By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
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.
Starting again with more evidence.
A fresh diagnosis of Trump’s symptoms has been published by a professor of internal medicine at a leading US university. After the usual disclaimers about diagnosing patients without seeing them in person, the doctor writes: “Trump certainly does not have Alzheimer’s Disease. He absolutely has personality traits – and just listening to him and watching his behavior – I lean toward Narcissistic Personality Disorder and likely Antisocial Personality Disorder. At his age, and with some of the behavior I see, there is a far more common issue that may be going on. It is known as microvascular white matter disease – what used to be known in our culture as ‘hardening of the arteries’. This is profoundly common in the West. The white matter contains the billions of conduits going from one neuron to the other in the brain as opposed to the gray matter where the actual neurons reside. As we get older – and some of us are far more prone to this than others – the white matter begins to have large numbers of microscopic strokes. These may take out the conduit for 10-15 neurons, maybe more, but not the neurons themselves. Our brain can rewire around them but eventually things begin to look like Swiss cheese and there is no way to repair things. At that point, symptoms begin to set in. These are usually manifested as ‘filter’ deficiencies — sudden emotional outbursts, inability to decide, long diatribes, stories about things from decades ago, inability to recognize one’s own mistakes and deficiencies, some mild memory issues, increased impulsive and risk-taking behavior, anger and wrath, inappropriate laughing and crying among many others. This disease process also greatly magnifies the underlying personality disorders.”
A Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan of Trump’s brain is the most reliable test for white matter disease (WMD), but there is no sign that Trump, or US Navy Captain Sean Barbabella, the White House physician, or his fourteen specialist consultants have ordered this to be done – or revealed if it has been countermanded in their annual medical examination for 2025. Also, their report on Trump’s health omits to reveal ultrasound testing; this is the standard diagnostic tool for the chronic venous insufficiency admitted on July 17 by Capt Barbabella three months after he didn’t admit it in the release of Trump’s medical test results.
The White House physician is also concealing earlier scan evidence of Trump’s brain.
It is certain that Trump underwent computed tomography (CT) scanning of his brain following the attempted assassination on July 13, 2024, when he received a bullet injury to his right ear. Subsequent reporting, unpublished until July 1 of this year, reveals that Trump explicitly requested the original CT scan imagery, and when this was initially refused him by hospital doctors, he sent his campaign director to obtain the film and remove it. After the film was removed, it is not known whether the imagery remains in digital form in the hospital record.
CT scans can reveal the brain lesions which are symptomatic of white matter disease (WMD), but for more precise analysis of the soft tissues MRI scanning is the clinical diagnostic standard. Medical sources express surprise that neither CT nor MRI scans have been undertaken for Trump in the follow-up since the assassination injury, neither during the April review nor in this month’s testing. “It’s like an IQ test”, Trump told staff at the hospital after the gunshot wound a year ago. “They tell you that your brain is good so I just want to have that.” There has been no report from the White House doctors on what they have done with this record – if Trump has disclosed it after verifying privately whether it revealed his brain was good – or bad.
For the Russian intelligence assessment of Trump’s warfighting intentions, it is unlikely the necessary evidence has been hacked from the records of Trump’s fourteen specialists or of the Butler Memorial Hospital, Pennsylvania, or of his chief of staff Susan Wiles. Instead, they have monitored the available eyewitness, video and other records of Trump’s condition. These are suggestive; they can’t be conclusive.
Ergo, forecasting, as the intelligence services must do in their reports to the Kremlin, Security Council, and General Staff, includes the worst-case scenarios. In predicting Trump, this means a plan of US military attack on the scale Trump himself has referred to as “bombing the shit out of Moscow”; “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear processing plants at Fordow and Natanz; and “end[ing] a war…at Hiroshima…Nagasaki”.
Source: https://johnhelmer.net/operations-rough-rider-spiderweb-midnight-hammer-russia-gauges-trumps-rationality-in-warfighting-at-the-nuclear-edge/
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporters who released the tape of Trump's Moscow bombing threat do not identify the date of his remarks at his election campaign appearance or of the earlier telephone call with President Putin; they do not pinpoint whether Trump made his bombing threat before or after the CT scan of his brain on July 13, 2024.
