President Donald Trump’s long weekend trip to Scotland wasn’t to meet King Charles III; that meeting has been set for mid-September.
He met the President of European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, not to negotiate trade terms but to announce the conclusion of what Trump called “probably the biggest deal ever reached in any capacity trade or beyond trade;” also, “the biggest deal. People don’t realize. This is bigger than any other deal. We have, uh, great countries, great countries. Uh, I’m familiar with many of ’em, so are you. And, uh, this is really the biggest deal. This is the, I guess we’re the biggest, uh, out there.”
He also met British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The two hours he spent with each of them was less than the games of golf he played with his son Eric Trump, and with Warren Stephens, the US Ambassador to the UK since May and another of the asset speculators who have financed Trump’s re-election campaign.
Trump’s purpose in Scotland was to advertise the game of golf on the two resort courses he owns in Scotland — Turnberry in Ayrshire in the southwest, and in Aberdeen in the northeast. “The golf was, uh, the golf was beautiful,” Trump told the press beside von der Leyen. “It’s, uh, golf can never be bad, even if you play badly, it’s, uh, it’s still good. If you had a bad day on the golf course, it’s okay. Uh, it’s better than other days”.
That’s Trump’s game. But Trump’s golf business is in financial trouble within the Trump group of companies in the US; and in the financial accounts it is required to report to the UK Companies House.
Advertising the value of the assets, as Trump’s game-playing visit has been planned to display, also exposes the financial vulnerability and invites rescue at a takeover premium. If the Trump plan is to pressure the British and Scots authorities into designating Turnberry for the British Open Championship; or if it is an advertisement to sell to an investor who has needs of his own from the US Government, then the scheme may amount to an offence under 18 U.S. Code § 201: “Whoever…being a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act.”
No one in their right mind puts himself or herself in a zugzwang.
Zugzwang is the German word which has become the name in all languages for the well-known position in politics, warfare, and games of chess which is the last one before capitulation. Literally, it means “being forced to move”. Metaphorically, it refers to the situation when one adversary has placed his opponent in a position where he must make the next move, and whatever move he makes will be his defeat.
In his chess manual of 1777, François-André Philidor illustrated the position at the end of the game when White has played his king and queen into the position where Black, forced to make the next move, must separate his rook from his king and lose the game (lead image, left).
Right now, Zangezur, an Armenian word Զանգեզուր with geographical and historical meaning for a mountainous region of southeastern Armenia (lead image, right), has been Armenian, Mongol, Turkic, Ottoman, Persian, and Russian over a very long past of sheep herding and fighting. Today it refers to a lowland transportation route for road and railway moving cargoes from east to west, north and south, and vice versa — the Zangezur Corridor. Operation of this route and control of it by force of arms pit the strategic interests of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, Russia, China, United States, US, France, India, and others, against each other in several shifting combinations.
If the powers strategize these combinations to benefit their interests at the expense of the others, the only one in the zugzwang is Armenia and its current prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, who has put himself there.
At dinner on July 19, President Donald Trump made a move to sweep everyone else’s pieces from the board, leaving the US with a victory in the game, and a new notch on his Nobel Peace Prize shooter. There were five, he said — and that was not counting the ceasefires Trump says he has notched publicly between Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, and the one he’s hoping for in September in Beijing — Russia and the Ukraine.
Zangezur is now his, Trump claimed. “Armenia and Azerbaijan, we worked magic there. And, uh, it’s pretty close. If not, it’s already done.”
The third round of Russia-Ukraine negotiations in Istanbul came and went in just one hour, and the Russian plan to continue the meeting on Thursday was dropped.
A face-to-face meeting between the two delegation heads, Vladimir Medinsky for Russia, Rustem Umerov for the Ukraine, was held before the plenary session; it lasted for less than 30 minutes. They were then joined by the Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan; the three talked for 15 minutes. In Kiev it was officially denied that Umerov spoke with Medinsky before Fidan joined them. Fidan then formally opened the session of the delegations, declaring “the ultimate goal of the negotiations in Istanbul is to reach a ceasefire for which Turkey has the necessary infrastructure to track compliance.” Between 7:51 pm and 9:39 pm the proceedings were open and shut.
For the Ukrainian side, Umerov read from a brief handwritten note that “we are ready for a ceasefire right now and for the start of substantive peace negotiations. It is up to both sides to agree to this fundamental step toward peace. The ceasefire must be genuine — it must include a complete halt to attacks on civilian and critical infrastructure. Real steps are possible, and each side must demonstrate a constructive and realistic approach.”
More voluble in Kiev, Vladimir Zelensky posted a statement on Telegram reporting a fresh exchange of prisoners of war; he ignored the Istanbul outcome.
