly impending nuclear conflict began to spread with the speed of a stink. Well, yes, it’s one thing to poison a Russian bear locked in a cage, it’s another thing to go into his cage after all this harassment. You can make good money by pitting Russia against Ukraine, this bastard product of Bolshevism. But to die for Ukraine? No, of course not. In the West, no one is ready for such a development of this story. And if we really prove, probably not to them, but, above all, to ourselves, that we are ready to go on to the end, then this is the only way to stop the bloodshed and defeat the collective enemy. If we falter, we will begin to dodge, dodge, fawn — death awaits us.”

Source: https://t.me/rogozin_do/6389

“Today, on September 30, our country celebrates a memorable date – the Day of the reunification of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Zaporozhye region and the Kherson region with the Russian Federation. On this day in 2022 in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the heads of the two people’s republics and the two regions signed international agreements on entering (more correctly to say, return) of the regions of Novorossiya to Russia – based on the results of earlier referendums. And this means that the capital of my region is the city of Zaporozhye, as well as Stepnorsk, Gulyaipol, Orekhov should be liberated from the presence of foreign troops – Ukrainian and NATO… If we do not want the war to spread to our children and grandchildren, we must finally crush this bastion and go further to the Polish border. Otherwise, the bloodshed and threats of Russia and the Russian people will never end.”

Last year in the book On the Western Front Rogozin had written: “The country and society must live by the interests of the front. The one who is ready to go to the end always wins. And our people are ready to go into battle only for a clear goal for them. Not for money. You can learn to kill for money, but you can’t learn to die for money. Our army in Ukraine is fighting for the Motherland. We have no right to lose. This is our army and our destiny.”

This means no Kremlin negotiations until the Russian Army reaches the Polish border, and on the way eliminates the regime in Kiev.

By Konstantin Remchukov, editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. A former MP, he is regarded as a leading thinker in Russia

1. Putin makes all fundamental decisions personally, on the basis of his own ability, expertise, and sense of historical responsibility. A vivid example of this was the president’s speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14, in which he outlined the key provisions of Russia’s foreign policy priorities and his vision for the formation of a new international order. Most participants in the meeting expected the head of state to speak for no more than half an hour. In practice, Putin spoke for almost 80 minutes on theses he had written out himself, which he later explained to journalists.

1. The task of ensuring the security of the country and protecting Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, which Putin has been facing since 2014, has become the main existential factor of his rule. He will not hand over power to anyone before the final, internationally guaranteed settlement of this issue.

He cannot give up control until there is a final, globally recognized solution. Anything short of this would mean handing his successor a messy bunch of unresolved problems. Today, no one in Putin’s entourage is better at solving problems than the president. He knows this and is firmly convinced of it.

1. Putin will not resign. At the beginning of September, a schoolgirl in Tuva asked the president: “How would you spend your days if you were an ordinary man, i.e. not the president?” Putin replied succinctly and clearly: “It’s hard for me to imagine that now.” This is his most important message of recent times – both for Russians and outsiders. Putin is saying that in your own future planning, proceed from the basis that I will be in the Kremlin. In this way, the president has delivered a reality check to the many Western politicians and indeed Russian opposition activists who have been dreaming and deluding themselves, claiming that “if there is Putin, there is a problem; if there is no Putin, there is no problem.” The fact is, the president is here to stay.

2. It is now clear that after more than two years of a nuclear threat hanging over us all, the world is ready for real negotiations on this issue. However, there are doubts about whether talks will be successful. The most serious Western politician – and someone who actually understands the consequences of nuclear war – is US President Joe Biden. Sadly, he will be gone in a few months. Neither Kamala Harris nor former President Donald Trump has the foreign policy credentials to even grasp the importance of this issue and the dangers involved.

3. The past years and months of the Ukraine conflict, the brutal sanctions, and the radical transformation of the driving forces of the Russian economy have clearly demonstrated that it is time for our own domestic public and political consciousness to decisively abandon the notion, once sown by the Polish/American thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski, that Russia’s greatness rests on its unity with Ukraine. If the country is torn out of Moscow’s sphere of influence, Russia’s status as a great power will come to an end, he warned.

