Russia and the GOP Have the Same Goal for America - Chaos - Or How We Know Who'll Win the American Election - Trump, No. Clinton, No. Putin, Of Course.

Republican Congressional leaders have been pretty outspoken about one thing - if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, they plan on making the gridlock that beset the Obama administration even worse, much worse. They will plunge the government and, to some extent the country itself, into chaos.

Perhaps not coincidentally that's an agenda shared with Russian strongman, Vlad Putin. From Foreign Policy:

The desired result in this election has not necessarily been the presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, he seems to them to be rather disposable. The mission is sowing disruption, chaos. And in doing that, Putin will have accomplished something for himself, regardless of who wins next week: a deeply fractured American system, once held up as a shining alternative to Moscow’s style of power, now tarnished beyond recognition.

Even more importantly, Putin will have shown himself to be able to project power far beyond where anyone would have suspected. It’s no longer just in his backyard, like in Georgia and Ukraine — not even in the Middle East. Putin is now able to bring his tactics of asymmetric warfare deep into the belly of his greatest foe, the world’s last superpower. “Putin wants to show himself as a player who can’t be forced to do what America wants and that he can do what he needs, whether the others like it or not,” says independent political analyst Masha Lipman. “Today, everyone understands that you might not like Russia, you might hate it, you might be scared of it, you might want to punish it, but you can’t do anything about it. It can do what it wants."

“If Trump wins, of course they’ll drink champagne in the Kremlin, but not for long,” says former Putin advisor and political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky. “Then they’ll realize that nothing is resolved and that the election of Trump will lead to more chaos. But that’s what we’re selling — chaos.”

If Clinton wins, Putin won’t mind that he’ll be dealing with a president who had to climb over a mountain of Kremlin propaganda and interference to get to the White House. Bitter? Fine. But at least you’ll know that we’re stronger than you thought. “How can it be a regional power if it was the central topic of the third debate?” Markov asks.

“It doesn’t matter who’s president,” Lipman says. “Any kind of turmoil or internal split that’s hard to overcome, that is good for Russia. If your powerful opponent is disabled from within, it works to your advantage.” It also greatly undermines a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, one that has driven Putin to distraction: democracy promotion and the idea that striving toward American values is a force for positive change in the world. “‘They said our elections are no good, but look at their elections, look at this much-touted democracy,’” Lipman says of the Russian view. “That is much more important than a single person.