The Long Con Comes To An End

[douglas9]

Yesterday, Friday 21 November, ended up being one kind of day but it was supposed to be another. 21 November, in case you had forgotten, was supposed to be the day that the Trump Administration levelled crippling secondary sanctions on Chinese, Indian and Turkish companies that buy Russian oil. Indeed, the Treasury Department even hinted earlier this week that those secondary were ready to go. It capped off six weeks of a frenzy of reporting about how Trump was going to really hit Putin hard. Piles of articles (many of which had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the oil markets) were written about how Trump’s sanctions were real this time.

Even The Bulwark, fell for this con, and we saw a hopelessly naive article by Cathy Young about how Trump really was going to hurt Putin this time.

Well, yesterday came and went and, drumroll please….no secondary sanctions have been announced. Now, Chinese, Indian and Turkish oil companies can get back to business buying as much Russian oil as they want/can. Soon Russia will be making more than they were.

btw, the Chinese probably never stopped buying Russian oil, but that is a piece for another day.

Instead, what actually happened on November 21 was that the Trump Administration came for Ukraine—as they always intended to do. The Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, a very close associate of VP JD Vance, went to Kyiv and tried to bully the Ukrainians into accepting Trump’s 28 Point Plan to neuter Ukraine. Driscoll formally presented the plan to divide Ukraine now, and end it later, and the reality of what Ukraine and Europe was facing finally sunk in. Here was how the Atlantic story on the meeting began.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-long-con-comes-to-an-end