Political Thinker wonders!

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Aug 13, 2025

Editor: Bret Stephens is the natural inheritor of mantle of Fred Schwarz nototious for Christian Anti-Communism Crusade! How do I know this? In 1961 Schwartz came to my Highschool, in Lynwood California, to give his presentation. Mr. Sculnick a teacher of mine, hated Schwartz. Mr. Sculnick had a ‘talk’ with me about my Levi’s jeans, my first and only pair: Lynwood Highschool wanted to improve it’s standing, by having students appear more polished, in sum to appear more Middle Class. Mr. Sculnick and Fred Schwarz were on on my ‘LIST’! It was the early 1960’s and ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’, book and Movie, with the aid of ‘The Organization Man’ made conformity, in its myriad expressions, a valuable political commodity! This paragraph is introductery!

Donald Trump, the world’s greatest negotiator according to himself, may not think he needs much advice before his summit meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin on Friday. But the president should give Robert Kraft a call.

Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, knows what it’s like to be fleeced by the Russian president. On a visit to Russia in 2005 with U.S. business leaders, Kraft, at the urging of Citigroup’s then-chairman, Sandy Weill, showed Putin one of his $25,000 Super Bowl rings.

“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft recounted in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three K.G.B. guys got around him and walked out.” Kraft said he was urged by the Bush administration to pretend the ring had been a gift, while Putin later mocked Kraft’s complaint and suggested that the ring was embarrassingly cheap.

Editor: The Reader might wonder the source of this tale? Kraft himself , carefully embroidered? Or just apocryphal? Putin is by nature untrustworthy or just a thief : in sum a man without scruple: it comfortably dovetailes with the remainder Stephens diatribe?

Editor: These paragraps provide more ballist for Stephen’s :

Petty crooks sometimes become big-time ones, and Putin’s career is a case in point — from reports of pilfering high-tech secrets from the West as a K.G.B. agent in East Germany to suspicions about corrupt contracts while a mayoral deputy in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, orchestrating electoral theft in Russia and electoral meddling abroad, plundering the Russian economy and seizing territory from Georgia and now Ukraine.

This is not grand strategy at work. It’s grand larceny. It’s the essence of what Putin is about — and surely helps explain Trump’s long-held admiration for him.

Editor: Here is a selection from Stephens essay:

…

He may also be conscious that some of his predecessors made fools of themselves in past Russia summits, including George W. Bush (“I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”) and Barack Obama (“After my election I have more flexibility,” he said to Putin’s front-office man Dmitri Medvedev).

…

There are many ways this summit could go wrong, including vague talk of “land swapping” between Russia and Ukraine. But there’s also a way Trump can do something useful.

…

Editor: Mr. Stephens offers this maladroit sumation… The Russina’s are relentlessly advancing day my day!

The most positive thing that can be said about this summit is that it can be cast as a final good-faith effort by the administration to give Russia a face-saving way to cut its losses: an estimated million casualties, the loss of much of its stock of tanks and bombers, NATO’s expansion, the slow strangulation of the Russian economy, a war without end.

…

Stephens: A few items to lay on the table: (Editor: consonent with the Neo-Con Wet Dream)

Working with Europe to seize the estimated $300 billion of frozen Russian government assets to serve as a funding pool for Ukrainian purchases of Western arms. The president has the legal authority to do this under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and George H.W. Bush already set a precedent by freezing and transferring Iraq’s frozen assets to a compensation fund following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Signing the bipartisan Senate sanctions bill on Russia, which includes a 500 percent tariff “on all goods and services imported into the United States from countries that knowingly engage in the exchange of Russian-origin uranium and petroleum products.”

Removing all technical or targeting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons.

Pursuing a defense and technology cooperation pact with Kyiv on the model of U.S. military ties to Israel. Today especially, America has a lot to learn from Ukraine about the rapid development and fielding of drones on the battlefield.

Supplying Kyiv with additional squadrons of F-16s and other weaponry that can defend Ukraine’s skies and hold Russian military targets at risk.

Editor: Mr. Stephens still can’t let go of his self-serving version of a ‘History’, that is collapsing before his eyes!

The choice between these two sets of options — the off-ramp versus the road to hell — should be Putin’s to make. Though public opinion counts for almost nothing in Putin’s Russia, Russians should still know that their president was offered an honorable peace and refused it.

The choice will also have to involve Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, who run the risk of being treated in this summit much as the government of Czechoslovakia was treated by the powers who met in Munich in 1938. Neville Chamberlain is yet another leader to whom Trump won’t want to see himself compared. Friday is Trump’s chance to show he’s better.

While he’s at it, he can also ask Putin to return Kraft’s ring.

Editor: Mr. Stephens is a Neo-Con, and is trapped in its toxic mythology, as presented by Leo Strauss failed attempt to Re-Write the History of Philosophy!

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