By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 11/13/24

Ever since the outcome of the presidential election was clear on 6 November; all attention of American political analysts has been directed to whom Donald Trump will choose to fill the key positions in his administration on the understanding that such individuals equate with policy. Today, when names have been put to most of the slots which the Russians would call ‘power ministries’ in any government, the Kremlin has made public its conclusions about the individuals named and about the policies they expect Trump 2.0 to implement in general and towards themselves in particular.

In the past I would never have suggested that I divine what Vladimir Putin, or more broadly what ‘the Kremlin’ thinks on any given subject. But since that is precisely the phrasing that is used by my host on ‘Judging Freedom,’ I have stopped arguing and regularly use the most authoritative political talk show in Russia, ‘The Great Game,’ hosted principally by the hereditary Kremlin insider Vycheslav Nikonov, with guest panelists from the leading universities and think tanks, to represent what Vladimir Putin and his closest confidantes are thinking.

And so, as the Brits love to say, let’s get cracking.

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The single most important observation by ‘the Kremlin’ is that all of the key nominees, namely Mike Waltz for National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense; John Ratcliffe at the CIA, and (presumably) Marco Rubio as Secretary of State are soft on Russia and hard on China. This all supports the notion that Donald Trump genuinely wants to end the Ukraine war as soon as possible so that he can focus U.S: foreign policy on this other greater concern, and in this connection he is likely to respond positively to Russia’s terms for peace, including their claims to the Donbas and Novaya Rossiya oblasts that they have annexed and their demand that Ukraine be a neutral state without any prospects of joining Nato, without having foreign troops and installations on their territory.

Under the same logic, the Kremlin assumes that the USA under Trump however pro-Israeli it may be, will press Israel to de-escalate its campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza, and to conclude cease-fires as soon as possible. Moreover, the Kremlin does not expect the enmity towards Iran among several of those named in the Trump team to translate into hostilities of any kind. Indeed, given his pleasure in doing the unexpected, as was the case in his dealings with the North Korean leader, Trump is seen as possibly opening a dialogue with Teheran now and reducing tensions there.

Otherwise Nikonov and his panelists reported with some amusement on the likely changes at the Pentagon both before the confirmation in the Senate of Hegseth and after. They mentioned specifically the firing of the generals and others responsible for the debacle of America’s exit from Afghanistan and the purge of generals who in one way or another owed their promotions to the ideological agenda of the Democrats favoring gender equality, nontraditional sexual orientation and the like over merit. In this regard, they noted that the head of the Air Force Brown, present head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be flung out early in the new administration.

The panelists on The Great Game do their homework: they read both major US and UK mainstream press such as The Washington Post and The Economist as well as the leading American professional journals such as Foreign Affairs. Accordingly they quoted today from the latest article by Harvard professor Stephen Walt clearly conceding that Ukraine has lost the war and should sue for peace now; accepting Russian terms, while there is still something of their country left to save.

The Kremlin is taking great comfort in the latest professional commentary in the USA to the effect that it must reconcile itself to being just a major superpower among others that has no ‘exceptional’ status. All-in-all that comes to what Vladimir Putin has been saying at least since 2013, when he spoke of growing trust with Barack Obama after their deal on destruction of Syrian chemical weapons but still upbraided Obama for his retaining the unacceptable characterization of his country that had been given by Madeleine Albright as standing taller than others and seeing farther.

Russian television reporting on the war remains upbeat, very confident that it is going well in part thanks to the Zelensky’s grievous strategic mistake in committing so much of his best trained reserves to the hopeless invasion of Russia’s Kursk region where they are now being pulverized.

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Despite the waves of news coming out of the Middle East each day, there are many developments of great importance that are under-reported. One of those in the past 24 hours was the missile and drone attack on the U.S; aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its squadron in the Red Sea by the Houthis of Yemen. The Houthis were the first to announce that their mission was successful. The Pentagon spokesman in Washington confirmed to assembled journalists that an attack took place but said that no military personnel were injured and that the drones were all destroyed. This spokesman did not say anything about the ship-busting Palestine 2 hypersonic ballistic missiles that were allegedly used by the Houthis as part of the attack, and so perhaps there was some serious damage to the ships.

So far, so good. We may assume that the missiles were provided to the Houthis by Iran. But who gave them the precise coordinates of the ships, likely obtained from satellites overhead, shall we say by Russian satellites. This is similar to the question of the Russian role in countering the Israeli attack on Iran a week ago. For the moment the Pentagon seems to avoid speaking of the Russian activities in the Middle East even as it overventilates describing the way the Russians have integrated 10,000 North Korean infantry into their 50,000 man force that is about to crush or drive from Kursk what remains of the Ukrainian invasion force.

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Finally, I direct attention to the confused use of political nomenclature used by the American media, both mainstream and alternative media, as they put labels on each and every nominee by Trump for his incoming administration. Most commonly we hear that candidate X or Y is a ‘Neocon’ when what is really meant is that they just take aggressive stands on international issues. After all, behind the true Neocons like Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan there is an entire ideology, not merely the will to subdue one or another potential geopolitical competitor of the United States. That ideology is founded on the belief that they see the direction history is taking and want to accelerate that trend by staging coups d’etat or orange revolutions here and there, for example.

In this sense, I maintain that the America First promoters whom Trump is nominating are not Neocons, whereas those whom he has specifically rejected like Bolton are.

I also call attention to the US media confusion over Trump’s position against globalism. Globalism is also a whole ideology based on the premise that in our age the business of running the world can be left to transational corporations and other supranational organizations. Such views are essentially a denial of national sovereignty, just as the free movement of people across borders to seek employment where they will is a denial of sovereignty.

And so, in the end, there is indeed a closeness between the conservative; shall we say ‘retro’ political thinking of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But it is not in what Trump’s enemies are suggesting, namely that he admires strongmen rulers, authoritarians and dictators and wishes to be one himself. No, what they have in common is the pride of place they both give to national sovereignty. And; to give credit where it is due, this all goes back to 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia, and the then belief that the nation state is the best defender of the freedoms of their citizens.