Whelp, I think Consequence 1 is that the State Department and CIA will never let Russia be a world power again. The fact that the neocons allowed Russia to regain enough power to place a useful idiot in the oval office will forever inoculate the Gray Men from allowing politicians to set policy. The CIA gets their teddy bear back - "destruction of the Former Soviet Union" has been on their wishlist since they checked off "Destruction of the Soviet Union". I don't know that they'll succeed but between the Magnitsky Act, the Bucket'O'Sanctions and the half-tithe we're spending to decimate the Russian military five times over, I know it's rough for Russia. I think it will take several electoral cycles for Teh Crazeh to burn itself out in the Republican Party, but burn itself out it will. People forget: the number one requirement for Republicans has been LOYALTY since Newt Gingrich and we've seen the logical outcome of that. The era of Mitch McConnell is over; Democrats gained more seats than gerrymandering could protect, and Biden has nominated more judges than Trump as anyone with any character basically went "four more years" during the Trump Era. You can see this playing out in the Boebert Vs. Green debacle as the former nearly lost to a progressive Democrat while the latter handily beat her centrist challenger - Boebert now has to worry about actual voters while Green has to worry about even crazier morons to her right primarying her. I think the cost of opportunism has been demonstrated for all far and wide. You can be Jason Miller? But all that's left for you is stand-ups on a hated network for old people whose only advertiser is a coke-addled pillow salesman. When all the world is leaning into ESG and everyone around you had a choice between ethics or opportunism, your scarlet letter is never going away. You know how Snowden shocked the world with all his revelations about the NSA? Ten years previously all that shit was called Total Information Awareness. Know what drove TIA underground? The whole country going "oh fuck not John Poindexter again." And that was effectively before social media, an era before teenaged citizen journalists could supercut your transgressions while bored. You can no more get history off the internet than you can get piss out of a swimming pool, and the whole of the Trump Posse Baby Ruthed the fuck out of that watering hole. I think Jared Kushner is now Our Man in Riyadh. I think MBS went "I am the despot now" and the CIA went "fine, we see how well flattery works, we've got our own Donald Trump now." People forget - Donald Trump went "Jared is going to fix the Middle East" and by damn if Jared Kushner didn't somehow normalize relations to the point where you can fly direct from Riyadh to Tel Aviv now. Do I think Jared Kushner had anything to do with this? No I do not. The man's COVID solution was Facebook. But I think MBS doesn't give a shit about Palestine and the CIA went "we'll fund that emotion" and here we are. Will he still turn up drowned off the Canary Islands like Robert Maxwell? I sincerely hope so. But not while he's still a useful idiot. At its most cynical level, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message to the CIA as to how MBS intended to run the country, and from a CIA standpoint, it wasn't particularly expensive or damaging - compare and contrast with Iran. As far as consequences for Donald Trump? Whelp, he's likely got federal charges lined up against him, his extremely shady taxes are public, and at least two states are lined up for criminal and civil charges related to a smorgasbord of shady shit. And there is no disinfectant like sunlight. I think he's got five, six years of ignominy left. I don't know if he'll ever serve time. I know we'll be talking about it until he fucking dies, which is extremely tedious, but objectively speaking, the man is a historical figure. He matters more than George Wallace, Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon. He's up there with John Wilkes Booth as far as I'm concerned. We have been worried about a man like Donald Trump since before he was born. It has always been up to question what would happen if a legitimate challenge to democracy were to arise - how fragile is the republic, really? I believe we have our answer. One thing about our Mennonite form of government: it doesn't move quickly. There are many faster, more agile implementations of democracy in the world and while they're clearly better at coming up with things like universal healthcare, they also give you things like Brexit and Hugo Chavez. Which is not to say it won't happen again. But a whole lot of Donald Trump's maneuverability was due to the element of surprise. You can attack Pearl Harbor twice but it won't do nearly as much. History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme? And Donald Trump was what happens when George Wallace or Huey Long don't get shot, frankly. I don't know what that means for the future? But I know it'll be generations before anyone allows another Donald Trump to happen.
There's a lot to digest there, but thanks for such a comprehensive answer - more than I could ever have hoped for. The link between Russia and US elections is interesting - and worrying - because I feel that, before the pandemic, China had deeply infiltrated and had far too much influence over US affairs although through other means. I've also noticed the quality of their social media propaganda has increased by orders of magnitude. If they had someone cunning with vision at the helm... The concern about fascism is valid though - my main worry is that Trump was such a blustering narcissist that someone with real intelligence and guile might well have succeeded. Pretty sure Moseley was taken down as a deliberate decision so maybe "the system" does look after itself.
