What a difference a couple of days make in our appreciation of the Trump White House!
Beware to all interviewees who participate in prerecorded programs that will be released several days later to suit a broadcaster’s weekly scheduling!
I have just received the link to the Afshin Rattansi’s “Going Underground” that we recorded this past Wednesday but which only went on air today within the distribution channels of RT.
This was before the news of the Trump-Putin phone call, before the speech of J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference and before we were aware of Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s presentation on the end game of the war to the Ukraine Coordinating organization in Brussels.
All of these developments put paid to the notion that Donald Trump and his inner circle are unaware of the realities on the battlefield in the war and of what has to be conceded if the Russians are going to sit down and sign a peace. As we now know, someone in the White House has indeed been reading the daily mainstream newspapers and has trashed the briefings coming from the CIA without waiting for the intelligence briefings to be put in order by the incoming Tulsi Gabbard.
There is now great commotion in Europe over all of the breaking news created by Team Trump. The shake-out in German domestic politics is yet to come, hopefully at the ballot box on 23 February. It appears that after his speech to the Security Conference, Vance had meetings with both Alice Weidel of the Alternative for Germany and with Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats. If that should result in the formation of a new governing coalition in Germany, then the entire political orientation of Europe will be directed away from suicide and towards healthy realism.
We should all be prepared to be surprised in the coming weeks & months -- the proxy war in the Ukraine is probably still at the "end of the beginning" stage.
There are things which the NYT crowd would call "US concessions" which President Trump would see as positives -- such as removing US missiles from Europe, reducing US troops there, and making severe reductions in NATO. But we don't know what the consequences of the US tossing the problem to the Euros will be. Could the mighty Danish air force try to create a No Fly Zone over the Ukraine? Could Starmer send the entire British Army into the Ukraine? What about the French? We all expect the Euros to wimp out ... but we could be surprised.
Equally, how will the Ukrainian forces react? So far, there have been no real signs of large-scale surrenders or refusal to fight, although individual desertions run at a high rate. Ukrainian soldiers have fought tenaciously so far, and they may not give up in an environment that definitely favors the defending military and can be very hard on attacking forces. Prepared to be surprised!