A Summit Of Fools: Trump's Strange Imitation Of Joe Biden
There can't be any clearer sign of accelerating world systems collapse than the leader of the USA inviting the tyrant in the Kremlin for a chat on soil the Muscovites once claimed.
News of the impending Trump-Putin meetup in Alaska has already submerged one of the most important emerging trends in Ukraine’s fight for freedom: a visible improvement in Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive actions on the ground. Barring a dramatic reinforcement of orc capabilities, the misbegotten Sumy offensive risks becoming a rout that allows Ukrainian fighters to push back into ruscist territory in Kursk.
Fighting across the other active fronts remains fierce, with Ukrainian defenders mostly holding firm but still forced to give up small amounts of ground here and there - and the situation in Pokrovsk has of course deteriorated very sharply. The situation there is especially frustrating as the orcs appear to have been successful advancing along a route I forecast several weeks back they would aim for. Still, as I’ll get to in the second post of the week (there will be two, to shorten each), the situation isn’t quite as it appears - yet.
On the balance, the increasing scope and power of Ukrainian strikes on the enemy’s deep rear and near-certain mustering of powerful reserves hints at a nasty surprise in Putin’s near future. So of course Team Trump has chosen now to pivot back from their recent sensible approach to the conflict!
Or rather, decided that there was no longer any reason to bother concealing that they’ve been playing both sides from the beginning. Too bad for them they’re the proverbial sucker at the poker table who doesn’t realize they’ve being played by everyone else. Unfortunately for the USA and its many fans, Trump talks about his “achievements” the exact same way that Biden did. Remember how he was FDR 2.0 there for a while?
A few Bidenworld diehards can still be found who insist that his presidency was transformative in ways other than handing the country back to Trump - exactly how I predicted they would. Hell on a fair few occasions, I reached out to Democratic leaders and allied media types to try and lay out the simple science of how and why they were failing. As it turns, out, inside the party all kinds of voices were saying the same thing. The machine silenced them, accusing even the most careful critics of helping Trump by hurting Biden.
Makes a fella wonder why anyone takes anything pushed by American media types as worth more than a stock tip from a homeless guy on the street. Could be a winner - and that bean he cherishes beyond all other things could sprout into a magical beanstalk.
American media outlets - and foreign ones that cater to American audiences - are too busy worshiping at the altar of insider access to question the perverse way they cover international affairs. Nearly every writer at any major publication takes as a simple fact of life that American presidents can decide the fate of everything and everyone on a whim, as if they’re absolutist monarchs of old. And so Trump feels that he gets some kind of win by hosting a murderous fool like Putin on American soil - in a state many Muscovites sincerely believe belongs to their empire.
Damn good thing Putin is being hosted at Fort Richardson, outside of Anchorage. A hotel in town would be much too easy to hit with a drone. Though a US military base might actually not be that much better.
Make no mistake: Trump is debasing himself, his office, the Constitution, basic geostrategy, and the will of most American citizens by hosting Putin on American soil. American media portrayals of this farce are pushing it as a major moment where Ukraine might be carved up for the sake of what the talking heads will then dare to call “peace,” as if Neville Chamberlain is their patron saint. Another timely demonstration just how little faith anyone should place in American journalism or leadership these days. Random bloggers really do produce higher quality work, on the whole. No wonder journalists worry so much about losing their jobs to robots: most of what they produce is so generic that it’s obvious what a given article will cover and how it will conclude about two sentences in.
Continuing my Quixotic campaign against the biased nonsense these profit-mongers push on people inadequately trained on information hygiene, I’ve decided to take the advice of a smart Canadian reader and split my weekly updated going forward into two posts. One will focus on the strategic level of the Ukraine War, which is still the blaring alarm klaxon warning that the majority of the great storm is still inbound. The other will focus on the operational level, continuing what this blog was originally meant to do: create a unique dataset while hopefully contributing in some small way to Ukraine’s deserved and necessary victory.
I am well aware that the topics in each post have expanded to the point that the things are overwhelming. Believe me, I’ve watched a one day a week side project turn into a half-time job that threatens to become much more. I probably should have actively looked for employment somewhere I can get a nice salary for doing this kind of work long ago. But my other job the past year has been trying to figure out my family situation as my dad’s cancer got worse and worse.
Now that long bitter campaign is concluded, I’ve a lot of catching up to do. So I’ll work to streamline and simplify Rogue Systems Recon in terms of presentation while building up Earth Forces Bulletin. Should make it easier for readers interested in only operational or strategic matters to focus on what they care about.
