Aug 9, 2025 06:17 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 9, 2025 06:30 PM by C C.)
While certainly deserving brownie points for at least trying, at the same time there's no getting around that "ending the Russo-Ukrainian War" glared as a circa half-year folly of the administration. It may still continue to be that, if Trump returns to merely being vexed by Putin lying to him, and relaxes the tariff grip around India's throat, and whatever else due to Putin's future deceits. Also, a tad reminiscent of when Truman and Stalin first met. Truman briefly held the view that Stalin was an okay guy that he could work with. While Stalin privately expressed a (short-lived?) optimistic opinion that Truman was an idiot yokel amenable to manipulation. (Why Trump-Putin talks unlikely to bring rapid end to Ukraine war)
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Why Trump's stance on Ukraine has changed (Part 2)
https://youtu.be/NySVg5Xtr80
VIDEO EXCERPTS: [Trump] feels he has to be the smartest person in the room on any given topic. [...] After he comes back into power, he no longer has a cadre of several hundred people behind him to help him make policy. He just has a handful of people who, for their own personal reasons, have chosen to hook up. ... [Trump] basically stripped it of expertise, so that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong.
And what that meant is for the first six months, he was wrong a lot as regards Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war. [...] He finally decided that Steve Witkoff, who had been his frontman, really didn’t know what he was doing. And that was because Steve Witkoff really didn’t know what he was doing.
And so Trump took it over directly [...] he takes over the negotiations himself. So that puts Putin in a position where he’s lying to Trump’s face repeatedly, and according to Trump’s own words, on six different occasions...
[...] The first five times this happened. Trump seemed annoyed ... But the sixth time, Melania Trump called Donald Trump about it, and that apparently changed his mind. Melania Trump was not born in the United States. She was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain...
So she, among Trump’s inner circle now, is the most aware of international relations [...] and she’s the only one who can’t be fired. ... what she has done very successfully is to convince Donald Trump that he was being played, that he was being lied to, and that he was being made to look quite unintelligent.
And so a few weeks ago, Trump gave Vladimir Putin a 50-day deadline to change policy. And in the last 48 hours, Trump has said, I’m not going to give him 50 days because nothing’s changing and nothing will change. And that’s part of the problem with this conflict. Putin accurately sees the Ukraine war as the beginning of Russia’s last best chance to survive this century.
From the Russian point of view, and I think the correct, if they cannot conquer all of these countries, not just Ukraine, the other 15 as well, Russia will vanish from the Earth before 2100 based on how the war goes, potentially a lot faster. So there can be no peace treaty that the Russians can agree to that they will enforce....
Peter Zeihan: Geopolitics ... https://youtu.be/NySVg5Xtr80
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NySVg5Xtr80
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Why Trump's stance on Ukraine has changed (Part 2)
https://youtu.be/NySVg5Xtr80
VIDEO EXCERPTS: [Trump] feels he has to be the smartest person in the room on any given topic. [...] After he comes back into power, he no longer has a cadre of several hundred people behind him to help him make policy. He just has a handful of people who, for their own personal reasons, have chosen to hook up. ... [Trump] basically stripped it of expertise, so that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong.
And what that meant is for the first six months, he was wrong a lot as regards Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war. [...] He finally decided that Steve Witkoff, who had been his frontman, really didn’t know what he was doing. And that was because Steve Witkoff really didn’t know what he was doing.
And so Trump took it over directly [...] he takes over the negotiations himself. So that puts Putin in a position where he’s lying to Trump’s face repeatedly, and according to Trump’s own words, on six different occasions...
[...] The first five times this happened. Trump seemed annoyed ... But the sixth time, Melania Trump called Donald Trump about it, and that apparently changed his mind. Melania Trump was not born in the United States. She was born on the other side of the Iron Curtain...
So she, among Trump’s inner circle now, is the most aware of international relations [...] and she’s the only one who can’t be fired. ... what she has done very successfully is to convince Donald Trump that he was being played, that he was being lied to, and that he was being made to look quite unintelligent.
And so a few weeks ago, Trump gave Vladimir Putin a 50-day deadline to change policy. And in the last 48 hours, Trump has said, I’m not going to give him 50 days because nothing’s changing and nothing will change. And that’s part of the problem with this conflict. Putin accurately sees the Ukraine war as the beginning of Russia’s last best chance to survive this century.
From the Russian point of view, and I think the correct, if they cannot conquer all of these countries, not just Ukraine, the other 15 as well, Russia will vanish from the Earth before 2100 based on how the war goes, potentially a lot faster. So there can be no peace treaty that the Russians can agree to that they will enforce....
Peter Zeihan: Geopolitics ... https://youtu.be/NySVg5Xtr80