But that was then, and this is now. Today it is obvious that Russia’s place in the world is guaranteed regardless of the degree of proximity to any country or group of countries. Liberation from speculative constructs in the minds of influential ideologues is a powerful factor in normalizing the development process and assessing fundamental risks and opportunities. Russia can be a great and important power regardless of the degree of integration with other states. The greatness of a country is measured by the level of well-being and opportunities of its citizens, by achievements in health care, education, science, and technology.

1. Talking about the Russian economy, we should keep in mind one simple detail: the federal budget submitted to the State Duma (parliament) is based on an oil price of $60 per barrel. According to forecasts, the average annual oil price in 2025 will be $69 per barrel. This is a very high level of conservatism, realism, and sober calculation on the part of the Mikhail Mishustin government. The Russian economy is expected to remain manageable and the pace of development will be sufficient to meet the challenges we face. The obvious structural and technological difficulties will not be decisive in 2025. At this level of industrial development, a balanced budget and currency stability are crucial.

2. Today’s fighting makes it clear that the main goal of Russian troops on the ground is to reach the administrative borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. When listing his objectives, Putin increasingly uses the following words: the liberation of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and Novorossiya. It can be assumed that Novorossiya is only part of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. The main issue here is the land connection with Crimea. If my observations are correct, it is possible to draw a more concrete picture that will allow us to say that the military operation has been completed and its goals have been achieved.

3. It should be stressed that in recent months there has been a clear change in the Russian leadership’s assessment of the nature of Ukrainian statehood. This is the main difference from February 2022. Today, Moscow recognizes that a significant number of Ukrainians voted for the current government, consider themselves Ukrainians, and do not want to see a future with Russia. In this way, the Kremlin recognizes the state of Ukraine. When the West promotes the narrative that Moscow wants to destroy Ukraine as a state, this is an obvious contradiction, given today’s realities. Moreover, it is this narrative that allows Western politicians to claim that by destroying Ukraine, Russia will move further into Europe – into Poland and the Baltic states.

4. Speaking of possible negotiations, the West fails to mention the question of the legitimacy of Vladimir Zelensky’s signature in Putin’s eyes. They say it is obvious because Zelensky is flying around the world with his ‘peace plan’. I would warn Western partners against simplistic interpretations of Putin’s remarks and his concern that the Ukrainian Constitutional Court might later rule that Zelensky had not properly renewed his credentials and that his signature was therefore invalid. ‘Cheated, deceived, hoodwinked, and then deceived again’ is something that won’t be allowed to happen again. The level of mutual trust is not even at zero. Total mistrust now makes it necessary to have full negotiating powers in terms of the legal certainty available.

5. It seems that the issue of a new international order that provides equal security for states is equally relevant today for the critical majority of countries in the world – in the West as well as in the East. The main question is whether it will be possible to create a new international legal framework for peaceful coexistence. Let us remember that the worlds of Versailles and Yalta-Potsdam were born on the ruins of the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. The situation is different now. But hopefully humanity has learned something.

Chinese media declared China the winner of the 2024 Olympics, by considering Taiwanese medals as Chinese medals.

Additionally, they divided the US medals in two categories; ‘Africans descended from the slave trade’ and ‘Jews and Anglo-Saxons’.

by Keith Woods via Substack

Without a dramatic change of strategy, this election is now the Democrats’ to lose

Donald Trump is heading for defeat in this year’s election. I realise stating this is controversial — there has developed what I think is a misguided sense of inevitability about a Trump victory, especially on the radical right. When I said recently that I now believe Trump is going to lose, I encountered a flood of angry comments accusing me of needlessly blackpilling, ignoring polling, being contrarian, or just plain stupid.

I first expressed this view in opposition to my old nemesis, Academic Agent, who claims the election is a foregone conclusion, that Harris has “zero chance”, and that she has been appointed to play the role of a “jobber” (that’s pro-wrestling lingo for a wrestler whose job is to lose and make their opponents look strong.)

