World leaders, especially US presidents, ping pong back and forth between domestic and foreign policy due to the dynamics of political capital. Political capital might be a numinous concept, but it certainly exists. When leaders are losing in one realm, they will often switch to the other to obtain capital, and if they are winning, they will switch realms to spend it.
This is why it is absolutely necessary for Trump that he ends the Ukraine War. It is a binary outcome of total success or total failure which will determine his political capital in domestic affairs. This would be true even if he hadn’t made it a major campaign promise, but now it is even more so. He must prevail or perish.
If Trump ends the war, it will annihilate the Russian collusion narrative and the talking point that the Democrats are the adults in the room. It will save lives and money. It will continue one of the few successes from his first term: ending endless wars.
If Trump fails to end the war in a timely manner it will cast doubt on whether he can keep other campaign promises. It will continue to waste blood, which will enrage Democrats, and almost certainly money, which is practically the only thing that will enrage Republicans.
Failure to conclude the war will lead to another binary decision: continue supporting Ukraine or abandon Ukraine. Because aid must be of a sufficient quantity to be effective, there can be no middle ground.
If Trump abandons Ukraine, this would be a hundred times worse than Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, because it would basically reward starting the biggest war in Europe since WWII. The media/Left would be sure to hype it up to revive the Russian collusion narrative. This would smear Trump for the rest of the term—and more importantly, his presumed successor, JD Vance. The Kamala campaign shows that vice presidents cannot distance themselves from their presidents.
If Trump continues to support Ukraine, it will never be enough for the Democrats while even token support will infuriate Republicans. Even with ample support, there is no guarantee that Ukraine would not collapse. If there is even a 10% chance that the frontlines could catastrophically collapse after such massive loss and investment, that should be enough to bring him to the bargaining table.
Trump gambling the 2028 election, and his ability to enact policy in the meantime, on the hope that Russia’s front lines will catastrophically collapse first is not just cowardly optimism, it is reckless beyond belief. Peace is the only option. And if his advisors say there is a higher chance Russia will break first, he would be wise to ask for how long they have been saying that.
Trump was going to need to conclude the Ukraine War no matter what, but his bloviating on the campaign trail means he has less time to do it. How?
The key here is negotiating with Putin. This requires that Putin respect Trump, which means at some level fearing him. Putin does not respect abstractions, principles, big words, “muh rules based order”, or other frivolity. Putin respects strength.
Putin and Russia might be one extreme of realpolitik, but realpolitik is how most of humanity has operated for most of history. To do otherwise was to perish. The American establishment, and this includes Trump, are stuck in a delusional fantasy land spawned by English and American isolation, the capitalist will to plunder, Anglo legalism, the Enlightenment, safety and comfort, and boomerism. That fantasy is ending. It doesn’t matter if you like this or not. Like the weather, you can’t change it, your only choice is to acknowledge and deal with it or to disregard it at your own peril.
When Trump came down that escalator, he was exiting the world of business for the world of politics, and he failed to adjust accordingly. Business may be similar in some ways to politics, but its essence is fundamentally different. Business is about making deals to maximize profit; politics is about maximizing power. Power is not profit, even if they can be exchanged for one another, and the fact that they can be exchanged shows that they are not the same. Trump cannot blindly translate his business experience into politics, and the fact that many conservatives analyze politics through emerald-tinted business glasses is a large part of why they have failed to conserve anything. Politics is closer to war than to business, but even they are fundamentally different. Reductionism is fundamentally flawed.
So, how does Trump gain the initial political capital to pressure Putin to make peace? A lesson from history can guide us here. Apparently, the Soviets didn’t take Ronald Reagan seriously until he fired striking air traffic control workers. It was the right thing to do. But Reagan had to listen to a lot of shrieking from women of both sexes.
Trump faces a similar test of character as soon as he takes office. He needs to pardon ALL January 6 defendants. This is yet another binary decision. However, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and other conservatives have said that they will pardon only non-violent J6ers or do so on a case by case basis. Due to their political amateurism they are mistaking a binary decision informed by Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction for a non-binary decision that allows for compromise, as if it were a business deal.
