By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  July 18, 2020 (UPDATE: JULY 20)

Author’s note: A version of this article was published by Dork Side of the Force on July 9, but the editor made a number of substantive changes, altering or subduing my opinion, focus, and meaning significantly in ways that went beyond the scope of a typical editorial role, so I have decided to publish the full version here. I am grateful for being published by Dork Side of the Force but felt readers were safe in reading, and deserved to hear, my full views on these subjects as the focus in my full version below includes much more on the quality of Dave Filoni’s work and the direction Disney should take from the success of Clone Wars in approaching Star Wars in the present and future. Also, SPOILER ALERT for all kinds of Star Wars content, from the films to the multiple TV series, including Clone Wars.

SILVER SPRING—The Force is strong with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, its fans, and the show’s showrunners and cast.  From the announcement of its revival through the aftermath of the final episode of the final season, from Dave Filoni (showrunner and Jedi apprentice to George Lucas himself) and Ashley Eckstein (Ahsoska Tano), to Dee Bradley Baker (Captain Rex and all the clones) and Sam Witwer (Darth Maul), to Matt Lanter (Anakin Skywalker) and James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and the rest of the cast and crew, they understood and openly expressed for some time that by far the main reason Clone Wars was getting a proper sendoff and a final storyline as its creators had intended from the beginning was its passionate, insistent fans, who never let Disney off the hook for prematurely ending a series that was hitting its stride and producing absolute gold in the second half of its run, fans who kept demanding Disney revive the myopically-cancelled series.

The joyous but frustrating burden of Clone Wars fans

For years for the legions of Clone Wars fans, there has been and still is something of a burden we carry: we know how good the show is, but we also know that the initial theatrical release was hardly given rave reviews (and, admittedly, it is, by far, some of the weakest Clone Wars content, though still worth watching).  Furthermore, the seasons were all on Cartoon Network except for the sixth half-season, which ended up on Netflix along with the other seasons for a time after the Disney takeover.  Thus, by not being on a major network, so many people who would have seen it did not end up seeing it.  Additionally, Disney has hardly put much effort into promoting Star Wars content produced before its takeover, favoring its own Star Wars films and animated series.  So for me and other fans, we felt a responsibility to push Clone Wars on people and push and proselytize it hard.  It’s not that hard to sell people on other great shows like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Dexter, The Wire.  People on the fence can be easily convinced by close friends on shows like that. Trying to get them to watch a cartoon series with relatively weak opening is a whole other matter.

Then there is the issue of competition with The Mandalorian.  It’s not a hard sell to get people to watch a live-action show starring a fan-favorite from Game of Thrones and Narcos, the other dude from the classic Predator, and co-helmed by a man who was both the director of Iron Man and an executive producer of The Avengers series.  Trying to convince people that a Star Wars cartoon is one of the best dramatic series in years, and that its is one of the series with one of the most complicated intersections of plotlines that took years to build, in a similar way to Game of Thrones but with a final payoff that succeeds in all the ways the final season of Game of Thrones fell short and then some, is a far harder sell.  An even harder sell, as I have attempted to make before, is that Clone Wars has some of the most complex themes on politics, war, and terrorism of any show in recent memory other than Homeland, and, as I have written before, the show faithfully reflects the deepest themes of films of the Lucas-helmed Star Wars movies.  Yeah, to many, you generally will come off as crazy making these claims, as I am sure I have to many people.

Yet all this is true for Clone Wars, and its best storylines are among some of the best screen experiences I’ve ever experienced, whether film or TV.  I am not saying that there aren’t other stellar moments throughout the series, but, as I wrote for Dork Side, the very final four episodes of the final season are as good as anything I’ve ever seen in Star Wars, including the Original Trilogy, because of the loving care and respect that beloved characters are given in building up incredibly emotional climaxes that pay off beautifully.  Frankly, after five Disney Star Wars movies, none of those attempts came anywhere near such intricately woven and long-developed emotional payoffs as (spoilers) Luke’s redemption of Vader and Vader’s subsequent death in Return of the Jedi or Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side and Padmé’s dying of a broken heart at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but Clone Wars has at least two clear stories (and arguably several others that rise to that level) at the ends of seasons five and seven.   The moment in season five (spoiler), when Ahsoka leaves the Jedi order, breaking Anakin’s heart and his faith in the Jedi Order, came out all the way back in March 2013.  The half-season six in 2014 had some great stories but not at the level of that season five finale, so it’s been more than seven years since anything like that level of emotion has happened in Star Wars movies or shows, despite Disney’s “efforts.”  Let’s discuss those efforts, then…

Disney falling short

Solo is easily the best of the crop of Disney films overall, but especially in terms of character development and emotion.  Rogue One is a competently executed action film and has one of the best battle scenes in all of Star Wars, but there’s no serious attempt at character development or building emotion, and performances and “characters” are dull and barely developed, with only a robot even being somewhat interesting or funny and no one else even coming close to the robot.  Despite fine actors being attached to the actual Sequel Trilogy and even solid acting performances, the writing and storytelling were so insanely terrible that no acting could save the convoluted mess.  The Force Awakens negated the sacrifice of Vader and his redemption by Luke by basically putting the galaxy in the same peril Vader’s sacrifice and Luke’s redemption of Vader was supposed to save it from, as if just a few decades later, the Chosen One(s) might as well have never even existed. The middle chapter—Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi—was a betrayal of Luke Skywalker and the very heart of Star Wars itself, and the final movie in the trilogy—The Rise of Skywalker—shoved so much unnecessary, poorly-conceived and barely-explained random junk and characters into the nonsensical plot that any major power behind the climaxes was severely diluted or fell flat (not to say that there weren’t some nice moments, but the totality was a train wreck of storytelling that would make even Transformers sequels look coherent in comparison; it was almost as if J.J. Abrams was parodying the worst flaws of his style of filmmaking).  And Star Wars: Rebels had nowhere near the character development or emotional buildup not because the show was shorter but because the majority of the show was predictable and redundant and there was not as much effort to develop the characters.  There were some excellent moments and payoffs (spoilers: basically everything with Vader, Ahoska, and, to a lesser degree, Thrawn), but the best moments of the show—(spoilers) Ahsoka’s confronting Vader (the one honorable mention in that high-emotion category over this seven-year period, but which felt so brief and did not have a resolution the same way the highest emotional Star Wars acts have), her reuniting with Rex, and the final Obi-Wan/Maul duel in an episode that otherwise felt wasteful—earned their payoffs nearly entirely from content outside of Rebels, essentially piggybacking on the efforts and gravitas of Clone Wars (honorable mention, also, to Kanan as a solid new character with a real arc).  And as for Resistance, well, like you most likely, I haven’t seen it (and very few people seem to have).  So even with so much content over the past seven years from Disney, those of us seeking character-driven, emotional buildup on par with the Lucas films and Clone Wars‘s season five ending have been left bitterly disappointed, with only the rarest of moments even being anywhere near that ballpark.

A new hope against the odds: Clone Wars provably nailed it

Thus, with the announcement of The Mandalorian and especially with the surprise that Clone Wars was being resurrected, reason for cautious hope broke through like a ray of sunshine coming through dark storm clouds.  I love The Mandalorian, as I have noted before, for its excellent storytelling and am glad for it.  But as cute as “Baby Yoda” is, the show is not as deep or emotional as the great moments I have mentioned from the Lucas-era movies; it is not on that epic level, nor is it trying to be, nor does it need to be, and that’s fine.  Not only was it refreshing that it was not trying to be all things to all people, but the idea of telling scaled-down Star Wars stories in live-action format is welcome.  But with the final arc of final-season of Clone Wars, we see that Disney is capable of producing 10/10-level amazingly deep, resonant, built-up, theatrical-quality, and epic Star Wars content with transcendent payoffs—pretty much every moment of the final four episodes, a level of quality I have not experienced in entertainment since the best of Game of Thrones­—that can earn rave reviews from critics and fans alike and actually unite, not divide, the fanbase.

