by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
In Hollywood as in Bollywood, filmmakers and the executive directors representing the production financiers know that the money shot is the climactic moment in the shooting script which is put there to excite the audience, and to persuade the investors there’s money to be made. In porno films, the money shot is the moment of orgasm. No ejaculation, no profit.
President Donald Trump has been emitting tweets to announce his money shot on the battlefield of the Ukraine, in the genocide in Gaza, and in his wars against the Houthis, Iran, and China. To implement his desire, he recently sent Christopher Landau, his nominee to become Deputy Secretary of State — the brains behind Secretary Marco Rubio — to announce to the US Senate a policy of “commercial statecraft.”
By that, Landau — a Harvard-educated lawyer and Ambassador to Mexico during Trump’s first term – meant that “there is no force in the world that is as powerful as the American private sector”; and that it will be the Trump Administration’s objective to “unleash our private sector”, “out-hustle foreign competitors”, and fight China because they “are out-hustling us”.
One of the first tactics in this American hustle strategy has been Trump’s executive order restoring the lawfulness of US corporate bribery for “gaining strategic business advantages whether in critical minerals, deep-water ports, or other key infrastructure or assets.”
This hustle strategy and the tactics of the money shot are behind Trump’s announcement that as part of his end-of-war terms under negotiation with Russia at the moment, he aims to take US control of rare earth mining in the Ukraine, and also of the Ukraine’s nuclear power generating assets. A shot at taking over the port of Odessa can be expected to follow.
Like old-fashioned make-war profiteering, this is end-of-war profiteering by corporatizing the terms of ceasefire, armistice, capitulation, security guarantees, and reparations. Two of Trump’s hustling associates, Steven Witkoff, the president’s special negotiator for Russia and the Middle East, and Howard Lutnick, the new US Secretary of Commerce, are his brokers in this plan.
Because Landau will not be confirmed by the US Senate until Monday, March 24, he has not been named to lead the US expert-group negotiators to meet in Saudi Arabia with the Russian team headed by Deputy Foreign Minister (retired) and Senator Grigory Karasin, and Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, formerly of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Because Landau is a Spanish-speaking specialist on Latin America, he is afraid of being “out-hustled” by the Russians, and so he is obliged to depend on subordinates; they have not yet been identified.* His chief subordinate, the Under Secretary of State for political affairs, is currently acting in the job. She is Lisa Kenna, a Middle East expert at the CIA and Arabic and Spanish speaker without expertise on Russia. Like Landau, she is a partisan Trump tweeter.
The US negotiators in Saudi Arabia will rank below Landau and Kenna, and not above them in expertise on Russia or the war in the Ukraine.*
Listen to this discussion of the Trump Administration’s vulnerabilities with leading Indian military and intelligence experts, Lieutenant General P.R. Shankar and Brigadier Arun Saghal.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2urWmCJOZU
For more Indian expert analysis of geopolitics, warfighting, and intelligence follow the Gunners Shot website.
For analysis of the US president’s hustle strategy, start with Trump’s falsification of the value of US military and financial aid to the Ukraine by reading this. For the current hustle of Trump & Co. to capitalize on the sabotaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline and on the seizure of Rosneft’s oil refining assets in Germany, read this.
Top: left, Steven Witkoff; right, Howard Lutnick. Listen to Witkoff’s hustle with Tucker Carlson on March 21.
The same day Lutnick claimed that the only reason Americans complain when their Social Security checks don’t arrive is that they are “fraudsters”. Bottom: Christopher Landau testifying at his Senate nomination hearing on March 4. Source: https://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/nominations-03-04-2025
The only question the senators asked him on Russia and the Ukraine war was whether he agreed that Trump has been so hostile towards the Ukraine and so favourable towards Russia, he should be termed a “Russian asset.” Landau replied: “The President is an exceptionally gifted dealmaker. He is probably the only individual in the entire universe that could actually stop this [war]” – Minute 2:08:00.
