There's a Reason They Called it MAD.

They were all the rage in my day. Tactical nuclear weapons, mini-nukes, or "those little bags of instant sunshine."

Somewhere around here I've got a then-"secret" field manual laying out how these weapons were to be used in the event of a massive Soviet invasion of western Europe.  All eyes were on the Fulda Gap, two corridors through which it was expected a flood of Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks would pour into the central German plain and then on to the English Channel.  The idea was that those corridors provided convenient "choke points" where massed Soviet tanks and vehicles might be eliminated with tactical nukes delivered by NATO fighters including Canada's CF-104 Starfighters.

It was a dangerous gambit. There were so many unknowns. Would it encourage the Soviets to use similar weapons to annihilate NATO bases and our forces in the field?  Might an exchange of low-yield nukes escalate into a full-blown, civilization ending exchange of ICBM volleys?  The theory, as I understood it at the time, was a hope that using nukes to block a Soviet surprise attack would buy both sides two, maybe even three days to cool down and negotiate some way out of Armageddon.

With time the luster of tactical nuclear weapons faded.  Sure there were still arsenals of B-61 gravity bombs (above) scattered about. There still are. Most of the other stuff - the atomic cannon, the nuclear depth charge, that sort of thing has gone.

That sleeping giant is stirring again and, in a world already facing a variety of potentially existential threats, it does feel like "piling on."



Russia, meanwhile, is fielding new nuclear delivery systems of its own.  Among them are a robotic nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine that could travel very deep, very fast, over very long-ranges, navigating its way into America's coastal ports and naval bases. There's also, according to Putin, a nuclear powered, nuclear armed cruise missile. There's a new nuclear submarine-launched Russian missile and Putin has just pledged to develop a new intermediate-range nuclear missile. How does that grab ya?

Fortunately we've got a very rational, very stable genius in the White House. Thank God and the United States of America for that.

Living With Trump in the Age of Entropy. We Have to Figure This Out and Soon.

The Washington Post carried this message of warning from Steve Bannon in February, 2017:

Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order. 

“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and opposition forces. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.” 

Bannon says that the post-World War II political and economic consensus is failing and should be replaced with a system that empowers ordinary people over coastal elites and international institutions.

Bannon's warning came to mind following the fractious G7 meeting in Quebec over the weekend. This too seems to be borne out in an analysis piece in Foreign Policy, "The West Will Die So That Trump Can Win."

...it is not surprising that a U.S. administration no longer sees an overriding political need to restrain itself from pushing allies into making trade concessions. The Soviet Union no longer exists. To the extent that the administration’s detractors argue that its demands are unreasonable, or that the United States has bigger fish to fry — like maintaining solidarity in the face of Russian aggression — Trump’s response would presumably be twofold. First, a better deal is always better — “reasonable” is for chumps. Second, if geopolitics stand in the way of the United States getting better trade deals, then geopolitics should give way. Americans don’t care about Crimea; they don’t care about the abstractions of democracy. They care about winning trade wars. 

To the extent that these two things are true, at least to the average American, Canada and the EU have a bigger problem than they realize. Their strategy at the moment, reflected in tempered responses to Trump, is to wait him out — on the assumption that he will be gone in two and a half years, or less, and that the United States will then go back to normal. But Trump may be the new normal — not in the sense that future presidents will be as crude and loose with the facts, but in the sense that they, reacting to a seismic shift in U.S. public sentiment, will no longer recognize the constraints of solidarity with fellow free-market democracies. Those days are, perhaps, as Bolton would say, “no more.”

In the same issue, Daniel Sargent writes of, "The Slow Rise and Sudden Fall of the G7."

The end times have come and gone for the West over 70-odd years, but it is difficult these days, to escape the sensation that the dusk really is falling.

...After showing up late and interrupting a forum on gender equality, President Donald Trump scowled his way through sessions before departing early for Singapore. And as he headed out, Trump insulted his host and neighbor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and retracted his signature from the G-7’s communique, ending a 42-year run of choreographed collegiality. Then, over the past 24 hours, Trump has showcased his preference for the company of a callow despot, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, over engagement with what used to be considered America’s closest allies and peers.

...On the most urgent dilemmas of our times — economic inequality, sustainable development, and the looming peril of ecological catastrophe — the G-7 has been irrelevant. The G-7 has not evolved into a directorate capable of offsetting a historic slippage in U.S. hegemonic capabilities, as political scientists like Robert Keohane once hoped it might. To call Donald Trump’s Canadian temper tantrum an assault on the West’s governing framework is to overstate, by a mile, the G-7’s institutional significance. 

Trump’s assault is no death knell; as a project in global leadership, the G-7 was already dead. Its supersession by the G-20 during the global financial crisis confirmed its obsolescence as a framework for governance. The G20, not the G7, functioned as the forum for the coordination of fiscal stimulus efforts in the nadir of 2009. The same goes for the current GDP data. In 1980, the G-7 countries constituted about 51 percent of global production on a purchasing power parity basis; today, the G-7 claims just over 30 percent. The G-7 can no longer maintain a plausible pretension to run the world — it has become a niche organization. 

And herein lies the real significance — and the real tragedy — of Trump’s petulant behavior. The point of the G-7, as Schmidt, Pompidou, and Ford all grasped, was to foster unity in a historical phase when geopolitical trends were corroding the West. Dialogue on common economic problems, all hoped, would offer an alternative source of cohesion. Or, as Kissinger explained in 1975: “The trick in the world now is to use economics to build a world political structure. 

...Today, it is the sense of unity the G-7 has cultivated that is imperiled. Configurations of power and interest are an insufficient basis for durable order among nations, as diplomatic historians well understand. The West cohered after 1945 not only because of shared enmities but also because its elites cultivated sociability and common values. From the Bilderberg Group to the Trilateral Commission, sociability proved both a source of cohesion and a salve for disagreements. 

