Give America enough rope…

For Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, events in the U.S. could not be going better. These leaders are not harming, humiliating or harassing their mutual adversary. America has been doing it all to itself. 

Consider how both might be assessing the U.S.

The KGB’s successor, the Foreign Intelligence Service, had been pursuing its own “active measures” against the U.S. and its NATO allies under Director Sergey Naryshkin. This included hacking, cyber theft, influence and disinformation operations and routine espionage. But none had achieved such spectacular successes as the workings of the American government itself.

First was the six-week government shutdown. It intensified the already seemingly irreparable divisions between the two parties and infuriated a public denied many promised government benefits during the closure.  

Furthermore, the hangover from skyrocketing insurance premiums will persist and indeed may not be corrected. That will anger a sizable part of President Trump’s MAGA base, making a Democratic victory in Congress next year more likely. Such a win will only make politics more bitter and divided.

Second, and while this should have been a Russian intelligence plot, the so-called Epstein files continue to fan an intense firestorm directed against Trump. How this could happen over a convicted, deceased sex offender is incredible.

And that his allegedly accidental death could be deemed a suicide reeks of the Stalin era. No special guards on duty. Epstein’s cellmate was removed, so he was alone, and the missing footage in video tapes shot near his cell makes their evidence less compelling. 

Indeed, from a Russian perspective, a likely suspect was Trump, either to protect himself or his close allies and friends from being exposed.

Third is Trump’s declaration that affordability is a “hoax.” This clearly is pure propaganda from the old days in the Soviet Union when everything Soviet was the best in the world. Virtually every American knows how expensive life has become. This too will assure if not guarantee a Democratic victory in November and a divided government that can only grow more impotent and incapable of governing.

Fourth is the nonsense in Venezuela. Trump has sent much of his fleet to fire into Caribbean waters, sailing in circles while expending bullets, destroying boats and killing their occupants.  

The Trump administration says that these vessels are delivering dangerous drugs to America, killing its citizens. But unfortunately, little evidence has been offered. As a result, even Republicans are asking questions and are skeptical, if not outright critical of these operations.

Only someone who hasn’t checked the facts would not know that these drugs are headed east, mostly for Europe and not north of the border. Venezuela exports cocaine, not fentanyl. Those killer drugs are coming in from Mexico. So why pick on Venezuela?  

And if Trump wishes Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro gone for drug dealing, why did he pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of masterminding the export of 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.?

Fifth, what is Trump doing to his allies in Europe and Asia by placing extreme focus on China as the principal and “pacing threat.”  

In late November, the U.S. announced it was withdrawing a brigade from Romania, one of its closest partners in the war in Afghanistan. That was a signal that Trump was deadly serious about Europe paying for its defense and the costs of the war in Ukraine.

Compounding this was presumably an unforced error by U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker. At a conference in Berlin, to flatter his hosts perhaps, Whitaker said that NATO’s supreme allied command in Europe could go to a German. That was a 20 on the political Richter scale of 10.

Since NATO’s inception in 1949, the NATO European commander had been an American. One reason was that the U.S. had hundreds of thousands of American troops in Europe and Congress would not accept a non-U.S. commander. 

Another was an American commander guaranteed the link with the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Removing an American in European eyes would break that link.

Given these startling events, what orders might Putin give to his intelligence chief, especially since the end of the Ukraine war is not in sight? The answer: Give America enough rope and it will hang itself.

Harlan Ullman, Ph.D., is UPI’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist, a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council, the chairman of two private companies and the principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. He and former United Kingdom Defense Chief David Richards are the authors of a forthcoming book on preventing strategic catastrophe.