Even so, it was clear that Disney put way more effort into marketing The Mandalorian, even creating a separate behind-the-scenes show about the making of the show (over a good stretch over several months, a large portion of my YouTube viewings involved an ad for the show).  In contrast, I saw almost no marketing for Clone Wars.  And what’s so satisfying for we Clone Wars fans is that Clone Wars partly outperformed Mandalorian almost entirely on the backs of the show’s fans and the word-of-mouth buzz they have been so passionately trying to create for years.  Maybe a pandemic helped, but the numbers for Clone Wars speak for themselves, all without the huge marketing/media boost that Mandalorian got before its release.

And perhaps now, besides giving Disney a full-proof roadmap, the world is finally awakening to the amazingness that is Clone Wars, and the stunning number prove this. 

For one thing, Clone Wars has four of the top thirty TV episodes of all time and three of the top ten on IMDB by user ratings with at least 1,000 viewer ratings or more: #25, #6, #5, #4, as well as for shows with 5,000 or more user votes: #23, #6, #5, and #4, both having these be the four final episodes I have referenced before in ascending order (fans, you can add your votes at those previous links!). Yeah, this has Clone Wars in line with shows like Breaking Bad, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones, and Mr. Robot (admittedly lists that are biased against older shows like The Sopranos and Rome, but still an impressive achievement for Clone Wars on a list with still solid and renown shows).

“Ratings” for streaming content is an iffy concept, but Parrot Analytics has a useful substitute measure that was recently profiled in The New York Times involving individual consumption (i.e., downloading and streaming), social media posting and engagement “for” the content, and searching or consuming material about the content (e.g., videos or articles), putting these together into a metric the analysis firm terms “demand expression.” It is a weighted measuring system, so downloading a pirated copy is weighted much more than a like or a retweet of content, and a personally-written post fits in between. Backing up my claim about the passion of fans for Clone Wars being instrumental in the success of Clone Wars, Parrot’s Wade Dayson-Penney provided the following chart showing demand expressions for Clone Wars and The Mandalorian:

The two lines are not concurrent time-wise, as it tracks demand for each series before, during, and after the series aired, and the two did not air at the same time (Mandalorian ran about seven-and-a-half-weeks from November to December, Clone Wars from February to May over about eleven-and-a-half weeks.  Clone Wars had far-higher pre-release demand expressions by fans than The Mandalorian, and also had the highest single-week stretch of peak of demand expressions of all streaming content in 2020 thus far, including Mandalorian.

For the entire first half of 2020, Clone Wars was the third-highest in digital original streaming content (behind only Stranger Things and Mandalorian, way ahead of series like Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico, The Witcher, and Tiger King, and CBS’s Star Trek: Picard) and the tenth-highest overall streaming series in terms of demand expressions, with over fifty-six times the demand expressions of the average streaming content in the U.S. for that for that entire six-month stretch, as Payson-Denny explained in an e-mail to me.  It held the top spot in demand expressions for digital streaming originals throughout the coronavirus lockdown period, too.    

Even more impressive, while Mandalorian had overall longer heights of demand expression, as noted, at its weekly peak, Clone Wars surpassed not just Mandalorian, but all series streaming content, both digital originals and all streaming TV series, so far in 2020; that’s right, no other series reached the peak level of viewing in one week as Clone Wars, which peaked for a whole week at close to 130 times the average amount of demand expressions in the U.S. for streaming content.  Even if you go back an entire year, to the beginning of July, 2019, only Stranger Things, the latest season of which premiered that month, had a higher week peak-level than Clone Wars.  Throughout that entire year period, Clone Wars, with not even being on air for nearly eight months of out that twelve-month period, was the fourth-most in-demand digital original streaming series and earned the twenty-fourth highest in-demand expressions of any show, with over thirty-six times the U.S. demand for an average series.

In fact, a whole month before the season seven premiere, after just the season seven trailer’s January 22 release, the show saw a huge increase in demand, landing it the number-nine overall streaming spot, and the following week, while dropping slightly, it held the fourth digital original spot.  The first week of February, it fell to tenth digital original, then ninth the week after, and, finally, during the season seven premiere as the end of the third week of February, it climbed to sixth, not far behind The Witcher and Picard.  The new season’s first full week of availability saw it rise to the fifth overall and second digital original spot, only behind Stranger Things.  The show began March tenth overall and third with digital originals, staying in the same spot overall and rising to second, again, with digital originals the following week.  It lost its top-ten overall spot but stayed second among streaming originals in the third week of March, falling to third digital original the following week.  It stayed even spot-wise among originals the following week, fell to fifth original the first full week of April, then rose to fourth mid-April, with the first installment of the truly spectacular final arc premiering at the end of the week.

And wow, did the fans spread their approval for that episode, as word of mouth and fans telling everyone they knew “YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS!” brought the series the next week to the number-one overall digital original slot and the fourth overall slot the week the second episode of the arc premiered.  And the following week, when the penultimate Clone Wars episode premiered, the show stayed in the first digital original spot (though with far higher numbers) and rose to the first overall streaming spot.  The ensuing week, when the series finale premiered earlier than usual on Star Wars Day, May the Fourth (get it?), it maintained both top spots with dramatically higher demand that dwarfed everything else, including nearly one-and-a-half times the demand of the second overall spot (Spongebob) and far more than doubling the number-two and number-three originals, Mandalorian and Stranger Things, respectively, achieving the peak demand of anything thus far this year.

Even after the final episode was released, throughout the entire following week, it stayed in the number one original slot for the fourth consecutive week and only fell to number two in the overall streaming competition.  The next week, it was still seventh overall and barely got edged out by Stranger Things in digital originals, coming in just behind at number two.  The final full week of May, the show was still second in digital originals, and the next week, Parrot’s Payson-Denney confirmed to me in an e-amil that, a full month after the premiere of the final episode, Clone Wars was still held the third spot among original streaming content.  It was fourth in originals the following week, was still fifth in mid-June, maintained that spot the next week, was still seventh in digital originals the week ending July fourth—two months after the final episode premiered—and last week, it was back at fifth for digital originals, with nearly forty-times more U.S. demand expressions than the average show. UPDATE: July 20: July 12-18, the show skyrocketed back to ninth overall and second in digital originals, with nearly fifty times the U.S. demand expressions of an average show, after the announcement of the Clone Wars spinoff series Bad Batch.

Good content wins and the future and the Force is Filoni

Not bad for a show that had close to no marketing (I seriously don’t recall seeing any ads anywhere specifically for Clone Wars but do remember seeing tons of video ads and others for The Mandalorian, even after the final season Clone Wars premiered, if I’m not mistaken about that last part).  Considering Stranger Things and The Mandalorian both have far more intense marketing campaigns, one can only imagine how much serious paid marketing could have boosted the popularity and viewership of Clone Wars.  And we have to keep in mind that this was mainly because of just four episodes—the final four—out of the twelve-episodes of the season.  The first four were fun, for sure, with even a few deeper moments, but felt a bit drawn out, while the middle four were definitely drawn out and formed the weakest arc by far of the final season (it was, admittedly, build-up for the final four-episode arc, and I still enjoyed them all at any rate). 

After twelve years, Clone Wars seems to have finally earned some of the critical respect and mass appeal that its fans have known for so long it has deserved but which had, until this final season, eluded it.

