During this campaign, there has been a great deal of speculation of the strange relationship of Donald Trump to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Contributing to this has been Trump’s praise of Putin and his encouragement of Russian hacking of Democratic emails. There have been high officials in his campaign (Paul Manafort, Carter Page) who have business relationships with those associated with Putin, both in Russia and in Ukraine. To this recently we can add the apparent connection with long-time Trump associate Roger Stone with Julian Assange and Wikileaks, both increasingly viewed as cutouts for Russian intelligence organizations. Trump has been described as a “useful idiot” on behalf of Putin by some people with an understanding of Russia and its intelligence manipulations.
People has also speculated on whether or not people associated with Putin perhaps have some financial leverage over Trump, particularly as it has become increasingly impossible for him to raise money from domestic lenders and investors.
While I withhold judgment on some of this, what has happened now has all but convinced me that there must be some kind of relationship, although I am not yet ready to speculate on how it operates. What is relevant to all of this is Trump’s recent apology to Serbia, which you can explore in a story from Newsweek titled Donald Trump Apologizes to Serbia for Yugoslavia Bombing
Let me step back and provide some context. In 1989 Slobodan Milosevich gave a fiery speech on June 15, in Kosovo, an area populated by ethnic Albanians, who were Muslim. That was the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, during which Prince Lazar, the leader of the Serbian forces, was killed, and the Ottoman Turks, despite suffering heavy losses, basically took control of Kosovo, which over time led to moving a lot of ethnic Albanians — Muslim -co-religionists — into an area that was the very heart of Serbian Orthodox Christianity.
Over the centuries, Russia has taken upon itself a responsibility for Orthodox Christians under domination by the Ottomans. One gets a sense of this if one has ever seen the opera Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky, with the monk Pimen reflecting about Moscow the Third Rome.
When the former Yugoslavia broke apart, it split along ethnic, which also meant religious lines. In a sense, what was going to happen had been telegraphed in that 1989 speech by Milosevich. The Slovenians, with backing from other central European nations and given their mountainous territory, were successful. At first the fiercest conflict was between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, and one can argue that the Croats in part provoked it — the President of the newly independent Croatia adopted a flag that had been used by the Ustashe Nazi puppet state during WWII, and Croats tried to force the Yugoslavian troops in barracks in their territory to abandon their equipment.
The real battles, however, occurred between Serbs and Muslims, both in ethnically mixed Bosnia, and in largely ethnic Albanian Kosovo.
The Russians chose to back their co-religionists, the Serbs, and during the conflict in Kosovo when NATO forces were involved, there was a race for the airport in Pristina that could have resulted in a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia.
Our intervention in the wars in Yugoslavia were to stop ethnic slaughter. Ethnic Serbs have been charged with war crimes. Those charged included Slobodan Milosevich, who died of a heart attack while imprisoned while facing criminal charges.
To apologize to Serbia for our intervention is to affirm the interests of Russia.
It is to effectively disavow the commitment NATO made to prevent another genocide like that of World War II.
Putin clearly wants to undercut NATO. This can be seen especially in the threats he has offered against Estonia.
Further, with Putin having basically ordered overseas students to return home, some are wondering if Putin expects a confrontation in one of the areas of conflict — Syria, for obvious reasons, which would be with the US, Ukraine, where those he support have gobbled up a chunk of the country, or Estonia, which as a NATO member state might lead to a very serious issue.
Russia has effectively established an airbase in Syria. The nearest land base from which we could operate is Incirclik in Turkey, except the Turks might well refuse to let us use it for operations in Syria because of the Kurdish issue. The next nearest capable NATO airbase is probably Aviano in Italy, which is too far away for effective time over target either to maintain a no-fly zone or for combat operations. We certainly are NOT going to project force in Syria operating from the territory of Israel. In theory we could fly from Greece, but the infrastructure necessary to support large operations simply does not exist there. That would mean we would be limited to flying from carreirs moves to the Eastern Mediterranean.
I may be offering too much detail for many, but I do so to provide a larger picture, because that is how Putin and Russians think. The late Senator Eugene McCarthy used to argue that the Russians played chess, which requires thinking multiple moves ahead, whereas American were more prone to poker, where an individual hand is something relatively short term. (Sometimes he compared the chess to checkers, but I think the poker analogy is more apt).
In that sense, it does not matter to Putin whether or not Trump gets elected, so long as he can seriously divide America, and thereby weaken our resolve to oppose him.
Thus the things that Trump says and does do make him a useful idiot on behalf of Russian interests.
I am not sure how this can be put together in a way to make an effective argument in this political campaign.
But for me, it no longer matters why Trump is so in thrall to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, it is sufficient to note clearly that he is.