Broken Bromance.

President Donald J. Trump has gone on record that Russia MUST quit the Crimea peninsula... the very place where the locals want the Russians to stay! So what does the Vladimir think about the Donald now? What's happened to the romance between the two?

I say it's become tainted -- and utterly destroyed -- by the very same Neocons that Trump vowed to purge from the Deep State a.k.a. the USA National Security Apparatus and President Vladimir V. Putin is now thinking something on the lines of this:

A Pence Presidency?

A Pence Administration also means that the neocons' Poking the Russian Bear will continue, even if it results in WW3 and the lobbing of nukes.

Mike Pence in Bed with the Neocons.

Now the rumor mill has it that Trump is also in bed with the Russian banks, to the tune of $100 million or more. This must give Putin headaches, because the saying goes, if you owe someone $1,000 you can't pay, have a problem. But if you owe someone a $1,000,000,000 you can't pay THEY have a problem.

Now what will Putin do, when Trump tells the Russian banks to go screw? He can't send any of "his" (according to Newsweek) Russian mafia assassins to take Trump out. And he can't exactly escalate the Ukranian proxy war to full-blown war in Eastern (Central) Europe without breaking the NATO tripwire.

And the lobbing of all those nukes both sides own would create a twenty years' ice age (i.e., the nuclear winter).

World War Three Dead Ahead!

It will come either by Hillary's neocons going Russian Bear-baiting; or, if Trump gets elected, the neo-cons in the GOP establishment going bear-baiting, or Putin thinking Trump is now treating NATO like some sort of protection racket and thereby taking back the former Soviet Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Maybe Finland, too.

Donald Trump just made imbecilic statements that if certain NATO countries in Europe haven't paid enough money in his estimation to the United States for their collective defense, then he'll just sit right back and let the Russians roll right over them, should Russia follow through on a decision to invade certain NATO countries.

Now our parents and grandparents knew of a certain British Prime Minister who flew to Munich and returned with a pact between the UK and Hitler, proclaiming "Peace in out time!" Soon enough, Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and the following September, invaded Poland.

To thread the needle of avoiding World War 3, if that's even possible, the United States needs to STOP poking the Russian Bear, i.e., get out of the Ukraine, and at the same time reaffirm its treaty obligation or promise as a lead pipe guarantee that it will defend the European NATO countries against a Russian attack. That means, of course, that we need to redirect our War Department dollars (622 billion of them) so as to spend them wisely, and not waste them on boondoggles such as the F-35 Lardbucket: no way is that thing going to compete with Russia's new Sukhoi fighter jets.

But most importantly, we should be waging peace at the same time we keep our committments and keep strong enough to keep them, in order to maintain the peace.

If You Want to Get Mauled, Go Poke a Bear Repeatedly.

Vladimir Putin and "The Hildebeest."
Hillary will continue the neocon policies started under Clinton 42, or even under Poppy Bush 41.
Source: static.kremlin.ru/media/events/photos/big/fdPIA2gpDXpa3tZvdgqJMuvwDGr5tDAx

Well Neil Godfrey of the Vridar blog, a Top 50 Biblioblog and one that explores Christian Origins not limited to an historical Jesus, has joined the chorus of warnings that current US foreign policy against Russia is leading us straight into World War III. Why is the USA doing this? In one word and three: Greed and Russian Natural Resources.

Reblogged from Vridar, Neil Godrey's post, Sleepwalking once again into war, this time nuclear.

Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, scares me. He compares in Frontline Ukraine the current international tensions over Ukraine with those over the Balkans prior to World War 1. He further compares the dynamics between NATO/”Wider Europe” and Russia with those between Western Europe/UK and Germany prior to World War 2.

On the one hundredth anniversary of World War I and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II, and 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Europe once again finds itself the cockpit of a great-power confrontation. How could Europe have allowed itself to end up in this position, after so many promises of ‘never again’? This is the worst imbroglio in Europe since the 1930s, with pompous dummies parroting glib phrases and the media in full war cry. Those calling for restraint, consideration and dialogue have not only been ignored but also abused, and calls for sanity have not only been marginalised but also delegitimated. It is as if the world has learned nothing from Europe’s terrible twentieth century. (Sakwa, R. 2015, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, I.B. Taurus, London. p. 1, bolding mine in all quotations)

....

A word search (I have not yet read past chapter 3) takes me to the following:

Hillary Clinton packed the State Department with ‘Democrat’ neoconservatives with a messianic and Manichean view of the world. Clinton herself had few achievements in her four years as the American foreign minister, and has since concentrated on positioning herself as a potential candidate in the US presidential election of 2016 by scoring easy points – and there are no easier points than Russia-bashing. (p. 217)

....

Even the Cold War architect of Containment, George Kennan, was horrified:

The implications of NATO enlargement were substantively debated. In an interview with Thomas Friedman in 1998, the doyen of international diplomacy and the architect of the original policy of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union in the post-war years, George Kennan, was unsparing in his condemnation. Kennan spoke with dismay about the Senate’s ratification of NATO expansion plans:  

I think the Russians will react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else […] This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed on to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.  

Not for the first time the ‘superficial and ill-informed’ nature of Congressional discussion was condemned. Equally, he added words that remain a portent for today:  

I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.(Sakwa, R. 2015, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, I.B. Taurus, London. pp. 45-46)

“Her Cold War stance is reflected in her parting injunction to Obama that ‘the only language Putin would understand’ is ‘strength and resolve’.”

Putin understands the language of ‘strength and resolve’ perfectly; it is evident he does so by his rebuilding of Russia’s strength and has so far shown steely resolve and restraint in the twin disasters of Syria/ISIS/Iraq and the Ukraine.

Dmitry Orlov last week posted this warning from several Russian-Americans plus some US luminaires that if the United States were to keep bear-baiting Russia into World War 3, the United States will find itself at the very least with no economy, no working infrastructure and no government; and at the very worst, it will be reduced to a radioactive ashtray.

In other words, World War III is death to America! Ugh.

Jesus Fracking Christ. And the only way we can get out of this, alive,is if we vote for Jill Stein, or at least Trump in the general election. But it doesn't matter who votes, but who counts the votes.

Hat tip to Neil Godfrey and Uncle Joe (Stalin).