The qutab is an exceptional meat pie in a world that’s full of meat pies.
That’s because it is the national meat pie of Azerbaijan, and because there is nothing quite like it outside the Azeri borders or culture.
It is baked with a thin flatbread which is stuffed with heavily seasoned mincemeat of sheep, goat or beef. You might call the combination of meats, onions, pomegranate syrup, herbs, and spices complicated if you weren’t persuaded how uniquely tasty it is.
It’s the same with the politics of Azerbaijan. They are not to be confused with the politics of Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Georgia, Azerbaijan’s neighbours, just as there can be no mistaking the qutab for a pirog, gozleme, lahmajoun, kubdari, or لاهم بی آجین (lahm bi ajeen). Caution: if you are MAGA supporter, it would be your big mistake to call any of them a pizza.
Mistaking the superficial appearance of things for the reality is what sophomores do because they haven’t learned to know better. It’s what state propaganda organs and their spokesmen do because they are paid money and because information warfare is what politicians do to advance their interests. Repeating that the qutab or pirog is a pizza over and over will convince many taste testers, according to the Big Lie doctrine of Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill and their student, Joseph Goebbels.
Forcing taste testers at the point of a gun or bribing them with money will also work to turn the Azeri and the Russian pies into an American pizza for a time; this is to speak literally as well as metaphorically. In Russia, that time was ten years long – the decade Boris Yeltsin was president.
Very recently, his successor President Vladimir Putin acknowledged publicly how long it has taken for him to learn. “I thought that the contradictions with the West were primarily ideological. It seemed logical at the time – Cold War inertia, different views of the world, values, the organization of society. But even when the ideology disappeared, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the same, almost routine deviation from Russia’s interests continued. And it was not because of ideas, but because of the pursuit of advantages – geopolitical, economic, strategic.”
Right now the reality of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Russia isn’t how the propaganda, the force of arms, and the corruption of money are explaining it. To understand, click to listen to this discussion with Nima Alkhorshid, starting at Minute 42:30:
About President Donald Trump, certifiable maniac isn’t an expletive – it’s a clinical diagnosis.
In the neurological and psychiatric evidence that has been accumulating about Trump over many years, there is the medical history of Alzheimer’s Disease which runs in his family: his father was first diagnosed at age 86 and died at 93; his older sister died of it, aged 86; and at least one cousin died of the same, aged 84. Since the President has just turned 79, there is reason to anticipate similar onset of symptoms and cause of death for him.
Trump thinks this himself, according to Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and the President’s niece. She has published a case history of the President in 2020 which Trump’s lawyers failed to suppress in court. Last week, she published a new symptom of what she calls the acceleration in Trump’s cognitive decline: he cannot tie his own shoe laces. This claim has already been pursued by online investigators who have been reporting Trump’s lace-ups which appear from the photographs to be tied permanently and a mysterious right shoe several sizes too large.
The evidence of Trump’s incapacity to understand the Russian end-of-war terms, as he expressed himself in the July 14 press session with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, was reported here.
Listen to the new evidence that Trump has failed to register the “new idea, new concept”, presented last week by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid; click.
When Trump and Rutte accuse President Vladimir Putin of failing to negotiate seriously, the record reveals the opposite. Negotiating on the Ukraine war with Trump is proving to be impossible because Trump isn’t serious. That’s not his political decision; it’s his neuro-psychiatric handicap.
“You really gave him [Putin] a chance to be serious to get to the table to start negotiations,” Rutte said to Trump on Monday. “Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, we all try to help you. But you’ve now come to a point where you say, well, hey, you know, you have to — you have to get serious.” Trump agreed, replying: “We actually thought we had probably four times [agreed] the deal.” Five times over, Rutte repeated that the Russians aren’t serious. Trump repeated himself: “We’re going to go for a period of time. Maybe he’ll start negotiating. I think we felt, I felt, I don’t know about you Mark, but I felt that we had a deal about four times and here we are still talking about making a deal.”
Trump’s recall was that the terms of his deal had been accepted by Putin; he didn’t recall what Putin’s terms were. He is revealing he cannot comprehend the difference between the US and Russian negotiating positions; he hasn’t so much rejected the “new idea, new concept” from the Kremlin as not to have understood it. This isn’t Trump’s negotiating tactic – it’s cognitive incapacity camouflaged by the threat of force to compel Putin’s capitulation.
The first test of Trump’s rationality is the Mary Trump test – an Oval Office press conference in which Trump demonstrates how he ties his shoe laces.