And not just Clone Wars, but showrunner Dave Filoni, who, alongside Jon Favreau, is the main force behind The Madnalorian. NOTE TO DISNEY: PUT DAVE FILONI IN CHARGE OF LUCASFILM PROJECTS GOING FORWARD!  LET HIM HELM MORE SERIES AND FINALLY MOVIES, both animated AND live action.  Filoni also directed more than half the episodes of the first season of the animated Avatar: The Last Airbender (including some of the highest-rated of the whole series, the pair of episodes that closes out the first season), a show that ended twelve years ago but is even now one of Netflix’s surprising top hits for the past few months since Netflix acquired rights to the show, which is shattering most records of longevity and views on the platform for this year, becoming one of the most-watched items on Netflix since Netflix started releasing viewership rankings.  And, similarly to Clone Wars with Disney, this show received no marketing from Netflix (it was not Netflix-original content) and beat out other competition that benefited from heavy marketing.  Filoni is simply gold and resistance is silly, Disney!!

I get the sense that Disney was irrationally reluctant due to some sort internal division or even infighting, because if the top executives had any brains, they would have insisted on producing the eight unfinished episodes that became the highly-rated novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden to make the final season twenty-episodes instead of twelve.  Those additional eight episodes, unlike the first eight episodes, would have been near and perhaps even at the quality of that astounding final arc, and I would know: I read the Dark Disciple novel, which debuted on The New York Times Best Sellers list, and it was excellent, a challenging story unlike anything else in Clone Wars or the movies (except perhaps the Rey-Kylo relationship being a pale reflection, with Dark Disciple in many ways showing what could have been made of that relationship).  I have no doubt that Disney could have seen demand similar to what happened with its final episodes throughout the eight-episodes of the Dark Disciple arc, with unique story that would have generated a lot of buzz and another stellar, strong, independent, and complex female character in Assajj Ventress, a story which would have also featured, Count Dooku, Quinlan Vos, Boba Fett, and Obi Wan Kenobi, just to name some of the main players; it would have been dark (but probably not too dark for Disney) and filled with edge-of-your-seat emotion and tension throughout and could easily have opened up the season, generating far more interest compared with the other weaker arcs that ran before the finale and giving Disney two additional full months of top-level consumption   Twenty episodes with eight weaker episodes in the middle and twelve top-notch episodes to begin and end them would have been even more fitting, but it’s hard to criticize the final season too much given its solid buildup and transcendent ending.  Disney can and easily should still make these eight episodes for Disney+ or into a feature-length movie, slated for theatrical release (same with the final four episodes of the series).  If this seems an unrealistic ask, consider that work on the Dark Disciple episodes, like the season seven-opening Bad Batch arc, had already begun years ago (you can watch some of that Dark Disciple work here).

It is a tragedy that Disney did not put more muscle behind Clone Wars.  It’s almost as if Disney was spiteful of its non-creation inspiring so much more passion and acclaim that its theatrical releases, which divided fans fan deeply as opposed to unifying nearly all Star Wars fans, like Clone Wars did.

If nothing else, let these numbers show the Disney corporate executives that Filoni and Clone Wars represent a future than can be profitable, artistic, epic, and well-executed in non-polarizing ways, as opposed to whatever adjectives we may use (some certainly unprintable here) to describe what the Sequel Trilogy was and was not.  Dave Filoni’s and George Lucas’s Clone Wars stands as a testament to the value of careful planning and storytelling and allowing creative control in ways that stay true to the real spirit of epic Star Wars even while breaking new ground, giving us content that can stand the test of time and match some of the best content of any type out there.  Clone Wars is not just Star Wars at its best, but entertainment at its best, and, in an era of depressing disaster that makes you lose faith in the choices and taste of people, the show also finally now has the numbers to prove its success and popularity and that good content can and will be rewarded.

See Brian’s related Star Wars articles for Dork Side of the Force here, including The final arc of The Clone Wars is Star Wars at its best and Mandalorians and cultural trauma in The Mandalorian.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 5, 2020

Here is the unedited version of an article published today by Al Bawaba where major edits drastically changing the focus of the piece were made without consultation or my approval. The editorial line felt discussing Trump’s unfitness for office and the Cuban Missile Crisis were “asides” that were “highly subjective” (Game of Thrones? Maybe, but the points are well-accented by that reference, too), but since such considerations are objectively important and specifically central to this article I felt the need to publish in full here.

“The truest cause (alêthestatê prophasis) I consider to be the one that was least evident in public discussion (logos). I believe that the Athenians, because they had grown in power and terrified the Spartans, made war inevitable (anankasai).” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23

WASHINGTON—The past week has been a week of incredibly dramatic and historic escalations between Iran and the U.S. in the Middle East—specifically in Iraq—that have put both countries dramatically closer to war than at any time in years, possibly decades.

Climate of Escalation in an Increasingly Unstable Arena

After some relatively banal but escalating tit-for-tat, first came what were dramatic attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, involving pro-Iranian militias and almost certainly orchestrated by Iran.  This was a very bold move on the part of Iran, to say the least.  They may or may not have been inspired in part by Trump being under siege from the U.S. House of Representatives and its impeachment of him, and with Trump, we know domestic concerns are rarely far from his foreign policy moves (hell, that’s exactly why Trump has been impeached).

Just as dramatic an escalation, perhaps even more so, was American President Donald Trump’s ordering a strike to kill one of Iran’s top generals and almost certainly a man involved in orchestrating the attacks against the U.S. Embassy: Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force and the mastermind behind Iran’s military adventures abroad, especially in Iraq and Syria.  Over many years, he at times targeted American military personnel (killing hundreds and injuring thousands), other times he targeted ISIS.

Make no mistake about it: not only is the entire region from Yemen and Saudi Arabia through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Afghanistan all ripe like tinder before a conflagration, that conflagration may have already started and there may be little to no chance of putting it out before it spreads and consumes much.  In fact, it is hard to see how things do not erupt.

Before these latest developments, things were already terrible in the region:

• Yemen was a horror-show of a mess.
• Israel’s political leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing an existential domestic politics crisis even as escalation between Israeli forces on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other had been occurring all throughout 2019; throughout the same period, Palestinian areas simmered with opposition to the status quo of Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank along with the siege of Gaza.
• Lebanon is facing historic protests and frustration with its typically paralyzed government, of which Hezbollah—Iran’s primary proxy militia—is a part.
• Syria is still dealing with its long, brutal civil war, now seeming to wind down even as new intrigue has developed with a massive Turkish incursion and a dramatic, sudden, irresponsible partial U.S. withdrawal that betrayed key Kurdish allies who had been fighting ISIS, a withdrawal that may now allow a resurgence of ISIS.
• Iraq is reeling from major unrest and frustration from its own people directed at the government, forcing the recent resignation of its prime minister; key issues were corruption and many Iraqis feeling like their leaders were selling them out to Iran, and it seems Iranian-backed forces were behind much of the killing of hundreds of protesters.
• Iran has itself been in the midst of its largest violent protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; the current round has seen some 1,500 people killed.  Iran is also enriching Uranium at high levels again since the collapse of the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal, a collapse irrationally instigated by the Trump Administration.
• In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent and Trump has signaled he wants out of Afghanistan as major reporting from The Washington Post suggests U.S. officials for years may have been less than forthcoming about the level of progress being made there.

A Horrible Game of Chicken

In the context of the above Iraq situation, Iran was clearly hoping to drum up anti-American sentiment to counter anti-Iranian sentiment that had been boiling over.  Whatever Iranian leaders thought America might do in response, they probably figured that a senior government official like Soleimani was off limits; they are probably as surprised as anyone else.

Soleimani has been pretty much the only Iranian military official you would see with any regularity in news reports: in other words, Iran has no replacement of his stature, ability, and experience, and his death is a devastating blow to Iran’s senior leadership and its political, intelligence, and military objectives as Soleimani was perhaps the most effective operator in the Middle East.

