Trump's Historic Re-election Does Not Make the U.S. 'Agreement-Capable'

resident-elect Donald Trump reportedly held a phone call with Vladimir Putin, with Elon Musk on the line (CORRECTION: both sides deny this phone call ever happened and the Washington Post has been accused of either jumping the gun about a planned call or outright faking news).

Is real lasting change possible for America's UniParty Blob run-to-failure foreign policy? Or will we see a repeat of Trump's first term, in which he avoided escalating wars (good) but neocons infested his Administration, quietly preparing Ukraine for war with Russia while assassinating the IRGC commander Soleimani and undermining Trump's stated goal of withdrawal from Syria? Several members of Trump's first Administration went along with mainline GOP-promoted aspects of the Russian collusion hoax that sought to delegitimize Trump's 2016 victory by claiming it was somehow due to the Kremlin, refusing for example to challenge the FBI accepted shady deep state cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike's claim that Russia's military intelligence agency the GRU hacked the Democratic National Committee, rather than the DNC leaks being an inside job. The 'Russia hacked the election for Trump' deep state narrative was used to brainwash a whole generation of Democrats into frothing hatred of the Russians and pave the way for the mother of all proxy wars that the deep statists had planned for Hillary Clinton's first term in Ukraine, which later kicked off under Joe Biden.

For some sobering reality checks on Trump's historic electoral college landslide and popular vote win, here's a post preserved on Steemit that we wrote for Rogue News under are old alt James the Russian Analyst in late 2017—seven years ago. For a discussion of what a Trump second term would look like, see this Election Day symposium with our friends Matthew Ehret, Joaquin Flores and Tim Kirby.

Most notoriously for conserva-tarians, Trump boasted of 'Operation Warp Speed' to rollout the COVID vaxx, which likely injured untold millions of people worldwide and could contribute to chronic or fatal illnesses for decades to come. Trump under heavy pressure from Big Pharma with Big Tech throttling his supporters online dissent ignored calls from his Congressional Liberty Caucus allies and populist base to fire Anthony Fauci. And then there was the infamous Seven Days in May-esque but woke-grandstanding of CJCS Gen. Mark Milley, behaving as if Trump ordering the National Guard to put down BLM-inspired antifas riots would've been Hitlerian of Trump and later seditiously plotting against his Commander-in-Chief with his pal Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

While we may never have justice for the full-blown color revolution and the lives destroyed by the Summer of Floyd BLM/rioting campaign, culminating in the heavily federal informant provocateured 'assault on the Capitol' of January 6, we could see pardons for non-violent 1/6 offenders who've received draconian sentences after rotting in jails for years with their Constitutional rights to a fair and speedy trial grossly violated.

The massive statistical outlier of Joe Biden 'winning' 81 million votes compared to Kamala Harris pathetic showing in comparison isn't going to be easily explained away as lots of Never Trump er Republicans and independents having stayed home for woman of color Kamala in 2024 after backing the old white guy Biden in 2020. The fact that the 2020 election pattern of late night mail-in ballot dumps was not repeated (except perhaps in Arizona and a few other US Senate races after the Trumpslide was confirmed) suggests the deep state that dominated throughout Trump's first term has been partially defanged. But the real tests for Trump and the incredible coalition he built will come after January 20, 2025.

Photo credit above: U.S. and Russian flags on a negotiating table

Uploaded to iStock by MicroStockHub Feb 2018 iStock photo ID: 913980510

On the Russian front, Trump is talking a good game and his involving Elon Musk as an informal advisor is a good sign. Musk can credibly state that his Starlink terminals were a major help to the Ukrainian Army, while still retaining some credibility with the Russian side. He has pushed for a ceasefire and end to the war, with his friend David Sacks arguing for months on X that Zelensky is corrupt, untrustworthy and press ganging Ukrainian men into pointless deaths in a war of attrition that Ukraine can't win.