Functioning at the most elite level of all, the G-7 nurtured unity among the world’s liberal democracies through economic crises and geopolitical transition. Its debasing by a feckless U.S. president will serve only to tear the West’s fraying bonds of commonality still further asunder. In Beijing and in Moscow, the West’s rivals are cheering.

If Trump is not simply a perverse aberration but the "new normal" of the United States, it seems foolish, even reckless, for Ottawa to imperil Canada by pretending that it's still business as usual.

Maybe there is, finally, a real "Axis of Evil." Maybe there is an emerging alliance of despotism, strongman rule that see lesser, weaker nations as prey for the picking. Look at the leaders Trump is so obviously drawn to - Putin, Xi, Kim, the House of Saud, Erdogan, Orban - just about every murderous thug on the planet.

Don't forget it wasn't that long ago that another gang of thugs sought to carve up the nations of the world among themselves. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the government of the Sun God, Emperor Hirohito. Why should today's thugs be much different?

The world today is vastly different than the world of the 1930s. It is a world that is massively overpopulated; rapaciously consumptive and rapidly running out of resources of all descriptions; and just beginning to become battered by the early onset impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. It would not be rash to think of it as pre-dystopian.

Recently Britain's prestigious think tank, Chatham House, warned that Trump is intent on taking down the World Trade Organization, a precursor to creating a world without rules in which the large economies can pillage lesser economies.

In a world where there are no internationally predictable rules, most countries faced with protectionist actions, crudely, have two options – retaliate or concede. If they choose to retaliate, the optimal strategy is to cause enough pain to the political leadership of the protectionist country that they will back down. This is the course of action that the EU and China have so far taken, with the hope that powerful political constituencies in the US will successfully lobby the administration to change course. 

However, this can only be effective for large economies that the US exports to significantly. For smaller countries without significant leverage, the alternative is to concede and try to negotiate a favourable settlement, which will still be asymmetrical.

In 2014, before Trump declared he was running for president, political scientist R. Schweller described how the world had already embarked on an "age of entropy."

It increasingly seems that the world will no longer have a single superpower, or group of superpowers, that brings order to international politics. Instead, it will have a variety of powers -- including nations, multinational corporations, ideological movements, global crime and terror groups, and human rights organizations -- jockeying with each other, mostly unsuccessfully, to achieve their goals. International politics is transforming from a system anchored in predictable, and relatively constant, principles to a system that is, if not inherently unknowable, far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy. 

Entropy is a scientific concept that measures disorder: the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. And disorder is precisely what will characterize the future of international politics. In this leaderless world, threats are much more likely to be cold than hot; danger will come less frequently in the form of shooting wars among great powers than diffuse disagreements over geopolitical, monetary, trade, and environmental issues. Problems and crises will arise more frequently and, when they do, will be resolved less cooperatively.

During the Occupy movement there were many warnings about America falling into class warfare. That prompted billionaire investor, Warren Buffet, that America had already gone through a class war and his class, the wealthiest, had won it. The poor and the working class, by the time they woke up, they had already lost.

Perhaps what we should be focusing now is on whether our government, the Trudeau Liberals, have the measure of these seismic shifts in the world order. Do they understand the uncertainties we face and our vulnerabilities? Why do they keep acting as though we're still in the 80s? Why do they keep dreaming that Donald Trump could ever be our friend?

There is no proof that Donald Trump is working for Vlad Putin but Obama's national security advisor, Susan Rice, writes that Putin couldn't have wished for a better stooge.

Mr. Putin’s objectives are plain: to restore Russia to global greatness at the expense of the United States and to divide Europe by weakening NATO and the European Union. In Mr. Putin’s zero-sum calculus, when the United States and Europe founder, Russia benefits. The Russian leader knows that America’s global power rests not only on our military and economic might but also on our unrivaled network of alliances from Europe to Asia. For some seven decades, our alliances have ensured that America’s strength and influence are magnified. Accordingly, Mr. Putin seeks to drive wedges between the United States and its closest partners, to strain and ultimately rupture its alliances.

If Mr. Putin were calling the shots, he would ensure that America’s reliability is doubted, its commitments broken, its values debased and its image tarnished. He would advise the new president to take a series of steps to advance those aims:

First, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade agreement the United States negotiated to bolster its economic and strategic position in the Pacific, at the expense of China (and Russia). Then, pull out of the Paris climate agreement, becoming the only country in the world absent from this landmark accord.

Second, criticize NATO and cast doubt on America’s willingness to defend its allies on the grounds that they haven’t paid their bills (when that’s not how NATO works). Simultaneously, corrode the European Union by: lauding Brexit; sending Stephen Bannon to stoke European anti-establishment movements; and undermining Europe’s most powerful country, Germany, most recently through installing a right-wing flamethrower as ambassador.

Third, for the coup de grâce: start a trade war with our closest allies. Impose steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union with the threat of auto tariffs to follow so that, according to reputable economists, both the United States and its allies’ economies will suffer. Justify the penalties on the preposterous grounds that allies threaten United States national security. Do so after withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, following months of stringing our European partners along with the hope that we might agree to augment aspects of the pact. Then threaten sanctions on European companies for abiding by the deal, which has worked as intended.

...Finally, for completeness, Mr. Putin might encourage the president to ensure that countries large and small revile America’s leadership, suggesting he: disparage African nations and Haiti with a vulgarity; call Latin American migrants rapists and criminals; halt most refugee admissions; ban Muslims from several countries from entering the United States; restrict legal immigration; and separate children from their parents at the border.

With the sum of these actions, President Trump has deeply angered our closest allies and offended almost every member of the international community, except Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — and Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is ascendant in the Middle East. The European Union is reeling — with Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Hungary now led by populist nationalists who embrace Mr. Putin and wish to terminate sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. NATO’s unity is similarly strained, provoking concern about its collective will to counter any new Russian aggression.

