Passive Aggressive Putin
August 22, 2025
This is a podcast interview with Kate Gerbeau that I did for Times-Radio on August 21, which provides my take on the situation:
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This is a podcast interview with Kate Gerbeau that I did for Times-Radio on August 21, which provides my take on the situation:
Excellent deciphering of the realities of Putin’s war against Ukraine—an entirely rational view and analysis. But I would go farther in my own analysis of Trump’s floundering and mixed motives to highlight the crucial role his narcissistic personality disorder has. This is a personality structure that distorts his ability to see what is actually happening, and to act effectively to end this war—And it will only end when Putin’s war beast retracts its claws and returns to its lair—or is simply slain in the field.
Ukrainians can never stop fighting until that point because Putin has “put them on death’s ground”. For them it is a fight for survival in every meaningful way—it is fight or be crushed, lose simply everything, be tortured, raped, forced to fight against your own and experience the theft of your children and their terrible abuse.
There is only one way to stop such a war, and that is to decisively defeat the aggressor because that is the scenario Putin and his gang of thieves out into play from the start in which the only possible end for them would be a total capture and defeat of Ukraine.
So this is the only language they understand—and it was clear to me and others from the beginning—this was the language of brute force. Biden and his team failed ever to reply in it to Putin, and so failed to meet the reality Putin was aggressively putting into play, and so failed Ukraine through inadequate and delayed military support and also, continually, through inadequate words. The US could easily have afforded and provided effective military support, and clear statements in the language of power that Putin believes in and speaks. Biden’s administration could also have made a much more persuasive case to the public for stopping the Russian invasion. And this continues to be true for Trump’s administration too.
So also many of the other liberal democracies failed to rally effectively against Russia and in support of Ukraine (which I have read that Putin anticipated would be the case). It may have been because their leaders were also focussing mainly on domestic politics and their own standing with them.
But I think there was, and continues to be, another major factor, and that is the failure to see in its full import, the reality of others, and assumptions or beliefs they are taking as correct.
Trump as a core narcissist is interestingly “free” from such allegiances, and so restrictions—that of holding any committed perspective on reality. Instead he can shapeshift and lie through each moment and challenge, and authentically so! because he is through and through a narcissist, the actor who improvises, a conman fluent and at home in manipulating appearances and other people. His only core interests seem to be—besides feral survival—a bottomless greed and grandiose idea of himself which he needs to be endlessly validated by others.
And that, of course, is no basis for successful leadership of anything. The result is he is now on course to bankrupt America in every facet of its life, just as he bankrupted his past companies and lost their money before. But evidently, the record points to Russians and Russian money as the ones who fueled his success and repeatedly bailed him out. I have heard that they identified and supported his brand of destructiveness and amoral intent, in their interest in undermining American power—via using Americans to defeat Americans.
But for Trump, I think his view on reality is different: the flag he flies instead is over a total, persistent fantasy. There is no core rational person inside, no one to learn and no one to see. That human potential was lost long ago, and he is instead as irredeemable in this way as Putin, and currently Russia, is in its way. The driving force here, in my view, is the strange way people can assess reality and conceive of their “needs.” This computation may be in an algebra we don’t understand, but if we refuse to learn it, or cannot, we will be subject to its actions and effects just the same.
Thank you, Diane. There is a lot of 'hopium' going around that Russia's new guy could be 'bargained' into stopping the murder and mayhem at his hands; and,
Hope without tangible action? - I'm sure there's an applicable parable to be found on the emptiness of THAT notion...
But, your observations, I think, are correct here. Putin's bet the farm on this action, and the thought of a couple hundred thousand injured, deluded, and angry soldiers coming home to Nothing to hope for in a better life is a formula for huge instability. There are already reports of de-mobilized soldiers being nothing but trouble back in 'civilian life'. The second-hand prospects for the rest of the planet are horrifying.
And, in re the present inhabitant of the White House? Yes. His lack of curiosity and empathy or any semblance of human decency are well-documented and endlessly chattered about. What's still mostly missing in all this 'talk' in the media, by my observation, my reading and 'who-the-heck-am-I-anyway' point of view is the fact that the man and his 'supporters' have figured out how to game the whole financial system so as to develop piles and piles of money to which they have access, and have gained power and impunity to get hold of more, including the now- dwindling assets of people like me, by acting in ways, large and small, to wreck 'The Economy' (whatever THAT still is) that will somehow leave them like the cash-holders in the Midwest after the '29 Crash. That is, to sweep in upon desperate farmers and households, and pick up their assets on the cheap, and then charge back untenable rents for the 'privilege' of living. A neo-feudal order in which, even worse than the corrupted church of the Middle Ages, the thing that we are all to believe in is a 'Free Market'; or, as one troublemaker from Nazareth (and others) named it: Mammon.
So there, in my observation, where the next 'play' is.
Thanks again for this interview. I don't worry anymore about things over which I have no control, but am aware that I need to get that two cords of free-fall hardwood split and stacked. Winter's coming.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15.