It’s been a terrible week for diplomacy. For global stability. For U.S. leadership. And for customer service.
First we asked Russia to stop being communist, now we’re telling it that when it purchases a U.S. president with cheap flattery, vague opportunities for personal business growth, and possible, disturbing, but very much on-brand kompromat, it can’t get any solid diplomatic guarantees. Is this good advertising for the joys of capitalism and other assorted Western values? What would Milton Friedman say?
First Trump says that Russia didn’t meddle in our election. Now he says he had a senior moment. This is all very upsetting and just proves that you can’t trust advertising anymore. It’s kind of like getting a self-tanner that promises a “natural glow” only to be turned into an orange hellbeast that may or may not have just wandered out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Just think about what it looks like from the Russians’ perspective. Putin has long needed to diversify his country’s economy. Exporting oil, gas, guns, and the children of a brazen elite who believe in Western education just doesn’t cut it anymore. Some more solid investments are needed. A man like Putin, a man who literally rides flying sharks and inspires young women from rural communities with no social mobility to make sexy calendars for him, wasn’t ever going to invest into something like green energy or self-driving cars or whatever. That’s for pussies. So he invested in Trump, a reality TV star/demagogue running against a highly qualified woman.
Makes sense, when you think about it. At least Putin, who recently approved the loosening of his country’s domestic violence legislation, is consistent in his desire to show women their actual place.
And what does Trump do? Prove to be as bad a purchase as a bunch of his real estate, not to mention his own damn steaks. Like an eager kid ordering sea monkeys from the back of a magazine in the 1990s, Putin got played. Those monkeys weren’t really monkeys, and they didn’t have tender emotions for each other OR live in castles.
“Natalia, shut up about investments. There should be a higher purpose to international diplomacy,” you’re saying.
Sure, you’re right. So how about the purpose of siding with and elevating a nihilist kleptocracy and saying, “Hey, they’re just like us”? Honestly, there is so much division and strife in the world. Everywhere you look, there’s a war going on, or, at the very least, a protracted celebrity break-up. Hate is on the rise, our researchers tell us. The prognosis for world stability is grim.
So it should be heartening, really, when two men from vastly different backgrounds can come together and quietly bond over corruption and moral and legal nihilism. You say the sun has gone down in the West, behind the hills and into shadow — *I* say that we are discovering new opportunities to make nice with other cultures, provided the basis of making nice is a trend toward lawlessness and unprecedented greed. When I was just a year old, Sting asked us if all of the Russians love their children too — what he *should* have been asking is whether or not Russians are capable of creating a parasitic elite that combines the worst of what Western elites have to offer with the lack of institutions meant to at least somewhat hold rich people in check. And the answer, of course, would’ve been, “Hold my beer.”
This is precisely why Trump’s betrayal of Russia is even more upsetting than initially meets the eye. It’s one thing to go back on a contract — but what about a sacred pact? What about principles, goddammit? You don’t pledge your soul to Beelzebub and then go, “New phone, who dis.” That’s just immoral and frankly ungodly and un-American. Frankly, the party of traditional values should really be speaking up right now and condemning this disgrace.
Photo: Fibonacci Blue/Creative Commons