First up this week - and probably most, since maps showing what happened on the ground over the weekend generally appear on Tuesdays, and I get going first thing on Mondays - is the strategic level overview of the world system as D.C. and Moscow desperately try to work out how to stop their mutual slide towards irrelevance. Policy on the world stage is fundamentally driven by the shifting balance of power, with all players now actively reconsidering their options after decades of assuming the Postwar paradigm would never end - thank a generation of tenured professors for pushing that error on the world.
World System Brief - Week 32, 2025
So back to the upcoming Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage. As with most situations involving either of those two, it’s not quite what it seems.
I fully expect Trump to walk out of the summit and stand next to Putin proclaiming that they’ve done a deal to bring peace. It won’t, but note how Trump is already asserting that anyone who questions any of his historically weak achievements must be a Democrat who hates America. Gotta love the nice deal he has going on with the media where he attacks them on ridiculous grounds, making any and all criticisms of their business practices seem radical. So whatever happens this Friday (though I wonder how many Gavrilo Princip wannabes skilled with drones are living in Alaska?), Team Trump will proclaim victory.
But thanks to their internal political battles, the Trump people have blundered into a no-win situation that will, at worst, force every remaining American partner to rethink the relationship in a hurry. And at best, Trump will have granted legitimacy to a murderer and open enemy of the United States on home soil for absolutely nothing but sustaining the illusion that diplomacy is about deals which are about two buffoons getting in a room and posturing. I can hardly imagine a greater degradation of his office and legacy; to make matters sadder, Trump is elevating Putin for nothing but partisan politics.
The fount of all American foreign policy has been domestic partisan politics since 2017. Trump is looking ahead to next year’s midterms and trying to be able to tell every member of his coalition that he made sure they won. He’s leading a far more fragile coalition than most politicos seem willing to admit. The Republican Party is now an uneasy menage a trois porno featuring the remaining traditional conservatives, Vance-Hegseth Christian fascists, and Musk-style oligarchs.
Vance and his Constitution-hating allies still dream of an alliance with Moscow on pseudo-religious grounds - like today’s Moscow-dominated russian orthodox church, they’ve sold out every long-established Christian principle Judas Iscariot style in a bid for raw power. Meanwhile Rubio and the other Republicans who have decided that their political future depends on maintaining ties with the people who adore Trump but aren’t making all their coin catering to conspiracy theorists and bigots still maintain some fealty to science and common sense. Musk fans are all over the map, but like spectacle. Trump’s Ukraine policy is so chaotic because it must satisfy all three to some extent.
With this summit, Trump aims to be able to tell the Rubio-Kellogg faction that they have to shut up and do what he says because he didn’t let Putin have all of Ukraine. He will make the Vance-Witkoff twits happy by giving Putin enough Ukrainian land that Moscow can imagine it won after failing to take all of Ukraine in 2022. The Musk people just want to see a big macho tough guy sit down with another bit macho tough guy (in the universe where BMTG doesn’t actually mean lying weasel terrified of being killed by an assassin).
But what can Trump actually accomplish? Who believes that he’s got enough capital with the Europeans or even Japan and South Korea at this point to force Ukraine to stop fighting? True believers, sure, but anyone else - come on.
It’s honestly always a bit funny to watch Trump manage to step on his own feet with such aplomb. He’s definitely America’s deserved comeuppance - the country’s inability to come up with a response to a guy the majority of the electorate has never liked, approved of, or voted for is a condemnation of the system as it stands and a sign of deep collapse. Very possibly terminal.
All Trump had to do after his big beautiful peace push fell apart this spring was sit back and ignore Ukraine, letting the military professionals in Europe quietly feed Ukraine vital intelligence and supplies under the radar of the D.C. media machine. But here he is handing Putin a major diplomatic win, as if Vance has some dirt on him and really, really wants his foreign idol to survive the debacle of his war so they can cut a deal in 2029. After Trump are the two words nobody in D.C. will dare whisper, but they’re on everyone’s mind. And the games have long since begun. The one thing Vance does well is act like a classic American corporate stooge, carefully parroting the boss until it’s time to stab him squarely in the back. Not sure he realizes that he’s basically the Republican version of Kamala Harris. And here I thought that would wind up being Marco Rubio’s job!