AA’s take on this is definitely the majority view. Trump has been handed win after win this year, from Biden’s shocking debate performance against him to his brush with death and triumphant recovery, giving us one of the greatest photos ever taken. With the nominee now almost certain to be Kamala Harris, some have taken this as confirmation that Trump really is the anointed one. Whatever chance old Joe had in a rematch with Trump, Kamala is electoral poison. While Biden could make the Democrats’ anti-white, radical left agenda palatable with his old-timey white guy shtick, Harris is the DEI regime’s real, ugly face. After all, even Democrat voters soundly rejected her.

This is a simple and intuitive, vibes-based approach to forecasting, and anyone could be forgiven for thinking fate is just on Trump’s side after the events in Pennsylvania, but I think the more I take a cold look at Trump’s prospects for this election, the more bleak they seem. I’m not saying he is certain to lose, and a lot can happen between now and November, but he is currently rated 1/2 with bookmakers, or about a 65% chance of winning. Presuming she is the unchallenged nominee for the Democrat party (not yet assured) I would flip it, and give those kind of odds, if not even shorter, to Harris. Thus, I think the current odds of 6/4 being offered on Harris represent a lot of value (not financial advice).

If we want to go from vibes to something tangible, we could look at polling. The problem though, is polling has proven to be a poor predictor of election outcomes in US presidential elections, especially this far out. It’s July. In July 1988, George H.W. Bush — who, like Harris, was then vice-president — trailed his Democrat opponent by 17 points. Bush not only won that year’s election, he won it handily: a smashing 426-111 victory in the electoral college vote.

At first, Trump was well ahead of Harris in national polling, but recently, Harris has made big gains, including in key swing states. A shift that dramatic in the space of a few days only underscores the fact that we can’t really expect these numbers to be the same four months from now, and that’s not even accounting for other issues like who’s answering the pollsters and who will actually turn up to vote.

No, polls won’t do. A lot of political scientists have tried to come up with a more reliable means of forecasting, to mixed success. From decades of testing, one method seems to stand out for its success: these are the “keys to the White House”, a method developed by American historian Allan Licthman.

Lichtman developed the keys in collaboration with a Soviet seismologist. Treating US elections with the same kind of systems-driven approach used to study earthquakes, the duo found a method of analysis which treats general elections as a referendum on the performance of the ruling party. Using the keys, Lichtman has correctly predicted the popular vote winner in every General Election from 1984 and 2012, correctly predicted Donald Trump’s win in 2016 (though he failed to win the popular vote), and Biden’s win in 2020. The system was also tested on past elections right back to the 1800s, and found to retrospectively predict them correctly, too. If there is a better system to predict elections, I haven’t found one.

With that said, I am not treating this method as decisive. Demographics are changing so rapidly that the US is hardly the same country as it was during most of the elections studied. But based on its past performance it is probably a good test of how voters will be feeling about the ruling party come November, and so seems like a good place to start.

The Keys to the White House in 2024

There are thirteen “keys” to the White House, which are a measure of the sentiment around the ruling party heading into the election. If a challenger candidate can turn a majority of the keys, there is likely to be a political earthquake, and an ousting of the ruling party, regardless of debate performances or the nature of their election campaign.

So, let’s see what the thirteen keys are, and how they are looking for this election cycle:

KEY 1 (Party Mandate): After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections.

2024 Verdict: False. The Democratic Party won fewer seats in the 2022 midterms than in 2018. However, this key has the least predictive value of all; the decline was slight (235 to 213 seats), and the Republicans performed well below the expected “Red Wave” in these elections.

One key for Trump.

KEY 2 (Contest): There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination.

2024 Verdict: True. Biden didn’t face competition for the candidacy and then appointed Kamala as his successor, who has been endorsed by all the party big-wigs and seems to have the nomination secured. If she were to be challenged, or Democrat higher-ups were to organise a coup to replace her at the last minute with someone they consider more electable, this could be flipped, but right now it seems Harris is secure.

One key for Harris.

KEY 3 (Incumbency): The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president.

2024 Verdict: False. Was true for Biden, not for Harris, though she represents the same administration.

Two keys for Trump

KEY 4 (Third-party): There is no significant third-party or independent campaign.

2024 Verdict: True. RFK jr. looks like one of the more credible threats to come from a third-party candidate for some time, but probably not enough to turn this key. Lichtman’s system rates them as a serious contender only if they poll over 10%. RFK jr. is unlikely to break this threshold.