The deadlock which the Russians had proposed to break with the “new idea, new concept” which Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on July 10 was dismissed by the Ukrainian side. Instead, it was agreed, as Medinsky announced in his press conference, “to form three working groups that will work online”. The Ukrainians, he said, agreed only to “consider this proposal.” Umerov didn’t say so.
According to Fidan’s later statement, there was agreement to think about the working groups, but no agreement to start them. “The delegations also discussed possible steps to intensify technical discussions on the ceasefire and align their positions. They also agreed to explore the idea of establishing working groups on political, humanitarian, and military matters.”
Manouvres there were; surprises there were not.
A Russian source comments; “So next contacts are downgraded to working groups so that’s the end of talks. Now guns, drones, and missiles will do the talking.”
In Washington there was no direct reaction. The White House is concentrating on Trump’s departure on Friday to meet King Charles III and Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland.
At the same time, on Trump’s order Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched from the White House press room a series of accusations against both President Vladimir Putin and former President Barack Obama for plotting against the US. “Putin’s principal interests”, according to Gabbard, “relating to the 2016 election were to undermine faith in the US democratic process, not showing any preference of a certain candidate. Putin chose not to leak the most damaging and compromising material on Hillary Clinton prior to the election; instead planning to release it after the election to weaken what Moscow viewed would be an inevitable Clinton presidency…The material about Hillary Clinton that Putin chose not to release before the election, included possible criminal acts.”
Obama, she accused, of a conspiracy “to subvert the will of the American people…essentially…a years-long coup against President Trump.”
In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, the discussion focuses on the Russian goal to secure Trump’s agreement to a ceasefire for a single short-term objective – regime change in Kiev by nationwide elections to replace Zelensky. The silence in Kiev and also in Washington, which has followed the session in Istanbul, confirms that Zelensky knows this and is reinforcing his power at home and abroad, in order to save himself.
In following up the last report, new information has become available on the brain scanning which was conducted on Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, following an attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
This is despite a comprehensive and long lasting blackout which began with the US Secret Service and other US government agencies then under President Joseph Biden, and also the Trump election campaign staff.
The Trump diagnosis is that the clinical symptoms of madness are accelerating. Ergo, time is short for the Kremlin to take advantage. Very short.
The Pearl Harbour problem is that the intelligence of the Japanese plan of attack on the US Navy fleet at Pearl Harbour in December 1941 was very obvious after the event – but dismissed in advance because the political pressure to interpret the intelligence and believe otherwise was too great. Ergo, the conviction President Vladimir Putin currently holds that Trump is capable of rational deal-making on terms for ending the Ukraine war if treated with courtesy and respect may be a misinterpretation. Depending on what happens next, a very large one.
The contradiction ought to be obvious between the first and the second in Russian warfighting strategy.
Equally obvious is the solution which Putin has favoured until now – delay.
The qutab is an exceptional meat pie in a world that’s full of meat pies.
That’s because it is the national meat pie of Azerbaijan, and because there is nothing quite like it outside the Azeri borders or culture.
It is baked with a thin flatbread which is stuffed with heavily seasoned mincemeat of sheep, goat or beef. You might call the combination of meats, onions, pomegranate syrup, herbs, and spices complicated if you weren’t persuaded how uniquely tasty it is.
It’s the same with the politics of Azerbaijan. They are not to be confused with the politics of Russia, Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Georgia, Azerbaijan’s neighbours, just as there can be no mistaking the qutab for a pirog, gozleme, lahmajoun, kubdari, or لاهم بی آجین (lahm bi ajeen). Caution: if you are MAGA supporter, it would be your big mistake to call any of them a pizza.
Mistaking the superficial appearance of things for the reality is what sophomores do because they haven’t learned to know better. It’s what state propaganda organs and their spokesmen do because they are paid money and because information warfare is what politicians do to advance their interests. Repeating that the qutab or pirog is a pizza over and over will convince many taste testers, according to the Big Lie doctrine of Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill and their student, Joseph Goebbels.
Forcing taste testers at the point of a gun or bribing them with money will also work to turn the Azeri and the Russian pies into an American pizza for a time; this is to speak literally as well as metaphorically. In Russia, that time was ten years long – the decade Boris Yeltsin was president.
Very recently, his successor President Vladimir Putin acknowledged publicly how long it has taken for him to learn. “I thought that the contradictions with the West were primarily ideological. It seemed logical at the time – Cold War inertia, different views of the world, values, the organization of society. But even when the ideology disappeared, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the same, almost routine deviation from Russia’s interests continued. And it was not because of ideas, but because of the pursuit of advantages – geopolitical, economic, strategic.”
