4 out of 5 doctors recommend that you stop watching Fox News.
Stranger
These are public offices. I fail to see how less transparency would be more likely to lead to positive outcomes for the people they represent.
Sorry, but you may not support Trump or his policies, but you seem to be falling into a trap that because Trump is rich and powerful through real estate, reality shows, and other business ventures, he actually knows what he is doing on in international politics.
I would say Trump’s approach to dealing with Putin is similar to how Trump might deal with any corporate negotiations. Building up a “relationship” with the other CEO so Trump is the one he turns to when he needs to buy more product.
So it’s not really clear to me what Trump actually negotiated here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin often became frustrated with President Donald Trump over his lack of knowledge on geopolitical issues, Fiona Hill said, adding that this played into Moscow’s decision on the timing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
By being so weak and toady, Trump convinced Putin that Putin was stronger than he actually was, thereby encouraging him to set out on his disastrous war against Ukraine.
And then, there’s this take:
One of the reasons Putin invaded Ukraine with President Joe Biden in the White House was that he expected the US to “sue for peace” and thought it would be better to deal with Biden than trying to negotiate with someone like Trump, whom the Russian leader had “to explain everything to all the time,” Hill, who served as the top Russia advisor on the National Security Council under Trump, said Tuesday at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs event.
“He thought that somebody like Biden — who’s a transatlanticist, who knows all about NATO, who actually knows where Ukraine is, and actually knows something about the history, and is very steeped in international affairs — would be the right person to engage with,” Hill said.
Unfortunately for Putin, he didn’t consider that a former comedian-cum-President would lead Ukrainians to a vigorous resistance that should inspire someone to make an Eastern European remake of Red Dawn, or that that Russian military would klutz themselves into repeatedly snatching failure from jaws of success. Controlling Biden is pretty much the least of Putin’s problems now.
Stranger
If you are negotiating on your own behalf with your own money or other capital, it might be a fine idea. Or not, it’s sort of a case by case thing. Sometimes it might soften up your adversary, but sometimes you’re the one that gets softened up and you may not see it.
But when you are negotiating on the behalf of the country that hired you, using taxpayer dollars, it’s a horrible idea. It gives the appearance of impropriety and calls your objectivity into question. If there are other parties to the negotiation ( as is often the case in international relations), it can cause problems with the other parties. It’s a horrible idea, and full transparency should be required.
Plus, you might be the one getting played, especially of you are susceptible to flattery and manipulation and do something totally stupid like give a press conference where you all but offer to hand two American citizens that were highly critical of Putin over to Russia for prosecution. Yes, Trump really did that.
BTW, Trump is quite possibly the worst negotiator in the world, and I suspect that he was only brought into Trump Organization negotiations at the last minute after the deal was already agreed to, and even then everyone white-knuckled it, hoping he wouldn’t screw up their hard work. I believe the reason he hated treaties so much was he had no idea what to do with a multi-party negotiation. And no one in NY real estate will negotiate with him without witnesses, because one of his techniques is telling everyone the adversarial party agreed to something they didn’t agree to, and them calling them backstabbers and liars when they contradict you. This technique is disconcerting when it involves world leaders with nukes.
Also not much of a businessman:
Stranger
No, I feel Pence had a rational plan. He figured he’d serve under Trump for eight years and then be well placed to succeed him.
Trump was just being played. Putin saw him as a useful idiot.
Somebody once pointed out that Trump would have more money now if he had just taken the money his family gave him and put it all in a basic index fund.
I’m actually pretty confident that if Trump had been president when Russia attacked Ukraine, Trump would have made a high profile visit to Putin in order to have a serious and frank discussion in private about what would happen next.
And what would have happened is that Trump would have declared war on Canada.
This is seriously within the realm of possibilities here.
Mexico; Trump would never have the balls to go after Canada.
Stranger
I’ve read that claim, and thought it was bogus because it didn’t factor in the yearly expenses of Donald’s lifestyle (big jet, multiple wives). However, I just did a search and came up with a 2015 article that comes to the same conclusion, while allotting Donald a billionaire life style. It evens accepts Donald’s estimates of his wealth, rather than the much lower numbers from Forbes.