We are in that Great Events of History realm where things tend to take on momentum and will of their own, where managing what happens becomes more difficult and far messier.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we had serious minds with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exercising leadership and guiding events, each acting against pressure for further escalation from their own hardliners, a situation that still nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.  Before the dust on this current crisis settles, we must be prepared to be forced to watch as helpless bystanders watching powerful people make bad decision after bad decision (even a good decision taken in a vacuum often becomes a bad one).

The current U.S. Commander in Chief is facing his greatest test by far right now, and there is little in his acts as president prior to now that should reassure anyone in this moment: his public statements and the corroborated reporting that comes from sources within his own Administration (many of whom have parted ways with that Administration) speak for themselves and demolish the idea that the perception of the President of the United States as unfit for office has anything to do with partisanship.  The man whom his own top chosen advisors have repeatedly called him unfit for office is now in charge of managing a dangerous crisis he knows little about that may already be a war.

At the same time, the Iranian leadership has shown its willingness to gamble irresponsibly and increasingly so, behavior the nuclear deal Trump had abandoned was designed to mitigate.  After scrapping the deal, Trump and his Administration only offered threats to Iran, and Iran responded with its own increasing hostility, increasing its aggressiveness in Yemen and against U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (who knows where we would be if there had been sustained, robust engagement after that deal had been implemented, not to say necessarily crises would have been avoided, but better to try to avoid them than instigate them).

Thus, both American and Iranian leadership have shown predilections that shun de-escalation and opt for escalation and surprise.  But in the geopolitical situation just described, surprise is the last thing those hoping for peace and stability should want, and such sudden, dramatic escalations ring of the series of unfortunate events that escalated into World War I.  A year ago, I wrote for West Point’s Modern War Institute of the urgent lessons of WWI precisely with scenarios like our current one in mind, and I fear that the lessons I noted as urgent are going unheeded by leadership on both sides of this unfolding struggle.

Clear Acts, Unclear Consequences

The collateral damage will be severe and not geographically contained.

Like never before, Iraq is about to become (even more so) a battlefield between the U.S. and Iran, threatening to undermine everything that the U.S. has tried to build there since 2003.  There are places in Iraq where U.S. troops are vulnerable, and this is also true in the few places where U.S. troops remain in Syria.

Let us also not forget that Russia and Iran are allies, even if uneasy ones: Soleimani had briefed Russia’s leadership in Moscow before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to militarily intervene in Syria, the Iranian becoming an important factor in convincing the Russians to intervene and in planning their military support of the Assad regime, a close ally of both Iran and Russia; Soleimani even met personally with Putin and continued to coordinate with Russian military leaders after Russian forces began fighting in Syria.  Those Russian military forces are deployed throughout Syria, sometimes between spots where Iranian and Iranian-supported forces may try to take on U.S. forces and their remaining allies.  Russia—which is itself engaged in clearly hostile actions against the United States—could accidentally and/or deliberately be drawn into this fight explicitly and/or covertly, adding yet another perilous dimension to all this.

If this is good news for anyone, it’s ISIS.  The main fighters against ISIS were the U.S., the Kurds, and Iran.  The U.S. and Iran will now focus their attention on each other, and Trump’s sad withdrawal from northern Syria means the Kurds are reeling and trying to defend themselves from the Turks now more than ISIS.  The terrorist group will most certainly exploit this situation to further its comeback, a dimension that only makes this mess even messier.

Consider, too, that U.S., Israeli, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian leaders are all facing domestic political crises even (mostly) without war within their borders, and that, especially in the cases of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conflict with Iran would be desirable politically as each are facing concerted threats to remove them from office through extraelectoral means and they would be eager to rally their publics to focus on external threats, diverting attention from their own misconduct.

Iran, likewise, would love to quell its domestic unrest by focusing on a conflict with the U.S.

Conversely, the hapless leaders of Lebanon and Iraq are at this moment terrified of their countries being torn asunder as proxy battlegrounds and will very much be at the mercy of the decisions of Washington and Tehran.  Conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan (the latter on Iran’s border and with plenty of vulnerable U.S. troops) would also see further escalation and intervention as Iran and the U.S. will seek to harm each other wherever they can, and we have not even gotten to the global reach of Hezbollah.

After such a move as the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, it would be politically impossible for Iran not to respond massively.  And it will be politically impossible for the U.S. to not respond to that.  I have written of the general pressures of the anarchic interstate system before, and we have here a moment where pressure classically reduces the options of the belligerents.  We really may be in a Thucydides trap, where war is almost inevitable and takes on a mind and momentum of its own, a reference to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s opinion that the fear of one power (Sparta) concerning the rise in power of another (Athens) made war inevitable (1.23).

Another piece I wrote for the Modern War Institute at West Point looked at the chaos of the final season of Game of Thrones as instructive for reality, and we are certainly staring at chaos now even as we help to unleash it.  The question is, will leaders look at chaos as a “ladder,” as Lord “Littlefinger” Petyr Baelish did, or as something to be avoided, “a gaping pit,” as Lord Varys did?  The Varyses seem few and far between when it comes to those leaders driving current events.

A Gaping Pit

One would hope leaders on both sides are considering all these things, and have plans for how to deal with these multiple varied flashpoints.  History has shown that such hope is often misplaced, that the cooler heads of the Cuban Missile Crisis are more the exception than the norm.  The above axes I have mentioned are by no means all the fronts on which a regional conflict could quickly become a more widespread war and even a global one, one which may even involve Russia, Israel, Turkey, multiple terrorist groups, and crucial oil shipping routes, with leaders mixing domestic politics and foreign policy in ways not for the better of either.  From the 2020 election to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the security of Jordan and a further inflaming of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, there are a number of fronts beyond the direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that could be consumed by the chaos unfolding before our very eyes, “swallowed” by its “gaping pit.”

Actions in the next days, weeks, and months could set the board for the next century, much in the way World War I did and, in many ways, set the map for many of the preexisting conflicts into which this American-Iranian conflict will play and which will play into it.  Every step, every act, every missile right now carries a weight that, if not properly respected (and it seems clear it will not be) risks throwing not just the Middle East, but the world into chaos, bloodshed, displacement, and recession that will make most recent conflicts seem quaint by comparison.

For all the talk of how the U.S. might fall into a Thucydides trap with  China, here it is in one now, with Iran.  Nothing was inevitable about coming to this point, but now that we are here, some disturbing events are now inevitable.  This is, of course, the most likely outcome from the beginning since the Trump Administration abandoned the nuclear deal that was stemming most if not all (but perhaps even all) of the current dynamics leading to this juncture.  One would hope a “lesson” to not casually abandon logical diplomacy would emerge, but then perhaps the bar is so low as to be meaningless?

In Trump, we have a brutal reminder about how history can be dangerously ignored at will to the peril of all.  He will not read this article, nor any of the countless others calling for reflection on the sheer weightiness of this moment.  Will we read thoughtful pieces?  Will our voting public?  Iran will now inevitably be front-and-center in the 2020 election, forcing voters to at least partly realize they are not just voting on Trump, but on the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want, the kind of world they want to help create.  How any of this turns out remains to be seen, but simply hoping for cooler heads to prevail, as was the case with the brink of nuclear war in 1962, seems today naïve at best and irresponsible at worst, with our current cast of characters misstepping from Mar-a-Lago to Persia and altogether too many other locations in a conflict that will refuse to be contained.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981 and on his news website, Real Context News.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) November 24, 2019 (Update: December 7, 2019: we now know Giuliani has been meeting in Ukraine with Andrii Artemenko and is still meeting with Lutsenko, Kulyuk, and Shokin!; December 19: added bullet-points)

WESTON — Herein is a preview/excerpt of Brian Frydenborg’s brand new eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: An Epic Saga with Companion Sections in Fifteen Parts, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials

Available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook

(You don’t have to own a Kindle or Nook, you can use free apps to read!)

