What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987? nymag.com/daily/intellig… via @intelligencer From the legal point of view, he is, like all of us, innocent until proven guilty.
From the political point of view, however, the salient point is that he's *behaved* as if he's under the control of a hostile foreign power. No one even argues about that, right? They try to explain it away, or make up elaborate theories about why he does these things.
But whether he's a Russian asset or not, he has swiftly brought whatever was left of the American century to an ignominious end. The only question is whether he means for us to go out with a whimper or a bang.
So, credit him for this: He's destroyed American power and what remained of its moral authority. This may work out just fine for Americans: They live on an island, Canada to the North, Mexico to the South, fish everywhere else.
But for regions where the US has traditionally been the counterweight to aggressive authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, it is very grim. Power adores a vacuum. The genie's out of the bottle. America betrayed Europe. And that was our strongest alliance.
What does that look like to Japan, I wonder? ANZUS? The OAS? South Korea? Pakistan? The Philippines? That's a lot of expensive real estate to leave lying around now that the idea of the US as the power that enforces global norms is a joke.
Especially since the US demanded of many of its allies that they knock of their squabbling. What's life going to be like in Morocco, say, when all now know that the US is but a boasting elderly humbug, inflated by mirrors and a smoke machine?
