Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 21 – Russian
commentators are celebrating Donald Trump’s decision to pull American forces
from Syria, with some calling it the US president’s early Christmas gift to
Vladimir Putin (ehorussia.com/new/node/17588)
and others referring to it as the work of Russia’s “Agent Donald” (news-front.info/2018/12/19/agent-donald-skazal-agent-donald-sdelal-vojska-ssha-vyhodyat-iz-sirii-colonel-cassad/).
But
perhaps the most devastating Moscow commentary comes from Petr Akopov of Vzglyad who entitles his essay about the
most recent news coming out of Washington, “Trump’s Policy Completely
Corresponds to Russia’s National Interests” (vz.ru/politics/2018/12/21/956628.html).
Trump, Akopov writes, “is an
opponent of foreign intervention and games at playing ‘world gendarme,’ and
this was one of his main election slogans,” the Moscow journalist says. “By keeping his promises and beringing
American soldiers home, he increases his already not bad chances to be
re-elected in 2020.”
That of course means, he continues,
that the globalist majority of the American establishment and indeed all the Atlanticist
super-nationalist elites will have to deal with [Trump] until 2024.” It is one
thing to block him for two years; it is quite another to block him for six.
“What is Trump doing?” Akopov asks
rhetorically. “He is thinking strategically: globalization of the Anglo-Saxon
kind has failed. On the one hand, the US doesn’t have the strength” to maintain
it. And on the other, “the growth of alternative historical centers of force
like China, Russia, India and the Islamic world” preclude it.
Trump and those who support him may
be called “American nationalists, anti-globalists, conservatives,
anti-interventionists, neo-isolationists or traditionalists,” he says. “The
terms aren’t precise and to a large extend they do not have any importance in
and of themselves.”
“What is most important,” Akopov
continues, “is that Trump loves the US … He really wants to ‘make America great
again,’ that is, to strengthen its economy, society and statehood. In order
that it can not only withstand the storms ahead … but also preserve its place
as the first country in the world” not as a policeman but as a model of
advanced society.
It is for this reason, the Vzglyad writer says, that those who do
not understand his strategy hate him.
And those who hate him also “demonize Vladimir Putin because Russia is
so interfering with their plans.” Thus, they have come up with their failed
effort to “find the nonexistent Russian traces in [Trump’s] victory.”
The only thing that the opponents of
Trump have been able to do is to block his meetings with Putin. “This, of
course, is no small thing because there is nothing more horrific for the
globalists than the very probability of a coming together and coordination of the
actions of their two main enemies. The
internal enemy is Trump; the external enemy is Putin.”
It is clear to them and to everyone
else that “the goals of the two presidents coincide on the main things: both
want to make their countries as strong as possible and as sovereign as possible
and fully independent.” They view the world in far more similar ways “than it
seems” to many.
“And the main thing which unites
them is that the world must be run by national states and not by super-national
structures.”
Of course, Akopov says, even if the
two are able to form “a new world order,” there will be tensions and
competition between them. “But there will be an understanding of the spheres of
the vital interests of each other and a tough agreement about this or that regional
or world problems and a profitable cooperation on this or that economic
projects.”
“On the path to such a world order,
much remains to be done. But Donald Trump with all his strengths is moving
America in that direction. He may fail, although this would be a catastrophe
for the US, they may kill him, but while he does what he does, this completely
corresponds to the national interests of Russia.”
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