From Trump’s perspective, the Putin summit maneuver is also a great hedge against whatever happens on the battlefield in the next couple months. If Ukraine starts kicking the orcs back in a big way late this September, Trump can say that Putin broke the deal and claim credit for everything Ukraine did, probably say it was all a brilliant plan. And If Pokrovsk falls, then Kupiansk, and after that Kostyantynivka, Trump can lambast Zelensky for not surrendering to the inevitable.
Not that anyone even knows what’s actually been proposed - or can. Trump’s envoy Witkoff apparently either got confused or fell victim to a Putin power move, though Putin is happy to lie regardless. Supposedly Putin indicated that he was willing to retreat from occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as well as the border areas in Sumy and Kharkiv in exchange for Ukraine retreating from Donetsk and Luhansk and tacitly accepting them and Crimea as lost for good. Later news had it that he actually offered no concessions whatsoever and simply demanded that Ukraine abandon the urban Donbas fortress in exchange for a ceasefire.
Putin would very much like a ceasefire right now, because his forces have failed at yet another major offensive and Ukrainian corps are almost certain to counterattack the orc spearheads trying to cut off Pokrovsk. Inability to stop escalating Ukrainian drone raids is another serious concern. Then there’s the faltering orc economy. A short ceasefire would also interrupt whatever the Ukrainians are planning for the next couple months, buying time to dig in. Putin’s best-case scenario right now sees a ceasefire fall into place around mid-September with his forces having pushed into Pokrovsk despite tens of thousands of fatalities.
Putin might even pretend to agree to a deal just to snow Trump for a while longer. Either way, it looks like a given that the two will say they came to some agreement, and Zelensky will be blamed for rejecting it outright.
Ironically, had Trump gone about this correctly and the right confidence measures were put in place, the proposal might have actually served as a starting point for agreeing to a ceasefire. Step one would have to be a good-faith Muscovite withdrawal from the vicinity of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk as well as abandon the salients held in Kharkiv and Sumy - Ukraine would pull back from the pockets of Muscovite home turf still held too.
Only after that could the two sides have enough confidence in the deal to start simultaneous phased withdrawals from larger chunks of territory. Giving up the urban fortress in Donbas would be a wrench, but the strategic advantage in severing the land bridge to Crimea would be well worth it in pure military terms. Assuming the conflict would restart one day, the key in any land swap from Ukraine’s perspective would be neutralizing Crimea and the threat to the south. Donbas could be isolated without entering Muscovite territory - or the Ukrainians could push into Belgorod and Rostov without going into populated areas directly to effect a siege.
Ukraine almost certainly has the ability to totally isolate Crimea in any future conflict from this starting position, rendering Crimea’s utility as a military base close to nil. It becomes Kaliningrad, only with a bridge to the Muscovite mainland: looks scary, but actually a trap for the orcs. Pushing the enemy back so far from Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro would make it a lot easier to fortify what would have to be a very wide DMZ in the east. And Putin might not withstand the consequences of a war that saw the mighty Muscovite empire fully claim two devastated border provinces in exchange for around three hundred thousand lives.
Which is why he’ll never accept anything resembling a fair deal. Not for real, anyway.
A ceasefire of any length would also undoubtedly save lives in the short run, and Ukraine’s willingness to accept one is genuine, not just a rhetorical tactic. Ukraine will be in a better position to build up combat power ahead of the inevitable resumption of hostilities down the line.
But the basic trouble with a ceasefire is the same as a land-swap deal: who can trust Putin to keep his word? Ukrainians would still be forced to live with the threat of the shooting starting up again at any time. The moment Putin felt like his forces were regenerating slower than Ukraine’s, he’d have a strong incentive to cancel the deal and go all-in. A serious ceasefire of any real length would lead to Ukraine holding elections, and that process is guaranteed to bring all kinds of simmering political disagreements in Ukraine to the fore. Not having elections if it’s possible to hold them isn’t an option, because that will lead to systemic problems of its own in short order. So Putin would gain a chance to strike Ukraine when doing so would generate the most confusion, allowing for his forces to seize even more territory before Ukraine could mobilize.
The correct way to bring a malevolent miscreant like Putin to heel is to impose harsh measures and make him beg for relief before agreeing to negotiations. This is how hard power is meant to operate: the United States has serious problems, but is still more than a match for Moscow one-on-one. Trump is pretending to be after peace when he’s really just sacrificing America’s own security and power to internal party politics. Why not meet the leader of Iran in Alaska next? Oh wait, he’s Muslim, and Putin is nominally Christian.
