To begin with, they can’t act like Rex Tillerson. They need to model themselves after Mike Pompeo. As many of us know, Tillerson lasted just over a year as Secretary of State. Then, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he called Trump a moron in a moment of pique. With that, he slammed the door and handed in his resignation.
In came Pompeo to replace him, impressing upon State Department officials that “Trump is not a moron. He is simply an unconventional genius.” Trump, ever the professional showman, played the role of unconventional genius to the hilt in the Middle East with Pompeo in the director’s chair. In fact, he played it so well that world leaders began to think that he was the one behind the Abraham Accords.
The grown-ups in the White House must appeal to the unconventional genius’s personal interests when persuading him to take action in the foreign policy realm. They must remember he thinks of himself as the leader of the entire world, someone with no rivals. Let no amount of flattery go to waste, even in its crudest forms. If they aren’t willing to lick Trump’s backside, their most bitter geopolitical enemies will polish it until it shines, starting with his ex-KGB handler in the Kremlin. He is already chomping at the bit to get his chance to do some polishing. It’s something straight out of the Sergei Yesenin poem “Khlopusha’s Monologue”: “Lead me to his presence, lead me to him, I want to see this man!”
Ukraine’s Zelensky to Attend Munich Security Meet: Organisers
Putin wants to “see this man” so that he can smooth-talk him in two hours flat into being his obedient lapdog, just like he did in Helsinki.
Putin considers himself, with some justification, to be the alpha male in this relationship. Under no circumstances must the grown-ups allow this unconventional genius to remain alone in a room with such a professional manipulator.
In order to work effectively with their client, the grown-ups need to come up with an explanation that fits Trump’s unconventional mind to frame the war being waged across the globe. His clip-thinking consciousness has been ruptured; it is incapable of seeing connections between what is happening in the Middle East, Ukraine, and the Pacific Rim. It is a given that Trump must be at the center of any proposed plan; he must be the global demiurge and future Victor in the Final World War.
The three horsemen of the geopolitical underworld – China, Russia, and Iran – are now free to act with impunity.
Totalitarian regimes the world over, filled with centuries of hatred towards the West, were watching intently as the reputational catastrophe that was the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded live on television screens across the globe. These regimes took this failed withdrawal as a sign of fundamental weakness within the decadent and hedonistic (as they saw it) Western civilization and looked on with satisfaction as its establishment began to surrender its global leadership role. The three horsemen of this geopolitical underworld – China, Russia, and Iran – now free to act with impunity (the US is gone and they can get away with anything), threw down the gauntlet to the Free World by announcing their intentions to destroy, in a deliberate manner, three sovereign nations – Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel.
The initial reaction from the United States – the leader of the Free World – was shameful and did nothing but encourage its enemies. The head of the CIA – Bill Burns – traveled to Moscow and offered Putin a behind-the-scenes promise. He wouldn’t allow Ukraine, the only victim of aggression here, to conduct retaliatory strikes on Russian territory. The agency under his leadership then released its professional prediction for an invasion: Kyiv would fall in a week, two at most.
But Burns and his agency were wrong. The first climactic battle of World War IV took place at Hostomel and resulted in a miracle on the Dnipro – the horde was soundly defeated. Those 300 symbolic Ukrainian Spartans saved Western civilization from a barbarian invasion and literally dragged the United States by the scruff of the neck back onto the world stage.
About a year and a half later, with the West still in the throes of a cowardly indecisiveness, Iran embarked on its multipronged operation to destroy Israel. And with that a fourth horseman appeared.
A new political reality had begun to take shape in Washington. The far-left (progressive) wing of the Democratic Party and its accompanying ideology became almost fanatically invested in a World War IV unleashed by totalitarian regimes. Many progressives sided with the tyrants and the bandits. After all, they had loathed the “Imperial West” since their college years and wanted to see it defeated. Their professors at Harvard and Yale, you see, had drummed it into them that this West was guilty of centuries of crimes against the world’s oppressed nations.
At the moment there are not that many progressives in Congress, but they do wield great influence at “quality” media outlets. As far as World War IV is concerned, these outlets essentially serve as propaganda mouthpieces for Hamas on the Israeli front and for Putin on the Ukrainian one.
These progressives demand an immediate cease-fire both in the Middle East and in Ukraine – in other words a kind of Afghanistan on steroids – with another embarrassing US withdrawal from the world stage.
Trump’s victory in the presidential elections was first and foremost a triumph over these progressives – the fourth horseman of the geopolitical apocalypse. His election has essentially untied the West’s hands at a critical moment and given it a unique window of opportunity to achieve a larger, historic victory over all its enemies. What’s more, this victory will be more of a conceptual, theoretical one and will not result in a significant loss of human life.
