The Train to Helsinki: Entertaining Mr Putin.

US-USSR, now US-Russia, summits used to be no more than glorified ceremonies, grand meetings to sign, or not to sign, essentially nuclear deals that had been thrashed out months before by officials of the two countries: superpowers that had enough weapons between them to destroy humanity and most of other flora and fauna several times over. They are no more than a reaffirmation of the agreement that none will be the first to pull the nuclear trigger. It is as if one is saying to the other: 'hey guy, I know all about the madness involved in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), so let's shake hands and then use our fingers to commit to paper, put it in black and white, that we we will never use them to make the insanity happen.' You wouldn't know the nuclear weapons they were so frightened to use were the same they had spent billions of resources to make and which they used to send enemies into sleeplessness everyday. These two monsters at the opposite ends of a bipolar world were not going to agree on much else: the Soviet Union wasn't going to back off supporting Vietnam or Cuba and the US wasn't going to stop supplying arms to Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA bandits in Angola or the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. So summits were all about managing the nuclear conundrum. That and a sprinkling of trade and scientific deals.
They could even take on a daub of notoriety. Like the infamous one between Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev in which the US president arrived in a suit so ill-fitting that a journalist was compelled to ask him if the oversized clothes really belonged to him. Regan had not made a hurried visit to a flea shop, it was a measure of how much esteem with which he held the meeting.
Nothing has much changed. It is now Russia instead of the USSR, the nuclear weapons are still there aplenty, but both countries are even less enthusiastic about using them now. If you held a knife to his throat, Putin wouldn't even think of letting go Crimea, an Ukrainian territory he annexed in 2014 to global outrage. And even less reluctant would he be in admitting his country meddled in the US elections that brought Trump to power even if his counterpart prodded him on it till tomorrow. And neither will Trump be in a hurry to lift sanctions the US and its allies imposed on Russia for her arrant misdemeanors all over the world, from Salisbury in England to Abkhazia in Georgia Republic.Trump himself has placed a thick, damp squib on what would have been the major talking point of the summit, by casting serious and deflating aspersions on the findings by his own officials that it was likely Russia meddled in the polls that brought him to power.
It is no surprise many pundits have predicted the summit isn't likely to achieve anything of substance.
But the sightseeing is going to be okay even though Finland is such a flat, colorless country you begin to wonder if bears roamed the streets of Helsinki. And there is no doubt Trump has been overawed by Putin. He has often spoken of his admiration for the Russian strongman. The enormous powers he wields, the grip he has on his country, the crucial matters of life and death he commands on the tips of his fingers were things Trump covets. And which he would like to lay his hands on but which he is highly unlikely to get because of chuffing lawyers and courts and a liberal, squeamish populace in his own country. His backing down on forced family separations of illegal immigrants and the torrid hounding of his officials in restaurants and public places have been chastening indeed. He will never be Putin and the US will never be Russia. But if you cannot be him, why not shake hands with him. High autograph-hunting can be very pleasant.
Which has brought some trepidation that has been thankfully taken care of. The summit will take place four days after a meeting with NATO allies. Officials of the organization were jittery that if it were the other way round, Trump out of some figure worshipping, might agree certain things with Putin. Things that would later put NATO in an awkward position indeed.

Trump

 Putin and Trump

Gorbachev

Regan

Rex Tillerson: Serving God and Mammnon.