Two keys for Harris.

KEY 5 (Short-term economy): The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.

2024 Verdict: True. The US Economy is experiencing good growth, and the Biden/Harris administration has invested heavily in the US economy in the last 4 years. A big economic shock between now and the election is unlikely.

However, although per-capita GDP is the easiest way to measure the short term health of an economy, it can be misleading, and since this is an election, voter perception matters more than real numbers. Lichtman’s model does not look at perception, only real growth, which seems like a potential oversight.

A recent study found that 3 in 5 Americans think the country is in recession, and most think it began last year. People also tend to misremember how good things were economically under previous administrations, and this seems to be happening with Trump now.

If most Americans think the country went into recession some time during the Biden/Harris administration after being handed a strong economy by Trump, can we really still call that a key for the Democrats? I think it will depend how voters feel by election time, so I’m going to leave this key neutral.

KEY 6 (Long-term economy): Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.

2024 Verdict: True. Growth under Biden/Harris has been higher than the previous two administrations, and included a large bounce-back from the COVID slump.

Again, the same caveat applies regarding public perception. The American public think they’re a year into recession, mostly due to changes in the cost of living. Cost of living matters just as much as growth figures or earnings, since people judge their affluence by how much they can actually buy with what they earn. Still, the government seems to be getting inflation under control now, and on paper, Harris still has a good record to sell, so I’m going to say this key leans Democrat. Both economic keys could easily swing to Trump if the American economy goes into recession between now and the election.

(Tentatively) Three keys for Harris.

KEY 7 (Policy change): The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.

2024 Verdict: True. Biden’s greatest accomplishments are the massive investment programs, including a $1.9 trillion rescue package after COVID, a bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the CHIPS and Science Act which has directed more resources into American innovation.

Deindustrialisation was a major reason for the turn to Trump’s populism in the Rust Belt in 2016, but now Biden has doubled the amount of factory building in the United States and invested billions into American manufacturing. The US is also gettinginflation under control, meaning there is a very formidable economic record for Harris to run on.

Four keys for Harris.

KEY 8 (Social unrest): There is no sustained social unrest during the term.

2024 Verdict: True. The pro-Palestine protests are the closest thing to serious social unrest, but they are nothing on the level of the summer of Floyd and not enough to turn this key.

Five keys for Harris.

KEY 9 (Scandal): The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.

2024 Verdict: True. As much as conservatives tried to make Hunter Biden the focus of a real scandal, it never landed, and Biden was a pretty controversy-free President.

Six keys for Harris.

KEY 10 (Foreign/military failure): The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.

2024 Verdict: True. This one could be controversial, but none of the things that will be held up as Biden’s major foreign policy failures by Republicans really hold up. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was promised by Trump, and although some American soldiers were lost in the process, this hasn’t plagued the Biden administration. Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the breakout of war between Hamas and Gaza have caused problems for the Biden government, neither has been a disaster for him domestically. Russia has not yet achieved victory over the multinational coalition led by the US, and Americans are broadly in agreement with the current approach, or at least not opposed enough for it to be yet seen as a major failure.

Seven keys for Harris.

KEY 11 (Foreign/military success): The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.

2024 Verdict False. Just as there hasn’t been any massive failure, the Biden/Harris administration has no great foreign affairs story to brag about. Afghanistan could have been a success, if not for the messy withdrawal and loss of American lives on the way out. It seems unlikely the Israel/Palestine conflict will be resolved soon, and the hope of a surprise Ukrainian victory over Russia is even more unlikely.

Three keys for Trump.

KEY 12 (Incumbent charisma): The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.

2024 Verdict: False. This is reserved for the once in a generation candidate with huge cross-party appeal like FDR or Ronald Reagan, Harris certainly is not that.

Subscribe to New Columns

Four keys for Trump.

KEY 13 (Challenger charisma): The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.

2024 Verdict: True. Trump has a cult-following and is a very charismatic figure, but he is also extremely divisive, and doesn’t have the ability to appeal to a broad base of support outside his party, as someone like Reagan of John F. Kennedy could.

Eight keys for Harris.

Final tally: Harris 8 – Trump 4.

