CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump and Putin: Their Failures in Regime Change

Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, 2025. (Screengrab from video posted to YouTube.)

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will go down in history for their respective failures in regime change.  Both Trump and Putin overestimated their military strengths and underestimated the military strengths of their adversaries.  They miscalculated the strategic challenges and economic costs of widespread use of their military arsenals.

Both Trump and Putin failed to anticipate the long-term chaos that would accompany their wars.  Their regimes used scare tactics in the initial stages of the war: Putin claimed he was denazifying a Ukrainian society that was devoid of nazism; Trump is warning that Iranian suicide teams are a threat to domestic stability at home in an effort to keep skeptical publics on edge.

Intelligence failures were abundant in these cases to go to war, which is the realm of uncertainty, according to Carl von Clausewitz.  Putin underestimated the ability of the Ukrainians to defend themselves as well as the willingness of the Western community, particularly the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,........

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