There can be no compromise. Anything less than full pardons sends a combination of several dangerous messages: 1. the election wasn’t really stolen so Trump is a liar, 2. resisting a stolen election is worse than stealing it, which emboldens Democrats to steal another election, 3. blacks and liberals can riot with impunity but whites and conservatives better not stick a toe out of line, 4. Trump cannot or will not punish his enemies and reward his friends, and most importantly, 5. Trump is not a serious leader and America is not a serious country. (The only exception to full pardons should be for people who cooperated with the feds, but this exception is an even more hardline application of the friend-enemy distinction).
Objectively, it is a binary decision because anything less than full pardons implicitly acknowledges the Left’s ludicrous narrative that a very well-armed segment of the population attempted to overthrow an alleged Democrat victory in a Democrat stronghold without any of their numerous firearms. It implies that torturing prisoners at the DC gulag after allowing antifa and BLM to run rampant was justified. Trump and others may claim otherwise, but actions speak louder than words.
Subjectively, we will make it a binary decision and big deal. The J6ers have been hardened and bonded together by their experience as political prisoners. Already, its crystal clear that they will be maintaining absolute solidarity with anyone left behind. One does not need a poll or focus group to know the J6ers are well-beloved by the MAGA movement. And the Great Christmas H-1B War shows that the base, and even a surprising number of conservative influencers, are willing and able to flog the administration on policy betrayals.
What’s most embarrassing is that pardoning all J6ers would cost Trump nothing. He would simply have to endure the screeching of shrill Leftists who hate him anyway. The liberals have angry words but no divisions. Putin has plenty of divisions. Why should a man with an army respect or fear a man who trembles before menopausal journalists of both sexes?
Putin is not just any world leader. He almost certainly assassinated Prigozhin in retribution for his attempted mutiny, along with a string of Russian diplomats several years ago. (One of them, Oleg Erovinkin, is suspected of helping create the fraudulent Steele Dossier from the Russian collusion hoax. Interesting). I personally dislike Putin for his war of aggression against Ukraine. But love him or hate him, no one can deny that Putin is a serious leader. Deadly serious.
Full pardons are the bare minimum for Putin, or really anyone, to take Trump seriously. It is certainly necessary, but may not be sufficient. Ample restitution of millions of dollars for each defendant is the only real way to ensure true respect. Partial pardons would be an amateurish fumble. Serious men are taken seriously by other serious men. Weaklings are not.
Trump will immediately pardon all J6ers or he will not, which will determine if he has a chance of ending the Ukraine War or not. And that will determine whether Trump’s friends and enemies will take him seriously for the rest of his term.
Or not.
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10 comments
From the recent strutting around with expansionist rhetoric I the strategy might involving the atrophied muscles while further abusing the enslaved Europe (there are signs that the Ukrainian war is going be dumped on Euros to catch most of the flak once the country implodes, at least by recent comments from Kellogg). This will provide enough imperial circuses for the plebeians at least for some time while very controversial issues like J6, could be swept under the rug of other distractions. One of the stark features of rump/decaying states is that their foreign policy becomes a function of the internal one to an outstanding degree. PR victories, bombastic declarations are means to win political capital over the opposition even if nothing comes of it for the nation.
If Trump pardons ALL the J6 political prisoners unconditionally, it will make him look strong and decisive. It will cost him nothing. That would be a huge defeat for the Deep State regime. The shrieks of outrage from leftwing loonies & neocons would unite the people against our internal enemy. It’s an easy decision.
I don’t expect it to happen, though. The Jews control Trump. Jared Kushner will advise against helping his own supporters. Can’t anger your donors. We’ll soon see.
I think Trump has a good chance to end the Ukraine war as long as he lets Russia keep most of the territory they currently occupy. Putin needs to save face but the war is taking a heavy toll on Russian soldiers and supplies and the Ukrainians have started to bomb infrastructure in Russia. I am sure Putin would like it to end.
Trump is unpredictable which could help convince Putin.
I agree about pardoning J6’ers. It shows he keeps his promise and it will endear him to his supporters.
Why is pardoning the J6ers a condition of viewing Trump as a serious man? Putin answers to whomever is in power in Washington, whom themselves answer to Israel. The Ukraine War has served its purpose for the Jews: kill about a million Slavs and fortify the war machine on both sides. My guess is it will end in some kind of DMZ stalemate with the compromise being an Ukraine NATO membership and the four provinces plus Crimea permanently annexed into the Russian Federation.
