In the wake of the Putin-Trump Helsinki summit, there is much speculation about what was actually said between Putin and Trump behind closed doors and the uncertainty spread throughout the American government about whether agreements had been reached on issues such as Syria and the Ukraine. The subsequent invitation to Putin to visit the White house in the fall – probably just before the November elections – has resulted in further uncertainty especially after Putin’s statement that he proposed to Trump holding a referendum to resolve the eastern Ukraine issue. So, what is really going on here?
Quite frankly, we have all been scratching our heads as the behaviour in some respects is reminiscent of 18th and 19th century monarchs gathering to decide the fate of wide swaths of the world in private meetings. Putin is an autocrat and Trump is a business autocrat who admires political autocrats, so their personal level diplomacy may indeed be a series of moves designed to remake the world and return it to an age when Russian and American led blocs were the only game in town. Both the Russians and the Americans have seen their political influence decline in a multilateral world led by growing Asia-Pacific economies and both countries have been less than comfortable with the rise of China.
One has to wonder if this is an attempt by Trump to forge some type of private alliance with the Russians in an effort to coordinate their interests and deal with their ebbing international influence? The idea sounds like science fiction. Indeed, the idea of these two countries getting together and establishing a CoDominium actually has substance in an alternate reality – the science fiction world of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. In their novel The Mote in God’s Eye, which was originally published in 1974, a series of treaties between the Russians and the Americans establishing the CoDominium in the 1990s sets the stage for a global government and the expansion of the human species out into the galaxy. This of course would place Trump’s musings about setting up a Space Force into quite an entirely different light. Indeed, is Donald Trump drawing inspiration from a mythical civilization disrupting character known as a Crazy Eddie?
Trump may be trying to engineer some broader type of Russian-American political alliance to counter their waning influence in the world driven by a nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s. After all, the rise of the Chinese economy and the growth of Chinese military influence is seen as a potential concern in some circles. It does not matter how far-fetched the idea may seem given everything else that has been happening lately whenever Donald Trump takes the world stage. Disrupting the world, wrecking the liberal economic order and creating chaos and then having America and Russia step in to fix things may seem crazy but does it make sense to foreign policy experts? And, while Trump may be thinking along these lines, what is Putin really thinking? I doubt he is a Niven and Pournelle fan.
Of course, one expects that greater formal cooperation between the Americans and the Russians will ultimately require Congress to sign-off especially if actual treaties are eventually negotiated. On the other hand, if it is all kept informal and behind closed doors, who knows what is eventually going to emerge?
Always like a Jerry Pournelle residence. He did a whole series of books set in the CoDominion universe.
Posted by: Lorenzo from Oz | July 20, 2018 at 09:01 PM
Russia has a smaller economy than California and a declining population. I don't see any partnership. More likely they talked the hotel business, if Trump is consistent.
Posted by: Matthew Young | July 21, 2018 at 11:37 AM
@Matthew. Well, the hotel business and assorted private business deals is really probably all they discussed. However, the dreamer in me would like to imagine they discussed the founding of the Grand Fleet of Earth and the Empire of Man.
Posted by: Livio Di Matteo | July 21, 2018 at 07:14 PM
What "Codominium" ? The US plan was "full spectrum dominance" of the one sole remaining superpower.
I do not know, how much the Ukraine situation is discussed in Canada.
The new government in Kiev since March 2014 did not get there by constitutional means, armed groups surrounding and in the parliament, no 75% majority, no involvement of the Supreme Court.
The Ukraine has long been divided into catholic Ukrainian speaking west and orthodox Russian speaking east. A cleft state.
See Samuel Huntington "Clash of civilizations", and former US Ambassador Jack Matlock http://jackmatlock.com/2014/03/ukraine-the-price-of-internal-division/
Crimea and the Black Sea fleet in Sewastopol are Russian and now connected by a new, long bridge to the Russian main land.
The Kiev government has cut off the oblasts Lugansk and Donbass, no pension payments since 3 years.
The Kiev government has since 4 years not taken the promised (Minsk protocols) first step of changing the constitution to give some autonomy to those provinces. One can continue the sanctions, which will change nothing, and heard the West as much as Russia.
The attempt of the US, Saudis, UK, France to topple the government in Syria has failed, a year before Trump was elected. Many Syrians may not like Assad, but they were not willing to fight against him and fled to Turkey, Lebanon, then migrated to Germany instead.
Russia will not roll over to the West. Putin still has a popularity of 80%
Nixon and Kissinger 45 years were intelligent enough to understand that the US can not take on Russia and China at the same time, and Europe has no interest to fight with Russia, and spend those 4% of GDP for the military, and the streams of blood to go with it, for some attack force.
Who will be the US future enemy Nr. 1 ? Russia or China?
The Dems and the deep state in the US say : Russia
Trump, his Navarro: Death by China, and blue collar worker followers say: China
Merkel kept so far the EU together on the sanctions, despite Germany being hurt most, but that unity is now crumbling.
Unian: "Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of Italy Matteo Salvini in an interview with the Washington Post called legitimate the occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, and branded the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine a "pseudo-revolution" which was "fake" and externally financed." The Victoria Nuland ("F... the EU, "Yats is the guy") and her 5 billion spent come to mind
Read more on UNIAN: https://www.unian.info/politics/10195827-mfa-ukraine-to-summon-italian-ambassador-over-minister-salvini-recognizing-crimea-annexation.html
And many others do not say it, but think so.