...America stands alone, weakened and distrusted. Without United States leadership, the G-7 can accomplish little. And, when next we need our allies to rally to fight terrorists, place sanctions against North Korea, combat a pandemic or check China and Russia, will they join with us after we have so disrespected them?

Taking Democracy for Granted. Are We On This Road Too?

Andrew Sullivan has a thought-provoking essay in New York Magazine about how we're killing off liberal democracy and not just in Poland or Hungary or the United States either.

This elite condescension toward challenges to their power stems, philosopher John Gray recently argued, from a fundamental and demonstrably false assumption that liberal democracy and a transnational world order are the ultimate end points of history. The narrative was set in 1989 and, for elites, it cannot be relinquished now. What we’re witnessing, with Trump, Putin, and Xi, is just a detour, liberal democrats tell themselves, before normal service resumes. 

But “what if we were wrong?” as Obama asked in the wake of Trump’s victory, according to Ben Rhodes’s new memoir of the White House years. “Maybe we pushed too far.” You think? A ruinous war, a devastating recession, trade policies that wiped out so many communities, soaring debt, and wage stagnation: Not a great record for the liberal democratic elites, is it?

And this record is why the most probable future is not about liberal democracy and internationalism, but about populist nationalism, with a distinctly “strongman” flavor.  

...the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea. 

And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.

...Trump knows that most Americans are not going to read the fact-checks. And his pitch is so relentless, his ballsmanship so huge, that, in the end, the path of least resistance seems the most practical response. Even now, his repeated, unfounded calumnies against the Mueller inquiry, the Justice Department, and the FBI are working. Belief that Mueller is partisan is growing; confidence in the investigation has sunk; Trump has almost succeeded in making Russia’s intervention in the 2016 elections seem as if it were designed to support Hillary. A majority still hasn’t bought this. But, with a GOP “kinda taking a nap somewhere,” when it isn’t echoing every single lie and delusion of the Supreme Leader, the relentless propaganda is having an effect. Unless Mueller has evidence so astounding that even Sean Hannity draws a breath, the special-counsel probe could also be a political winner for Trump. If he’s impeached, barring an economic collapse, he won’t be convicted in a million years, and his reelection, once unthinkable, now has to be seen as likely. 

In the end, most people just give in to the lie completely. It’s easier than constantly resisting a malignant, relentless narcissist. Or you tune out. It’s perfectly understandable. Covering this degeneration for the last year and a half has stressed me beyond any expectation. I may be missing a looming, massive tide for the Democrats this fall, and I hope I am. But it is perfectly possible that we will soon be entering the next phase of Trump: when the lie becomes the truth entirely.

Where There's Smoke... There's Wilbur

It's like dragging up a bucket of seawater and looking at all the tiny little critters swimming around inside. You're only getting the smallest of looks, a bare peep, into what's in the sea. A microcosm if you will.

The bucket of seawater in this case is being called the Paradise Papers, a massive media investigation into just two "offshore service providers and 19 tax haven's company registries." There are a bunch of critters, some of them tax cheats, who are being identified including Justin Trudeau's confidante and chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman.  Lorne has the rundown on Bronfman, here.

There's another, perhaps more interesting name, being splashed onto the pages of The Guardian, Wilbur Ross, Trump's commerce secretary, and it touches on the secretary's active business dealings with Vlad Putin's son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, the husband of Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova.

Leaked documents and public filings show Ross holds a stake in a shipping company, Navigator, through a chain of offshore investments. Navigator operates a lucrative partnership with Sibur, a Russian gas company part-owned by Kirill Shamalov.

...

Analysts said the arrangement was troubling. Daniel Fried, an assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under George W Bush, said Ross’s connection to “cronies of Putin” threatened to undermine US sanctions.

“I don’t understand why anybody would decide to maintain this kind of relationship going into a senior government position,” he said. “What is he thinking?”

...

The disclosures come as inquiries intensify into Russian interference with the 2016 US election. Congress and Robert Mueller, the special counsel, are investigating possible collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Moscow. Ross has dismissed claims of collusion as “rumour and innuendo”.

The involvement of Ross and Shamalov in the shipping venture dates back to 2011. That year, Ross’s investment firm, WL Ross, began buying into Navigator with an investment that gave him two seats on the company’s board. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Shamalov began investing in Sibur, which was formerly state owned.

By January 2012, having built up his holding in the Russian company, Shamalov, then 29, was made its deputy chairman. That summer, WL Ross took control of Navigator by buying a further $110m stake from the collapsed Lehman Brothers bank.

Shamalov is the son of Nikolai Shamalov, one of Putin’s oldest friends from St Petersburg, where Putin worked in the mayor’s office. He married Katerina in a secret ceremony in February 2013.

Later that year, two ships from Ross’s company began transporting liquefied gas out of Russia for Putin’s son-in-law’s firm under a decade-long contract initially worth $226m.

Of greater interest is Wilbur's relationship to the Kremlin through his ownership interest in the major Cypriot bank, the Bank of Cyprus, where he served as vice-chairman. Cyprus is considered the first stop in the laundering of dirty money from Russia. It's alleged Paul Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars in rubles through Cyprus before transiting through Deutsche Bank en route to a new life as real estate and other investments in the US.

Back in March, The Guardian took a look at Wilbur's dealings with Moscow while at the Bank of Cyprus. 

In 2015, while [Ross] served as vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the bank’s Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who had ties to both the Russian president and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. At the time, Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Avetisyan had earlier been selected by Putin to head a new business branch of the Russian president’s strategic initiative agency, which was tasked with improving business and government ties.

Avetisyan’s business partner, Oleg Gref, is the son of Herman Gref, Sberbank’s chief executive officer, and their consultancy has served as a “partner” to Sberbank, according to their website. Ross had described the Russian businesses – including 120 bank branches in Russia – as being worth “hundreds of millions of euros” in 2014 but they were sold with other assets to Avetisyan for €7m (£6m).