The second test requires Russian counter force. This is the Oreshnik decision-making point for Putin, when there is no longer any point to negotiating because the US side aims at escalating its arms supplies to the Ukraine battlefield and encouraging the Germans to join in long-range missile attacks on the Russian hinterland, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the Russian decision-making now under way, there is an attempt to find the rational calculations in what Trump is meaning; that is to say, what Trump’s advisors, constituents, and officials are calculating when he himself is incapacitated. The first of these, Russian sources believe, is that the Trump escalation is a pitch to prevent Trump’s domestic voter base, the MAGA enthusiasts in the battleground states which won the presidency for Trump last November, from deserting him.
The second calculation is that Russia is militarily and economically vulnerable to a combination of escalation of attacks inside Russia and sanctions on the oil trade outside. This is the strategy of the “bigger bear”, announced on CNN this week by former Trump and Biden Administration warfighter, Brett McGurk: “the Russians approach diplomacy as a bear approaches a dance. The bear knows it will determine when and how the dance ends, unless the other dance partner proves itself to be a bigger bear. Sometimes, it helps to be the bigger bear. In the context of Ukraine, like Syria, while the United States is a far more powerful country than Russia, Putin believes that he has the upper hand in such localized conflicts due to Moscow’s determination and consistency contrasted with Washington’s perceived lack of focus, stamina and shifting politics through election cycles. Correcting that perception is a first principle for effective diplomacy with Moscow, and the approach outlined by Trump yesterday offers the chance to do exactly that.”
The third rational calculation, Russian sources believe — as do some US analysts — is that by supplying the Ukraine battlefield through Germany, the UK and Norway with a combination of Patriot anti-aircraft defence batteries and long-range offence missile systems like the Typhon, the Trump Administration will escape having to face a US taxpayer revolt in Congress over the multi-billion dollar cost of direct US arms supplies to Kiev regime.
According to this scheme too, Trump would have an alibi if the Oreshnik decision is taken by Putin, and if the US weapons are defeated in the collapse of the Zelensky regime. Trump would blame the Germans, repeating his line: “don’t forget, I’ve just really been involved in this for not very long and it wasn’t initial focus. Again, this is a Biden war. This is a Democrat war, not a Republican or Trump war. This is a war that would have never happened.”
There is only one way to interpret the meaning of the carefully scripted, rehearsed, memorized , sloganized, and repeated words which President Donald Trump announced in his Monday meeting with Mark Rutte, the Dutch ex-prime minister and now Secretary-General of NATO. They mean the opposite of what he thinks he is saying; and he cannot comprehend either the difference, or that they mean nothing at all. Between meaning that is false in fact and meaning that is non-credible to a friend or foe, Trump’s brain cannot discriminate; does not comprehend.
By Russian as well as Anglo-American neurological and psychiatric standards, this man is a certifiable maniac.
The strategic problem this poses for Russia’s military and political decision-makers, according to a source in a position to know, is that Trump’s mental disability is not that he is lying – he doesn’t aim to deceive. Rather, he is clinically incapable of understanding the logic, the evidence, the weight of options, and the sequence and consequence of actions. He cannot think; ergo, he cannot negotiate in good or even bad faith. He is, according to this Russian neurological diagnosis, a mentally incapacitated brain with only one reflex – the use of force to compel capitulation or effect destruction.
Following their 60-minute meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday (July 10), Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced the only new points he made with Secretary of State Marco Rubio are two he has made before, often. These were “the resumption of direct flights [between Russia and the US] and continued efforts to normalise the functioning of bilateral diplomatic missions.”
The third point Lavrov says he made is a new point camouflaged as an old formula. “It has been agreed to continue constructive dialogue on a growing number of issues of mutual interest based on mutual respect between the Russian and US foreign policy offices.”
What this means is that President Vladimir Putin agrees to ignore President Donald Trump’s foul mouth and his reference to Putin’s “bullshit” if Trump implements actions to halt the US arms flow to the Ukraine and other terms for ending the war in the Ukraine.
Russia will turn the other cheek when US actions speak louder than words – that, Rubio told the press later, is “a new idea, a new concept that will – I’ll take back to the President to discuss.” Eyes, closed, Rubio then added his qualifying scepticism. “Hopefully, it will lead to something positive. I can’t guarantee it. The President has been frustrated at the lack of progress. He’s made that clear publicly. But we’ll see if that changes.”
