https://archive.md/5As2z
"For a guy who’s lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers and barely moved his
front lines forward in a war that’s already lasted longer than U.S. involvement
in World War II, Vladimir Putin is looking pretty smug and self-satisfied these
days.
It has become commonplace for Western strategists to say that, no matter what
he tries now, the Russian dictator will come out of his Ukraine adventure a
loser. In nearly four years of horrific bloodshed, Putin has captured barely 20
percent of Ukrainian territory and failed completely in his goal of denying
Ukrainians the right to statehood. Meanwhile, NATO has grown, bulking up its
defenses and adding Finland and Sweden to its formidable front line.
But seen from another perspective, Putin has good cause to look so confident:
He appears to be succeeding in his larger goal of dividing and weakening what
is loosely called the “West”—the nations that make up NATO. And this is a large
part of what the Russian dictator has been trying to achieve in the first
place, many Russia watchers say.
Nothing has made that clearer than the debacle of the last few weeks as
negotiations orchestrated by U.S. President Donald Trump dissolved into a
cacophony of confused finger-pointing across the Atlantic, with Americans and
Europeans offering up wildly incompatible peace proposals and angrily blaming
each other for undermining the talks.
In recent days that gulf has grown dramatically wider, with Trump dismissing
Western Europe as “weak” and “decaying” in an interview and suggesting, yet
again, that Ukraine would have to cede its Donbas region to the aggressor,
Putin.
Those remarks appeared to echo the administration’s just-released
National
Security Strategy, in which the Trump administration suggested Europe was in
danger of losing its “Western identity” and said the president’s emphasis now
is to “reestablish strategic stability with Russia.”
For Putin, all this amounts to an early Christmas present—a very big one. “This
was Putin’s motivation from the get-go with the invasion: He thought NATO
wouldn’t hold together,” said Bruce Jentleson of Duke University, a former
senior foreign-policy advisor to the State Department.
“The Biden administration and key European leaders get credit for countering
this, and for NATO expanding to Sweden and Finland. Now with Trump as enabler,
Putin has another and even better chance to divide the West.”"
Via Joerg Fliege.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