I agree that Trump should make a clean break for broad J6 pardons and let the (((corporate news media))) pickel in their tears and sorrow if they don’t like it.
This will make a clean break instead of letting dead issues fester like Russia Gate during his first term.
As far as Stop the Steal, the less said about that now the better. Trump handily won the election and even the proverbial popular vote, and this indicates how unimportant the controversy really is now. So take the win and stop picking at the scab.
Trump already has a mandate to govern ─ in no small part because the opposition was so unthinkably loathsome, and frankly, politically maladroit. And Trump needs to act like he has a clean mandate on the day he is sworn in. I am not sure if there has been more popular support for change since Ronald Reagan’s first term, but it does not matter. He simply needs to get that Wall built and abide no friction doing it. The people have spoken. No more excuses.
As far as the notion that the Soviets were impressed when Reagan fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers in 1981, that is the silliest Zoomerism that I have heard in a long time.
I used to be a Shop Steward in the IBEW Union about thirty-five years ago when I was a Broadcasting Engineer. I remember 1981 well and what smitten Conservatives were endlessly bleating on about it. I can fully speak to how clueless the GOP was and is on the White working class.
I also know how duplicitous and anti-White the Democrats can be and how in the end both sides got what they wanted which was Globalization, open borders and deindustrialization, and the impeachment of the White working class.
A real nation isn’t the sum total of real estate brokers and stock market investors, whether they look White or hail from the Pale. That is a subject for another time, though.
What the Soviets ACTUALLY found impressive about the Gipper was that for all his talk on cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations ─ and by implication, cutting dem programs to pay for it ─ he instead massively spun up the arms race and did not give a fig how high the trillion-dollar budget deficits could go.
In the end the Supply Side economic theory was rhetorical horse-hockey like any other. Big Goverment was nothing but bad unless it was related to military spending. Gotcha.
Instead of Trickle Down, Reagan was all about winning the arms race against those Godless secularists and not about skittishly hiding in fallout shelters and appeasement with new treaties and generous loans to the Communist bloc as in the old days.
There was a massive increase in American military spending under Reagan but this did also come with quality reform of the services, especially the Army, which I witnessed. Reagan’s silly Neocon advisers were even hell-bent on actually building a 600-ship Navy to take global imperialism seriously. And the Soviets took due notice.
During the Brezhnev years from 1964-1982, the Soviets had modernized their military industrial complex at great cost ─ and just when they were hoping to take a breather and enjoy the security that Fascism had supposedly imperiled since the 1920s, the USA comes along with this former Hollywood actor cowboy who ends decades of appeasement and occasional outright subsidy and moves the Cold War to new technological frontiers that likely can’t be matched. Your move, Ivan.
It’s complicated and I don’t want to say that Reagan’s SDI brought down the Soviet Union, which could not compete with a new arms race or a technological frontier that makes the Manhattan Project look cheap ─ but the path the Soviets were on from 1928-1991 was either going to lead to victory or bankruptcy.
The U.S. could do nothing else when, for example, in 1983 the Soviets mistakenly shot down a Korean airliner and killed a based U.S. Congressman.
But when Gorbachev took power from the progressive school of KGB reformers in 1985, the new policies of openness and pragmatic restructuring in order to garner new strategic arms treaties and Western trade, only helped hastened the end of Stalin’s legacy and bring down what Mr. Goebbels called the Iron Curtain.
By contrast, the Left would have simply made new noises about staving off Nuclear Apocalypse and gone to whatever lengths or financial arrangements necessary to keep the Soviets in the game.
So Reagan justifiably gets some credit to tacking a hard-line against the Commies ─ but that has little or nothing to do with Unionization in the United States.
A big part of Reagan’s failure (in my view his legacy is deeply tainted) was simply that he betrayed the White working class ─ or are you believing the spate of trickle-down narratives so popular amongst Libertarians and race-mixing fiscal Conservatives?
As Commander-in-Chief, Ronnie loved sending carrier task groups and pinprick air-strikes against shïtbird countries in the Levant. And the (((Lobbies))) were greatly pleased!
In my view that does not make him a great President, simply because it did not advance authentic American national interests.
