The Art of The Steal: When Foreign Policy Becomes a Business

In the latest Critical Conditions podcast, Claire Berlinski and I concluded that there are moments in history when the absurd stops being funny — when corruption becomes so open, so shameless, so contemptuous of both law and reason that public indifference becomes a second scandal. That is the feeling one gets reading the recent Wall Street Journal investigation into the real motives behind Donald Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine. The revelations have hit Europe like a bombshell; Americans, meanwhile, seem barely aware of the explosion. SAD!

The reporting describes a now-infamous gathering where Kremlin fixers met Trumpworld emissaries to craft what the Journal puckishly labels the DimWit Plan. Jared Kushner casually dropped in from his billionaire bunker nearby. The scheme sounded like something dreamed up by a kleptocrat with a NASA hobby: redirect the $300 billion in frozen Russian central bank funds — legally earmarked for Ukraine’s reconstruction — into joint U.S.-Russian business ventures in the Arctic, exploiting mineral wealth in the melting ice, reviving the notorious Nord Stream pipeline (a presently defunct vehicle for subordinating Europe to Russian energy domination), even collaborating with Elon Musk on a mission to Mars. It would be laughable if it weren’t deadly serious.

The cast of characters involved reads like a sanctioned oligarch roll call. Exxon secret-meets with Rosneft. Trump family friends angling for slices of Russian gas projects, while other donors pay handsomely to pry Russian pipelines out of sanctions and into profit. The brazenness is almost refreshing in its transparency: foreign policy not as geopolitical doctrine, but as get-rich-quick scheme.

And yet the larger shock is how few Americans seem to care. The rest of the world stares in open-mouthed disbelief; too many Americans change the channel.

Meanwhile, delusion and coercion have become the governing principles of US power. In just the span of days, Trump has threatened wars, closed skies over foreign countries as if the planet were his fiefdom, and instructed voters in Honduras to elect his preferred candidate or suffer U.S. reprisal. He pardoned a Honduran drug lord who once bragged about stuffing cocaine up gringos’ noses, all while proclaiming a ...