Some Predictions About Trump, China, & Eastern Europe
Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter
Putin’s Senior Aide Patrushev Made Some Predictions About Trump, China, & Eastern Europe. The outcome of Trump’s continued struggle with the “deep state” will reverberate across the world.
Putin’s senior aide Nikolai Patrushev, who ran the FSB for nearly a decade (1999-2008) before chairing the Security Council for over 15 years till recently (2008-2024), made three predictions about international affairs in his latest interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The first concerns the continued struggle between Trump and the “deep state”, the latter of which can be described as US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, some members of whom are known to oppose him.
Patrushev expects Trump to implement domestic and foreign policies that are practically the opposite of Biden’s, which he characterizes as pragmatic and more aligned with the interests of the American people, but he’s unsure whether he’ll ultimately succeed due to internal resistance. The precedent from his first term bodes ill for his second, but the outcome of this latest struggle will reverberate for decades seeing as how the world is undergoing far-reaching systemic changes last seen since 1991.
On that topic, Patrushev assessed that one of Trump’s top foreign policy priorities is to ramp up pressure on China, including by artificially exacerbating bilateral tensions. He then reminded everyone that “For us, China has been and remains a most important partner, with whom we have relations of especially privileged strategic cooperation. These relations are not subject to the situation, they remain regardless of who occupies the Oval Office.” This can be interpreted as signaling that Russia won’t backstab China. In other words, Trump’s declared goal of “un-uniting” those two will fail, thus meaning that no worsening of their relations will occur.