The attrition going on three years of NATO's entire European artillery park, much of the 'world's most powerful alliance's armored vehicle stocks and above all Ukrainian manpower has made the 'as long as it takes' Biden policy unsustainable. Ukraine's occupation of Russia's pre-war territory in Kursk oblast has been squeezed down to a rump around the border town of Sudhza, sustaining 30,000+ casualties since August. According to many estimates the Ukrainian Army can hold out maybe another six months through late spring 2025 to a year maximum (winter 2025/26) before the currently crumbling fronts in the Donbass and in the south around the city of Zaporizhia begin to collapse, with very serious risks that swathes of Kharkov region if not the city itself could fall to Russian advances as well. In the westernmost edge of their advance, Russian troops are already pressing to the outskirts of Pokrovsk, the key logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in the mineral-rich region. If Pokrovsk falls after the ground freezes in mid-winter, the Russians will only have open steppes and small villages in the barely 100 miles between their forces and Dnipro, Ukraine's fourth largest city.

John Helmer, the longest-serving Western journalist in Moscow (since 1990) and a strong critic of Western foreign policy, believes Putin is looking for a deal with Trump, over the heads of his general staff. In our extended commentary published here on Helmer's debate with Gilbert Doctorow last month, we didn't necessarily agree with that assessment. Russia has to look like it's willing to accept reasonable terms to its closest BRICS partners China and India, for multiple macro-economic and even military (arms sales) reasons. China still needs the legacy U.S. market and the dollar to a more limited extent, but both of those conditions are rapidly changing. Trump's personal rapport with Xi and obvious affection for the Chinese as shrewd business people clashes with the China hawks that are expected to populate his Administration. But the China hawks see the Ukraine War as a lost cause and want to pivot fully to the Pacific, even as low-level conflict between Israel and Iran will persist for some time. The Houthi blockade of shipping to Israel via the Red Sea also remains far from broken.

Yet with all that being said, the 'leaked' early reports about what a 'deal' would entail to end the war on the new Administration's peace terms look semi-fanciful. The Zelensky regime which since 2022 has become a full-blown wartime dictatorship ruling by emergency powers (since Zelensky's term expired in May and those of the Verkhovna Rada members in August) cannot end the war without allowing elections that will certainly spell the end of their kleptocracy. And Putin will be under heavy pressure from Russian hardliners if not a majority of the Russian people declaring that the new quasi-recognized borders simply won't be any kind of buffer for the pre-war Russian mainland against the longer range air launched cruise missiles, ground-based ballistic missiles and drones Ukraine will build and receive from NATO--drones have made the already unenforceable Minsk Agreements formula of withdrawing MLRS/artillery an agreed distance from a contact line obsolete. Nor would the majority of Russians even if grateful for an end to the war see a large, permanent NATO occupation of Ukraine west of the Dnieper accompanied by the Collective West re-arming a weakened but revanchist Kiev regime as anything other than a likely prelude to the main act of World War III, when Russia's enemies will try again in less than a generation (like the brief pause between German aggression against Russia between WW1 and WW2). The Russian hard liners and many SMO veterans are clear: Russia has to be prepared to cross the Dnieper and go all the way to Odessa and Transnistria, completely landlocking a rump Ukraine to achieve a decisive victory.

Besides the mistrust between the Russian and Ukrainian sides and Russian rejection of NATO officially (not just unofficially like the present) occupying Ukraine, there's the question of a Trump-hating, delusional and entitled Eurotrash political class generating wildly unrealistic demands of Washington. With many of these same EU political hacks calling Trump a Putin puppet before they started kissing The Donald's ass on November 6th. They are also especially the German warmongers truly terrified of actually having to put their countrymen's asses on the line and send their own soldiers to fight and die if the Ukraine War continues as they demand--actually dying for Ukraine is the job of deluded idealist U.S./Canadian veteran 'volunteers', expendable Poles, Balts and mercenaries from South America. The incoming Trump Administration will want to call the shots. But behind the scenes, it's likely to demand that the British in particular, who did so much to overhype Ukraine's chances and deliberately tried to meddle in the election, put their butts where their mouths are and officially send troops as peacekeepers. This while the British Army itself is barely large enough to pack Wembley Stadium.