Ross has not been accused of wrongdoing and there is no indication the Russian deal violated US or EU sanctions. Ross resigned from the Bank of Cyprus board after he was confirmed as commerce secretary last month.

...

In 2014, the Bank of Cyprus was still considered to be in a precarious state following a dramatic €10bn rescue of Cyprus’s banking sector by the ECB and the IMF. Under the terms of the deal, many of the bank’s wealthy Russian deposit holders lost their cash and became shareholders in the bank.

Ross, who had made billions of dollars years earlier by betting on bankrupt steel mills, was known for taking risky bets. But his decision to inject €400m into the bank with other investors encompassed a different kind of risk. It put him at the centre of the biggest financial institution in a country that was widely considered to be a tax haven for Russian oligarchs, even as the US and EU were imposing sanctions on Russia. In 2014, the year he made his investment, the US State Department considered Cyprus an area of “primary concern” for money laundering (pdf), according to its official assessment.

Meanwhile, the Paradise Papers scandal seems to have Ross working overtime to distance himself from the Russians and not very convincingly.

Rockas, Ross’s press secretary, tried to distance Ross from the Sibur deal with a series of statements that were contradicted by other sources. He said the Navigator-Sibur deal was signed in February 2012, before Ross joined the Navigator board. But Sibur’s annual report for that year said the deal was signed in March.

Rockas said Ross did not join Navigator’s board until 31 March 2012. But a press release filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on 2 March that year said Ross was by then already on the board. In ethics forms filed this year, Ross estimated that his start date had been January 2012.

Rockas said: “No funds managed by WL Ross & Co ever owned a majority of Navigator shares.” But a press release issued by the company in August 2012 was titled “WL Ross Agrees To Acquire Majority Stake In Navigator”.

Navigator vessels also carried out extensive business with the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, records show, at a time when Venezuela’s government was cracking down on opposition. Trump imposed sanctions on PDVSA in August.

Rockas said Ross “has been generally supportive of the administration’s sanctions of Russian and Venezuelan entities.” He said Ross had never met Shamalov, Timchenko or Mikhelson.

It raises the question of why so many Trump administration principals have such close financial ties to Russian companies, Russian oligarchs, even Putin himself. Both Paul Manafort and Wilbur Ross were operating in Cyprus during the same period, Cyprus the first link in the money laundering trail leading out of Russia. Ross who was the vice-chairman of the Bank of Cyprus resigning only once he was confirmed to his appointment as Trump's commerce secretary.

What I want to know now is what does Robert Mueller know.

I Hope Bob Mueller Has a Sense of Humour

There are some things that just get better with age. That includes scandals. They need time to soak and simmer. Yesterday it was Manafort (plus one) and Papadopoulos.

Trump began yesterday running for cover, focused on distancing himself from Paul Manafort. His former campaign manager's foibles had nothing to do with Trump or his presidential campaign. Besides it all was old news by the time Trump decided to run. It was unconvincing but probably was just what Trump's base wanted to hear.

The George Papadopoulos guilty plea, well that caught Trump off guard. He had to hold fire until he could work out what to say. Today the Mango Mussolini lashed back, calling Papadopoulos a "liar." Hard to argue that one. The guy did plead guilty to lying to FBI investigators. He's a confessed liar. Only Trump needs to maintain that everything Papadopoulos told the FBI after he was caught lying, that's the real lie. Talk about reed thin.

Curiously enough the Russians got into it too. A Russian government spokesperson is arguing that Mueller's case is "cooked up."   Really, how so?


...the spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, pointed out that the 31-page indictment wrongly describes Yulia Tymoshenko as a former president of Ukraine.

In fact, Tymoshenko twice served as the country's prime minister, before being jailed in 2011 on embezzlement charges that the U.S. and others said were politically motivated.

"I liked a lot the bit that, it turns out, according to the recent findings of American enforcers, the Ukrainian president before [Viktor] Yanukovych was Yulia Tymoshenko," Zakharova told the state-owned Russia 1 television station Monday. "We did not know that, but there you go."

She suggested that the mistake undermined the rest of the indictment.

"This is a very important moment showing the way how, once again, this document had been made, cooked up," Zakharova added. "You understand when you talk about serious investigation one cannot allow things like that."

Why am I suddenly thinking Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha? Why did Team Putin even decide to air such a stupid argument?

If this is what we're getting on Day 2 you can only imagine what awaits in the coming weeks as more information comes out of the investigation. It does sound as though Mueller has Putin as rattled as Trump.

There's plenty of new speculation that Papadopoulos, described by the FBI as a "proactive cooperator" probably spent a good bit of time since July meeting with Trump's people while wearing a wire.

Harry Litman, a former US attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in the New York Times that Papadopoulos' guilty plea is far more immediately ominous to the president and his inner circle than the charges against Manafort and Gates.

A paragraph in the plea agreement indicates that Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 5 to lying to the FBI about his contact with the professor and the plea was sealed so that he could act as a "proactive cooperator".

"The meaning of that phrase is unclear," Litman wrote. "But one nerve-racking possible implication is that Mr Papadopoulos has recently worn a wire in conversations with other former campaign officials. This will surely have members of Mr Trump's inner circle agonising about the possibility and wondering who else might have been similarly cooperating with the investigation."

Former public defender and professor Seth Abramson explained on Twitter why the term "proactive cooperator" is probably bad news for others in Trump's orbit.

"Prosecutors often require a defendant to perform cooperative services for the government well in advance of his or her formal plea," he tweeted.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara, who Trump fired earlier this year, told Politico Magazine: "Hard to tell, but the George Papadopoulos guilty plea tells us (a) Mueller is moving fast (b) the Mueller team keeps secrets well (c) more charges should be expected and (d) this team takes obstruction and lying very, very seriously. That should be of concern to some people."