As it stands, Putin is almost certainly not willing to actually give up anything he’s stolen from Ukraine. Aside from scoring a diplomatic victory in pulling Trump back for another round of the great ceasefire waltz, this summit also buys time for allies like Hegseth to interrupt Pentagon aid shipments again. Which the Pentagon reportedly has been authorized to divert to US stocks as needed, so now he’s got bureaucratic cause to act without Trump officially knowing about it. Ah, plausible deniability.
When the world system collapses, it isn’t some overnight Armageddon that leaves the survivors picking up the pieces. It’s a long, slow grind, just like a recession. All the power players fight to hold onto whatever they can, trying to keep pace with events they hardly control.
In times like these, it’s events on the ground, right down to individual combat engagements, that most strongly shape the future. It’s the possibilities at the front which determine political realities, not the other way around. Politicians may decide when soldiers fight and generals get to say where, but it’s the blood, sweat, and tears of those who actually clear trenches, sling shells, move supplies, control drones, drive vehicles, and organize all of the above and more.
If my coverage of global affairs is often cynical, sardonic, and dismissive, it’s because for all the damage politicians do, it’s mostly by accident. They haven’t the faintest clue about the consequences of their policy. Until someone reminds them with force. Then they panic.
Atlantic
On a related note, isn’t it ironic how Team Trump is so quick to dispatch the National Guard to D.C. to fight crime when rates have been on a steady decrease anyway when back in January of 2021 they portrayed a bunch of rioters attacking the democratic process and killing police officers as enthusiastic citizens? These people don’t even try to cover their partisan motivations any more. Everything for the team, to the bitter end!
I’m not all that upset about the Guard going into D.C., though, because under the weird way the District of Columbia exists in a legal sense the president does have the authority to call them up. Fearful of the deadly implications for America’s democracy, media outlets actively downplayed the significance of Trump’s deployment to Los Angeles under even more spurious grounds earlier this year. California’s ambitious governor Newsom chose not to assert his full authority, instead letting the courts rule on the matter after the crisis is over. Thus setting the standard that Trump can always abuse the Constitution so long as he gets things done before a case can churn through the judicial system. Cute.
More hazardous to the survival of the USA as a country is the emerging move to gerrymander House districts in every Red and Blue state to eliminate ones held by the minority party. Texas started it, California is matching the move, and other states are soon to follow suit. And so the two dismal partisan teams find yet another excuse to entrench themselves where they can. This is how countries begin to physically divide.
As far as Ukraine goes, most of what needs to be said about geopolitical developments this week has been: all eyes are turning to Anchorage to see what false promises Trump decides will constitute peace. Zelensky is extremely unlikely to attend, because that would be futile, binding him to a process certain to be rigged against Ukraine’s interests. European leaders have made it clear that Trump is on his own, as they must. They’ve finally got him in a situation where he will out his true interests for the whole world to see.
On Friday, Trump can choose to:
Proclaim a deal, then blame Zelensky for not agreeing (probable)
Issue a banal statement revealing a hard deadlock, ending the charade (possible)
Turn around and go after Putin for refusing to budge (maybe)
If it’s the first option, Europe knows the game is over and attempts to placate Trump further are beyond futile. They can proceed with a major military buildup with minimal coordination between D.C. and Brussels, treating American companies as rivals which will never be able to compete on labor costs or quality, only access to Pentagon purchasing committees that will write equipment requirements to suit their favorite Pentagon startup angling to get bought by Amazon or Google. This plus trade shenanigans will lead to Europe’s emergence as a world power rival to the USA and an alternative to China by necessity, with containing Moscow being Europe’s immediate geopolitical priority.
Option two will likely entail America turning away from Europe more gradually, while all sides maintain a fig leaf of good cheer and cooperation for decorum while savagely competing over intellectual property behind the scenes. This is really just a softer version of the first option and the option I expect. No one wants a dramatic shock, but everyone knows where matters will stand in five years.
Option three would, in a strange way, be the most destabilizing, continuing the fraught but sometimes useful working relationship between Team Trump and Europe as it presently stands. In the short run this is manifestly the best outcome for Ukraine and the USA, but would upend many European assumptions and keep Europe bound to D.C.
No matter what, Ukraine looks bound to fight on. Some recent polling purporting to show Ukrainians being ready to negotiate away sovereignty for peace is highly misleading as reported. Phrasing in social science research is critical, as is context: Ukrainian respondent willingness to negotiate has always closely tracked how often the government itself is talking about negotiations.