The first direct challenge to this corporatization of Trump’s warmaking followed a leak from Pentagon officials last week that Elon Musk had arranged with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to receive a personal, top-secret briefing on the “U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.” The leak appeared in the New York Times on March 20; Musk then appeared the next day at the Pentagon, but he was restricted to a 30-minute handshake with Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth. The war plan briefing was cancelled.
Hegseth then hurried to the White House to join Trump in a press briefing. “Certainly,” Trump said, “you wouldn’t show it [China war plan] to a businessman who is helping us so much… Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible perhaps to that.” Standing next to Trump, Hegseth claimed the newspaper report was a “fake story…meant to undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with Elon Musk.” The Defense Secretary was lying.
The episode also reveals that Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, a corporate lobbyist, is unable or unwilling to control either Musk or other subordinates and associates of the President from exploiting their relationship with Trump to advance their personal and corporate interests. In Landau’s restatement to the Senate, these interests aren’t conflicts – they are “commercial statecraft”, and that now includes bribery and corruption.
“On the one hand, this is an example of just how chaotic things are in Washington,” comments a US source in a position to know. “How did Trump not know about Musk’s planned attendance at the Pentagon meeting, or did he know and was playing dumb? Hegseth’s behaviour suggests he’s on the take from Musk or that he understands how much power Musk has with Trump, and that he cannot cross Musk for fear of what Trump will do to him.”
“I’ve begun to see the pattern with Trump. When something he’s been sounding off about doesn’t go his way – for example, “peace” with Russia, “peace” in Gaza — he moves on to another subject, another target, where he figures he can show force and strength. Like Yemen, like Canada. But they aren’t working out either.”
In the podcast discussion, Tulsi Gabbard’s performance on her visit to New Delhi on March 17-18, where she met her Indian intelligence counterparts, is examined for her vacuity on policy details and for her political advertising for Trump.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLPfTAQ9RqQ
Gabbard opened her speech with the Hawaiian language greeting, “Aloha”. Gabbard is not an ethnic Hawaiian – American mother, Samoan father -- and she does not share the indigenous belief that Hawaii was the target of takeover by American “commercial statecraft” in 1893. That was when US businessmen and US Marines launched a coup d’état to remove the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, and five years later annexed the kingdom as a US territory; it became the 50th US state in 1959.
In Gabbard’s official press release, issued after she returned to Washington, she identified Trump in five of the statement’s six paragraphs. Her talks with Indian officials focused, she said, on “intelligence-sharing, defence, counterterrorism, and transnational threats…President Trump remains unwavering in his commitment to achieving peace through a strategy rooted in realism and pragmatism. Securing peace through strength requires strong leadership with a clear-eyed and realistic understanding of global challenges and opportunities.
An Indian business source in Moscow responds: “President Putin will come to Delhi in April and he will show that, compared to Trump in the US, Russia offers long-term stability as well as short-term profitability for Indian interests. He will be too polite to say about the US what is becoming more and more obvious to us – it’s unstable, unpredictable, unreliable. To reverse something American leaders once said about Russia – the US under Trump is becoming Albania with nukes.”
[*] After this podcast, it was announced that the US negotiating team in Saudi Arabia is led by two mid-level staffers of Trump’s first term, Andrew Peek and Michael Anton.
Peek is now Michael Waltz’s deputy at the National Security Council (NSC). He has been a Congressional staffer and intelligence advisor to the US military command in Afghanistan. He was at the NSC and State Department during the first Trump term, and specialized on the Middle East. Peek’s published material is limited to the Middle East. So is his tweet record. Before the Special Military Operation began in February 2022, Peek was a keen Russia warfighter.
The second US negotiator is Michael Anton, the new director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and a veteran of Trump’s first term. His background includes jobs as a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Rudolf Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and press spokesman for Black Rock. For an indirect expression of his view on negotiating with Russians, read his essay on George Kennan.
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