Right now the reality of the conflict between Azerbaijan and Russia isn’t how the propaganda, the force of arms, and the corruption of money are explaining it. To understand, click to listen to this discussion with Nima Alkhorshid, starting at Minute 42:30:
As President Donald Trump got off his helicopter on Tuesday afternoon, he was asked by a reporter about his threat to impose 100% secondary trade sanctions if President Vladimir Putin doesn’t capitulate on US terms for ending the Ukraine war within fifty days.
“Question: Are you concerned that uh, secondary tariffs on buyers of Russian oil will hurt American consumers, higher gas prices —
“Donald Trump: I don’t think so. I think that whole thing is gonna go away eventually. It should have gone away. And Putin does say, ‘Oh, I want peace. I want peace,’ but so far he hasn’t lived up to that. So I think it’s gonna go away. But we’re gonna find out soon. We’re gonna find out soon.
Question: Can yougive us more details on the sanctions? Is it 100% sanctions?
Donald Trump: No, I don’t wanna do that. But they’re very biting, they’re very significant and they’re gonna be very bad for the countries involved. I mean, they’ll be very, very powerful and, uh, very bad for the countries involved. And I hope we don’t have to pull that string and maybe we won’t. We’ll see. Gotta end.”
The Kremlin has said next to nothing except to warn that Putin might not think Trump’s threats worth answering. “If and when President Putin deems it necessary,” declared spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “he will certainly comment on that. Let’s wait for Putin to decide whether he will comment on that himself.”
In the meantime, the Kremlin-funded internet platform for political, economic and military strategy, Vzglyad, has published the assessment that Trump will not dare to implement his secondary sanctions threat because the impact on the US will be much too damaging.
About President Donald Trump, certifiable maniac isn’t an expletive – it’s a clinical diagnosis.
In the neurological and psychiatric evidence that has been accumulating about Trump over many years, there is the medical history of Alzheimer’s Disease which runs in his family: his father was first diagnosed at age 86 and died at 93; his older sister died of it, aged 86; and at least one cousin died of the same, aged 84. Since the President has just turned 79, there is reason to anticipate similar onset of symptoms and cause of death for him.
Trump thinks this himself, according to Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and the President’s niece. She has published a case history of the President in 2020 which Trump’s lawyers failed to suppress in court. Last week, she published a new symptom of what she calls the acceleration in Trump’s cognitive decline: he cannot tie his own shoe laces. This claim has already been pursued by online investigators who have been reporting Trump’s lace-ups which appear from the photographs to be tied permanently and a mysterious right shoe several sizes too large.
The evidence of Trump’s incapacity to understand the Russian end-of-war terms, as he expressed himself in the July 14 press session with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, was reported here.
Listen to the new evidence that Trump has failed to register the “new idea, new concept”, presented last week by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid; click.
When Trump and Rutte accuse President Vladimir Putin of failing to negotiate seriously, the record reveals the opposite. Negotiating on the Ukraine war with Trump is proving to be impossible because Trump isn’t serious. That’s not his political decision; it’s his neuro-psychiatric handicap.
“You really gave him [Putin] a chance to be serious to get to the table to start negotiations,” Rutte said to Trump on Monday. “Steve Witkoff, Marco Rubio, we all try to help you. But you’ve now come to a point where you say, well, hey, you know, you have to — you have to get serious.” Trump agreed, replying: “We actually thought we had probably four times [agreed] the deal.” Five times over, Rutte repeated that the Russians aren’t serious. Trump repeated himself: “We’re going to go for a period of time. Maybe he’ll start negotiating. I think we felt, I felt, I don’t know about you Mark, but I felt that we had a deal about four times and here we are still talking about making a deal.”
Trump’s recall was that the terms of his deal had been accepted by Putin; he didn’t recall what Putin’s terms were. He is revealing he cannot comprehend the difference between the US and Russian negotiating positions; he hasn’t so much rejected the “new idea, new concept” from the Kremlin as not to have understood it. This isn’t Trump’s negotiating tactic – it’s cognitive incapacity camouflaged by the threat of force to compel Putin’s capitulation.
The first test of Trump’s rationality is the Mary Trump test – an Oval Office press conference in which Trump demonstrates how he ties his shoe laces.
The second test requires Russian counter force. This is the Oreshnik decision-making point for Putin, when there is no longer any point to negotiating because the US side aims at escalating its arms supplies to the Ukraine battlefield and encouraging the Germans to join in long-range missile attacks on the Russian hinterland, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In the Russian decision-making now under way, there is an attempt to find the rational calculations in what Trump is meaning; that is to say, what Trump’s advisors, constituents, and officials are calculating when he himself is incapacitated. The first of these, Russian sources believe, is that the Trump escalation is a pitch to prevent Trump’s domestic voter base, the MAGA enthusiasts in the battleground states which won the presidency for Trump last November, from deserting him.