The oil industry where Rex Tillerson made his mark was a fairly certain arena. The newly-drilled oil-well is guaranteed to produce; new technology was going to make shale oil commercially available and the shady atmosphere enveloping Nigerian oil was always going to get cruder and darker. Only instability in the prices of oil was going to be of much challenge but that too wasn't exactly rocket science and for a man who had risen to the top echelons of his calling, he could be counted on safely to handle that. In short, the world he was familiar with was stable, rational, fairly predictable: always within his grasp. It was a place of gentlemen and handshakes.
So, it must have been a shock to him when he decided to switch jobs and throw himself into politics. Politics is a calling rough enough and American politics is a particularly toxic variant. It wasn't an arena for gentlemen, handshakes being very, very rare and fists in ample display and use and nobody was going to pull punches. And the most combative of the pugilists was the man he was going to serve as Secretary of State, President Donald Trump, a boxer who was going to play very unfairly, not hesitating a moment to punch below the belt. And the most volatile part of American politics would certainly be found in the State Department, in foreign policy. There he would have to deal with players even worse than his master. A place as stable as earthquake-engendered tsunami. An arena where the appalling Rohingya crisis could break out at any time, where Russian hackers and exterminators were going to cause trouble at any time. An arena filled with irrational souls as Mugabe, Kim Jong-un. A theater savaged by unpredictability such as the North Korean rascal making a volte-face and proposing talks with the US all of a sudden. Moments defined by not only not knowing when the next nuclear test will take place but also not knowing whether the missile was flying towards Hawaii, or flying over Japanese mainland or was going to end up shortly in the Pacific Ocean. Torrid moments of terrorists freshly abducting schoolgirls in Nigeria. Intolerable situations in which Turkey, a NATO ally would attack  Syrian Kurds, America's staunchest allies in the Middle East, and both the president and his top diplomat would be tongue tied. Tillerson was stepping into an insane world he was never prepared for, both by training and temperament.
A world that was perfect fit for his master, by temperament. Tillerson was supposed to be America's face to the outside world but it was an America that that gone Trump, a guy who was as brash and unpredictable and unrestrained as his worst adversaries in the diplomatic boxing ring. A chap whose remarks are often off cuff and whose most coherent foreign policies could be found only on his lips and tweets. It was eerily difficult imagining Tillerson as Trump's Secretary of   State. The Rasputin Coefficient was horribly non-correlative. Tillerson, in Trump administration, was practically serving God and Mammon at the same time.
Hence he would think the Iranian deal to be reasonable while Trump would savage it as nonsense. He would lay into Russia over the Salisbury spy poisoning while his president would be uncharacteristically taciturn and quiet all of a sudden. You would think that if the president was going to accept talks with North Korea, he would consult his secretary first. A dove, so to say, wasn't going to serve a hawk. Tillerson was more studied, careful, restrained than he was a pacifist but he wasn't going to do well in a regime stuffed with hardliners and of which head was a sheriff likely to shoot first before asking questions later.
Trump admitted he didn't agree with Tillerson on most issues. Sacking him behind his back was his most poignant testament to that disagreement.   

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 2

So President Erdogan  sends troops, tanks and warplanes into Syria at will to attack the Kurds while President Trump and Secretary Tillerson look on numbly like rabbits caught plumb in powerful headlights. It does not really matter that Syria is supposed to be a sovereign state, the country had long been partitioned among Russians, Iranians, The Gulf States, Saudis, Turks, Kurds and just anybody that could arm a miscreant with a rifle. This inaction, even silent acquiescence, on the part of the US is even more baffling in the sense that the Kurds remain the only sensible option for securing the porous borders and crossing points  from Syria to Iraq and even to Turkey itself. Hence the decision of the US to convert the YPG to a border force is a well thought out policy, the only effective way to stop the IS from regrouping. After all, Turkey with all its huge army and security paranoia was unable to prevent would-be militants from Europe and elsewhere from using the country as transit points to join  the shitty caliphate in Syria and Iraq at the height of IS ascendancy. Hordes of them were crossing the borders in broad daylight and Turkish officials were looking the other way as a result of compromise or sheer incompetence. The Kurds represent the only credible and capable buffer force in those climes, a fact Trump well recognizes. Hence shrugging helplessly while Erdogan attacks and decimates the forces required to carry out the all-important policing can only be as a result of a foreign policy that is at best, formulated in tweets. Trump is horribly incoherent in his foreign policy and in no instance is this more demonstrated than his inertia in coming to the defense of his most dependable allies in the Middle East. It seems as if he had gathered the Kurds in a police compound for training and then he sends in a bomb-laden suicide truck to blow up the whole place. When policies are set out in tweets, or on a glib tongue, the obvious victims are organization, logic and unity. Senselessness supplanting sense and vice versa.
Maybe Trump thinks that it is a choice between NATO and the Kurds. Then it is equally a choice between where he could put his two feet in and a place that could, in all honesty, admit in other feet. It is leaving immediate, pressing certainty for a long-term certainty, if we can even qualify it as such. It is the Kurds that are in the demand books of the US now, not the Turks. A country that the EU would not even allow in.
Someone said he was confused as to what the US could have done when Turkey sent in its forces into Afrin. Very simple, a couple of US soldiers stationed in very visible places in the enclave. There was no need to do anything combative. No need to unleash warplanes to protect her allies. Something very symbolic would have stopped the tanks. Erdogan's attack on Afrin was no more than a diplomatic test of will, just like Hitler's re-militarization of Rhineland. He was really expecting a firmness from Trump that an attack on YPG and Kurds would be an attack on US troops itself. A couple of  unarmed Green Berets placed on Afrin roads would have driven that home quite trenchantly.
Just like Hitler, all he got in response was sordid appeasement.
After Rhineland, Austria was next and then Czechoslovakia. After Afrin, Manbij, Raqqa and other Kurdish enclaves.
Appeasement is defined as letting a bully have his way always.