There's a powerful psychological game in play here and, providing you're the one asking rather than answering the questions, it can be immensely fun to play.

So Much for Democracy

We now know that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by well more than 2.5-million ballots. Perhaps as many ballots again were not counted due to Republican efforts to disqualify eligible voters. - Strike One.

We now know that investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency determined that Russia meddled in the election by leaking Democratic emails to Assange's WikiLeaks that then spread the damaging material into the election campaigns. - Strike Two.

Then there was the FBI director's curious announcement, less than two weeks before voting day, of yet another criminal investigation into Clinton's emails. Just a few days before the vote the director, Comey, cleared Mrs. Clinton only the damage was done. - Strike Three.

Now it's suggested that the FBI knew about Russia's skulduggery, knew that the Russians also had Republican emails that they were withholding, but said nothing. Outgoing senate minority leader Harry Reid argues that Comey was every bit as bent as J. Edgar Hoover. - Strike Four???

Meanwhile Trump hasn't even waited for his inauguration to tell the Gullibillies who were stupid enough to vote for him that all those election promises that got them so hot and bothered - well that was just malarkey to suck them in. That swamp? It stays, in fact it's going to be worse than ever. "Lock her up" Hillary? Hey, he was only screwin' with ya. - Strike Five.

Then there's the unhinged, unwashed horde who did support Trump while deep in an alternate reality.


Over the course of the campaign we found there was a cult like aspect to Trump's support, where any idea he put forth a substantial share of his supporters would go along with. We see that trend continuing post election. 60% of Trump voters think that Hillary Clinton received millions of illegal votes to only 18% who disagree with that concept and 22% who aren't sure either way.

A couple other findings related to the vote in this year's election:

-40% of Trump voters insist that he won the national popular vote to only 49% who grant that Clinton won it and 11% who aren't sure.

-Only 53% of Trump voters think that California's votes should be allowed to count in the national popular vote. 29% don't think they should be allowed to count, and another 18% are unsure.

There's been a lot of attention to the way fake news has spread and been believed especially by Trump supporters and that's borne out in our polling:

-73% of Trump voters think that George Soros is paying protesters against Trump to only 6% who think that's not true, and 21% who aren't sure one way or the other. (I personally had to explain to my Grandmother that this wasn't true a few weeks ag0 after someone sent her an e-mail about it.)

-14% of Trump supporters [and Trump's pick for national security advisor] think Hillary Clinton is connected to a child sex ring run out of a Washington DC pizzeria. Another 32% aren't sure one way or another, much as the North Carolinian who went to Washington to check it out last weekend said was the case for him. Only 54% of Trump voters expressly say they don't think #Pizzagate is real.

There's also been a lot of discussion recently about how we might be in a post-fact world and we see some evidence of that coming through in our polling:

-67% of Trump voters say that unemployment increased during the Obama administration, to only 20% who say it decreased.

-Only 41% of Trump voters say that the stock market went up during the Obama administration. 39% say it went down, and another 19% say they're not sure.

The research plainly shows that a good many Trump supporters were mentally fogged in. They are Gullibillies in the most pejorative sense of the term. Utterly misled, incapable of properly exercising their democratic franchise. - Strike Six.

This, then, is beyond argument the least legitimate government in American history and in the postwar western world. The whole thing is a sham built on layer upon layer of deceit and contrivance by Trump, his backers, a foreign power, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Captain Exxon for Secretary of State

The New York Times is reporting that Trump has chosen Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to serve as his secretary of state. Between the one-man wrecking crew Trump has chosen to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and Tillerson as state secretary, plus a deranged general at National Security and three Goldman Sachs alumni in key financial posts, the swamp is back and stronger than ever.

Tillerson has been a fierce defender of fracking except for one exception - the area around his own home, this humble casa:

Like Trump and his handpicked lunatic, Flynn, Tillerson is also buddies with Vlad Putin. In 2013, Putin awarded Tillerson Russia's Order of Friendship.

Oh yeah, the NYT also mentioned that hyper-bellicose John R. Bolton from the Bush/Cheney regime is being considered for deputy secretary of state. Bolton has spent countless hours perfecting his two looks - the grimace and the scowl.

How the Leader of the Free World Became the Leader of the Global Right Wing.

AmeriKa's president, Donald Trump, will not be the leader of the free world. He will, however, be the leader of the global right wing. Across Europe, the radical right is embracing the next US leader as one of their own. Donald Trump validates their ugly bigotry, racism and xenophobia. He is one of them. It's no accident that he's also warmly received by the radical right Netanyahu government in Israel.

In the Middle East, the strongman thugs who rule with iron fists in the post-Arab Spring era couldn't be happier.

He will be a bit of both but radically different, too, predicts Theodore Karasik, a senior adviser with the Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, who has discussed the future of the region with Trump’s advisers in recent months. Trump’s chief priority, he said, will be to fight the Islamic State, while outsourcing the rest of the region’s security to Russia and to Arab states.

Words like “moderate” and “democracy” won’t feature in a Trump administration’s Middle East vocabulary, he added. “We are now engaged in realpolitik.”

For the region’s strongmen, most of whom had fraught relations with the Obama administration, that is welcome news. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyep Erdogan and Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi have hailed Trump’s election as a chance to reset their badly frayed relationships with Washington.

Hold onto your hats. With ideology this rancid driving AmeriKa's foreign and military policy, we could be in for a very sharp and wild ride.

What? Putin Wasn't the Only One Who Noticed?

The damage is done. This presidential election campaign has left America's reputation in tatters around the world. At this point it doesn't even matter who wins.

Harvard professor, Stephen Walt, writes in Foreign Policy that the damage Trump has inflicted on America isn't going away.