This is the official form of words in the State Department’s record. But this record has added words Rubio didn’t actually say. According to the verbatim transcript, Rubio’s doubt that Lavrov’s “new idea” will change Trump’s mind is missing: “Again, I wouldn’t characterize it as something that guarantees a peace, but it’s a concept that we’ll – I’ll take back to the President today and – here as soon as I finish with you.”
Following Rubio’s return to Washington, Trump then told NBC by telephone that he is still “disappointed in Russia” and will be making “a major statement on Russia on Monday [July 14]”. Trump added that he has just made a “deal” with NATO for US arms deliveries to the Ukraine to go through NATO “and NATO is paying for those weapons 100 percent.” These new weapons supplies will include Patriot missile systems, NBC has reported Trump as saying.
President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the BRICS summit session in Rio de Janeiro this week (July 6) was brief. Unusually so for Putin’s public speeches, but not so for his speeches to the BRICS summit in earlier years.
This time he took 810 words (Kremlin English version; 710 in the Russian). Leaving aside the 2024 summit when Putin hosted the BRICS meetings in Kazan, Putin took 635 words in 2023; 451 in 2022; and 683 in 2021.
In substance, Putin emphasized the positives on which all the attending states could agree in Rio – the four original members of 2006; the fifth in 2011; the four added in 2024; the fifth added in January 2025; and the ten partner states added in 2024 — and he avoided the negatives on which they don’t agree. The rule for the ten members for composing their final communiqué is that “the decision-making process is based on consensus.”
Accordingly, Putin emphasized how big BRICS is becoming: “not only a third of the Earth’s landmass and almost half the planet’s population, but also…40 percent of the global economy, while their combined GDP at purchasing power parity stands at $77 trillion…By the way, BRICS is substantially ahead of other groups in this parameter, including G7.”
Without naming the enemies in war of Russia, China, India, and Iran, the President emphasized the economic over the political and military, money over lethal force. “The unipolar system of international relations that once served the interests of the so-called golden billion, is losing its relevance, replaced by a more just multi-polar world…Everything indicates that the liberal globalization model is becoming obsolete while the centre of business activity is gravitating towards developing markets, launching a powerful growth wave.”
Putin was making a point which is not made in the final communiqué drafted by this year’s chairman, President Luis Lula da Silva, and his government. Titled “Rio de Janeiro Declaration — Strengthening Global South Cooperation for a More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance”, it runs in English for 31 pages. Not on a single one of these pages is there mention of the terms which Putin dismisses – unipolar, liberal, globalization.
The United Nations is mentioned 22 times in the Rio Declaration; there is no mention at all of the United States. “Hegemon”, the diplomatic euphemism for the US, is also absent.
This is the BRICS fudge – and it appears to have been largely the doing of Lula and the Brazilians.
Putin left it to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attending the summit in person to spell out or hint at the details of Russia’s differences with them.
If it was also understood by the Russians that Lula was attempting to pacify US President Donald Trump, Trump announced within 72 hours that Lula had failed. In a text posted by Trump, he has accused Lula of pursuing former president Jair Bolsonaro in a “witch hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!” Trump also targeted “Brazil’s attacks on Free Elections and the fundamental Free Speech rights of Americans [social media platforms]”. Unless Lula stopped, Trump said he would impose a new Brazil-specific tariff penalty of 50%.
As Brazil’s currency dropped sharply, the Financial Times in London noted that Trump was acting on prompting from Elon Musk whose Twitter/X media platform was banned and fined in Brazil last year. “The US president’s intervention in favour of Bolsonaro will cheer Brazil’s far-right movement, which claims a judicial crackdown against digital misinformation unfairly targets conservatives,” the newspaper said.
President Donald Trump began rigging his latest attempt to win the Nobel Peace Prize in January 2024, a year before the Norwegian Prize Committee closed the 2025 prize nominations on January 31. That was also eleven months before Trump was elected president to begin the peacemaking streak which he currently lists as Pakistan and India, Iran and Israel, Congo and Rwanda, Israel and Hamas, and Kosovo and Serbia.
Trump had told Republican congresswoman Claudia Tenney to file her nomination on January 30, 2024, and so – owing Trump a great deal of election campaign endorsements and money in 2018 and again in 2024 — Tenney did exactly that on January 30, 2024.
It’s not exactly clear from the Norwegian rules whether that nomination has been held over to qualify Trump for this year. So on April 24 at the White House Trump told Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre to make sure of the rules. “I salute President Trump… on that we work together,” Støre said, adding: “on that prize, you know, there is a committee taking care of that which is completely working on its own terms and I cannot comment on that.”