The keys are firmly in favour of the Democrats, suggesting voters are unlikely to be in the mood for the political earthquake of a democratic regime change. This methodology is mostly about the viability of the party, not the appeal of the candidate. But the keys would have been turned even more strongly in Biden’s favour if he was the incumbent, yet after his disastrous debate performance in early July, a consensus developed that his senility was so apparent that he would lose, regardless of his record governing. A similar argument is currently being made about Harris, she is just too unlikeable to win a national election. Is that true?

I would point to Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Clinton ranked as the presidential candidate with the second highest unfavourability rating ever, second only to Trump! Pollsters found ‘liar’ was the word most associated with Clinton in voters’ minds, and, she was shrouded in controversy over her deleted e-mails and, to a lesser extent, her primary contest with Bernie Sanders. Harris isn’t the most appealing politician, but I’m willing to bet she will be more popular than Clinton.

And despite the widespread dislike for Clinton, she still won the popular vote in 2016. What mattered was Clinton lost three key Rust Belt states to Trump that swung the election: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump’s margin of victory in those states? 79,316 votes. Trump won Pennsylvania by 46,435 votes, Wisconsin by 22,177 votes, and Michigan by 10,704 votes. These are tiny margins: to be precise, 0.057 of total voters cost Clinton the election. Now factor in eight years of demographic change and cultural leftism and ask yourself if Harris can gain this kind of margin on Hillary Clinton.

How (and who) Trump Won

In 2016, Trump won these Rust Belt states by challenging the Republican party from the outside and presenting as a populist. Trump actually won fewer White voters than Mitt Romney, but he won more of the White voters who mattered. There are a few interesting things about the key areas Trump flipped. For one, they are some of the Whitest counties in America:

Another interesting and anomalous thing about these swing states becomes apparent from looking at a map of voter attitudes in the US, which show that these states are some of the few in America where the majority voter attitude is ‘populist’ rather than some variant of conservative or liberal:

Many of these White, populist voters are disaffected Democrats who felt left behind by the country’s embrace of globalism and free trade. They chose Obama in 2008 and 2012, but switched to Trump in 2016 because they liked how he sounded on issues like immigration, protectionism and rebuilding American industry. After governing like Jeb Bush for four years, Trump gained more support from ideological conservatives, but he lost crucial support from the White, working-class moderates and populists whose votes are decisive in these states.

Instead of governing as a populist, Trump’s great legislative achievement was a Paul Ryan tax cut that favoured the rich. In the Rust Belt states in 2020, the trend was Trump losing a disproportionate share of lower and middle income earners, while either gaining or losing a smaller proportion of high income earners.

Non-college-educated White voters were critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, but in 2020 the Democrats made gains with this demographic, increasing their share of this vote from 28% to 33%.

A more relevant question than how much voters are going to like Kamala Harris is what Trump is going to do to win back the populist White voters he lost. Currently, the Harris campaign is doing more explicit outreach to White voters than Trump, who recently framed his opposition to mass-immigration as motivated by a desire to protect the jobs of Blacks and Hispanics. Part of a strategy, it seems, devised by Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles, who says they will compensate for losing White ‘Karens’ by winning ‘Jamal and Enrique’.

Trump had a chance to learn from his mistakes in 2020 and return to the populist platform that won him populist White voters in 2016. But Trump is proud of his record as President. At the RNC, speaker after speaker celebrated Trump’s tax cuts. There was very little mention of immigration — a South American immigrant addressed the crowd in Spanish and spoke about how illegal immigration was hurting legal immigrants like her. There is little mention either, of the vision of economic nationalism Trump pointed to in 2016. The focus instead is inflation — an always popular target for conservatives — gas prices, and oil. Speaker after speaker promised Trump would “unleash American energy” a return to the 2008 GOP “drill baby drill” platform.

Trump talked a good game about rebuilding American manufacturing in 2016, but he failed to deliver for working-class Whites in Rust Belt states. An economic study at the end of Trump’s term looked at well-being in five Midwestern swing states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio. It found that among the counties that flipped from voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 to voting for Trump in 2016, 61% were in economic decline. During Trump’s term, there was very modest growth in manufacturing jobs — about the same rate as Obama’s, and only enough to restore a fraction of the jobs lost in the prior decade.