That sense of relief [should Clinton win] may be short-lived, however, because Trump’s candidacy and the broader condition of American politics have already done considerable damage to America’s image overseas. If you talk to foreigners a lot (it’s part of my job), you mostly hear repeated expressions of bewilderment: they find the Trump phenomenon as hard to understand as America’s fondness for guns. The French newspaper Liberation called him the “American Nightmare,” and a diverse array of foreign media outlets offer similar appraisals. Or as the New York Daily News headlined in March: “As [Trump] sinks lower, he does lasting harm to America’s image in the world.”

"To make matters worse, the Trump campaign has revealed that a fair number of Americans seem to like the Donald’s disdainful and bigoted views of Muslims, Mexicans, and most U.S. allies. It can’t be encouraging for the citizens of other countries to discover that a non-trivial chunk of the American body politic is xenophobic, racist, protectionist, and ill-informed. That may always have been true, but it took the Trump campaign to put it up in bright lights."

"Alas, the problem isn’t just the campaign. The recurring dysfunctions at both federal and state levels reinforce the growing sense that something has gone badly awry with America’s other political institutions. Congress can’t pass budgets or ratify trade agreements, won’t even bother to hold hearings on Supreme Court nominees, won’t vote either to authorize the use of force or to withhold authorization, won’t conduct genuine oversight of the intelligence community, and won’t perform any of the other key functions the Founding Fathers designated for them. Instead, representatives and senators spend more time “dialing for (campaign) dollars” than they do legislating, while the rascals most responsible for all this obstructionism keep getting reelected. Several U.S. states are flirting with bankruptcy; gerrymandering is endemic; media outlets spew fact-free bile on a daily basis; and the country’s existing institutions seem incapable of undertaking clear, obvious, and farsighted initiatives and then bringing them to fruition."

For nearly 70 years America has reaped great prestige, wealth and power from being the country that most other countries respected, even admired. There's been no other nation where appearances counted for so much. That's the sort of goodwill that pays huge dividends but hard as it is to achieve, losing it is almost effortless.

A word of caution for those tempted to dive headfirst into the pool of Schadenfreude. What Trump has done to America's standing in the world is merely the icing on a multi-layer cake. It's just one more element in the destabilization and decline of the United States. You can add to that the repeated demonstration, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, that all the King's Horses and all the King's Men have utterly failed to deliver military victory. Then there's America's debt-fueled economy dependent on the confidence of foreign lenders willing to keep buying the country's debt, a.k.a. the national deficit, and buying it in American dollars. Not one of these corrosive forces is being turned around. America is coming to be revealed as the main street facade of a cowboy movie set.

Bang the War Drums. Rattle those Sabres. Mental Mobilization for War Proceeds Apace.

It's a form of conditioning, something we're not very good at detecting. We are being mentally mobilized for war, something that begins by demonizing our adversary.

The warning came in the form of an editorial in the German financial paper, Handelsblatt. It offered the chilling observation that, in the wake of the Russian takeover of Crimea, the people of the West were being "mentally mobilized for war."

No mention of NATO's decade long march to Russia's doorstep.

No mention of how Washington fueled the uprising in Ukraine.

Now Russia is playing the same game. This time it's former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev taking to Russian airwaves warning that the US is trying to provoke war.

"The world has got to a dangerous phase," former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview with state news service RIA Novosti on Monday.

Now America seems to be drifting into a muzzle-to-muzzle confrontation with Russia in Syria. Having already been outmaneuvered by Putin in the Syrian civil war, partly a function of America's war fatigue with its 15-year long and no end in sight conflicts in the Middle East, Washington may not have as many options remaining as it would like.

Is the United States trying to provoke war with Russia? Probably not. Is the United States deliberately trying to menace Russia? Absolutely. The map above illustrates how close NATO forces in the Baltics are to Moscow. Imagine a similar deployment of Russian forces that close to Washington. Yet we treat it as tantamount to an act of war when Russia deploys Iskander missiles to its sovereign Baltic territory of Kaliningrad.

This nonsense, this drift, has to stop. We have to revisit the idea that we are responsible for creating the very conditions in which nations have backed themselves into protracted and bloody wars in the past.

Could Syria Become the 21st Century Sarajevo?

There were plenty of proxy wars during the Cold War only back then the principals had enough sense to avoid direct clashes. That was then, this is Syria where today we find the rival superpowers circling each other inside the same phone booth.

You could search the world over and never find one place where so many players are gathered as Syria.

First up is the Alawite government of Bashar Assad.

Then there's the original rebels, Syrian Sunnis.

Then we have the Sunni Islamists - the 'moderate' al Nusra, an affiliate of al Qaeda, and the far nastier Islamic State, ISIS.

The United States and its minions have been waging a bombing campaign against ISIS, first in Iraq and later also in Syria. It's been the standard, ineffective "whack a mole" stuff.

Turkey finally got off the fence and began its own air campaign only they're less concerned about ISIS than they are at bombing Syrian Kurds.

The United States was supporting the Syrian rebels with equipment and training until it discovered the rebels were surrendering all that gear to al Nusra and al Qaeda. Can't be having that. So the United States is now supporting Syria's Kurds which is really pissing off Turkey's Erdogan.

Recently three more places have been set at the table of mass mayhem. Here sit Russia, Hezbollah and now Iranian forces all supporting Bashar Assad.  Latest word has it that Iran has not only sent in units of the Revolutionary Guard but also a contingent of warplanes. They seem to be focused mainly on the moderate Syrian rebels but they also take on the Sunni Islamists every now and then.

It's hard to keep track of how many nations are waging air wars in Syria.  There's the Syrian air force, naturally, its strength replenished by replacement aircraft from Russia. There's the US Air Force and the League of Vassals, America's aerial Foreign Legion that, naturally, includes a Canadian contingent plus strike fighters from France, Britain, Australia and other European states plus Jordan and a half-hearted effort from a few Gulf States.