Trump then told the Pakistan’s Army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to arrange for Pakistan to file its prize nomination; Trump lunched with Munir at the White House on June 18; the nomination was announced in Islamabad on June 21.
Trump’s advisors thought a Muslim nomination mightn’t do the trick in Oslo so they recommended Trump ask for a Jewish one. This was produced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at dinner with Trump on July 8.
The Prize Committee is due to announce the winner on October 10. Pope Leo XIII has agreed to come to Trump but not in time to nominate him.
The only Christian head of state to decline Trump’s invitation to a prize-winning session is President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Trump has been asking him since their telephone call on February 12. He repeated himself when they spoke on July 3. But Putin said no.
Trump has been announcing his response ever since. “I’m not happy with that”, he said after five hours.“ An hour later: “Yeah, I’m very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin…And I, I’m very disappointed.” On July 6: “I was very disappointed with my call with President Putin. I was very disappointed.” On July 7, meeting with Netanyahu Trump repeated twice over: “I’m disappointed, frankly, that President Putin hasn’t stopped. I’m not happy about it.” On July 8 he told a Cabinet meeting: “We’re not happy with Putin. I’m not happy with Putin. I can tell you that much right now ‘cause he’s killing a lot of people…And I’m not happy with Putin.”
Is this a cognitive symptom Trump is revealing?
Repetitive stress injury can affect the brain, according to Russian experts. US experts call it chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) from injuries to head. Obliteration – another repeated Trump word – of brain cells is the direct cause. Visible symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic of Cleveland, are “Trouble thinking. Memory loss. Problems with planning, organizing and carrying out tasks. Behavioral changes. Impulsive behaviour. Aggression.”
In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, “Trump’s Masterplan DESTROYED by Putin in One Move!” we discuss the Russian diagnosis of Trump’s symptoms, and the new Kremlin decisions to follow.
In Moscow a very well-informed source comments: “Nobel Peace Prize was always the Olympic Gold for war criminals so he has that sealed. The Peace Prize repeat now includes Serbia and Kosovo. The slaps at Putin are explicit. Papa is disappointed that Vova is a bad boy and didn’t give him his ceasefire. We have to accept the Russian diplomacy option has failed and there is continuity in US policy. All the more reason and case for a very loud and unmistakable military victory.”
A NATO veteran comments: “He doesn’t need to be to more mentally competent than Biden. Everything is in place. From Congress, Senate, Supreme Court, law enforcement, the military, right down to the local pub; the raids, detentions, firings, threats, international aggression. It’s all baked in.”
Russian public opinion isn’t well understood in the US because Russian opinion changes with the news from the Ukraine battlefield and from President Donald Trump’s (lead image, right) warmaking elsewhere; because there are more Americans who want to be loved by Russians than there are Russians who want to be loved by Americans; and because US experts on Russia haven’t caught up with the latest Russian opinion polling.
This reveals that the initial Russian optimism of last December and January that Trump’s inauguration might produce a negotiated end to the war is evaporating rapidly. Immediately after the presidential election last November, Levada, an independent Moscow pollster, reported that 54% of Russians surveyed across the country were hopeful of an improvement in relations with the US. This had shrunk to 44% in January after the inauguration. At that time, the Levada poll revealed that “almost two thirds of the respondents rate relations between Russia and the United States as bad. The majority of respondents have a bad attitude towards Joe Biden, while the majority have a good attitude towards Donald Trump. The good attitude towards Trump is due to his attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict and improve relations with Russia.”
That was measured between February 20 and 25. The survey followed Trump’s telephone call with President Vladimir Putin on February 12 and the first round of face-to-face negotiations between US and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on February 18.
Five months later, after the Russian media have reported Trump’s bombing of Yemen and Iran, his involvement in the drone attack on Russian bomber bases on June 1, and the failure of the end-of-war negotiations in Istanbul, the Levada Centre has not yet reported the shift in Russian sentiment towards Trump.
Because Russians also report believing that Germany follows US orders, and that the German tanks which invaded Kursk between last August and December have now been destroyed, public hostility towards the Germans as the “main enemy” is shrinking below the levels of hostility recorded towards France and the UK.