• The media has consistently miscovered “Ukrainegate,” portraying it at worst as a separate scandal from Trump-Russia/the Mueller probe, to, generally, at best, a related scandal. 
• But a deeper exploration reveals Ukraine has been at the center of Trump-Russia from almost the beginning.
• Not only are the same issues involved going back to even before Ukraine’s Orage Revolution (2004-2005) a decade-and-a-half ago, but many of the characters involved before in Trump-Russia and of note in the Mueller probe have ties to the people involved now in more recent Ukraine developments, or, it is even the same people involved in both.
• The saga involves two main threads:
  1. Russian mafia and Kremlin-linked people (often the exact same thing) connecting with Trump and/or people who were close or would be close to Trump, starting in the 1980s and through the present.  Central to all this is Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich, close to Putin and who had many operatives in the U.S. making contact with Trumpworld.
  2. A massive Eurasian gas scheme that seems to have been planned by Mogilevich and other mobsters and the Russian government since at least the mid-1990s, only a few years into Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.  The scheme amounted to billions of dollars and was designed to corrupt Ukraine’s ruling class to bend to Putin’s will and keep Ukraine under de facto Russian control.
• Multiple people involved in both schemes would cross over and join the other or become entwined in both.
• This has culminated with the now infamous Rudy Giuliani forays into Ukraine’s politics, with his and Trump’s efforts to get Ukrainian officials—including multiple presidents—to smear former Vice President and current 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden based on disinformation and propaganda with zero factual basis.
• The smears on Biden are based on circumstantial associations with no evidence, but the only evidence we do have—circumstantial or otherwise—is that, after both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got involved, there was positive movement on corruption issues, including with Burisma, the gas the company on the board of which sat Hunter during the positive developments.
• Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was actually part of the West’s overall effort to reduce corruption in Ukraine and, therefore, to weaken the tools by which Putin dominated Ukraine and kept it from reducing corruption and orienting itself with the West politically, economically, and militarily, despite the wishes of Ukraine’s people.
• Essentially, Ukraine is the center of the main front line in the New Cold War between the West and Russia.
• In this New Cold War, Trump’s actions are essentially handing victories over to Putin.
• Putin’s efforts amount to an effort to corrupt the U.S. system through Trump to change it into what Ukraine resembled under Putin’s old stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, who was deprived of a cheated victory in the Orange Revolution (2004-2005) and driven out of power in the (Euro)Maidan Revolution (2013-2014).
• Since then, Ukraine has been plunged into occupation, annexation, and civil war, all orchestrated by Putin.
• The efforts by Trump to force Ukraine into helping him attack his political rival, Joe Biden, center on Ukraine’s desperate efforts to secure military and diplomatic support in its struggle against Putin’s Russia.
• Most tellingly, the people against whom Biden and the West worked against to fight corruption in Ukraine have untied with Giuliani and Trump to advance Trump’s and Putin’s interests at the expense of Western influence, democracy, and transparency. 

These issues that have now exploded this all into impeachment for Trump show the union of the two main threads in ways that make the corruption and duplicitousness of Trump and the bad actors in Ukraine painfully obvious, erasing any doubt about whether or not the Trump Administration and the Kremlin are working to advance their shared goals at the expense of longstanding U.S. interests in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Preface

Trump’s current Ukraine insanity is just an extension of old Trump-Russia and the media still does not know how to cover it.

As the Hunter Biden “story” keeps receiving attention, the myopic mainstream media—just as in 2016—is unable to present a coherent big-picture understanding of what is happening or how things fit together.  In a stunning lack of self-awareness, its top news outlets are once again playing into Trump’s and Putin’s hands, sabotaging the Democrats and spreading Kremlin and Republican disinformation.  The roots of much of this lie with the media’s overall failure both to understand the bigger picture of the Trump-Russia saga and, in part as a result, to realize that these “recent” Ukraine scandals are not something new so much as a continuation of the old Trump-Russia saga that was the focus of the Mueller probe.

The only way to get anything approaching a full sense of what is going on with Ukraine, Trump, Russia, and the media is to painstakingly trace the threads of corruption and Russian influence operations related to Putin’s Ukraine drama, Putin’s and his top mafia boss’s co-opting of Trumpworld, and the actors involved throughout the many stages of this overall saga.  These threads can be traced from their origins in the 80s and 90s directly into today’s White House and the battlefields in Ukraine.  Only then will the centrality of Ukraine to the whole Trump-Russia saga be understood, only then can the full scale of the horror be comprehended, but it can and must be.  The threads are solid and come together to form a powerful and clear line of remarkable influence of the Russian government in Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian mafia into the major players, policies, and decisions of the Trump White House.  As this exploration will make clear, simple logic and the sheer amount of billowing smoke plumes coming from so many points obviously show that Trump has been raised up and co-opted by Russian influence to the point of being an asset—whether willingly or if he is too stupid to realize it, he is a “useful idiot”—for Putin and his allies.  Even if the actual flames are obscured, the heat can be felt as we choke on the smoke: those fires still exist and are presented here even if most of the top media news outlets, playing Trump’s and Russia’s game in their inability to sustain focus, have largely missed these conflagrations.

Table of Contents (Main chapters)

I. Introduction: Trump and Putin, Playing the Media Like a Fiddle

II. A Song of Gas and Politics Prologue: How a Meeting in Tel Aviv May Have Set Up Two Decades of Ukrainian History

III. How A Russian Web Enveloped Trumpworld Starting in the 1980s & Kept Expanding

IV. A Song of Gas and Politics Part One: The Chess Pieces Begin to Move

V. The Collapse of Russia’s European Influence

VI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Two: A Game of Revolution

VII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Three: Putin’s and Manafort’s Gaslighting of Ukrainian Politics

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Comes to America and Trumpworld when Trump Is Hurting for Cash

IX. The Curious Case of Michael Cohen: Linking Trump and Ukraine

X. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Four: Putin’s Triumph in Ukraine

XI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Five: Hubris and Revolution

XII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Six: The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma

XIII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Seven: Manafort Crosses the Not-So-Narrow Sea & a Shady “Peace” Deal, or, How Our Saga’s Two Main Threads Unite

XIV. A Song of Gas and Politics Epilogue: Trump and Giuliani Bring Everything Together Full Circle (but the Media Misses It)

And, included below in this preview: XV. Conclusion: Collusion Beyond What Was Imagined and the Need for a Media Self-Correct

“Chaos Is a Ladder”

What makes Giuliani’s escapades in Ukraine so useful is that they present amazing illustrations of the overall dynamics of Trump-Russia, with all the key elements.  There is some sort of past event or incident involving someone who stands up to Putin and Trump—in this case Joe Biden and his push against Shokin specifically and corruption in Ukraine in general—and then the gaslighting begins.  Reality is turned on its head and then barely tangential facts—e.g., Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma—are blown enormously out of proportion.  A mostly demonstrably false narrative is built from a few tiny kernels of truth to try to tear down an opponent of both Putin and Trump in ways that help advance both their interests, in this case helping Trump in the 2020 election and seeing that Putin’s influence is extended in Ukraine.  The false reverse narrative is repeated and amplified so much that it becomes reality for a great many and even more so casts doubt where its creators want it to be: whether the e-mails of Hillary Clinton or Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, the fantasy narrative forms the backdrop for all other discussion.  People not even in the camps of Putin or Trump will buy into the narrative, then, or at least let it enter their calculus.  The very propagation of the narrative puts those slandered by it on the defensive, forcing them to adjust and react on ground not of their choosing.  What is constant throughout are lies, repetition, deliberate manipulation of the media, corruption, co-opting of parties that should be more neutral—the media, the State Department, Ukraine’s presidency and prosecutor generals—and an emphasis on factional loyalty best exemplified by following the lead of a cultish leader.  Whether Trump’s 2016 campaign or Putin’s second presidency, this is how these two and their camps operate.