We want to battle ISIS. The other side seems intent mainly on attacking Syrian opposition rebels. The Turks prefer to bomb Syrian Kurds, the very group the US is still supporting. Nobody is bombing Assad, the guy who sparked the original fighting, and, with the Russians riding shotgun, it's hard to imagine the Western coalition going after him any time soon.

Syria, which is almost the same size as the state of Washington (just over twice the size of New Brunswick), suddenly has an awful lot of warplanes buzzing overhead at cross purposes.  The Russians have also introduced their highly lethal  S-300 surface to air missile batteries. Turkey, meanwhile, is clamoring for the US and Germany to reactivate their Patriot missile batteries in support of their NATO partner. Eventually someone may fire one of those things.

The Americans have been snookered by Putin and this is bound to have geopolitical ramifications throughout the Middle East. Will the Saudis and the Egyptians tolerate Shiite Iran's military presence in Syria? Will they pile on?

Could Syria become the Sarajevo of the 21st century, the place where a proxy war becomes a shooting war between the West and Russia? Those expert in these matters warn these eyeball to eyeball confrontations are the sort of situations in which rival powers can back into direct conflicts neither one of them truly wants to initiate.

Austerity's Silver Lining - Arms Race Update

A couple of headlines this morning got me thinking that the West's embrace of austerity might not be all bad.  Of course it's probably just wishful thinking.

The first article concerns a refreshingly nuanced and balanced lecture delivered by former US ambassador to Russia, Jack Matlock.

In a lecture at King's College London, Jack Matlock said that the crisis in Ukraine is increasingly comparable to what he saw during his time as ambassador during the turbulent end of the Cold War. "We see increasingly implicit military confrontations and I'm beginning to wonder, could this result in something which is almost the functional equivalent of the Cold War," he said.

According to Matlock, an explanation for the crisis in Ukraine and worsening relationship between Russia and the West does not simply lie with the actions of Russian President, Vladimir Putin.

"Is it just a matter of Russia violating international norms and law, is there more to this story? There is no question that Russia has violated international law, that the way they conducted the referendum of the Crimea and then annexed it, was a violation of a number of agreements.

"However, all of us should recognise that as brutal and aggressive as Russian policy is, ultimately it is prompted by…feeling…that US and West in general…are trying to encircle and strangle them," he said.

Following a decision made at the recent G7 summit to continue imposing sanctions on Russia, and the steadily increasing popularity within Russia of its President, Matlock argues that the West needs to reconsider its own policies to "bring the results that we want."

The second headline concerns the newly minted NATO sec-gen Jens Stoltenberg claiming that the alliance will not get dragged into an arms race with Moscow.  I suspect Stoltenberg's comforting assurance is really code for the obvious.  With most of the peoples of the Western nations already under the heel of brutal austerity policies, their governing classes are keenly aware of what might befall them should they try to pump up their defence spending to 3 or 4% GDP to play the arms race game with Vlad Putin.  After all, you can't have defence and the ultra low, corporate tax cuts demanded by your corporate masters.

A silver lining?  Maybe, maybe not.  Well, we're plenty ready to sacrifice the environment and our grandkids future to the whims of corporatism.  Surely defence spending is a paltry bauble in the greater scheme of commercial morality.

Meanwhile, In Our Vast, Undefended North...

The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine is devoted to espionage, spying, and the magazine reports that today's Ground Zero of spying is the Arctic.

For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—
Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.

While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.

If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”

...Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.”

...Over the past few decades, [Arctic countries] have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.


...Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.

Greetings, Comrade!

More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”

...Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.

With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast-
attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.

One evening in November 2014, U.S. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.

Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.

If Harper is planning to blunt Putin's sharp elbows he's going about it in a curious way - defunding the armed forces, degrading the readiness of the navy, air force and army alike.  Canada's military budget has plummeted to just 0.89% of GDP and our 'missions' to the Baltics and the ISIS air war eat up a good chuck of that.

Who?  Harper?  Nyet!

In other words it's Vlad Putin's military muscle versus Harper's hot air. Harper was on the money when he said that we have to exercise our sovereignty in the north or risk losing it.  That, however, was 2007, before the Great Recession. Harper was presiding over a government he inherited from the Libs with a balanced budget and money in the bank.  That was before he began defunding the government and degrading the readiness of all of our military forces - army, navy and air force.  Today his focus is on pipelines and jury-rigging government revenues and expenses to create the illusion of a balanced budget before Canadians choose their next government.

When NATO stages Arctic air exercises and Canada is a "no show", we're running on fumes which is music to the ears of a guy like Putin.

Putin Signs Military Pact with Argentina

Well this is bound to piss off David Cameron.  Badboy Vlad Putin has inked a military pact with Argentine president Christina Fernandez backing her country against Britain over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) dispute.

“The new agreement on military collaboration and data protection will enable the considerable increase of practical cooperation in this field”, Mr Putin said.

The posturing risks tipping the war of words between London and Buenos Aires into full-blown conflict, as tensions heighten over sovereignty of the remote south Atlantic outcrop.

Meanwhile in the Baltic the Finns say they've spotted what they believe to be a Russian sub in Finnish territorial waters.  Sigh.

You'll Never See Vlad Putin the Same Way Again

If there's one guy who doesn't get any slack from the Western media, it's Russian strongman, Vlad Putin.  We vilify Putin at every turn and, while he certainly brings some of it down on himself, we make sure to depict ourselves as the guys in the white hats while we heap scorn on him.

It's time to reset our compass and there's no one better to do that than Princeton prof Stephen F. Cohen who has been involved with post-Soviet Russia since he served as an advisor to George H.W. Bush during the fall of East Germany. According to Cohen, Putin is as much our creation as his own.