One paragraph: “If the S&P 500 averaged 11.3 percent per year, and if Trump sold 2 percent of his portfolio annually, he could have spent like a king while his wealth grew by a compounding average of 9.3 percent each year. This would have turned his $500 million into about $9.4 billion today. That’s $5.3 billion more than Forbes estimates. It’s $700 million more than Donald Trump says he has.”
The one thing Trump really is the bigglyest at, is omniincompetence. He’s bad at everything.
From what Fiona Hill says, even literally so to the point of annoyance.
This thread is an attempt to rewrite history.
Trump was one of the few world politicians who opposed Putin and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
From BBC - Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanctions on Russia gas pipeline
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The US considers the project a security risk to Europe.
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Both Russia and the EU have strongly condemned the US sanctions.
And while Trump put sanctions on the pipeline he encouraged Germany to build Liquid Natural Gas ports so they wouldn’t be further at the mercy of Russian control of their energy.
From The New York Post - Pushed by Security Concerns and Trump, Germany Weighs a New Fuel
- For Germany, Europe’s largest consumer of natural gas, an L.N.G. terminal would provide an alternative to its dependence on fuel piped from Russia, its largest supplier, and give the country a way to receive supplies from Qatar or the United States or elsewhere if an alternative were needed.
When Biden became President he removed the sanctions.
From Reuters - U.S. waives sanctions on Nord Stream 2 as Biden seeks to mend Europe ties
- The Biden administration waived sanctions on the company behind Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany and its chief executive, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday, a move decried by critics of the project in Congress.
Clearly the historical facts show that Trump saw the danger of Russian control of energy over Germany and attempted to put policies in place to limit that from happening. And before anybody tries to hand wave this away it was Congress who wrote the sanctions.
All of this was just common sense given Russian control of the pipeline into Poland and the recent capture of Crimea. Trump and Congress sanctioned the Russian pipeline and Biden removed those sanctions.
I said Putin saw Trump as a useful idiot and I stand by that.
The evidence that Trump is an idiot is too extensive to deny.
The reason he was useful to Putin was because Russia benefitted by the United States having incompetent leadership. Trump wasn’t a Russian agent following orders. Trump was just being himself, weakening America by doing so, and Putin was able to sit back and reap the benefits.
I’m sure Putin was hoping to get four more years out of Trump but Trump was too incompetent to hold on to power by legal or illegal means (although he tried both). So Putin took the advantages he got out of four years of Trump and cashed them in.
this is pure hyperbole on your part. I’ve cited Trump’s direct intervention against their pipeline with sanctions and Biden’s retraction of the sanctions. The useful idiot is Biden.
You can’t site a weakening of the US under Trump. The border was better controlled, gas was cheaper, the economy was in much better shape than it is today. He oversaw the fastest development of vaccines in history.
Virtually everything under Biden is a cluster-fuck failure.
*laughing into pain* You mean the guy who advised people to inject themselves with bleach and household cleaner, refused to wear a mask even after he was infected and contagious, infecting Secret Service agents, and only very reluctantly promoted vaccination? The one who started a self-destructive “trade war” under the mistaken belief that the Chinese would bear the cost of the tariffs? Trump, who separated children from parents in a move universally condemned my mental health experts of all political stripes but failed to build more than a tiny fraction of “Wall” (which was not a “Great beautiful wall,” that he described but a bollard fence constructed by cut-rate contractors that is currently falling apart) and did absolutely nothing to resolve the long-standing snafu of stalled immigration reform? That guy?
Your Trump fetishism does not sell well here in reality. It doesn’t sell well at all even on the discount shelf.
Stranger
I cited reality between the actions of Trump and Biden regarding who was against Putin and who supported him. There’s a clear difference between the actions of Trump and the rapid development of covid vaccines and Biden’s failure to get covid tests out in a timely manner.
Citing what Trump actually did is not a fetish. It’s fact. I don’t even like him but he was a far better President than Biden has shown to be so far.
As far as China is concerned, they are not our friend. Not even a little. Negotiating trade deals that favor the US is what a President is supposed to do.