In contrast, Biden has pumped billions into these Rust Belt states. Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act is bringing high-paying technology jobs into the American economy, which includes a focus in Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the year after passing the act, construction spending by US manufacturers more than doubled. The Rust Belt is becoming a center of electric vehicle production, with companies like Ford making big investments in EV battery production in these states. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act pumped billions more into these states, giving generous subsidies and tax breaks to green energy manufacturers.

Manufacturing electric vehicles and solar panels isn’t how residents in these states might have imagined the return to industrial dominance when it was offered by Trump, but it has actually put these states at the center of an ecosystem of innovation after Trump offered them little for four years, instead focusing on another Reagan-era tax cut.

That was the whole story of Trump’s first term — making an appeal to White populism and economic nationalism, but handing policy over to the fiscal conservatives who populist voters despise. In fact, Trump’s ability to sell more of the same GOP policies with rhetorical populism has probably masked just how unpopular this agenda, and conservatism in general, is.

The fact is, the Republican Party has underperformed in every election since Trump won in 2016 by presenting as something other than a Republican. Since then, the Democrats have beaten the Republicans in the 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 elections. Democrats not losing ground in 2022 was especially significant, bucking the historical trend of midterm losses for the party in the White House. A big part of the reason Democrats were able to avoid the promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms was the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the same year, making abortion front and center of national politics.

Abortion

Support for abortion is now at a record high among Americans: 69% now supportlegalising abortion for the first three months of pregnancy. This is not just a Democrat issue, when a referendum on “abortion rights” passed in Trump-voting Ohio in 2023, the New York Times reported that

Across the state, the margin of support for abortion rights was stronger than the margin of support for Mr. Biden three years ago. Among the Trump counties that voted for the amendment, the abortion rights vote was stronger where Mr. Trump won by smaller margins.

Elections in 2023 showed how the abortion issue could be decisive. Democrats in Virginia regained control of their state legislature with heavily abortion-focusedcampaigns. Red state Kentucky elected Democrat Andy Beshear over a Trump-endorsed candidate, helped by an attack on the state’s stringent abortion laws. Similar results occurred elsewhere. Politico concluded:

When the right to abortion is on the ballot, it wins. It wins in red states that voted for President Donald Trump. It wins in counties President Joe Biden lost by more than 20 points. It wins when popular Republican officials campaign for it and when they ignore it. And it wins even when the outcome has no immediate effect on abortion access.

The most telling example is the state of Michigan, an important swing state for the upcoming election. Richard Hanania:

The state voted for Trump in 2016, had a Republican governor until 2019, and a Republican legislature until last year’s midterms. Michigan now has Democratic women in the positions of governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and senate majority leader. To say that the Democrats in the state have run on abortion would be an understatement.

Gretchen Whitmer, the Democrat governor of Michigan, had been tipped as a potential late substitute for Biden if he decided to step down. Whitmer put abortion front and center of her campaigning:

At the Michigan State of the State, she did not treat abortion as Democrats often do, as if it’s slightly icky and private, damp and sad. She did not cordon it off in its own dolorous corner separate from all the rousing stuff about creating a mighty Michigan economy. Rather, she led with it, weaving it into a business-forward spiel called “Make It in Michigan,” suggesting that prioritizing abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections would help bring businesses and expertise back to her former manufacturing state.

The result was historic support from women in Michigan, widening a gender gap between the parties that was already at a record in 2018.

The abortion issue especially activates college educated White women because it gets at a deep status anxiety — any woman is just one unwanted pregnancy away from joining the “poor Whites”, the most derided, low-status group in the country. These women will spearhead Harris’s campaign, and Harris being handed the torch has energised them in a way Biden didn’t. TikTok has been alight with educated White women and non-White zoomers giving “Momala” the meme energy Biden was lacking, and which Trump so successfully tapped into in 2016.

People writing off Kamala’s chances have said this is an astroturfed boost pushed by regime media, and Harris has little support on the ground. But just a week after being announced as the new Democrat candidate, she has raised $200 million, 66% of which is from first-time donors, and added over 170,000 volunteers to her campaign. This is quite a staggering boost from a change of candidate.