As Russia’s leader, Putin has changed over the years, especially in foreign policy but also at home. His first impulse was toward more free-market reforms, anti-progressive taxes. He enacted a 13 percent flat tax—Steve Forbes would’ve been ecstatic, right? He offers [George W.] Bush what Clinton never really offered Yeltsin: a full partnership. And what does he do? On September 11, 2001, he called George and said, Whatever you want, we’re with you. Bush says, Well, I think we’re going to have to go to war in Afghanistan. And Putin said, I can help you. We’ve got major resources and assets in Afghanistan. I even have an army over there called the Northern Alliance. I’ll give it to you! You want overflight? It’s all yours!

How many American lives did Putin save during our land war in Afghanistan? And do you know what a political price he paid in Russia for that? Because his security people were completely against it.

...Oh, yeah. You think they minded seeing America being brought to its knees? They’d been invaded so often; let America get a taste of it! But Putin assumes he’s achieved what Yeltsin couldn’t and that this benefits the Russian state. He has a real strategic partnership with America. Now, remember, he’s already worried about his radical Islamic problem because Russia has nearly 20 million Muslim citizens of its own. Russia sits in the East and in the West; it’s on the front lines.

What does Bush give him in return? He expands NATO again and he unilaterally withdraws the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the bedrock of Russia’s nuclear security— it’s a complete betrayal. Is that how you repay somebody who’s helped you save the lives of your citizens? This is where the word “betrayal” begins to enter into the discourse.

...I’ve heard him called, among right-wing Russian intellectuals, an appeaser of the West. Soft. You can hear this today: Mariupol? Odessa? Should’ve taken them a year ago; they belong to us. What’s he thinking? Why is he discussing it? [Mariupol and Odessa are two contested cities in the southeastern region of Ukraine.]

So Putin sets his course, and then comes this famous speech he gives in 2007 in Munich, with McCain sitting in the front row. Putin says just what I told you. He says, Look, we want to be your partner; this is what we’ve wanted to be since Gorbachev. We believe in the common European home. But every time we turn to you or we negotiate with you or we think we have an agreement with you, you act like a hegemon and everybody has to do exactly what you say if they want to to be on your side.

Putin has come to tell them that America is risking a new Cold War with more than a decade of bad behavior towards post-Soviet Russia. John McCain interprets this as the declaration of a new Cold War.

Cohen argues that America is massively damaging its own national security by its bellicose approach to Putin over Ukraine.

I think the Ukranian crisis is the greatest blow to American national security— even greater than the Iraq war in its long-term implications— for a simple reason: The road to American national security still runs through Moscow. There is not a single major regional or issue-related national security problem we can solve without the full cooperation of whoever sits in the Kremlin, period, end of story.

Name your poison: We’re talking the Middle East, we’re talking Afghanistan, we’re talking energy, we’re talking climate, we’re talking nuclear proliferation, terrorism, shooting airplanes out of the sky, we’re talking about the two terrorist brothers in Boston.

Look: I mean American national security of the kind I care about—that makes my kids and grandkids and myself safe—in an era that’s much more dangerous than the Cold War because there’s less structure, more nonstate players, and more loose nuclear know-how and materials…. Security can only be partial, but that partial security depends on a full-scale American-Russian cooperation, period. We are losing Russia for American national security in Ukraine as we talk, and even if it were to end tomorrow Russia will never, for at least a generation, be as willing to cooperate with Washington on security matters as it was before this crisis began.

Therefore, the architects of the American policy towards Russia and Ukraine are destroying American national security—and therefore I am the patriot and they are the saboteurs of American security. That’s the whole story, and any sensible person who doesn’t suffer from Putin-phobia can see it plainly.

...The truth is, not everything depends on the president of the United States. Not everything, but an awful lot does, and when it comes to international affairs we haven’t really had a president who acted as an actual statesman in regard to Russia since Reagan in 1985-88. Clinton certainly didn’t; his Russia policy was clownish and ultimately detrimental to U.S. national security interests. Bush’s was reckless and lost one opportunity after another, and Obama’s is either uninformed or completely out to lunch. We have not had a statesman in the White House when it comes to Russia since Reagan, and I am utterly, totally, 1000 percent convinced that before November 2013, when we tried to impose an ultimatum on Yanukovych—and even right now, today—that a statesman in the White House could end this in 48 hours with Putin. What Putin wants in the Ukraine crisis is what we ought to want; that’s the reality.

Maybe it's time we realized that the West, led by an increasingly bellicose Permanent Warfare State, has some fence-mending to do for our sake as much as anyone's.  

Okay, Canada. Prepare To Be Probed.

What a moment to be stuck with a navy so horribly neglected that it can't put a single task force to sea.

Now that the Harper government has left us with our pants down in the Arctic, Vlad Putin has placed Russia's Northern Fleet and paratrooper units on full alert for military exercises in the polar region.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is overseeing an expensive modernisation of the armed forces, said Russia faced new threats to its security which obliged it to boost its military strength and capabilities.

"New challenges and threats to military security require the armed forces to further boost their military capabilities. Special attention must be paid to strategic formations in the North," RIA quoted Shoigu as saying.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksey Meshkov said on Monday, according to Tass news service, that Russia was "deeply concerned about the increase in exercises of NATO countries close to our borders".

It was "particularly surprising that this takes place in the north-eastern region of Europe, which is the most stable in security terms, not only on our continent but possibly in the world," Mr Meshkov said.

Tensions between Russia and the West have reached their worst level since the Cold War over the crisis in Ukraine.

Putin loves to ring our bells.  Twice the Swedes have detected what they claim were Russian subs in their home waters.  Twice the Brits have detected what they believe were Russian subs off the Royal Navy's own submarine base at Faslane, Scotland.

Maybe Putin will give Canada a pass because, after all, what's the point of going up there if we wouldn't notice?

The exercise reportedly will involve 41-surface warships, some 15-submarines, 40,000 personnel and a variety of air force units.  Maybe they'll send Jason Kenney a souvenir postcard.