Spelling out the fallacy of intelligence agency assessment of early warnings of surprise attacks won Roberta Wohlstetter, author of Pearl Harbor, Warning and Decision, a Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in November 1985. Her book was first published in 1961. In the interval between, she and her book were used by President John Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and since then through each of the military surprises which the White House has suffered to 2013.
The Pearl Harbour problem, as Wohlstetter has explained it to US warfighters sixty years ago, is that in projecting rational decision-making on the available evidence of intercepting the enemy’s military and diplomatic codes, the US assessment was mistaken when it ruled out the likelihood of the Japanese belief that they could win a war against the US, starting with a shock-and-awe surprise bombing. Don’t under-estimate your enemy, Wohlstetter warned, by over-estimating his rationality to be the equal of yours.
It didn’t occur to Wohlstetter, daughter of a Harvard professor and a 17-year employee of the US Air Force think tank RAND, that the rationality of US warfighters like herself might turn out to be less than that of enemies like the Russians. Ergo, Wohlstetter did not warn the US presidents and military chiefs against expecting to win a war themselves against their principal enemies, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, by shock-and-awe surprise attacks. When Wohlstetter died in 2007, Trump wasn’t a twinkle in her eye. His susceptibility to the irrationality of Japanese-type confidence in victory of 1941 didn’t become a Russian concern until 2016, when the US conviction was already established in the Obama Administration that Russia could and would be destroyed by a combination of military and economic methods whose time had come in the Ukraine in 2014.
The question now is not whether Trump and his officials and advisors have learned the lesson of the Obama and Biden administrations that their war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield has been lost. The question now for the Russian leadership to decide is whether Trump’s policymaking towards Putin proceeds from (is motivated by) a rational appreciation of the military realities, or from Trump’s personal madness.
A Moscow source in a position to know says: “I believe he has been briefed in clearest terms that Ukraine is a lost cause and defeat is inevitable. That’s why he is acting crazy (псих) because he doesn’t really know what to do. That’s because he is programmed like all American elites to see Russians as inferior barbarians. They see Russians through the stereotypes built up through decades of cold war. Will they ever accept that Russians and Chinese, Persians and Indians are superior races with greater civilizations? They won’t. But that’s not on account of Alzheimer’s. It’s on account of [genital expletive on expletive] syndrome they have all suffered from for centuries. Apologies for such profane language but that’s what imperialists do.”
“In short, I believe we have to treat Trump as a president unless he is removed for mental incapacity. We have to treat him as a leader who brings continuity to Biden for slightly different reasons but with the same effect.”
“This is the problem for us. Russians and others are becoming aware that there is more than one kind of person they can’t talk to in Washington, and Trump is the worst kind because he is unguided by a brain. So we don’t respond to his baiting – not directly, anyway. We must just keep doing what we’ve been doing; gradually dismantling the Ukrainian capacity to act as a NATO gun platform. The risk with this strategy is that we are dealing with a maniac who on any day can in a fit of pique, via a casual remark, launch a violent measure, trigger the likes of [Defense Secretary Peter] Hegseth, to do something that will put us all in peril.”
Does this mean that this gradualist approach exposes the Kremlin or the General Staff to a Trump surprise attack — one of greater impact than the June 1 drone operation targeting the Russian strategic bomber fleet?
A military source in a position to know says there is confidence that the current ground and air operations preserve escalation dominance for the Russian advance westwards and eventual victory. Surprise attacks on Moscow and elsewhere by drones are called “terrorism” in official reporting, the source adds, because they do not alter the strategic or operational balance against Russia in favour of the Ukraine and the US. However, if Trump orders a strategic surprise attack, the source says there have been political warnings aplenty that Russia’s strategic weapons are being held in reserve for retaliation.
Retaliation means that, for the time being, there will be no Russian pre-emptive strike, no surprise from the sky, no Oreshnik Moment. Not yet – the time being was last Thursday, July 17.
