A Fabulous Listen. Examining Putin's - Strengths and Weaknesses. My General Thoughts Regarding Trump's Meeting With "Fat Boy."

This is a fabulous listen and explains why we are where we are without realizing how it happened.  It describes the problem America has with Liberals who are bringing us down because of Russia's success at subtle destabilization etc. that has taken place over the past few decades. Everyone should listen twice!

https://www.facebook.com/KingforCongress/videos/1856659077741426/

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This really is the last memo before we leave but I keep running  into articles  I find interesting and worth passing along.

Far too often we believe our adversaries are bigger and stronger than they might be and this could be the case with Putin.  Putin has been leading both from strength and weakness.  Strength because he walked all over Obama and his stupid "reset button" strategy and he also faces a divided and feckless West that cowered with respect to The  Crimea, Ukraine and The Middle East.

Meanwhile, weakness is his economy.(See 1 and 1a below.)

Noonan applauds Trump but only for a brief period. (See 1b below.)

When it comes to the proposed meeting of Trump with "Fat Boy," there are a variety of issues/concerns I have.

1) China can benefit a lot if Trump is actually able to get "Fat Boy" to do our bidding. It re-stabilizes their region and if China convinces Trump they assisted  it gives them possible pay back trade leverage with Trump.

2) Trump could get sucked into believing "Fat Boy" is actually going to do what he commits to and we have no way of actually finding out/verifying and  we could end sitting on pins and needles.

3)  Even worse, "Fat Boy" could be using the time it takes to work  out the details of the meeting  to perfect his ability to deliver a nuke into our country.

4) Trump's belief in his own expertise could wind up backfiring and we could come out on the short end as his predecessors have. Trump could  believe the meeting creates a favorable atmosphere for Republicans, in view of the 2018.

5) Another result, and one I think most improbable, Trump is able to accomplish his goal and "Fat Boy" actually denuclearizes for real because he wants to survive, believes in the long term an alliance with S Korea will benefit him and  the penalties/sanctions we imposed are truly putting his dictatorship in peril.

6) What I most fear is"Fat Boy" could say he met Trump's many unreasonable  demands but Trump made impositions so unfavorable  "Fat Boy" had to walk away and, thus,  win the propaganda war because the West is feckless/gullible.  The fact that "FB" is meeting with Trump gives him  a claim he walked the extra mile. Of course, Trump could make the same claim but it might make the option of attacking N Korea more difficult and The West, I remind you, is always anxious to embrace/assume the Chamberlain posture

7) Trump has no option after this meeting but to attack if  he concludes he has been duped , been played for a sucker or, even worse, blundered during the meeting because he failed to listen to advisers who tried to prepare him for the meeting.

I do not sell Trump short but I am concerned about some of Noonan's rationale and Trump's infatuation with his  headstrong "Art of The Deal"  diplomatic approach/style.

For sure Trump has accomplished more than his predecessors and done more to make it happen by realizing feeding bullies increases their appetite whereas starving them makes them more amenable and pliable.

Obama had very skinny, un-masculine, toothpick legs and I believe Putin took notice. Fat Boy is not stupid. He's actually as clever as he is spooky looking.

When it comes to the proposed meeting of Trump with "Fat Boy," there are a variety of issues/concerns involved.

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Now for some parting humor: https://1funny.com/til-death-d o-us-part/   
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Dick
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1)

Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted?

A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West.

By Tunku Varadarajan

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West.

Mr. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the sort of historian who’s gone out of fashion at American universities. He readily admits that the subject that interests him most is power: “Where does power come from, how does it work, how does it accumulate and dissipate?” He is a historian of politics and international relations at a time when history faculties everywhere are recoiling from big themes and grand strategy, embracing instead an increasingly narrow social and cultural historiography.

“We have more than 60 professors in the history department at Princeton,” Mr. Kotkin says. “I consider that a very substantial number. We don’t have a single one whose specialty is U.S. diplomatic history.” He stresses that he’s not against the other types of history being taught at universities, just that he’s saying that there “should be room for straightforward, old-fashioned, political-diplomatic history, about foreign policy and current events.”

Mr. Kotkin became a historian by messy accident. He was a pre-med student at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, where he boasts that he had “the highest average in organic chemistry, the most difficult course.” He was in the operating room one day with a professor—“a bit of a showman”—who’d opened a carotid artery in a way that made blood spurt. “I’d never seen anything like this,” says Mr. Kotkin—his face faintly green even in the remembering—“and I began to feel woozy.” The callow Mr. Kotkin threw up and passed out. “That ended my medical career.”

