I absolutely fucking hate these “yeah, well maybe we can also admit that Zelensky didnt play his hand well” takes. He was put there to be humiliated. There is no direction for him to have taken that results in Trump and Vance being happy with his conduct and him and his cause not utterly humiliated on a live international broadcast. They wanted him to nod along as they presented Russia as being blameless in the Minsk agreement breaking down, that Putin and Russia were not aggressors. They wanted him to acquiesce to ideas that made justifications for supporting him harder to accept.
Fareed is a smart guy, but is one of those smart guys who is too taken by his own perception of his smarts to think that he has the super secret path to dealing with Trump and not getting filthy in the process.
I didn’t think it was possible to be this petty, but it is. Trump literally and figuratively ate President Zelensky’s lunch after meeting. It was his decision, the White House press secretary said.
Also from Kreml today
The Trump administration’s foreign policy “largely coincides with our vision”
Unfortunately, I think an intermediate step is far more likely, where faced with those internal tensions, the US attempts to transfer those tensions towards one or more external targets. The price of construction lumber(housing), anything aluminium, and electricity in much of the US are supposed to spike 25% next week with the tariffs on Canada, with electricity and aluminium both being highly inelastic and close to 100% flowthrough (the last round of Al tariffs actually increased Canadian market share and profitability). Mexico’s situation is far more complex because so much of what they supply is essentially labour in one form or another, but the cost of living impacts are going to be significant. If they do the same with the EU (having already started on China), the combined effect is going to be real economic pain - for a population that has had nearly a decade and has yet to come to the realization that they are in some way responsible. So an external villain becomes a political need.
The strangest American foreign policy objective you will see this week. It is beyond illogical. This is something they have been fighting against, both parties for decades. It is economically damaging to the United States.
I am not saying that Trump is a Russian operative, but if he was a Russian operative, this is what he would try to do:
The UN as well? They are getting crazier by the hour. One’d think that it’s only a matter of time before there’s a fightback. There’s no way that the entire country takes this lying down.
The comments, Russian bots working overtime atm