On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 7:30:36 PM UTC-2:30, brat_olin wrote:
Vince Langman@LangmanVince:
"4 short years ago, we had:
Peace in Europe
Because Putin counted that Trump will do his job for him - break up NATO or at least take the US out of it.
Trump's own national security adviser:
John Bolton: Trump Is a Putin-Loving Moron Who Thought Finland Was Part of Russia".
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/john-bolton-donald-trump-ukraine-finland-russia
"Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States,” the New York Times reported in 2019. That reporting was confirmed when Trump’s former
national security adviser John R. Bolton published a memoir in 2020 that described Trump as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the alliance, saying at one point, “I don’t give a s--- about NATO.” Bolton said he had to convince Trump not to quit
NATO in the middle of a 2018 summit."
Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, was also described as saying that “one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.”
==
Why would Putin ruin the good thing?
==
Newsmax: "I’m surprised you don’t think that [Trump] would’ve handled this better than Joe Biden."
Bolton: "No, he did not. He did not. We didn’t sanction Nord Stream 2…we should have, we should have brought the project to
an end. We did impose sanctions on Russian oligarchs and several others because of their sales of S-400 antiaircraft systems to
other countries. But in almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it saying we were being too
hard. The fact is that he barely knew where Ukraine was. He once asked John Kelly, his second chief of staff, if Finland were a part
of Russia. It is just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians. I think the evidence is that Russia
didn’t feel that their military was ready."
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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