Pre-September 1, 1939 borders of Poland. Note multiple modern western Ukraine cities including the Ukrainian nationalist heartland cities of L'vov and Ivano-Frankisk inside the red line. Note also that historic Polish frontiers include Russia's closest tactical nukes sharing CSTO ally Belarus.

As for the Poles, who were widely expected by the neocons in London and Washington to act on their historical loathing and mistrust of the Russians by dutifully fighting and dying in non-disavowable brigades or divisions for Ukraine, the Poles have increasingly soured on the war. Many Polish patriots in particular are fed up with the millions of Ukrainian refugees becoming semi-permanent residents of their country, many of whom are not working 2 1/2 years since they left their homeland. And many Poles dislike the Ukrainian cult of Galician Nazi collaborators and Volyn genocidaires that has been largely swept under the rug in Western media since 2022. Any major deployment of the Polish Army not only could spark protests in Poland, it would raise suspicions on the Ukrainians' part that Poland may be seeking to quietly reclaim its pre-1939 border--including the Volynia region that was brutally ethnically cleansed of Poles by the UkroNazis of the UPA in 1943-44.

Then there are the Germans. Who is anybody kidding about a sad-sack Bundeswehr which has stripped its stockpiles bare for Ukraine, being able to send anything more than a lightly armed token peacekeeper brigade? A deployment that even after a ceasefire deal is reached will be highly unpopular with the German people, haunted by bad memories of the last time German soldiers officially trod Ukrainian soil. Any German peacekeeping contingent thus will almost surely have to be bolstered by troops from the Baltic States as well as Scandinavian peacekeepers from Sweden and Denmark (the Finns and Norwegians may pass for already bordering-Russia reasons). But even the political will for this may prove lacking as the German government of Olaf Scholz just collapsed.

But ultimately, these issues are secondary to the question of whether the U.S. government and by extension the Collective West it still purports to lead are 'agreement capable' and actually trustworthy enough to pursue peace in good faith. Because Washington not London, Paris, Brussels or Berlin decides when and how to start cutting off the spigot of weapons and money that has kept the wartime Kiev regime alive in order to force Zelensky or his likely to be unelected successor to the negotiating table. It was the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov having coined the phrase 'non-agreement capable' to describe the inability of the U.S. to make its Ukrainian proxies adhere to the Minsk Agreements that were supposed to freeze the 2014-2021 conflict localized in the Donbass that preceded Russia's Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Just because the deep state is down at the moment does not mean that they are out, and have conceded that the 'Christmas help' of the 2nd Trump Administration will actually decide U.S.-Russia policy over the objections of the permanent bureaucracy, the Eastern European ethno-lobbies and the Refight the Crimean War Anglomaniacs aka British neocons in London. The Pentagon itself and the military Twitter or #miltwitter bros who've been repeating feelgood lies about the Ukrainians winning the war are also going to have to find a face-saving way of admitting defeat, perhaps by comparing the Ukrainian territorial and no NATO 'Finlandization' neutrality concessions to those ceded by the defeated Axis Finnish state of 1944-45. Miltwitter will keep insisting against all evidence that Russia's casualties must surely have been higher than Ukraine's over half a million combat deaths and similar number of permanently maimed men. The alternative will be 'our cause was just but war effort was betrayed back home' rationalizations similar to those many anti-Communist conservatives made about America's defeat in Vietnam.

More thoughts on this topic of how the Ukraine War finally ends soon from ourselves and our ESW Eurasia Editor, US Army veteran Stanislav Krapivnik. We plan to have Stas on the ESW Rogue webcast next Friday, November 15, 2024.