A switch to English literature followed, with a minor in history, which put Mr. Kotkin into contact with the legendary Christopher Lasch. A moralist as well as a historian, Lasch was writing “The Culture of Narcissism” at the time. “He was a kind of Midwestern, prairie populist,” Mr. Kotkin says, “and his critique of American progressivism was something you cannot now hear on American campuses.”

Attracted to history, and away from literature, Mr. Kotkin ended up at the University of California, Berkeley for his doctorate, specializing in Russia. “I started learning the Russian language in the third year of my Ph.D., and then four years later I was assistant professor of Russian history at Princeton.” That was 1988, Mr. Kotkin was 29, and the Soviet state was withering away. There couldn’t have been a better time, one imagines, for a historian of Russia to find a wide and hungry audience.

Mr. Kotkin was drawn to Stalin because “the history of Stalin was a history of the world.” He was also “the gold standard of dictatorship.” With Soviet nostalgia sweeping Russia today alongside a revival of Stalin as a paragon, Mr. Kotkin welcomes my asking him how much of Stalin we should see in Mr. Putin today—and how much of Stalin Mr. Putin sees in himself.

Old-school historian that he is, Mr. Kotkin responds with a narrative. “The way you have to begin with this is with Russia’s place in the world. How do you get a figure like Stalin or Putin in the first place?” The answer lies in Russia’s aspiration “to have a special mission in the world—something that most people attribute to its Byzantine heritage.” Russia, in Russian eyes, is “not a regular country, it’s a providential power that’s ordained by God.”

This is where the threat from Mr. Putin springs. It’s very difficult to manage the proposition of Russian power in the world, says Mr. Kotkin, when the “capacities of the Russian state today, like the Soviet state before, are not always of the first rank.” They’re economically modest and technologically mediocre, so they “look for ways to compensate,” and subversion of competitors is an obvious, low-cost strategy.

Mr. Kotkin invites us to ponder Mr. Putin’s options. “We have a situation where a desire for a special mission in the world is the overriding organizational framework of Russian national culture, and the Putin regime is the inheritor of this.” Mr. Putin couldn’t possibly abandon Russia’s self-image and decide that his is going to be “just another country,” the way France and Britain did, and Germany and Japan were forced to do. Among major world powers today, Mr. Kotkin says, “those countries that feel they’re destined under God to be special are really only the U.S., China and Russia.”

Russia, it would seem, is providential yet impotent. “That’s why the Russians love the U.N.,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They have a veto on the Security Council.” It is also why Russia today retains a state-led economy: “You use the state to beat your people up, and the state also picks the winners and losers in the marketplace.” Russia is beggaring itself, Mr. Kotkin believes, in relation to China, but it’s staying afloat strategically “vis-à-vis the West because the West itself is in disarray in a way that China is not. The United States is in a period you can describe any way you wish, but it’s not one of vigorous global leadership.”

Russia appears to have resigned itself to China’s inexorable rise. It has therefore turned its competitive focus entirely on the West. “Russia’s grand strategy,” says Mr. Kotkin, “is Western collapse. Just wait it out. If the European Union breaks up, if the U.S. withdraws into itself and gives up all of its alliances around the world, Russia has many fewer problems, and its relative-power gap can narrow substantially.”

Mr. Putin’s modus operandi, Mr. Kotkin suggests, is to “enhance the process of Western collapse. You can try to interfere in Western elections and support disarray in the West, but ultimately only the West can destroy itself.”

Mr. Putin did not “hijack the U.S. election,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He hijacked American public discourse.” Moscow conducted an intelligence operation to discredit Hillary Clinton and U.S. democracy by obtaining compromising material, “of which there was plenty.” This evolved into “an operation to obtain compromising material on Donald Trump as well, with the aim of getting sanctions lifted and a whole lot more.”

Mrs. Clinton and her campaign were, says Mr. Kotkin, “unwilling victims; Trump and his campaign were willing ones.” As a result, “America’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s intelligence activities morphed into a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign. And then, sadly, into an attempted manipulation to derail that investigation.” Russia’s actions, Mr. Kotkin says, “failed to decide the election, or to have the sanctions against Russia removed, but succeeded in stealing America’s attention.”