Reagan’s economic ideas were not especially brilliant by almost any measure.
To reiterate, these policies were always more interested in maximizing Wall Street profits by shipping industries overseas in search of cheap labor than in anything good trickling down to the White people who voted for him and the changes they expected and deserved ─ and getting precious little for it other than prayer in schools and some cheap petit-bourgeois Midwestern rhetoric in the bargain.
I supported the modernization and build up of the Army at the time. I saw first-hand how things changed from the post-Vietnam and Jimmy Carter malaise to one of national strength. The way to beat Communism is not to blink.
But I broke with Reagan when I realized that he saw more value in sending Marines with empty rifles to places like Beirut for public relations purposes (and getting them blown up in the process).
This was as bad as Mr. Carter allowing our embassies to be attacked because he believed that it was more about turning the other cheek than lancing a boil or defending against legitimate attacks.
Reagan’s (((people))) saw the writing on the wall early on that the Soviets were a moribund empire ─ and they wished to shift the imperial focus to some other “Monster to Destroy,” essentially creating some kind of open-ended “Islamo-Fascist” threat that didn’t exist as long as Mohammedans were kept contained in their own lands and we minded our own business and ignored certain alien (((Lobbies))) with their ancient ethnic hatreds and axes to grind.
Recently, I stumbled onto a YouTube clip from a Zoomer historian working in the halls of Deep State academia or whatever. These perpectives can be interesting sometimes. Anyway, she was answering schoolkid-level questions about American History, and one question was what was the greatest Presidential speech ever given.
I expected the answer would be something like the Gettysburg Address, but that is probably too steeped in White Supremacy and Patriarchy for the pupils of today.
Instead she claimed that the greatest Presidential speech ever given was FDR’s Four Freedoms (1941).
There is no doubt that this was the Hyde Park demagogue at his best. But my answer would have been Washington’s Farewell Address, which advocated authentic nationalism and staying out of thorny foreign entanglements.
We lost our Continental supremacy and our Nation when we first started going overseas in search of what John Quincy Adams called Monsters to Destroy, and claiming in true Orwellian fashion that we were promoting Peace by doing so.
If Trump is going to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, now is the time. Dalliances with irrelevant details and cheap rhetoric will not be helpful. And that is no reason to forget about completing the Wall.
🙂
Scott
Do you have a blog or twitter outlet?
Hi Bigjimk,
I don’t have a blog and I don’t do Twitter, but I do occasionally post at RODOH and CODOH, although maybe not so profusely as in comment sections. (I don’t claim to be a particularly talented writer.)
There are also a handful of reviews and essays that I have written (LINK) for some Revisionist journals in the past ─ although they have tended to cease publication for various reasons once I started making regular contributions, LOL.
🙂
Trump should pardon all J6 and then make them a committee investigating why leftwing wreckers are given free pass by the courts while even remotely patriotic citizens have all 500 pages of the book thrown at them repeatedly.
Should be fun watching how Justice “Toast” has to explain why he didnt sentence Antifa member “Lenin Schmutz” who was at Justice Kavanaughs house throwing things at the house while sentencing patriot “Mike Banning” walking through Congress without damaging or hurting anybody.
And if even just one tiny bit points to Justice “Toast” violating the equal rights mentioned in the Constitution then its time for a court composed of normal people.
Trump should pardon all of them to put American’s first. Plus, all of the domestic concerns about friend/enemy castle building and destruction you mentioned. It seems a stretch to know that this is the issue upon which Putin determines his level of respect for Trump and that in turn is what a mutually beneficial peace deal is dependent upon.
The very legitimacy of Trump vs. The Regime reasons you bring to light are a brilliant insight. Those and the well-being of American patriots from the Historic American Nation are all the reasons Trump should need to do these pardons. Financial restitution would be great and a deep-state criminal investigation of Epps and other actors as well as the disbarment of the judges in the J6 cases would be even better.
The bottom line is, Trump needs to build and bolster friend castles and destroy and weaken enemy castles. There are very few of the former and a hegemonic many of the latter in institutional America. Time to get stacking.
A powerful post which Trump (or an advisor) must have read!
I think Trump did just pardon all the J6ers. I’m not sure whether he has attempted to provide compensation for their wrongful imprisonment.
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