Iran is an easy fix. No boots on the ground will be required from the West. Israel will simply conduct one devastating strike (perhaps with US participation for certain specialized facilities). After that, the rebuilding of what used to be Iran will fall to the country’s resurgent urban youth along with a joint Turkish-Azerbaijani military force, already deployed in the Iranian part of Azerbaijan to protect its countrymen.
The cowardly, over-cautious (or consciously traitorous) Biden administration never permitted Ukraine to exploit its spectacular successes at the outset of the war and achieve Victory in 2022 or 2023 (a return to 1991 borders and complete restoration of the country’s territorial integrity). Instead, the conflict changed shape and became an exhausting war of attrition, a circumstance not at all in Ukraine’s favor.
People then began discussing in earnest a “Korea scenario” for freezing the conflict. Cognizant of the Soviet peoples’ historic contribution to an Allied victory in WWII and keen on preventing the loss of hundreds of thousands more Russian and Ukrainian lives, President Trump made a unique offer to the dictator in the Kremlin – he would pull Putin out of the gruesome mess he got himself into as a vassal to China.
For this, he must agree to cease all combat activity along the line of contact. Of course, there will be no recognition of his territorial gains. He will be allowed to keep them for a certain amount of time and remain in power in Russia, after he tells his obsequious minions that victory has been achieved, of course.
Western troops will guarantee that the main part of Ukraine remains safe and prosperous (as was the case with Korea). It doesn’t really matter what they are called – peacekeepers, volunteers, contractors...
The majority of these troops will come from Europe. Trump has called on Europe for years to take on more responsibility for its own security. The very real threat hanging over the continent at the moment only serves to strengthen Trump’s argument. Macron has long been trying to persuade his counterparts that EU countries must play a role in Ukraine.
Europe has wished for its own army for decades. But, as Zelensky correctly noted in Davos: “For the first time in 75 years, Europe has its own army, one capable of stopping the Eastern horde. It is the Armed Forces of Ukraine plus aircraft provided by Europe.”
This new resolve we are seeing from Europe will allow Trump and his allies to effectively provide for Ukraine’s security in the same way that President Eisenhower in his day provided for the security of South Korea – by deploying an expeditionary Allied force.
It is precisely these wars – waged by Ukraine and Israel, at enormous cost and suffering – that provide Trump with a unique opportunity to remove the China threat once and for all.
If Putin chooses to decline Trump’s offer, he loses everything. It is no coincidence that the Putin propaganda machine has been sending out trial balloons of late that seek to justify accepting the offer: “We have already won! We have seized a land corridor to Crimea and weakened the Ukrainian army!”
It’s a fitting resolution really – the Putin regime is destroyed while Putin temporarily keeps his head and his throne.
President Trump believes, with good reason, that communist China is the US’s most powerful and dangerous enemy. But until recently this indisputable fact has led him to come to the totally incorrect conclusion. He thought the key to countering the Chinese threat was to settle two conflicts he saw as nothing but distractions – those in Ukraine and in the Middle East. It was a colossal mistake.
It is precisely these wars – waged by two great peoples, Ukrainian and Israeli, at enormous cost and suffering – that have provided the Free World with a unique opportunity to remove the China threat once and for all. And without shedding a drop of blood.
I strongly believe that a double beheading (Iran and Russia), for all the world to see, would force the remaining head of this Chinese dragon to come to its senses and forget about its hostile intentions vis-a-vis an independent Taiwan and any plans for a political and military confrontation with the US.
There is one major obstacle preventing the client from making full use of the pedagogic material set forth above – his manic obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize. This fixation gives Putin a massive amount of recruiting potential. He will thank Trump for his offer, gaze at him with devoted, admiring eyes, and promise to provide any support needed in his quest for the Nobel. His territorial demands will be strikingly modest. But what he will do is smooth-talk Trump into including a couple of innocent lines into the final peace agreement about “security guarantees for Russia.” And then, after Trump receives his deserved Nobel, Putin will use these “guarantees” to come for the rest of Ukraine.
Trump’s obsession with a Nobel Peace Prize (he is absurdly jealous of Obama) might just disappear when he will be presented with a much more impressive red carpet into the history books.
President Woodrow Wilson won World War I.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt won World War II.
President Ronald Reagan won World War III (the Cold War).
All three of these great American presidents were certain that they had won the final World War. Unfortunately, each victory contained a flaw that inevitably led to the next global conflict.
President Donald Trump has been presented with a mission of epic proportions – to defeat the Empire of Evil in the Fourth and Final World War, to do it with relatively little effort and resources spent, and all within the first 100 days of his second presidential term.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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