The two most dangerous monsters in the world so far in the 21st century are Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. There are arguments to say that Barack Obama is the Doctor Frankenstein who created them. Or, rather, he was not the one who created them, since that honor belongs to his mothers, but the one who prompted his most evil tendencies.
What I am going for is the theory that Trump would not have run for president of the United States and Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Obama, very smart, had kept his mouth shut.
Putin first. I have just watched a BBC documentary called Putin versus the West, which aims to trace the factors that led Putin – himself, alone – to go to war. One factor that the documentary focuses on is especially striking. In 2014, after Putin's troops seized the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, Obama declared: "Russia is a regional power that threatens its immediate neighbors based not on strength but on weakness."
José Manuel Durão Barroso, then president of the European Commission, detected the blunder. “Obama says that Russia is just a regional power. This is not helping,” said Barroso, Portugal's former prime minister. “It doesn't help because it breeds resentment, and to me Putin is essentially a product of resentment that stems from the decline of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What is the use of creating even more resentment in a character like Putin?
Barroso, who had met Putin several times, quickly found himself vindicated. In the months following the unfortunate statement by the president of the United States, Putin had several meetings with leaders of the European Union in which he repeatedly reminded, indignantly, that Russia was only a regional power. His language became more warlike at the same time. He began to insist in public that Ukraine was not an independent country, that it belonged to Russia.
Barroso's successor as president of the European Commission at the end of 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker, also lamented Obama's words. His chief of staff says in the BBC documentary that Putin felt "hurt and insulted." Another interviewee, an Obama adviser, acknowledged the mistake. "Putin was fired up," he said. "He needs to feel like a great world leader, like his Soviet predecessors."
Fast forward to February 11, 2022, two weeks before the Russian invasion. British Defense Minister Ben Wallace met with the Russian General Staff in Moscow. They assured him that they had no intention of invading Ukraine. Wallace didn't buy it. "It was a case of 'I'm going to lie to you, you know I'm lying and I know you know I know I'm lying, but I'll lie to you anyway.'"
The truth came out of the mouth of the head of the Russian General Staff, Valeri Guerasimov, after the meeting ended. Putin's puppet Gerasimov muttered to Wallace: “They will never humiliate us again. We were the fourth army in the world, now we are number two, the United States and us." In that instant, Wallace's doubts were erased. "That's when I understood why," he told the BBC, of what he knew would be the imminent Russian invasion.
Away from the dramas of war, in everyday life, there are few things more uncomfortable than dealing with people with fine skin. Smelling their insecurity, detecting that they don't feel comfortable with themselves, that they harbor resentments, that they live with a permanent predisposition to resentment, one understands that the only way to deal with them is on tiptoe, taking great care with words for fear of offending. .
This is Putin, as a person and as the embodiment of a failed country, a victim of both the failed experiment in communism and the failed experiment in savage capitalism that replaced it after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia would be little without his nuclear arsenal, and Putin, deep in his reptilian cortex, knows it. He is the schoolyard bully, with worse grades but bigger than his classmates, who have the intelligence to know better than to provoke him.
Obama provoked him. He hit the wound. She forgot that she was dealing with a child who was at once insecure, mean and destructive. Or, changing the metaphor, with a silly but ferocious dog that should not be bullied but treated with exaggerated respect. "Good little dog, great little dog, strong little dog, handsome little little dog." Jokes, the minimum.
Putin is self-conscious. Russia is a complexed country. His age-old problem is how inferior he feels to the West (they spoke French at the courts of the tsars). And Obama, as the highest representative of the West, goes and insults him where it hurts him the most. Today we see the consequences.
Trump has a psychological profile similar to Putin's. Insecure, resentful, envious, spiteful. The equivalent of Putin's complex about the West is his complex about the establishment in his native New York, which rejected him, and the Washington elite, who never disguised his disdain for vulgarity and childish machismo. that define you.
The one who not only did not hide it, but also blamed him, was Obama. It happened in 2011 at the annual dinner of correspondents who cover the White House, in which Trump was among the guests. President Obama devoted five minutes of his speech to Trump, five minutes of cruel humor in which he portrayed him as the jerk that he is. He embarrassed him, humiliated him as no one had been humiliated in a forum that for years has brought together the richest, most famous and most powerful figures in the American empire, all of whom died laughing – except Trump, mute as a statue – before thank you from the president
Is that where Trump hatched the idea of running for president? Was that the moment, like Putin when he heard about “regional power”, in which he decided to take revenge on him? There are many political observers in Washington who understand this. I suspect that he has a lot to do with it. As I also suspect that the disdain and airs of intellectual superiority of the left and smart-ass like me, not only in the United States but in many other countries, have to do with the rise in recent years of the rabid extreme right, that of the one that Trump and Putin are the maximum expression.