If we may quote Game of Thrones again, both Putin and Trump are strong devotees of the Littlefinger School of Politics, which proclaims that “Chaos is a ladder.”  Confusion, disinformation, war, they all can be useful to those who know how to manipulate them for personal gain.  Ideals like democracy and the rule of law?  At Lord Petyr Baelish’s School, they are simply “a story we agreed to tell each other over and over ’till we forget that it’s a lie.”  Fools cling to such ideals and when they try to manage the chaos with such “illusions,” they lose.  They fail to realize the main truth: “The climb is all there is,” that all that matters is the pursuit of power.  This is how Trump and Putin live and how they govern.  They actively seek to undermine, then destroy, ideals and institutions so that all that remains is horse-trading.  In a world stripped away of ideals, the raw power of Trump, Putin, and their models suddenly become far more attractive. 

Trump has helped make this the true battle of American politics now, just as that is what Putin has done in Russia and what he aims to bring back to Ukraine, which he is currently doing with Team Trump’s help.  Zelensky is a perfect example: the young idealist is trapped, for either he assists Trump in his quest to damage Biden, thereby undermining the very ideals and personality of Zelensky’s that got him elected—turning himself into the opposite of that on which he campaigned, corrupting himself and Ukraine’s institutions in a way that serves Putin’s long-term goal to reestablish corruption as the fuel of Ukrainian politics—or he stands strong on his principles in a way that earns Trump’s disfavor, causing Ukraine to lose aid and support when his nation is spread thin standing up to Russian war, occupation, and corruption.  Zelensky loses no matter what, and Putin gains no matter what.  All that is required are lies, their repetition, and a willing partner in power: Kuchma and Yanukovych before, and now the far more powerful American president.  Trump truly is the biggest seed of doubt about the West Putin could ever hope to realistically have planted in such a position of power: nations and factions that work with Trump are still repelled by him and, therefore, the United States; they move away from the U.S. in their hearts and see working with America more as a naked power move than being representative of any true affinity or value system.  In doing so, they are more open, at least subconsciously, to the Russian model.  And since Trump clearly favors Russia, being closer to Trump brings them closer to Russia, too.  And if they move away from Trump and the America?  Russia is there, too, watching and waiting: you make your devil’s bargain one way or another, and Putin is the devil behind it all.

To be sure, Putin plays Littlefinger’s game (spoilers in that link) far better, but Trump is still dangerously good at enough elements of it to succeed.   From the war in Syria to Brett Kavanaugh, from border detentions to journalists’ assassinations, pretty much any issue for either man is approached with this gaslighting model.

As noted, Trump, Republicans, Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.  The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

Furthermore, the manipulations that got to this point are also are blatant and beyond doubt.  Between the approval of Javelin missiles for Ukraine near the time when Manafort’s and Mueller’s cases were frozen, the offer made to Poroshenko for a state visit, the May pre-inauguration meeting with Zelensky’s top advisor (if Parnas is to be believed), and the phone call with Zelensky that sparked an impeachment drive in America, that is four possible examples we know of so far of attempts at an improper quid pro quo involving actions prescribed for Ukraine’s government designed to benefit Trump politically in exchange for policy favors from the Trump Administration. At least three of these involved Giuliani.

While there are so many different key players in Trump’s own administration raising grave concerns over his Ukraine actions, they are being extensively laid out and discussed well elsewhere.  What is overwhelmingly clear—no matter how much detail is released or not beyond that initial “transcript” that is not a transcript and the whistleblower complaint—is that Trump withheld both U.S. military aid to Ukraine that had been approved and authorized by Congress through law and the offer of other benefits to pressure and bribe the newly-elected Ukrainian president to go after Trump’s most formidable political rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election as a personal favor (remember that “bribery” is one of the only specific offenses outlined in the U.S. Constitution as impeachable).  Between the American and Ukrainian sides, no one misspoke, there was no ambiguity, no confusion, no misunderstanding: by the end, the parties knew what was being asked for, and what was being dangled in response was also quite clear.

The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In this extraordinary Trump-Russia saga, both ends of his maxim have been easily satisfied as far as proving Ukraine is of a nefarious centrality in collusions between Trumpworld and Putinworld.  But nether end is met with the claims made by Trump and his people about the Bidens in Ukraine.  The media must internalize this going forward and immediately shutdown even the mention of any “wrongdoing” when it comes to the Bidens in any discussion about Ukraine in the context of 2020.

The only hope of beating Trump and Putin at their game of chaos—especially since the well-documented reality is so blatantly clear on one side and so absent from the other—is for the media to steer clear of the false gods of whataboutism (a classic Soviet-style propaganda technique well utilized by Team Trump) and false equivalence; bowing down to them does not make news “fairer” or “neutral.”  It must stop doing Trump’s and Putin’s work for them, stick rigorously to the facts, avoid overdoing speculation, and shutdown and deprive of oxygen the false flames of the Bidens in Ukraine “scandal,” which only exists as it does because of the mainstream media’s myopia.

Ukraine: The Heart of Trump-Russia

Besides not falling for and being used by Russian and Trumpian propaganda, the media also needs to see the bigger picture for what it actually is and to actually start explaining it to people far more robustly than it has tried before.  As it is, the larger tapestry is being missed, obscured, or only partially described in everyday mainstream coverage, and this is a huge problem, since if the public is not even really aware of what is happening, it cannot be properly alarmed about it, let alone make informed choices about how we as a nation should respond.  Simply put, analysis must be better and more robust.

The first and most immediate way to start fixing this crisis is for the media to begin presenting the reality of the current Ukraine firestorm as being the latest in a long series of Ukraine issues that form the heart of the Trump-Russia saga, which hardly ended with the release of the Mueller report.  Too many of the presentations of what is now hurtling Trump and America into impeachment have characterized it as something separate and distinct from the Trump-Russia scandal and its accompanying Mueller probe.

Yes, this chapter is easier for people to understand on its surface than the massive Trump-Russia scandal since it is a smaller chapter of a much larger, more complicated whole.  But that is like saying a piece of lettuce is easier to understand than a salad.  A piece of lettuce is not much by itself, but as part of a salad, it is so much more and has far more meaning, the same as a word in a sentence or a scene in a movie: the true meaning cannot be grasped in isolation.  Framing this as part of the old Russia scandal rather than some bright shiny new scandal is a necessary first step, then.

The next step is to find an easy way to demonstrate how these new developments tie into the older ones.  And Giuliani must be given credit for perhaps presenting the easiest opportunity to be able to do so with the cast of characters he has assembled in Ukraine.

Overall in our exploration, we have here so many threads coming together it can be challenging to keep track of their interweaving parts.  But in Ukraine this year, thanks to Giuliani, we have these key figures from earlier in our narrative working on behalf of or in coordination with Team Trump at the expense of the Bidens: Firtash, Kislin, Artemenko, and Shokin.  In Kislin and Artemenko, we have people who go back to early stages of Russian organized crime elements—especially tied to Mogilevich—that would be allied with Putin engaging Trumpworld and Ukraine, respectively.  Kislin is then later getting a future Party of Regions official an apartment in a Trump property.  We then have in Firtash a bridge to the main gas scheme and Manafort, who also hooks up with Artemenko, who, in turn, brings us up to the “peace” plan episode once Trump is president.  With Shokin we have the post-Maidan Biden situation, and then they all come together.  And they come together with the assistance of newer players in our discussion: Lutsenko, Kulyuk, Parnas, Furman, Fuks, diGenova, Toensing, Rep. Sessions, Solomon, and Sean Hannity, something of a goofy version of the Legion of Doom that took on the Justice League (the Legion of Doofuses?).  This second list brings people with connections to Trump, right-wing media, and Ukraine’s corrupt underbelly into the mix.  They are all joined by Secretary of State Pompeo, the White House, U.S. right-wing media, Kremlin run-and-linked media, and most Republicans in Congress in pushing the false narratives and standing by while the lies spread and people’s careers and lives—even U.S. policy—are ruined by them.  Here, we have Ukrainians, Americans, Republicans, Trump confidantes, media personalities, politicians, prosecutors, and mobsters and all holding hands in broad daylight working to advance a Russian agenda.  We see how Putin uses media, politicians, intelligence operatives, “businessman,” and organized crime like a modern general uses combined arms tactics.  Coming together, they represent decades of planning and preparation on the part of the Kremlin and its Russian mafia allies to both dominate Ukraine and co-opt Trump and people around him to turn him and his people into their useful idiots.

