When someone is senile but surrounded by supporting friends and family, it's a situation that is sad but, one hopes, manageable. When someone is senile but that someone is also the president of the United States, it's downright dangerous. The whole world has now seen President Joe Biden's undeniable senility.
To be clear, former President Donald Trump's "mirror, mirror on the wall" school of foreign relations is very far from ideal. Trump does whatever he believes is in his own interest in any one moment. He is unable to separate his perception of his own interests from those of the nation. But at least for now, Biden occupies the Oval Office. And that makes the president's catastrophic debate performance on Thursday a cause for deep concern regarding national security.
This is particularly relevant in relation to those U.S. adversaries that want to see Trump returned to office over Biden.
This doesn't mean all our adversaries want that result. China, for example, would likely prefer Biden over Trump's return, fearing Trump's tariff policies and retributive anger over the COVID-19 pandemic (which he blames for his 2020 defeat). Iran will certainly want Biden's retention of his office, desperate to avoid the heavy sanctions Trump previously imposed upon it.
That said, others want Trump. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may be one of them, seeking a new deal extravaganza with Trump. But it is Vladimir Putin who is most keen on Trump's return. The Russian president believes Trump is far more malleable than Biden to his manipulations.
At the debate, Trump said that Putin respects him. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. As best underlined by Putin's Shakespearean " tennis balls, my liege " soccer ball insult to Trump in 2018 (an insult Trump took as a salute), Putin believes Trump is an amateur. Putin hopes that by stroking Trump's ego and triggering his paranoias, he can win Trump's support for iceberg-like agreements — deals, that is to say, which offer a glimmering 10% appeal to Trump on the surface but 90% benefit Russia below the surface. While it's true that Trump has made positive clarifications on NATO and has rightly rejected Putin's utterly disingenuous Ukraine peace plan, Putin senses a term-two Trump would be beneficial to Russia.
That brings us back to the present security environment.
Sensing Biden's new political vulnerability, Putin may move to take advantage from it. From a U.S. national security perspective, the particular concern is that Putin will take near-term action to provoke American voters' fears that Biden's Ukraine policy is risking their security. Trump played to Putin's aspirations here when he said on Thursday that, due to its Ukraine policy, the U.S. has never been closer to a third world war.
Putin has catalyzed this world war escalation-narrative strategy in recent weeks, seeking to persuade Americans that U.S. support for Ukraine makes a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation probable. This is mostly fiction. While Putin is desperate to reduce U.S. support for Ukraine , Moscow remains highly unlikely to risk a direct military confrontation with Washington. Putin knows that he would likely badly lose such a confrontation in either the conventional or nuclear force domains. And Putin also knows that any use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine would rupture his critical economic and political relationship with China.
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Nevertheless, with Biden newly vulnerable and Trump newly ascendant following the debate, Putin may sense an opportunity to exploit the situation. Always an opportunist and a keen analyst (albeit often imperfectly) of U.S. politics, Putin might believe that some kind of near-term provocation would undermine Biden in an environment where more Americans are suddenly more doubtful of Biden's ability to lead. The ingredients are already apparent: Russia is conducting a sabotage campaign inside the West, inventing Ukrainian dirty bomb plots , playing games with North Korea , and teasing that it might down a U.S. drone over the Black Sea.
Thursday evening's events only make it more likely that Putin will choose an escalation gambit in the coming days. He'll want to foster American fears that Biden is incapable of command and that such an incapacity is unaffordable amid rising international tensions.
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