The election will be decided by who can get their demographics to turn out the strongest in key states, and Kamala will have an army of young volunteers to help with that. If Harris gets a strong turnout from Black and younger voters in high-density urban areas in swing states this would give her an advantage over Biden that could offset losing some of his White voters. Clinton lost White moderates to Trump, but the other factor in her defeat is she didn’t drive Black turnout as well as she could have, and that’s another area for Harris to make gains. And, for all the talk of Black voters rejecting Harris for not really being one of them, recent polling on Pennsylvania showed Harris with a slightly higher favourability among Black voters than Biden.

Part of why Harris got so much young support early in her campaign is her decision to immediately put abortion front and center of her campaign. Trump, too, knows the abortion issue could be decisive, which is why he has emphasised that he does not support a national abortion ban, and stated his support for abortion in the case of “the exceptions”. At the RNC, Trump did something perhaps no other could have done: he got the Republican party to amend its platform to remove support for an abortion ban. But the Democrats look set to launch an offensive campaign which will portray Trump as being the gateway to an ultra-conservative takeover of America, paving the way for a national abortion ban.

This is why they have made Project 2025 the focus of their attacks, as it represents the kind of fear many otherwise Trump-voting women have about them accidentally greenlighting more radical conservatives. This may seem obviously misguided to people who follow this kind of thing (Trump has now disavowed Project 2025 multiple times), but it does seem to be resonating with low-information female voters. And this will only be exacerbated by Trump’s VP selection.

The Vance Problem

I liked the idea of Trump selecting JD Vance to be his running mate. Vance is, you might say, thematically pro-White, and points to a future where conservative politicians might be more willing to explicitly defend White people against blatant anti-White discrimination, as Vance has done. He also seems more likely than most to set about actually turning back the Civil Rights regime and delivering some conservative legislative accomplishments, which is obviously a big part of the reason liberals fear him.

Vance has already been identified by the social media mobs as an awkward chud whose attempts at being relatable to voters end in cringe. “JD Vance is weird” has become the popular meme among his enemies, and it looks like it might stick. This isn’t that bad, Vance could lean into being a nerdy policy wonk who is determined to dismantle the institutions which have kept his people down. But right now, he hasn’t got it. After his selection at the RNC, Vance polled as the most unpopular VP pick ever.

Vance is a much bigger problem for Trump on abortion. The media is going on the attack against Vance: for complaining about ‘childless cat-ladies’, for saying people with children should have more votes, and, for saying as recently as 2022 that he supports a national abortion ban and a federal response to women who travel across state lines for abortion.

These comments are going to be the focus of media and Democrat party attacks for the rest of the election cycle, and will block Trump’s attempts to win women with more liberal views on abortion. Little wonder then, that there are now stories abounding of Trump’s alleged regret over his selection.

Israel

One final point against Trump is his foreign policy. In theory, this should be an easy win for Trump: he didn’t start any new wars, and since he left office, conflict has flared in Gaza and Ukraine. Until recently, Trump intentionally stayed vague on policy as it concerned these conflicts.

Now though, Trump is taking a more hardline Zionist stance on Gaza, complaining that Kamala won’t let the Israelis “finish the job”. By the Democrats switching candidates, they have an opportunity to create some distance between Kamala and “genocide Joe” on Israel — Harris avoided attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, then came out and promised a ceasefire, peace deal, and an eventual two-state solution to end the conflict.

Events in Gaza caused a lot of interesting speculation about non-Whites, ideological leftists, and Muslims abandoning Biden, maybe even voting for Trump in protest. If the choice is now a Zionist promising a ceasefire and a Palestinian state versus a Zionist promising unconditional support for the Netanyahu government, there is no chance of this happening.

Harris’ position is the popular one: polling has consistently shown strong support for a ceasefire among Americans, including even a majority of Republicans. Only 13% hold the Trump position of opposing a ceasefire and allowing Israel to “finish the job”. It’s hard to know how much this issue is going to sway voters or boost turnout, but if it does, it won’t be in Trump’s favour.