There are various words that can describe so many nefarious actors acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power and organized crime surrounding one person and his associates for decades and continually reengaging him and his people at different points on related issues with the same and/or connected people, but one of the words for sure is not “coincidence.”  Add to that more abstract description that we are dealing with the Presidents of the United States and Russia, and the word coincidence is even more surely not applicable in an exponential sense.

While there is also a good number of other connections between Trumpworld on one side and Putinworld on the other, here we have kept the focus on where those networks meet in Ukraine or are related to Ukraine.  No other topics in the Trump-Russia saga bring as many nefarious players together for nefarious purposes.  Thus, just this chunk alone—a significant portion of, but by no means all—of the Trump Russia saga, is deeply illuminating.

The Trump-Putin Assault on Biden in Ukraine Just the Latest Battle in Russia’s War with the West

As we consider Joe Biden’s earlier efforts in Ukraine, it is crucial to remember Ukraine’s identity crisis.  On one side, there is the old Ukraine, firmly in Russia’s orbit through a system of corruption and oligarchic machination in which gas and other resources are leveraged in ways to maintain Kremlin political control in Kiev.  On the other side, we have a younger Ukraine, looking eagerly to the West—the EU and America—that wishes for transparency, freer and fairer democracy, accountability, and independence from both Russian and oligarchic control.  Biden’s request concerning the prosecutor was very much a part of helping the second Ukraine rise at the expense of the first, part of longstanding U.S. policy since the end of Cold War, helping to advance American interests by seeing Ukraine transform into a fellow democracy committed to the rule of law, fighting corruption, and avoiding conflict in Europe. In this tug of war over Ukraine, those who foster conflict, thrive on corruption, and disdain the rule of law along with democracy are aligned against Biden and with Putin.  With Giuliani’s band of brigands trying to attack Biden, support shady prosecutors in Ukraine, oust a principled head of Naftogaz, restore Firtash to power, and corrupt hard-pressed leaders, it is clear which side Giuliani and Trump have chosen.  Putin has his own soldiers to do his dirty work in Ukraine, to be sure, but when Trump sends in Giuliani with his own people to come work on the ground with Putin’s allies and agents, we have an unprecedented amplification of Putin’s reach and capabilities because of his co-opting of the Trump Presidency.  And this is hardly limited to Ukraine: from Ukraine to Syrian Kurdistan, we are seeing the real-life effects of this play out and, to be sure, the U.S. is losing while Trump and Putin are winning.

In one way or another, all these folks mentioned here are working to further Trump’s and Putin’s interests in Ukraine are all contributing to undoing the reforms Joe Biden pushed for in Ukraine, reforms to make it less corrupt and less susceptible to Russian machinations.  Here, we have the most obviously blatant examples of agents with strong, direct, clear ties to Trump, Putin, and the Russian mafia all colluding together to boost Putin’s interests in Ukraine at the expense of reform long desired by both the West and Ukrainians themselves as well as to help Trump and damage Trump’s strongest electoral opponent, Joe Biden.  Here, the gas scam players and Team Trump are one team, with veterans from many a past campaign coming off the benches to work with younger blood.  Here, we see how Ukraine and gas really are at the heart of Trump’s candidacy and presidency as well as the heart of Putin’s relationship with Trump.

It could not have been executed more brilliantly by Putin: a sitting American president in 2019 uniting his agents with those of Putin and Mogilevich to advance perhaps Putin’s most important foreign policy goal: Russian dominance of Ukraine through corruption to the detriment of pro-Western forces in the country.  Ukraine is, then, ground zero for the New Cold War, the prime focus of competition between Russia and the West, viewed as an essential prize for Putin and Russian nationalism at he seeks to expand his influence into Europe.  This is not hyperbole: since the federal investigation into Giuliani and his Ukraine mischief includes a broader counterintelligence probe over concerns he may be the target of foreign influence operations, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current lecturer on national security law at Yale University Asha Rangappa notes this “means that the FBI believes …[Giuliani] may pose a national security threat to the United States.”

It is also crucial to note that the approach of the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political, media, and business elites of neighboring and other countries, all coupled with disinformation and misinformation operations and eventually joined with hacking and cyberwarfare—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do and has done much the same thing throughout Europe, has done the same to the U.S., and will keep trying to do so.

Putin’s Campaign to Turn America into His Ukraine

Tellingly, throughout this tale, we see here corrupt Russians, Ukrainians, and others from former Soviet Republics who are usually linked to the Kremlin trying to actively engage and collude with Team Trump in corruption by appealing to Trump’s personal interests (as opposed to America’s).  They see themselves and the corruption of their old-school post-Soviet systems supported by Putin in Trump and his candidacy, then his Administration.  That they even think this blatantly corrupt, bribery-and-extortion-laden approach will work with an American president speaks volumes about how low Trump has brought the United States, its credibility, and its reputation, as well as why Trump and Putin like each other so much.

The irony is that we are seeing something of a repeat in history.  Meddling in an election, Putin pushed for an easily pliable crony to take power in a foreign country.  Using corrupt methods but in a free and fair election and facing divided opposition, his candidate triumphed, yet in the span of four years, the extreme obsequiousness shown to Russia coupled with blatant corruption rubbed voters the wrong way.

This could describe either Yanukovych or Trump.  The people did rise in 2014 to oust Yanukovych, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will happen in America.  Many Ukrainians viewed Yanukovych and his Party of Regions not as pro-Russian but as “Russian-controlled,” and Trump and Republicans are facing similar views among many Americans.  For voters to make a truly informed decision in 2020, the media must realize that the Ukraine scandal propelling Trump and the nation towards impeachment is not separate at all, but the latest chapter in America’s Greek tragedy.  We fail to see how Putin uses the same techniques against America as he does against Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and Europe.  And our willful inaction is empowering Putin to just keep doing it more and more to us and more and more around the world.

The number of people with close ties to the Kremlin and pushing for Russia’s interests—especially when it came to Ukraine—working for, or colluding with, Trump’s presidential campaign and presidency is a modern singularity without parallel and makes clear that Trump’s campaign was highly compromised by foreign agents.  Foreign interests interfering in American elections and co-opting top officials in their then-new American constitutional order was one of the greatest of all the major fears of the Founding Fathers, and Trump would have been their nightmare.  On leaving office, George Washington himself told us in his magisterial Farewell Address that “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In tragic plays, from ancient Greece to Shakespeare, our heroes failed often because they failed to learn from their mistakes and adjust, hence the tragedy format.  As Trump tries to make Putin-and-Yanukovych-style corruption the norm in American politics, will Americans, the media, Democrats, progressives, and maybe even some Republicans learn from theirs, or will the third decade of the twenty-first century in the U.S. become a tragedy as well?  Time will tell, but based on how people are behaving now and especially on how the media has miscovered Trump’s efforts to use America’s Ukraine policy to score a political hit job on his most intimidating opponent, it seems not.