As Mr. Putin bets on Russia’s survival at the expense of the West, one wonders what his own ideology is beyond an obvious belief in Russian exceptionalism. “He is a Russian patriot in his own way,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but I don’t think his version of Russian patriotism is enhancing the long-term interests of that country.” Like other authoritarian rulers, Mr. Putin believes that “the survival of his personal regime and the survival of his country as a great power in the world are the same question.”

That conflation has put Russia “in a downward spiral,” and Mr. Kotkin lists several measures that show how poorly Russia has fared under Mr. Putin. Most striking is the “hemorrhage” of Russia’s human capital. “It’s hard to measure,” as “there’s no census,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but anywhere between five and 10 million Russians are now living beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.” The brain-drained Russians average about 20% above the mean income in the countries where they live, “which tells you that they’re a talented group, an educated, entrepreneurial, dynamic population. We have them at Princeton University—in our laboratories, our math department. You name it, they’re all over the place.”

With Mr. Putin a shoo-in for re-election, one wonders if he may, like Stalin, have a job for life in the Kremlin. Mr. Kotkin says he has “self-assigned tenure, meaning he can be there as long as he wants unless he’s assassinated in a palace coup.”

He may not have any choice in the matter: “It’s not clear he can leave if he wants to leave, because of the fact that he has narrowed the regime so considerably.” Authoritarian regimes tend to become victims of their own success. “The better they get at surveillance and suppression of dissent,” Mr. Kotkin says, “the less they know about their own society and what the people really think.” When authoritarian rulers first come to power, “they’re kind of like umpires. There are many different powerful groups that have disputes among themselves, and they turn to the leader to adjudicate.”

About to enter his fourth term as president, Mr. Putin is no longer the arbiter over a “scrum of competing interests, but is, instead, the leader of a single faction that controls all the power and all the wealth,” Mr. Kotkin says. This faction needs its protector to stick around so it can stay rich—and stay alive. “There’s really no way for Putin to retire peacefully.”

Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

1a) Is Putin Repeating the Mistakes of Brezhnev?

Like his Soviet predecessor, Putin presides over a stagnant economy and has no clear successor. His eventual exit could bring chaos.

By  Chris Miller

What better way to win Russian votes than to threaten the U.S. with nuclear attack? It wasn’t enough for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to ban his only credible opponent from the country’s upcoming election. Nor was he apparently convinced that his ironclad control of Russian TV would deliver a sufficiently resounding victory. In last week’s annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly, Mr. Putin threatened a new arms race, declaring that “efforts to contain Russia have failed” and showing video simulations of “unstoppable” nuclear missiles flying toward the West Coast of the U.S.

Mr. Putin’s nuclear posturing is intended to enliven a dreary, carefully scripted presidential campaign. Most of the candidates are familiar Kremlin stooges, such as far-right hooligan Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has run in all but one of the country’s post-Soviet presidential elections, and communist Pavel Grudinin, who runs a farm named after Lenin.

No prize for guessing who will win.

The Russian constitution says that this next six-year term should be Mr. Putin’s last as president, but he could emulate Chinese President Xi Jinping and change the rules. At 65, he almost certainly has a decade or more of active public life ahead of him. But he’s already beat one record: This year, he overtook Leonid Brezhnev, who held power from 1964 until his death in 1982, as the longest serving Kremlin chief since Joseph Stalin.

That he should now find himself in Brezhnev’s historical company might not entirely please Mr. Putin. During Brezhnev’s final years, the Soviet Union dozed into a decade of stagnation from which it never recovered. Mr. Putin’s Russia is on a similar economic track. The Kremlin today compensates for domestic failings by posturing abroad. Mr. Putin’s popularity spiked after he annexed Crimea in 2014, and Russians appear to like their country’s military role in Syria. Polls show that 72% of them now consider their country a great power, up from 48% in 2012.

Mr. Putin has reaped the benefits of this renewed role on the world stage, and neither Russia’s business elite nor its population at large has translated their economic frustration into opposition to his continued rule. But there’s a cautionary tale in the precedent of Brezhnev, who spent his final years in the Kremlin addicted to sleeping pills.

Brezhnev’s successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, were aged placeholders chosen because they wouldn’t shake things up. They continued his disastrous war in Afghanistan while the Soviet economy continued to sink. When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 and tried to reinvigorate the Soviet system, it was too ossified to change, too brittle to survive. Six years later, it collapsed.

