Forget Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch. When the world is writing the history of great investors, only one name will really matter: Vladimir Putin. Despite U.S. military expenditures that ran into the trillions and decades of political and diplomatic efforts that erected alliances and agreements around the world, it took Putin only a few million dollars to bring it all crashing down. A few million dollars … and Donald Trump.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria isn’t just a great day for Turkey and ISIS: It’s a genuine day of celebration for Putin and Russia. Even as American forces are still lining up to evacuate, Russian forces are rushing in to fill the vacuum created by a collapse of U.S. leadership. And the Kurds, who are longtime American allies, are now being forced to look to Russia and the puppet government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for protection against Turkish bombs and shells.
It’s an epic failure and a generational defeat that underlines what happens when our country is under the control of someone who thinks they “know more than the generals,” and someone who has over and over and over again demonstrated that he will bow to Putin no matter the cost to the nation. The debacle in Syria came in the wake of Donald Trump’s phone call to Turkish President Recep Erdogan, in which he “went off script,” according to military sources, to tell the autocrat that the U.S. would withdraw all troops from northeast Syria. The result is that not only has the United States lost a vital ally that has played a key role in the Middle East for decades, but Russian forces are laughing at America from inside abandoned U.S. bases.
But Syria was far from the only victory lap Putin took in the past month. Just a week before Trump gave Erdogan a big, bright green light to begin his invasion of Kurdish towns, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine would withdraw its troops from the fight in the Donbass region, ceding the area to Russian forces. More negotiations are expected to take place, with talks between Russian and Ukraine mediated by France and Germany. The United States, which held up military aid to Ukraine for months while Russia stepped up the pressure, will not be involved.
In less than a month, Putin has scored major victories in both Ukraine and Syria. And in both cases, he has one man to thank for why Russia didn’t have to pay for its victories in either blood or rubles.
Of course, Putin isn’t the only one seeing that it’s infinitely cheaper to buy political power in the United States than it is to pay for it on the battlefield. Erdogan also came out a big winner this month when Trump folded for nothing more than ensuring the continued presence of his name on an Istanbul hotel. When that move seemed too obvious even to some of Trump’s top supporters, he tossed them a sop in the form of tariffs on Turkish steel—which represent a whopping 1% of U.S. imports. Erdogan would, and will, happily pay those tariffs for as long as Trump wants to keep playing this game, because when it comes to buying permission for a genocide, a few steel tariffs are very much a bargain.
And of course, even as Trump has been betraying longtime Kurdish alliess, he’s been sending more American forces to act as mercenaries for murderous dictator Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. That’s in spite of repeated atrocities. In spite of murdering a U.S. resident Saudi journalist. In spite of the ongoing squabble with U.S. ally Qatar. In fact, Mohammed bin Salman’s extortion of Qatar now starts to seem much less like something that Trump overlooked, and more like something he used as a template.
Still, no one may have more to show for their Trump investment than Putin. Trump has spent the past three years maintaining that “no one has been as tough on Russia” as he has. But if that’s true … why does Russia keep winning and the United States keep losing?