Openness to something also doesn’t mean agreeing to a particular outcome. The US has forced Zelensky to accept the western taboo about saying that Ukraine can ever win the war, and been partially successful in getting him to grovel properly on command. But the fact that Ukrainians naturally prefer to negotiate to reclaim the occupied territories over time to bleeding in a fight to get them now doesn’t mean that they’re willing to sign away their sovereignty and cede them to buy a false peace. Any sane person wants this war to be over. But putting it on a shelf for a few years only makes for more suffering down the line.
Ultimately, Ukrainians very likely would trade away Donbas and Crimea in exchange for hard security guarantees - defined as an expectation that Putin or a successor can never seize more territory without triggering a world war, probably nuclear. And this would be a reasonable stance, if still extremely damaging to the integrity of the foundations of any global community worth calling that. But a world where territories are sometimes bought and sold instead of bled over shouldn’t be as bad as the present state of affairs.
But hard security guarantees mean immediate NATO membership and more - which the USA has ruled out. Hungary too, though I’m pretty sure NATO would swap Hungary for Ukraine in a heartbeat So the war will continue in some form. If Trump cuts off aid in another tantrum next week, Ukrainians will eat more Iskander strikes and decentralize more of their production - but in a year or so Hrim missiles will rain down on Moscow. Ukraine will keep getting stronger, because Europe’s defense potential is larger than Moscow’s once mobilized to the degree it has now been.
It is highly tempting for me to argue that Ukraine should actually shelve any counteroffensive plans for another year. If the right technological and doctrinal balance is reached and applied widely across the force and China does not escalate support for Moscow, Ukraine could be in a better position. However, this risks losing the chance to stabilize the front forever if Beijing more actively intervenes. Thankfully that isn’t my choice to make.
But even knowing the cost, I’d move in 2025 with whatever resources are available. As I’ll cover more in the operational post coming out later today, the entire logic of fighting the way Ukraine has on the Pokrovsk and Novopavlivka fronts the past year depends on launching a major counteroffensive. But nothing says that Syrskyi is the leader he seemed. Normally the ones with poor PR and devoted enemies willing to say anything and enlist any dupe who doesn’t question the motivations of their sources are alright. Broken clocks can still be correct twice a day, though.
In other North American geopolitical news, there have been reports that Team Trump really is considering military action against cartels in Mexico. That would be stupid beyond belief, but by no means out of character for the “isolationist” movement he was so recently proclaimed to be leading. He was once a fascist threat to the Constitution, too, but Americans aren’t supposed to talk about that any more. Talking might convince a few to do something meaningful to rectify the situation.
Mexican cartels have supposedly sent volunteers to fight for Ukraine then bring back neat tricks, including using drones, so they probably saw this coming. The day when a bold Mexican cartel ambushes and wipes out an American tank platoon with drones draws ever closer, I’m afraid.
The people donating the most money to political causes right now actually want to see the news become a reality TV show where they get a vote in the development of the plot. These donors want to see alleged cartel stuff go boom, and that policy they shall have!
Take note, Canadians. If the Fallout TV series doesn’t get run into the ground like every other Amazon big-ticket TV project (for the same sad basic tired postmodern reasons as the inability to understand that Ukraine can win, funny enough), and goes into the backstory of the USA’s fall at all, a misguided movement to annex Canada to protect America’s Alaskan oil pipeline from China could actually get going. I know that it sounds totally bonkers nutso, but nothing in the laws of policy science foreclose this from happening. When weird things start to happen, expect more weird things.
Indo-Med
Nothing has changed in Israel’s many ongoing wars except that a whole lot of civilians starved to death or were shot. Hamas did fire one rocket at Israel though (easily intercepted), so I guess that deserves a few hundred more air strikes on the Gaza ruins, yeah? And I’m sure the latest round of Al Jazeera journalists to get killed was totally self-defense. Those cameras and microphones they wield are lethal.
I mean, as an instructor on one range in the first part of my Army training back in the day encouraged us recruits to think, anything anyone is carrying could be concealing a grenade. Maybe they didn’t want to have to explain all the bullet holes in the cutout of the Iraqi child left by prior training cycles. Huh, wonder of those plastic little green men meant to represent Warsaw Pact soldiers got put into storage only to be pulled out again two decades later?
Anyway, Syria has stayed calm enough for Syria, Hezbollah is steadily reverting back to focusing on its interests in Lebanon, and Iran has been quiet, along with the Houthis. I guess when international attention is actually bothering to finally grapple with what’s been happening in Gaza over the past year, best to let your enemy do your work for you. While I knock Israel fans for always insisting that whatever Israel does is righteous and a wild success, Israel does inflict a lot of pain on its enemies, not just bystanders. Have to imagine they like a reprieve.