Watching Mr. Putin age and perhaps die in office is a prospect that few Russians find attractive. But what is the alternative? Mr. Putin has no succession plan. Some in Moscow speculate that he might amend the constitution to create a new role, letting him retain ultimate power while leaving the details of governing to someone else. His critics joke that he wants to become an ayatollah, replicating the role of Iran’s ruling clerics, who have a constitutionally-guaranteed status above the government.

Mr. Putin tried stepping back, at least partially, when he allowed Dmitry Medvedev to serve as president from 2008 to 2012, during which time Mr. Putin served as prime minister. Though everyone knew that he still held ultimate power, he was frustrated by his lack of direct control over the levers of government. When Mr. Medvedev’s term expired, Mr. Putin immediately returned to the presidency.

Instead of stepping back, could Mr. Putin perhaps step down? Retirement brings its own set of risks. Like every dictator, he faces a dilemma: Having obliterated the rule of law, he cannot count on his wealth or his personal safety after turning over power.

Several of his historical predecessors have had a quiet retirement after leaving the Kremlin. Others were banished to the margins of Russian society, or worse. Lavrenty Beria, the secret police chief who bid for power after Stalin’s death, was shot through the forehead. Former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov suffered a similar fate in 2015, gunned down on a bridge near the Kremlin.

For two decades, Mr. Putin has expanded his personal power on the theory that the only alternative to his iron grip is chaos. Polls say that many Russians think their country must choose between autocracy and instability. All signs suggest that Mr. Putin believes this too

He may not be wrong. A political transition might go smoothly, in accordance with Russia’s constitution. But it might not. The last example, when Boris Yeltsin handed power to Mr. Putin in 1999, occurred without problems, but Yeltsin was ill and discredited, so he represented no threat.

Mr. Putin’s exit would be more complicated. As president, he has rolled back provincial autonomy and asserted central control. His successor, who will need to buy support from provincial leaders, may have to reverse this centralization of power. It was only 25 years ago that voters in Tatarstan, the oil-rich ethnic minority province in central Russia, approved a referendum declaring their region a “sovereign state” and demanding more autonomy from Moscow.

Many Russians are dissatisfied with the status quo, but most think that Mr. Putin’s exit could make things worse. Yet Russia’s rulers also know that delaying change is like putting a lid on a boiling pot. The political stew keeps churning. As economic stagnation grinds on, social pressure will only increase.

Russia’s youth, who have known no leader but Mr. Putin, joined antigovernment protests in large numbers over the past year, and they are less risk-averse than Russia’s aging elite. Postponing the succession question only makes the dilemma more acute. There is no need, in other words, to tune in to what promises to be Russia’s most boring presidential campaign yet. Ignore Mr. Putin’s ostentatious missile threats. The real question is: What comes next?

—Chris Miller is an assistant professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. His new book is “Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia,” published by the University of North Carolina Press.

1b) Over Trump, We’re as Divided as Ever

One thinks: He’s crazy . . . and it’s kind of working. But everything we know tells us crazy doesn’t last.

By Peggy Noonan

n just a few months, in June, it will be three years since Donald Trump announced for the presidency. It feels shorter ago and longer. I will never forget that day. I watched it live, at home, wondering where this circus act was going. But as soon as the speech was over the phone rang and it was my uncle—husky Brooklyn accent, U.S. Marine of the Korean era—who said, “So how do you like my guy?” There was silence. “He’s—your guy?” “Yeah! Maybe he can do something.” We no sooner hung up than my sister—working-class, Obama voter—called, and she too began without preamble: “I looooove him.”

By 

Peggy NoonanIn just a few months, in June, it will be three years since Donald Trump announced for the presidency. It feels shorter ago and longer. I will never forget that day. I watched it live, at home, wondering where this circus act was going. But as soon as the speech was over the phone rang and it was my uncle—husky Brooklyn accent, U.S. Marine of the Korean era—who said, “So how do you like my guy?” There was silence. “He’s—your guy?” “Yeah! Maybe he can do something.” We no sooner hung up than my sister—working-class, Obama voter—called, and she too began without preamble: “I looooove him.”

And so I was alerted early on to an epochal change in our national political life. My uncle and sister are not ideological, are skeptical of both parties, and tend to back the guy who seems most promising. They love America and wear it on their sleeves. They’re patriots.

A great deal of embarrassed attention has been paid by the press as to why half the country in 2016 refused to do what it was supposed to do and reject Mr. Trump.