The second calculation is that Russia is militarily and economically vulnerable to a combination of escalation of attacks inside Russia and sanctions on the oil trade outside. This is the strategy of the “bigger bear”, announced on CNN this week by former Trump and Biden Administration warfighter, Brett McGurk: “the Russians approach diplomacy as a bear approaches a dance. The bear knows it will determine when and how the dance ends, unless the other dance partner proves itself to be a bigger bear. Sometimes, it helps to be the bigger bear. In the context of Ukraine, like Syria, while the United States is a far more powerful country than Russia, Putin believes that he has the upper hand in such localized conflicts due to Moscow’s determination and consistency contrasted with Washington’s perceived lack of focus, stamina and shifting politics through election cycles. Correcting that perception is a first principle for effective diplomacy with Moscow, and the approach outlined by Trump yesterday offers the chance to do exactly that.”
The third rational calculation, Russian sources believe — as do some US analysts — is that by supplying the Ukraine battlefield through Germany, the UK and Norway with a combination of Patriot anti-aircraft defence batteries and long-range offence missile systems like the Typhon, the Trump Administration will escape having to face a US taxpayer revolt in Congress over the multi-billion dollar cost of direct US arms supplies to Kiev regime.
According to this scheme too, Trump would have an alibi if the Oreshnik decision is taken by Putin, and if the US weapons are defeated in the collapse of the Zelensky regime. Trump would blame the Germans, repeating his line: “don’t forget, I’ve just really been involved in this for not very long and it wasn’t initial focus. Again, this is a Biden war. This is a Democrat war, not a Republican or Trump war. This is a war that would have never happened.”
There is only one way to interpret the meaning of the carefully scripted, rehearsed, memorized , sloganized, and repeated words which President Donald Trump announced in his Monday meeting with Mark Rutte, the Dutch ex-prime minister and now Secretary-General of NATO. They mean the opposite of what he thinks he is saying; and he cannot comprehend either the difference, or that they mean nothing at all. Between meaning that is false in fact and meaning that is non-credible to a friend or foe, Trump’s brain cannot discriminate; does not comprehend.
By Russian as well as Anglo-American neurological and psychiatric standards, this man is a certifiable maniac.
The strategic problem this poses for Russia’s military and political decision-makers, according to a source in a position to know, is that Trump’s mental disability is not that he is lying – he doesn’t aim to deceive. Rather, he is clinically incapable of understanding the logic, the evidence, the weight of options, and the sequence and consequence of actions. He cannot think; ergo, he cannot negotiate in good or even bad faith. He is, according to this Russian neurological diagnosis, a mentally incapacitated brain with only one reflex – the use of force to compel capitulation or effect destruction.
Following their 60-minute meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday (July 10), Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has announced the only new points he made with Secretary of State Marco Rubio are two he has made before, often. These were “the resumption of direct flights [between Russia and the US] and continued efforts to normalise the functioning of bilateral diplomatic missions.”
The third point Lavrov says he made is a new point camouflaged as an old formula. “It has been agreed to continue constructive dialogue on a growing number of issues of mutual interest based on mutual respect between the Russian and US foreign policy offices.”
What this means is that President Vladimir Putin agrees to ignore President Donald Trump’s foul mouth and his reference to Putin’s “bullshit” if Trump implements actions to halt the US arms flow to the Ukraine and other terms for ending the war in the Ukraine.
Russia will turn the other cheek when US actions speak louder than words – that, Rubio told the press later, is “a new idea, a new concept that will – I’ll take back to the President to discuss.” Eyes, closed, Rubio then added his qualifying scepticism. “Hopefully, it will lead to something positive. I can’t guarantee it. The President has been frustrated at the lack of progress. He’s made that clear publicly. But we’ll see if that changes.”
This is the official form of words in the State Department’s record. But this record has added words Rubio didn’t actually say. According to the verbatim transcript, Rubio’s doubt that Lavrov’s “new idea” will change Trump’s mind is missing: “Again, I wouldn’t characterize it as something that guarantees a peace, but it’s a concept that we’ll – I’ll take back to the President today and – here as soon as I finish with you.”
Following Rubio’s return to Washington, Trump then told NBC by telephone that he is still “disappointed in Russia” and will be making “a major statement on Russia on Monday [July 14]”. Trump added that he has just made a “deal” with NATO for US arms deliveries to the Ukraine to go through NATO “and NATO is paying for those weapons 100 percent.” These new weapons supplies will include Patriot missile systems, NBC has reported Trump as saying.