A poll released in mid-May by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) ranked France several points ahead of the UK and Germany on the enemies list. “The three ill-wishers included: France (48%, +27 p.p. from 2022), the United Kingdom (42%, +3 p.p.) and Germany (41%, +9 percentage points).” “For the first time in the history of monitoring, the United States lost its leadership in the rating of ill-wishers at once to three European countries, the so-called leaders of the ‘coalition’ in the conflict in Ukraine – France, Great Britain and Germany — which is largely due to the change of power abroad and their rhetoric to resolve the Ukrainian crisis.”
Levada analyst Denis Volkov was asked if he believes the trend for the “main enemy” was a flash in the pan towards Germany, and is now reverting towards the US again. He replied that Levada hasn’t made a new poll on this question so he cannot say if this trend has taken place or not.
President Donald Trump thought he had gotten the deal terms and the cover story right, and also the prize for himself (the Nobel Peace Prize ).
The deal was that under cover of an authorized leak to the press from Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eldridge Colby, that the US was running out of ammunition for Israel’s war with Iran, for the Ukraine war with Russia, and for US military stocks at their DEFCON levels, Trump would pause ammunition deliveries to the regime in Kiev, and then persuade President Vladimir Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire in exchange.
That’s the ceasefire which, since February, Trump has been asking Putin to announce at a summit meeting between the two of them. That’s also the fourth ceasefire in the row which Trump has been counting as his personal achievements – between Pakistan and India on May 10; between Iran and Israel on June 23; and between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda on June 27.
Only the scheme has failed.
A Moscow source in a position to know explains: “The Russian calculus recognizes the tipping point [for US arms supplies to the Ukraine]. Until then the General Staff will grind away methodically, slowly. Then when the Western supplies run low, we will hit fast and hard. If you total the June attacks, the picture emerges clearly that Putin has chosen the Oreshnik option – without firing it yet — over compromising on Trump’s terms. The outskirts of Kiev are burning like never before.”
There are American exceptionalists who insist they thought of this before — in 1943, in fact, when Walter Lippmann spelled out what has come to be called (by Ivy League professors) the “Lippmann Gap”. This is no more nor less than the ancient maxim — don’t bite off more than you can chew. But in Lippmann’s verbulation: “Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power. I mean by a foreign commitment an obligation, outside the continental limits of the United States, which may in the last analysis have to be met by waging war. I mean by power the force which is necessary to prevent such a war or to win it if it cannot be prevented. In the term necessary power I include the military force which can be mobilized effectively within the domestic territory of the United States and also the reinforcements which can be obtained from dependable allies.”
From the Russian point of view, the first two of Trump’s ceasefires have been clumsily concealed rescues for Pakistan and Israel; the Congo-Rwanda terms remain undecided; and the “necessary power” to reverse the defeat of the US, its “dependable allies”, and its proxies in the Ukraine has already been defeated. It won’t be Putin, however, to announce publicly that Trump has no “comfortable power in reserve”.
That, however, was Putin’s private message to Trump in their telephone call on July 3. “Russia would strive to achieve its goals,” was the way Putin allowed his spokesman to disclose: “namely the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs, the bitter confrontation that we are seeing now. Russia will not back down from these goals.”
This is the reason Trump later acknowledged: “[I] didn’t make any progress with him today at all.” It’s also the reason Trump beat a retreat from failure. “I’m very disappointed. Well, it’s not, I just think, I don’t think he’s [Putin] looking to stop. And that’s too bad. This, this fight, this isn’t me. This is Biden’s war.”
Here are the pieces of the intelligence assessment assembled in Moscow which led to the escalation of drone and missile attacks on Kiev since last Thursday night.
In the hour-long telephone call on Thursday (July 3) between the presidents of Russia and the United States, something President Vladimir Putin said, and also didn’t say, got up President Donald Trump’s nose.
President Donald Trump has said he believes he can use nuclear weapons to destroy his enemy’s forces for defending itself, including the enemy’s capacity for deterrence by nuclear counter-attack. This is Trump’s new doctrine of “total obliteration”. It is US shock and awe tipped over the nuclear threshold; it is American first-strike nuclear attack.
“It was so bad that they ended the war,” Trump told the press at the NATO summit in The Hague last Thursday (June 26). Speaking of the US bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment and weaponization plants on June 22, Trump said: “It ended the war. Somebody said in a certain way that it was so devastating, actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war, too. This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”
The enemy Iranians, claimed Trump, were taken by surprise and had no defence. “They didn’t get to see it. It was dark. That’s the amazing thing about the shots. They hit the shots perfectly and yet it was dead dark. There was no moon. There was no light. It was virtually a moonless. It was very dark and they hit — the shots were hit perfectly.”