Posted by: genauer | July 22, 2018 at 09:25 AM
For those with a Wall Street Journal subscription:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/brennan-and-the-2016-spy-scandal-1532039346
Kimberly Strasser:
"Clinton supporters have a plausible case that Mr. Comey’s late-October announcement that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the candidate affected the election. But Trump supporters have a claim that the public outing of the collusion narrative and FBI investigation took a toll on their candidate. Politics was at the center of that outing, and Mr. Brennan was a ringmaster. Remember that when reading his next “treason” tweet."
To describe the comments there with "foaming" would be a crass euphemism.
Others can get most of it at zerohedge.
Posted by: genauer | July 22, 2018 at 09:55 AM
Poppycock. Your definition of the language is a ridiculous strategic lie. Stalin ethnically cleansed Poles from western Ukraine after WW2. Stalin also sent Russian colonists into East Ukraine. All of the country speaks Ukrainian.
As for religion, Russian Imperialists, both Tzarist and Soviet, repressed the Ukrainian Uniate church.
What is Russian? Stalin also ethnically cleansed Crimean Tartars from Crimea and sent in Russian colonists. Facts established by crimes against humanity have no legitimacy.
There is absolutely no reason for all territories inhabited by ethnic Russians to be part of Rossiya. UK, France, Spain, and Portugal shed their colonies -- when will Russia?
Russia does not need a Black Sea fleet. If it wants one, it can park one in Azov. Sevastopol is Ukrainian.
UK and France have a tunnel and yet aren't the same country.
I think you mean "The Putin regime has cut off the oblasts Luhansk and Donbass by occupying them with Russian tanks in contravention of all international law since 1945."
What is the West? Russia could be part of the West if the Russian government wanted it to be. Unfortunately, it is convenient for Putin to pretend he has enemies abroad.
If Putin were actually popular, he wouldn't need to rig elections by barring Navalny or anyone else from running. Also, he ended democracy in Russia years ago by contravening constitutional term limits.
Posted by: Yildo | July 23, 2018 at 04:01 PM
The ideal chain-of-command of ours and them is similiar. Our top 10 is better; Trudeau at around 80th learning to 30th. Trump way down but better than his GOP rivals. And Putin #1. CPR was ready a week before WWII and what matters more is both leaders listen to their military advisors. Putin has a programmer at his heels. The EU right is broken into free-traders and isolationists. California real estate is expensive because people wanted to flash their gold watches; Trump did bad to have them being his current tech advisors. But his tariff strategy is sound.
The 30th Comonsol Congress brought about gifted schools and a society rejecting automation (killed 1960's Wpg's middle-class ladder to power). And with some industrial electives you don't wind up cosmopolitan enough to automate away military power and have no time to read. Both see the real-time balance of power interplay between Crown and private actors in the world, and if they would see AI as a 2024 problem, rather than 2040, they will be remembered. It is hard for N.America to fight European robots after the fact and while USA has the good technologies, Russia has a dynamic enough gvmt structure to use neuro-imaging...from a macro view:
$ makes individual WMDs happen faster after WWII, and it enables individual solutions at a slower rate unless the solvers come together.
Posted by: robots2005 AI2030 | July 24, 2018 at 03:30 PM
@ yildo
Your statements are directly contradicted by the American authors Huntington and Matlock.
And the Russians are certainly not interested in the opinion of an enemy like you about whether they need a Black Sea Fleet or whether some Tartars from Siberia should be allowed to evict the Russian population of their Crimea
Posted by: genauer | July 28, 2018 at 03:29 PM
I think I've figured out why the USA and the West have been in decline. During the Wpg General Strike, AB and Vancouver were loyal to Winnipeg, with only the Streetcar workers of Toronto standing up for Veteran's rights.
Back then, the division of labour was the only newspaper media flaw. In the 1950s and 1960s, atomic and space-age propaganda became the norm; tractors to irradiate soil pests and such. After WWII, Intrepid's propaganda tools were used to focus upon free trade and wealth creation for the rich. But there was still common sense.
1967 saw race riots in the USA. This must be when the USA changed its business school curriculum (as R.Phillippe referenced) to focus only upon the rich. It took us until 2006 to copy. Now rich people outside of Wpg and Russia are annoyed enough with their lack of time management and personal finance skills to ignore real technology threats in this world.
Putin and Trump are trying to redefine what would've been the focus had not the Race Riots have happened.
Faraday caged sounding rockets and VTOL fighter jets are technologies from the 1960's and 1970's yet are our best hope to survive unless industrial policy hits neutrinos and surveillance while arresting NASDAQ CEOs.
I can't see either nation winning eachother's hemisphere assuming a robot build time of 5 min to 12 hours. And sane lasers on the Moon are obviously a big budget item. I won't riot; I don't want to wake up at 5:30 and come home at 8:30. And Silicon Valley can make surveillance tools as easily as factories can make aerospace and medical imaging equipment.
Posted by: robots2005 AI2030 | July 30, 2018 at 02:40 PM