He Still Thinks That It Is A TV Show.

Reality and (pseudo)reality TV shows are not the same. But POTUS thinks that they are.  

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he may cancel his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina because of Russia's maritime clash with Ukraine. In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump said he was awaiting a "full report" from his national security team Tuesday evening about Russia’s capture of three Ukrainian naval ships and their crews on Sunday."That will be very determinative," Trump told the Post. "Maybe I won't have the meeting. Maybe I won't even have the meeting ... I don't like that aggression. I don't want that aggression at all," he said.

By now it all became so redundant, if not nauseating, that no one in Moscow really pays attention to it other than in a "here we go again" manner. Kremlin is keenly aware that there could be no sensible dialogue with the United States anymore. Ron Unz already summarized Trump's presidency really well.

For foreign policy reasons, I had strongly favored Trump both in the primary and in the general election, but I hardly regarded him as a thoughtful vessel for the positions he claimed to espouse. To put it bluntly, he struck me much like a highly-opinionated construction worker, angrily spouting off on politics in his local neighborhood bar, being right on some matters and wrong on others, but with none of his views based upon any deep understanding of the issues. I suspect that even many of Trump’s strongest supporters have gradually come around to a similar appraisal of their idol.  

Putin, certainly, is well aware of that. At this stage the only subject which could and must be discussed, if the meeting goes ahead, is how to avoid sliding into direct military conflict between Russia and the US, because American side continues to be consistently unaware of the consequences of its actions. Trump doesn't control his own foreign policy or, as Phil Giraldi succinctly observed yesterday: 

U.S. Foreign Policy Has No Policy. Why can't we just leave everyone alone?

This is one of those key points that Trump and people around him fail to understand--Russia neither admires the United States nor wants to benefit from the Russian-American relations anymore. Those times are long gone. As I commented year and a half ago:

Russians long ago stopped viewing the United States as possible ally and after West's committing a cultural suicide in Russia with West's inspired coup in Kiev, the only thing Russians do want is for West to just go away. That is what this neutrality means. 

Trump is not aware of this. He still thinks that he and the US are admired, worshiped, and are used as a model. This is not the case with Russia at all. I will omit here commenting on China but it seems at least Chinese are trying to fashion themselves into US 2.0 in the post-American world. But in the end, it all comes down to the United States not being a treaty-worthy party. American geopolitical "strategies" are as primitive as people who devise and implement them and Putin is also keenly aware of that--he knows that the US is at war with Russia. So, for Russians it really doesn't mean that much if there will be the meeting or not--it is absolutely meaningless to negotiate with the country which has long ago became a bad parody of itself and lives in the virtual world of a reality show. Oxymoron is intentional.

UPDATE: Colonel Lang just wrote an excellent piece on Trump. And I agree with a lot what he writes. 

As I wrote earlier he sees the world through an entrepreneurial hustler's lens, crudely assigning absolute dollar values to ongoing policy outcomes and actions which have little to do with the actual world as opposed to the arena of contract negotiations.  He evidently learned about balance sheets at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and wishes to apply the principle of the bottom line to everything.

I also agree on humanities issue. To clarify: if someone gets an impression that I am against humanities--they are wrong. My quarrel is not with humanities field, which is essential for any cultured person, my quarrel with products of ONLY humanities studies trying to pass judgements on (military) issues which require years and years of rigorous study and experience.