President Donald Trump's close relationship with Russia has long troubled observers. Now an author and Russia expert who recently wrote a book on Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a theory as to why.
"President Donald Trump excessively appeases Putin out of fear because he knows the Russian dictator likely has serious dirt on him, the author Luke Harding has alleged," reported The Daily Beast's Vic Verbalaitis on Wednesday. "Appearing on The Daily Beast Podcast, Harding told host Joanna Coles that Trump, 80, is 'afraid' of the Russian president, 73, because of the Kremlin’s sweeping surveillance operations."
Verbalaitis added, "'The Betrayal: Trump, Putin and The New Age of Conquest' author said that while working as a correspondent in Moscow in 2007, he experienced firsthand the frightening extent to which the Russian government monitored him and his family. Harding described how the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) broke into his family’s apartment and planted bugs, which they used to keep eyes on them even during their most intimate moments."
The Daily Beast journalist continued, "U.S. intelligence officials have already said Russia meddled in the 2020 election to benefit Trump." He wrote that "they made it clear that they were watching us because on one occasion, we came back from a family holiday in Berlin and they’d left a sex manual in Russian by the side of the marital bed, and I had to say to my wife, you know, ‘Darling, this really isn’t mine. The KGB have introduced this.’'"
After describing how he believes he was surveilled by Russian intelligence, Harding speculated that Trump is similarly alarmed.
“The reason I tell you this is that the... FSB, KGB, are adept at surveillance,” Harding told The Daily Beast. “They break in and watch everybody. And of course, that means there’ll be... tapes of Donald Trump.”
Writing earlier on Wednesday, another foreign policy expert broke down how Trump's handling of foreign policy has empowered both Russia and another rival superpower to the United States, China.
"In his first book, 'A World Restored,' Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy," Brookings Institute senior fellow and former foreign policy adviser to President Joe Biden, Thomas Wright, wrote for The Atlantic. "Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself. The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy."
In February Joseph Bosco, who served as China country director under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from 2005 to 2006, argued in The Hill that Trump's foreign policies have sacrificed America's greatness.
“History will brand the U.S. failure to ensure Ukraine’s victory and prevent Taiwan’s fall as the time when America fell from greatness and her ‘cunning’ but miscalculating enemies plunged the world into a new global conflict,” Bosco explained.
