Is it true that Putin has outsmarted Obama and Clinton as Trump claims?
Willingness to blow things up is not “outsmarting”Putin has been very aggressive. But outsmarted? I don’t think so. What he’s done is bully countries far smaller than him.And bullies tend to do badly when they get out of high school. We’re playing the long game. He’s not.He’s moved into Syria, which looks clever but in the long run will probably become a quagmire the way Afghanistan did. There are far too many groups to consolidate any power behind a single party.The only reason he’s making progress is because we haven’t chosen to directly confront him with military force. We’d win: Russian anti-aircraft and electronic warfare capabilities are intimidating, but we have the better professional army, a 10:1 advantage in aircraft carriers and a superior air force. But it would be idiotic.Putin’s brute-force approach is familiar: The USSR used it during the Cold War. But again, we need to play the long game.The Soviets lost the Cold War because they bankrupted themselves trying to occupy swaths of territory. They can build up their military, but don’t have the economic engine to support it. They can create more dangerous nukes, but the truth is we all have so many warheads that “more effective” warheads are like bigger hair on a dog’s back. It’s irrelevant, because everything’s already covered.Again: The long game.Putin hasn’t attempted action against NATO countries. He’s pursuing an all-or-nothing strategy in his own country where, if he fails to purge every opposition group, he’s eventually going to lose all power. If he doesn’t do that, then he’ll have to find a way to sustain what he’s built after he’s dead. How will he do that? Does he have a protege?What’s he doing to address the Russian economy? We dwarf their GDP by at least 5x.Yup: The long game.FinallyPutin supports Trump because he knows he can’t work with Clinton or Obama. If he really thought he could outsmart Clinton, why not support her?And, before we point fingers at the current administration: What we’re really dealing with, and will for decades, is the aftermath of the Iraq war. We destabilized the entire Middle East, which led to the rise of additional terrorist organizations, which led to civil war in multiple countries and complete fragmentation of political interests. We accelerated the fall of nation states, which left room for smaller groups who practice asymmetric warfare. Huge headache.But Putin? Outsmart Clinton and Obama? No.