Granted: Mr. Trump didn’t start the fire. A great deal had to go wrong before America put a man like him, a TV star/brander with no political experience and a sketchy history, in the presidency. The political class right and left, Dem and Rep, had to fail, and did, spectacularly, with the 2008 crash and two unwon wars. Their biggest sin the past few decades: The wealthiest and most powerful Americans, those who had most benefited from its system, peeled off from the less fortunate and made clear they were not especially concerned about their problems. Stupidly, and they are stupid, they didn’t even fake a prudent interest. The disaffected noticed this lack of loyalty and decided to respond with a living insult named Donald Trump, whom they sent to Washington to contend with a corrupt establishment.

All granted and, in these pages, previously stated at great length.

But this is about those who do not back him, many of whom are centrists and moderates. I’m not sure enough attention is given to their thoughts. It’s also about a fairly widespread cognitive dissonance that is causing fairly widespread disquiet.

Suppose you are an able and accomplished person in business—a midlevel person, or a small-business owner, or the head of a company. You’ve navigated your way through life with judgment and effort. You’ve learned lessons.

If you are that person, when you look at the policy impact of President Trump’s first year, you see some good and heartening things.

He has established in his government a deregulatory spirit that is fair and helpful. Regulation, you know, is good—we’re all human; business leaders will make decisions that are good for the company or shareholders or themselves, but not necessarily good for the town, state, country. So regulation has an important role: It helps you be a good citizen and gives cover to you when you are one. But excessive regulation, especially when it springs from ideological animus or practical ignorance, kills progress, growth, jobs, good ideas and products.

Mr. Trump has put a sober conservative on the Supreme Court, and many conservative judges on the lower courts. This provides greater balance in the judiciary. In a split country, split courts—balance—is probably the best we can do.

The economy is improving. And Mr. Trump helped pass a tax bill that was better—maybe a little, maybe a lot, but certainly better—than what it replaced.

Not bad for a first year in office!

So you, moderate, centrist professional, should feel high enthusiasm for Donald Trump. And yet you don’t, not really. What you feel is disquiet, and you know what it’s about: the worrying nature of Mr. Trump himself. You look at his White House and see what appears to be epic instability, mismanagement and confusion. You see his resentments and unpredictability. You used to think he’s surrounded by solid sophisticates, but they’re leaving. He’s unserious— Vladimir Putin says his missiles can get around any U.S. defense, and Mr. Trump is tweeting about Alec Baldwin. He careens around—he has big congressional meetings that are like talk shows where he’s the host, and he says things that are both soft and tough and you think Hmmm, maybe that’s a way through, but the next day it turns out it was only talk. This has been done on the Dreamers, on guns and we’ll see about tariffs. He loves chaos—he brags about this—but it isn’t strategic chaos in pursuit of ends, it’s purposeless disorder for the fun of it. We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not-fully-hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.

He’s on the phone with his friends: He doesn’t like the chief of staff; he may be out. He doesn’t like his national security adviser; he doesn’t like his attorney general; they may be out too. His confidante Hope Hicks is gone; so is Dina Powell ; now Gary Cohn is gone. His staff never knows what’s he’s going to do on any given day. And each day the Mueller leaks offer more evidence that whatever questionable or illegal activity took place during the campaign, Mr. Trump surrounded himself with a true Team of Screwballs.

Here is what you try to wrap your head around if you are a centrist or moderate who’s trying to be fair. You think: On some level this is working. And on some level he is crazy.

He’s crazy . . . and it’s kind of working. You struggle to reconcile these thoughts. You try to balance them.

Then you realize everything you’ve learned from life as a leader in whatever sphere—business, local public service—tells you this: Crazy doesn’t last. Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that, when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes.

And so your disquiet. Sooner or later something bad will happen—an international crisis, or damaging findings from the special counsel. If the president is the way he is on a good day, what will he be like on a bad day?

It all feels so dangerous.

A president who has relative prosperity and relative peace should be at 60% approval. This is why he is about 20 points lower.

Observations and criticisms like this make Mr. Trump’s supporters angry and defensive. So he’s not smooth, they say—“We never thought he was!” So he doesn’t have the right tone, he doesn’t always use the right words—“You’re like old-time snobs looking down on him because he uses the wrong fork.”

But it’s a little more essential than that.

Centrists and moderates are seeing what Trump supporters cannot, will not see.

Expecting more from the president of the United States springs from respect for the country, its institutions, and the White House itself. It springs from standards, the falling of which concerns natural conservatives.

It isn’t snobbery. The people trying to wrap their heads around this presidency are patriots too. That’s one of the hellish things about this era.

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