…You do, of course, know Hitler didn’t actually win, right?

There’s always the worst possible option: they’re true believers. They genuinely believe the rest of the world is freeloading on the US, and that (atlas) shrugging them off will make everyone else collapse.

Yeah, it’s not a joke, it literally happens all the time, and an error after block close generally means the system doesn’t think it’s closed, usually because a bracket isn’t paired off.

You didn’t mention Israel, I did. That was the start of this conversation, the comparison between his supposed treatment of Russia and his actual treatment of Israel.

You know what, forget it. I’m on post four in the conversation, and I’m already on the second recap. This is a waste of time.

That’s the thing - It doesn’t benefit anyone. Canceling it doesn’t benefit the US, because it lets Russia off the hook, It doesn’t benefit Russia either, because it lets the US off the hook. And it doesn’t even benefit China, because it lets both the US and Russia off the hook. The whole point of having the agreement is that it limits both sides, and both sides want it, that’s why they sign it in the first place. If Putin wanted out of the deal that badly, he could have just canceled it the same way Trump did (or, yknow, just kept breaking it like he already did). It literally doesn’t benefit anyone. If Trump were the kind of person that knows what the word “bilaterally” means, he could have handled it differently, like everyone - including Russia - wanted him to. But since he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who does, I have exactly zero problem imagining him concluding “Well, if they won’t then I won’t either!” and wrecking everything like the bull in a china shop that he is. He doesn’t consider the rest of the world as partners, he doesn’t consider anyone a partner, he seems to think in terms of zero-sum and tit-for-tat. Even his “I’m leaving NATO” left more of the impression of an extortionist shaking the EU down for cash. It wouldn’t surprise me he only likes Putin because he can use him to threaten Europe.

I asked what, if anything, did Trump do to warrant being called Putin’s pet dog, when from the outside he seems to favour Israel much more openly. Your examples are either inconsequential or entirely off base. It’s like blaming Russia for crashing your car because you were too distracted by thinking about how much you hate Russia to drive. If the president of a country were truly that compromised, you would expect him to, IDK, declare Crimea Russian, or ship them an F-35, or give them Alaska back or something. Not spend four years on chickenshit crap line “refraining from criticism”.

I swear to fucking god, there is no purgatory that will atone Fukuyama for that fucking article.

“Met with Putin”? Really? “Excused killing of journalists”? You sure they weren’t Hamas? Hell, you list the nuclear forces treaty, even when you, yourself, recognize it was because of China, not Russia. Is that what qualifies you as Putin’s “pet dog”? Tangentially kinda sorta benefiting Russia while trying to spite China? If retreating from the stage is “allowing russia to Take a bigger Part”, then surely it’s also allowing China “to Take a bigger Part”. Is he China’s pet dog too? If Europe finally gets off it’s ass and starts doing shit, will it retroactively make him EU’s pet dog?

Not going out of your way to antagonize a foreign nation does not make you a sleeper agent. It’s actually remarkable that the ambient level of hatred for Russia is so high that any interaction that’s not immediately and deliberately hostile is met with vaguely homophobic jeering. The one point you list that is actually, genuinely, directly for Russia’s benefit is the G7 membership, and even then I’m not entirely convinced he didn’t do it to troll Rachel Maddow.

…What is he doing? Like, seriously, what specifically? For all the hysteria both then and now, I can, off the top of my head, remember a few openly and directly pro-Israel moves from Trump’s last term, but not much on Russia.

Each one. Not “both”, each one. Hmmm…

Another reminder that France, Spain, and Italy forced the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria because they thought Snowden was on it.

Reminds me of Reagan, actually. That was more or less the response he and Bush gave back when a US ship shot down an Iranian airliner.

Gobshite is silly and clearly lacks any linguistics knowledge, but the most ignorant are often the most confident.

Shouldn’t that be “Gobshite are silly and clearly lack any linguistics knowledge”?

semantically wrong

This, TBH. It’s just speaking in third person. You’d think if it’s not trolling, at least you’d know what a pronoun is, from a grammatical standpoint.

Just this outstanding example of acting, directing, and prop management.

Not so - fine gazelle!

And before the switch, they showed him speaking Russian so the audience could realise what a good decision it was!

And the other from the people who forgot how he dies in the books.

You assume they have no dog in the race.

They think they’re Aragorn and we’re orcs.

IDK, the “we only need to be lucky once” is a hell of a message.

The argument for Iran was that Mossadegh was “turning towards communism”. Same for Allende, same for Arbenz. Hell, just the concept of “domino theory” was all about stopping the spread of communism. Pretending they were some sort of equal opportunity saboteurs is deeply disingenuous.