Source: https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/2036759/
“We have made it clear at the highest level,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova said, “that Russia has no intention of attacking NATO countries. What’s more, analysts have rightly noted the striking similarity between Mr Pistorius’s rhetoric and the propaganda clichés of Nazi Germany, which similarly used fearmongering to justify its militarisation and aggression. As for Germany’s reported support for long-range weapons production in Ukraine, this may indicate plans to localise the assembly of Taurus cruise missiles or similar systems within Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, despite Berlin’s public reluctance to supply such weapons directly. No matter how well these schemes are concealed, the truth will come to light. The first time our air defences intercept one of these missiles, it will be possible to trace its origins. And we have already warned of the consequences.”
“There is no doubt that the use of long-range systems is impossible without the direct involvement of military personnel from the countries that produce them, whether through NATO satellite data, flight path programming, or operational planning. In effect, German military personnel would be directly involved in planning and executing strikes against Russia, should the Taurus system or its variants under any other name be deployed. This would carry serious consequences. President Vladimir Putin outlined Russia’s position clearly in November 2024 in response to Western countries giving Ukraine the green light to use their long-range systems against Russian territory. That position has not changed. If Western-supplied weapons are used to strike deep inside Russia, we reserve the right to target military sites in the countries that provide such weapons. Should the conflict escalate further, our response will be swift and symmetrical.”
Operationally, what happens next is explained by the military source. “There are at least three potential encirclements being developed along the front. We see encirclements whereby Ukrainian logistics routes are taken under fire control, mainly via drone strikes, while [Ukrainian] formations within the developing kettle are bombed and blasted with artillery and airstrikes of a stand-off nature (glide bombs). Meanwhile, the Ukrainians and others [foreign advisors, operators, mercenaries] are subjected to the constant pressure of Russian small-unit attacks which threaten to become larger, more powerful armoured penetrations should a break in the enemy’s lines occur.”
“The Ukrainians, under NATO orders to be sure, feed reinforcements into the kill zone until the very last possible moment hoping to attrite the Russians via fighting from prepared positions, mechanized counter-offensives and, increasingly, drones. The Russians let them keep coming and do not seal the kettle as long as the commanders of the Ukrainian bullet magnets, and their ‘western civilization’ defending allies, order them to stand their ground and launch suicidal counter-attacks.”
“There have been things that haven’t been seen in this war since autumn 2022… this front is doomed”: for a detailed history of the Russian military’s victorious tactics in a single-area operation between June 1 and July 3, click to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3169dN4MQZY
“This goes on until 1) logistics are degraded to the point where there are no longer enough supplies to maintain an active defence. 2) Fortified positions are reduced to ruins and casualties via attrition, including those made up of personnel entering and exiting the tactical battlespace, are too high to sustain an effective defence. 3) A combination of 1 and 2 culminating in retreat, organised or not, or surrender. The Russians then move into and secure the abandoned sector and the process starts all over again.”
“To get an idea of what’s coming next it’s necessary to take stock of the rear-area targets. Logistics: warehouses, ports, marshalling areas, fuel depots, railyards, repair facilities, airfields. Manpower – also political: recruitment centres, troop lodgings (hotels, barracks, houses, apartment blocks). Command and Control – also political: operational unit level headquarters, staff meeting places, leadership personnel – including NATO. Industrial: large, medium, and small arms manufacturing plants, R&D sites. Political: continued drone strikes on Kiev, secondary strikes in Lvov, Vinnytsa, Nikolaev, Odessa, hits on SBU, AFU, recruiters. Air defence: seek and destroy individual and networked air-defence batteries, especially in and around decision-making centres. Right now it appears that gradually ramping up the pressure at the front and in the rear to sap Ukrainian manpower and materiel capacities to continue fighting is still the strategy. The rear area strikes have the added political benefit of lowering the population’s will to support the government’s continuation of the war. I’m skeptical that anything short of lights out, indefinitely, will get the bulk of them to give up.”
NOTE:the lead image is a cartoon by Jacob Burck in the Austin American on December 7, 1946, the fifth anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attack, and three months after Japan had surrendered.
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