Some more points in the Democrats’ favour

• A lot of the talk of Kamala’s unlikability with White voters in swing states will be offset by her VP pick. Currently, the favourites are former astronaut Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania governor Joshua Shapiro.
• Trump will likely lose the debates with Harris. Although he had some great moments against Hillary, polling on undecided voters showed they thought he lost every exchange. Harris performed reasonably well against Mike Pence in 2020, and Trump is not the man he was in 2016 or even 2020.
• In recent years MAGA has become more trashy, attracting a lot of low IQ, conspiratorial people. They are less likely to vote or volunteer for his campaign, and many Trump voters generally are demoralised by their belief that the 2020 election was rigged. If they are not demoralised, they are generally dismissive of Kamala’s chances in a way they weren’t of Hillary or Biden, as I have discovered discussing this. Contrast this with Democrat supporters, many of whom felt they were losing under Biden and believe Trump is going to try and end Democracy if he succeeds.
• Many Trump ‘24 maximalists believe the failed assassination attempt is a huge mark in Trump’s favour. I admit I got caught up in the spectacle of it at the time, and bought the consensus that this would hugely bolster Trump’s chances.In hindsight, I’m not sure it will have any effect at all. Polls conducted since haven’t shown Trump faring any better, and I feel like it will seem like ancient history by November. Trump wasn’t seriously injured, his re-appearance at the RNC after the event was lackluster, and the conservative subculture has already taken the energy out of it and made it uncool (their ability to do this to everything is quite something). Trump actually made a point of not using it to go on the offensive against the left, the media, or the deep state. Instead, he used the moment to push a message of ‘unity’, which translated to a 90 minute stump speech which has already been forgotten.

How Trump Can Still Win

By now, I think I’ve made it clear that the prospects for a Trump victory are very bleak, but that’s not to say he can’t win. There is still a long way to go until the election.

Given everything I have explained here about the demographics of the election, there is one clear path that stands out for Trump. It’s not complicated; in fact, it’s the same strategy that he used to win in 2016.

The election will be decided by who can get more of their demographic out to vote. Harris has recruited thousands of volunteers, raised hundreds of millions; she will win the Black vote. The Trump campaign can face up to this, drop the fantasy of a ‘Blexit’, find the populist White voters who are currently checked out, and focus on getting them to vote for Trump. Only 55% of non-college-graduate whites bothered to vote in 2020. If just 60% did, Trump would have won.

Recall how small the margins of victory were for Trump in swing-states in 2016. He had similarly small margins of defeat in 2020. Now consider that of the crucial non-college-educated White populists swinging between Democrat and Republican deciding these states, half are not even voting.

Brexit would not have passed without the Brexit campaign successfully targeting the biggest demographic of all — non-voters. These voters tend to be populist in their thinking, they don’t see either the “woke left” or the establishment right as representing their concerns. The Brexit campaign realised they could form a powerful protest vote bloc, and successfully won 2.8 million of them to their side.

The path to a Trump victory is staring Republicans in the face, but they would rather focus their energy on the fantasy of a multiracial coalition turning on the Democrats. Imagine if Republicans focused on beating Democrats at their own game, registered tens of thousands of non-college-educated Whites to vote in swing states, and even bussed them directly to the polls? This is an easy way to access tens of thousands of votes, and the only obstacle is the deep aversion to being seen to be courting White people.

We know what White populists want: immigration restriction, protectionism, affordable healthcare, a more fair redistribution of wealth; they still lean conservative in their social values but support more socialist economic policies. In short, they want nationalism. They dislike both parties. They liked when Trump seemed like an outsider challenging the GOP in 2016.

Trump could listen to his better instincts and campaign more like he did in 2016. The focus should be on crime and immigration, where Harris is weak, and on an economic nationalism that Trump dropped after becoming President. But most of these would-be voters aren’t very ideological. What matters is being a challenge to the elites, and the tribulations Trump has experienced over the past year have put him in a good position to embody that. JD Vance could come good as a voice of anger for a part of America that feels forgotten by the elites.

That is Trump’s path to victory in 2024 — not unity, but vengeance. And vengeance on behalf of America’s most reviled demographic: poor Whites. The last eight years make me believe it is unlikely the Trump campaign will embrace this. That’s why I believe this election is still the Democrats’ to lose.

(Republished from Substack by permission of author or representative)