Smaller conflicts continue to tear apart former Libya and Sudan, and Somalia has been a tragedy so long even Somalians are probably having trouble remembering peace. India and Pakistan are still mercifully in the frantically buying more kit phase of their conflict cycle. India seems to be leaning towards getting more French Rafales instead of Sukois despite losing at least one of the former, and probably several. From the sound of it, the ultimate cause of the Indian Air Force’s losses was arrogance.
I have to give the Indian Air Force credit, though: they are a very persistent lot when they want to spread a narrative. Ever since losing at least two, probably five jets to Pakistani aircraft wielding very long-range missiles, the Indian Air Force has been waging a relentless campaign to convince people that no, actually, we won, you see. Without presenting a shred of evidence, IAF leaders have been insisting since the ceasefire that after losing maybe one aircraft, if any, they then shattered Pakistan’s air bases before mercifully agreeing to stop kicking them while they were down. The latest claim is that India actually destroyed six Pakistani fighters in addition to crippling their air defense network. Sure, India likely landed a few hits, but knocking out the enemy entirely? Nah.
I like how they still feel the need to one-up the Pakistani kill claim after sticking to the well, we hit all their airbases so we obviously won line for weeks. Indian media isn’t known for asking hard questions of their military officials, though. I swear that the Indian, Israeli, and US air forces all use the same PR firm.
Or, as I’m discovering from conversations with friends and family who work in an office setting these days, maybe they all just use ChatGPT or some other scaled up version of the dismal autosuggest function Google and apparently every phone adopted some years back. Since these things just chunk up language, categorize packets, then rearrange them using statistical evaluation of content fed in as training data, strange seams are to be expected. The majority of language and communication is painfully redundant, which is why they have a certain degree of utility. But the fluid parts are so dynamic that machine learning in its present state still can’t match a trained wet mind. And when it can, it probably won’t be easily controlled.
Pacific
From a Pacific perspective, the choice of Alaska for the Trump-Putin hangout is extra galling, a further reminder of how we’re all - but especially Alaskans and Hawai’ians, seen as colonial subjects, barely true Americans at all. Moscow once laid claim to the place, then extracted what price it could to surrender it before the USA - or Britain - could get around to relieving the Muscovites of their murderous colony.
It has been amusing this week to see the total geographic ignorance of the average Muscovite on full display as Putin’s propagandists make silly claims like Alaska makes perfect sense because our delegation can just fly across the Bering Strait, when any flight from the Moscow region would track over the North Pole. Look up great circle routes sometime, it’s fascinating to see how projections of Earth onto a flat surface make an real-world straight line look curved.
It’s also a bit funny to learn that Putin’s security detail is also a whole lot dumber than I thought - if you want to assassinate a world leader, there are few better places to stage the thing than Alaska! If you’ve ever been to the Anchorage area, you’ll be familiar with the high mountains and dense summer vegetation. There’s also a whole lot of ocean nearby. Fiber-optic drones with a 25km range can launch from a functional infinity of covert launch sites, boats, apartments - you name it. Mothership drones with repeaters can hit from even farther. Sure, Elmendorf-Richardson (joint Air Force-Army facility) is a major military outpost, but this week the U.S. Army posted a video of its “historic” first intercept of one drone with another. Good grief, people, the Army brand is already not doing great…
Despite being officially a red state at the national level, Alaska’s independent streak has made it close to purple in recent years. Its political dynamics are similar to what you find across the rest of Pacific America - really, Western North America - except that rural places are sufficiently populous, and autonomous by necessity, that you lack an activism-inclined state government like, say, California. Alaska is also full of people who aren’t favorably inclined to tyrants, and a whole lot of retired veterans who know Putin for what he is and may not actually mind going out trying to take him down to make it into the history books.
Having Putin land in Anchorage is pretty much the exact inverse of sending Barack Obama to one of those forgotten counties in Appalachia where the Ku Klux Klan is still held in high regard as a defender of a “heritage” no one should ever seek to claim. This I say as a descendant of more Confederate than Union soldiers, and not because I’m “woke” or whatever. I’m just a true western conservative, I guess - one of those people who doesn’t see it as anybody else’s business, particularly the government’s, what anybody gets up to without a damned good reason.
Anyway, heck of a job, whoever decided to send Putin over the North Pole instead of down to Dubai to hang with Trump. May he meet the same fate dished out to Prigozhin, former head of Wagner.