It will not surprise you to learn that not only am I several books deep into both Soviet/Russian and Chinese espionage, but that I grew up with it! Wen Ho Lee wasn't exactly a friend? But he was a customer at my book shop. And my high school was one of the very, very few in the United States that taught Russian in the middle of the Cold War for... reasons. The link between Russia and US elections is clear. It's also clear that for all their meddling around on Facebook, they didn't actually tilt things that much. The link between Russia and Donald Trump is much, much clearer. He was big on the USSR in the '80s, they kept him solvent in the '00s and the whole of the Trump organization exists to launder oligarch money. And I mean, c'mon. Melania is a swallow. That woman gave up her future to be Putin's conduit to a usefully stupid American oligarch. Everything makes sense about Melania if you look at her as an employee who ended up overworked and underpaid. China? China has always suffered from, what's the word? Racism. What immigrants built the American west and were immediately kicked out? The Chinese. Who mired the Japanese down to the point where the Americans could beat them and were then effectively abandoned? The Chinese. In fairness to the Americans, it's not just the Chinese, it's anyone with epicanthic folds... to the point where "Russian" has always been "White Russian" not Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tuvan or any other minority who had to not only deal with being in the USSR but also be lower than any kulak. But the Chinese have always lacked access to power in the US. The structure of Chinese intelligence is also very not Machiavellian. Western intelligence operations derive from feudal politics, where there's a heterogeneous mix of hierarchies to play against each other with a constant churn of status and opportunity. China, on the other hand, has always been the divine on earth calling the shots absolutely and everyone under him jockeying for relative power. This structure presupposes that really, nobody matters but the sovereign. The direct consequence of this is that Chinese intelligence operations are low-value operatives performing low-value operations against low-value targets over and over and over and over again. Chinese intelligence is TikTok - a thing you try to put on every phone to snoop on everyone so that if anyone ever catches your interest, you query their phone. Chinese intelligence is Huawei - a thing you put on their network with the brazen ability to snoop whenever you need to, they'll never know they're idiots. The European-and-therefore-American approach is "weaponize just one or two things, hide the shit out of them, spare no effort or expense to get them near their target, scuttle that pipeline." You wanna know how Chinese surveillance works? You go to NAB, you visit the creepy Chinese floor, you chat up some odd manufacturer of gimbal mounts, and within six months someone Chinese is taking you to dinner to pick your brain about cinematography while dangling the prospect of you shooting a movie in Mongolia. The movie will never happen, and they'll ghost the minute they've learned everything they can about how you work? And they never even broke the law. Or, you go to IMTS, you visit the creepy Chinese floor, you chat up some odd manufacturer of CNC routers, and for the next two years they send you "hello how are you friend would you like to be our distributor" emails. Westerners spear-phish. Easterners spam. It reflects their fundamental understanding of culture. So yes - China has far too much influence over US affairs, primarily because they are paying for it. The difference between TikTok and Vine is that Vine was not an intelligence project fully subsidized and maintained by a state entity for the express purpose of influencing an adversary. But it only takes a few instances of Shaq groveling before Xi for saying something vaguely offensive before that shit's over. You don't hear about One Belt One Road much anymore because the carrot has been supplanted by the stick. Chinese policy towards Taiwan looks a lot like American policy towards Cuba... in 1962. There's 60 years of geopolitics between thar and hyar but fundamentally, Chinese foreign policy is "we don't have to know what you're thinking, you're animals." It doesn't take more than a couple interactions like that before you're no longer negotiating as if you have Most Favored Nation status. China has effectively squandered foreign influence for domestic control, which is what they tend to do every couple hundred years. As far as fascism and Madison Square Garden, there's a Ken Burns for that. Yes, there were elements in the United States that were very pro-Nazi. There were far more elements in the United States that were very pro-isolationism. There has been and always shall be evil in the United States. I think I've come around to the recognition, however, that Americans will fight like hell for our right to be left the fuck alone. While "I'm in your business" is definitely the guiding light for far too many Americans, "live and let live" is dominant and "live and let live" doesn't attend rallies. It doesn't stop foreign holocausts either so it's not all upside... but I think Americans have far more apathy towards foreign catastrophes than we do for domestic ones. Something to consider about populists - they come from outside the system, by definition. Which means the system will reject the infection if it's strong enough. Someone with cunning and vision will realize they have more power within the system, presuming the system is strong enough to withstand frontal assault. The court of Henry the Eighth will give rise to Thomas Cromwell; the Imperial Russian Monarchy will give rise to Vladimir Lenin. Moseley was Lord Curzon's son-in-law. He was mutherfucking anointed. There were Nazi sympathizers at the very top. Mosely was taken down by antifa. And that, really, is the difference between places with fascism and places without. Is there a tradition of self-determinism? Britain did execute a king who got too big for his britches. It didn't stick? But it definitely colored the future.