Trump’s Russia connection backfires

Abu Hena :
On Friday,22 August, Donald Trump, Republican presidential nominee released his first campaign ad, featuring an image of a polling site with the word “rigged”. U.S. election law officials have expressed concern that Trump’s incendiary word will create a self-fulfilling prophesy. “It went from being laughable to be what I consider to be dangerous”, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and election expert at the University of California, School of Law. Prof. Hasen said that while it initially seemed Donald Trump was seeking an early scapegoat for a possible loss, his language had turned darker. The ad came two years after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and began preparing for yet another military confrontation with the pro-Western government of Ukraine. Over the past weeks Russia had deployed additional military forces and weapons near Ukraine’s borders creating threat of a crisis and causing tensions. Then on Ukraine’s Independence Day, fighting broke out between the Ukrainian forces and Russian backed separatists in the East, killing 13 Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian President condemned Russian shelling saying ,”Putin wants whole Ukraine”. With Europe focused on a refugee crisis and Britain’s exit from the EU, and America riveted by a presidential election, this is the opportune moment for Putin to raise the threat of a wider conflagration to achieve economic and political goals. The Obama administration has already made serious concessions to the Russian President on Syria’s civil war and now for obvious reasons Kremlin has chosen this time to destabilize and covertly weaken the United States.
The “Gerasimov doctrine” holds that modern conflicts are not waged with guns so much as by dirty tricks. ” In practice”, says Russian analyst Konstantin Sivkov,”You can say that hybrid warfare can be successful when the opponent’s political system is unstable.” By that standard, the U.S. presidential election presents both a fitting target and a satisfying spectacle. Putin’s antipathy for Hillary Clinton is a matter of record. He publicly blamed her, then Secretary of State, for encouraging the massive street protests against him in Moscow in 2011. Now Russia came back with a dirty trick by posting nearly 20,000 DNC emails, some acutely embarrassing to Clinton. Her campaign sustained most of the initial damage. But the cyber-war, “equivalent of an armor-piercing shell” has clearly exposed Donald Trump’s insidious Kremlin connection. There are similarities between the foreign policy priorities of Putin and Trump. “Trump presents a different narrative, which in many ways corresponds to what Putin has always said,” notes Fyodor Lukyanov,a Russian expert on foreign policy, with close ties with Kremlin. ” So yes, people here view his chances , at the very least, with a certain level of interest.”
Trump has pointedly refused to say that he will honor the NATO charter and guarantee U.S. support for countries like Estonia – a fellow NATO member that borders Russia-were the Baltic nation to come under military attack by Moscow. During the Republican Convention trump aides watered down language that originally called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukrainians fighting Russian forces. The softer language inserted by the Trump campaign called for “appropriate assistance”. In the wake of a resurgence of Russia after the cold war debacle, Trump appears to have developed link with Vladimir Putin back in 2013, when announcing the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow he asked ,”Do you think Putin will be going…if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump has maintained his trademark pro- Kremlin stand while most Americans are alarmed by mounting evidence that a foreign power penetrated and pillaged one of the nation’s major political parties. The latest Russian hacking took place in the New York Times, currently under investigation by FBI. U.S. officials are convinced that Russia was behind the cyber-war. Experts inside Russia acknowledge that the Kremlin has the capability to root through the files of the Democratic Party, and worse.
Putin will be interested to create a nightmare situation by producing some miraculous election results on 8 November. Russia has the capability to hack the ballots, and U.S. experts believe they are certainly probing in a very active way the vulnerabilities as the Election Day approaches .That’s a dangerous possibility and any tilting of the scales would just be a bonus for Russia and a great damage to the United States .”The Kremlin team does take pleasure, as does the Russian establishment more generally, in Trump’s brutality,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin’s one time political adviser. “The fact that this brutality is not directed at Russia is enjoyable in itself.” Instead, Trump’s brutality is directed against Hillary Clinton, Secretary John Kerry currently negotiating with Russia, the U.S. democracy and its citizens.
Trump relies on aides who are deeply involved in Russian affairs, almost giving the impression that they had undergone the Russian vetting. One of his campaign advisers, Carter Page, was an adviser to Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy goliath. His former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was a strategist for Putin’s puppet, former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych , who was overthrown by a popular movement in 2014 and now lives under his protection in Moscow. The fact that he received $12.7 million from Yanukovych proves that he had more shady Russian connections than a James Bond villain. Trump’s new CEO Steve Bannon is known as the “Most Dangerous Man in America .”He made his former Breitbart a white nationalist manifesto. Yet Trump’s support among white men, the linchpin of his presidential campaign, is showing surprising signs of weaknesses that could foreclose his only remaining path of victory in November, reports the NYT. “This is an electoral disaster waiting to happen,” said Whit Ayres, who has advised Republican presidential candidates for 25 years .Two national polls have recently put his support from African-Americans at an astonishing 1 percent. The latest poll of Latinos, conducted by Fox News left Trump with just 20 percent support .The most recent ABC News/Washington Post/Reuter poll of registered voters had Clinton beating Trump in a nationwide race, 50 percent to 42 percent. Still there are American apprehensions that Russia could steal the White House using cyber-weapons and helping Donald Trump win.
[Writer was elected MP in the 7th and the 8th Parliaments]