“It was called obliteration,” Trump said. “It’s been obliterated. Totally obliterated.” He kept repeating the word obliteration eleven times in forty-seven minutes. “No other military on earth could have done it. And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.”
President Vladimir Putin has not responded to Trump’s claims. Instead, he told reporters on June 27 that he “hold[s] the incumbent President of the United States in the highest regard. His path to returning to power and to the White House has been exceptionally arduous, complex, and hazardous – a fact of which we are all cognisant, particularly given the assassination attempts he has survived, indeed multiple attempts on his life. He is a courageous man, that much is evident.”
Putin was showing no more respect and courtesy towards Trump than he had shown President Joseph Biden, despite the onset of Biden’s dementia which was too obvious to ignore in private, if not in public. After meeting with Biden in Geneva in 2021, Putin had said: “I want to say that the image of President Biden that our press and even the American press paints has nothing in common with reality. He was on a long trip, had flown across the ocean, and had to contend with jet lag and the time difference. When I fly it takes its toll. But he looked cheerful, we spoke face-to-face for two or maybe more hours. He’s completely across his brief. He himself does not miss anything, I assure you. It was completely obvious to me.”
These are not personal compliments; Putin is not ingratiating the US presidents. He is expressing the fundamental assumption in Russian warfighting strategy that whatever their personal eccentricities, medical handicaps, or psychiatric symptoms, the US president will always act rationally in the escalation towards nuclear war; and that he will be advised, persuaded and deterred against a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia.
This rationality assumption is being tested now by the Kremlin, Security Council, General Staff and the intelligence agencies as they review Trump’s record of bombing Yemen in March, Operation Rough Rider; his involvement in the attack with Ukrainian proxies on Russia’s nuclear bombers on June 1, Operation Spiderweb; and finally the US-Israeli war against Iran beginning on June 13 and ending with Operation Midnight Hammer on June 24, the US Air Force attack on Iran as reported publicly by General Daniel Caine, the spetsnaz officer whom Trump has appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The clearest recent statement of the rationality standard applying in an escalating war between nuclear-armed militaries, was spelled out on May 31 by Indian Army General Anil Chauhan, Chief of the Defence Staff. He was explaining India’s conduct of the war with Pakistan which began with Pakistan’s attack in Kashmir on April 22, and concluded with the destruction of Pakistan’s air defences, including its nuclear weapons base, and the ceasefire which took effect on May 10-11.
“There is a lot of space before the nuclear threshold is crossed,” Chauhan said. “There is a lot of signalling before that…The most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. That’s because they understand that conflict can swing either way. In every step which happened…I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as their actions. Why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?”
This is the question being discussed behind closed doors in Moscow now — whether the assumption of Trump’s rationality continues to be justified, and if his conduct is creating fresh doubt, what to do about it.
It had been three days after Trump had bombed Iran and after he had proclaimed his obliteration doctrine that Putin said: “we highly value both his domestic policies and his endeavours regarding the Middle East situation, as well as his efforts toward resolving the Ukrainian crisis. I have previously articulated this position and wish to reaffirm it publicly: I am convinced that President Trump is genuinely committed to resolving the issue on the Ukrainian track. Recently, I believe he observed that the matter has proven more intricate than external appearances suggested. That is indeed the case. Such complexity is unsurprising – there exists a substantial difference between distant observation and direct engagement with the issue. The same is true of the Middle East crisis. Although he may have greater experience there, having been more deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs, complexities persist there as well. Real life is always more complex than any notion of it.”
Putin was restating the strategic assumption that Trump is rational. The evidence of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer, and the failure, as the Russians understand it, of Trump’s war aims – regime change in Tehran, partition of the country, elimination of the Iranian military’s nuclear-armed missile capabilities against Israel – is far from conclusive.
“Iran is now central in the Russian discourse,” comments a Moscow source in a position to know. “Putin will not deviate from the pure diplomacy. There’s a two-track approach. It is part of Russia’s warfighting strategy. We now know that Trump is refusing to come to any of the terms we have tabled in Istanbul for a peace settlement. He keeps threatening to escalate. His record is showing the US won’t withdraw from the Middle East war and he is refusing to stop running the Ukraine war. So we draw the obvious conclusions. What’s the point of Putin announcing those if Trump shows he isn’t listening, won’t agree, maybe can’t understand?”