What many people forget is that Mueller’s probe consisted of two parts: a criminal probe about which he was required by law to write and submit a report and a counterintelligence probe that would be far broader about which he was required to share nothing.  Asha Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent cited earlier, has written extensively about the Mueller probe and has been careful to make these points repeatedly.  More recently, she noted that the counterintelligence probe that was a huge portion of the Special Counsel’s overall probe may still be ongoing and that knowing if this is the case is important.  Even if it is not, her broader point is key, because Trump-Russia is not just the Mueller report, nor was Mueller’s full investigation simply what was in the Mueller report.  Those larger issues are at the heart of everything dealt with in this piece.

President Trump has acted to benefit Putin on everything from sanctions to Syria, Ukraine being just one hot front in a many-front war that still includes an active home front in America.  These operations thrive on chaos, which is only amplified by poor media coverage.  It is far past time for respectable media to frame “Ukrainegate” in its proper Trump-Russia context, presenting the full and clear picture to the American people of how Ukraine has been at the center from 2016 through today and is central to understanding Trump-Russia collusion, Trump’s rise to power, and Putin’s war against Western democracy.  It must do so by the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses, and it must do so without juxtaposing demonstrable lies about Biden, Trump’s most threatening opponent.  Doing otherwise advances Putin’s interests by gaslighting the American people and committing election interference to the benefit of the Kremlin.  Especially after 2016, there is even far less excuse to miss the big picture, so the idea that the media would not know any better can no longer be an argument: laziness or carelessness would in this case make the media a willing useful idiot for Russia’s anti-American plans.  The media still can and must course correct and avoid a repeat of 2016 or worse, as the survival of both our American republic and the West itself may very well depend on it.

November 23, 2019

UPDATE: December 7, 2019: Giuliani is as of now back in Ukraine and has been meeting with Shokin, Lutsenko, Kulyuk (Kulyk), and even Artemenko. The layers of incrimination and collusion keep adding up!

A Song of Gas and Politics is available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook!

A sample of reviews below:

See related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

In the interest of full disclosure, the author interned for then-Senator Joe Biden for the last quarter of 2006.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 8, EPISODE 4 OF THE SHOW!! (but not beyond)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) May 12-13, 2019 (updated May 17 to add a quote)

All photos from HBO

AMMAN—As I contemplate life, art, and their imitations of each other before the final two episodes of HBO’s magisterial Game of Thrones, it is worth reflecting on the journey of the show’s characters and, yes, our journey with them.

Of course, not all the characters left standing as we entered the final two-thirds of the final season are/were “good guys” or even anti-heroes, but even the most wicked among them has also suffered deeply and grievously.  We now find ourselves rooting for characters that killed (The Hound, Jon [sorry Olly], Theon) or attempted to kill (Jaime) children, just to point out one crazy aspect of this show.  In fact, much with like another magisterial HBO show, The Sopranos, one of the most unique things about this show is the surprising level of empathy, sympathy, and respect it generates in the unlikeliest of situations, both in those watching and between the characters themselves.  Just to name a few such situations in which characters working together in the final season on the eve of the climactic Battle of Winterfell: Night King edition had previously found themselves in terrible relations with each other:

• Ser Davos and Tyrion commanded forces against each other at the Battle of the Blackwater.
• Jorah kidnapped Tyrion.
• Brienne was Jaime’s captor.
• Beric fought The Hound and was killed by him (before being revived by Thoros and the Lord of Light).
• Beric gave Gendry against his will to Melisandre, who nearly sacrificed him.
• Jaime pushed bran off of a tower with the intent to kill him and it left Bran crippled.
• Jaime and the Starks fought a war against each other and Jaime personally wounded Ned.
• Jaime and Daenerys nearly killed each other on the battlefield.
• Jaime had said he would kill Tyrion for killing their father, Tywin.
• Tormund and Jon were mortal enemies.
• The Hound, serving Joffrey, killed Arya’s friend, the butcher’s boy.
• Theon betrayed the Starks and took Winterfell from them. 

All of these people came to later join forces with some degree of respect, enthusiasm, and often even affection.  Incredibly, in the situations over the course of the show through the battle of Winterfell and, it seems, beyond in some cases, these folks take the maxim of Nelson Mandela (“To make peace with an enemy one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner”) to a beautifully artistic height, as insane as it might sound to invoke Mandela and Game of Thrones in the same sentence.

In an age in which empathy, sympathy, and respect is in ever shorter supply, this aspect of the show is without a doubt one of the most culturally enriching and healing elements it has bequeathed to the world, and make no mistake about it, Game of Thrones is global and a part of human culture in a way few works of fiction in history have been, putting it on par with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the Bible (I kid my religious readers… well, not really).  That one of the most brutal shows ever in the history of television may also be helping to make us kinder and remind us all of our common humanity is part of the stunning joy that this show has become.  There is still plenty of time for betrayal and backstabbing, but at least up until this point, there has been a coming together despite the daunting odds and clashing personalities that has been refreshing.

In particular, the second episode of this final season reminds us that, under the right conditions (and threats), almost any set of people can come together and share their humanity.  The small moments of intimacy between characters we’ve known for eight years and who’ve often been mortal enemies, or at least at odds with each other, was once of the most unique series of moments in the show and, indeed, television or cinematic history, as rarely do audiences have scenes that take the time to show us such non-rushed, imitate moments between characters we’ve known for nearly a decade but so rarely got to see interact in this way or interact at all, especially when they’ve so often been enemies, all capped with a barrier-breaking knighting scene for the ages and subsequent warm toast.

Another thing you think of as you watch this final season is that one of the first overall themes that really sticks with you is that flexibility is a key survival tool.  Some of the most important characters that are still with us—Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Sansa Stark, Bran Stark, Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Sandor “The Hound” Glegane—have been able to evolve as the conditions demanded.  Characters that did not evolve—Ned Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark, Tywin Lannister, Stannis Baratheon, Tommen Baratheon—met with untimely ends (to say the least).

The other thing that really sticks with you is how so much death has consumed the land and how pyrrhic almost all of these victories have been.  Of the six main great families of Westeros in the story—the Baratheons, the Starks, the Lannisters, the Greyjoys, the Martells, the Tyrells—all of them have been devastated, losing not only their heads of their households, but others as well, in addition to huge portions of their bannermen and lords.  The Wildlings and Night’s Watch are mostly wiped out, and it seems the Giants and the Children of the Forest might even be extinct.  There’s also only one dragon left.  There’s (almost?) a tragic pointlessness to it all, these petty squabblings between houses, as is often the case in real life (see my take on WWI for West Point’s Modern War Center here); of course, most people dying in a war would hope their death has some great meaning and makes some big difference, but that is far too often not the case.  As Tyrion says in episode four of season eight, “What is the ‘Realm?!’ A vast continent, home to millions of people, most of whom don’t care who sits on the Iron Throne!”

Perhaps the most depressing thing other than Westeros truly becoming, perhaps futilely, a “Feast for Crows,” is that (BIG SPOILER), as soon as the Night King and the Army of the Dead are defeated (and even a bit during the battle), squabbling about who will hold what title and bend the knee to whom comes right to the forefront, with alliances apparently unraveling even before their casualties are fully mourned.  As Tyrion tells Davos during the celebration after the battle, “We may have defeated them [the dead], but we still have us to contend with.” All this, too, is frighteningly realistic, with perhaps the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beginning even in the final stages of WWII while they were still allies only the most prolific example that comes to mind out of many in history.

Even in a world of dragons, Giants, Children of the Forest, White Walkers, wights, wargs, and a three-eyed raven, it seems people really are the final threat.  In our world, we don’t have such horrors to force us to more or less unite, and even in the world of Game of Thrones, that unification seems ever so brief, all the more depressing when one contemplates how hard it is without supernatural threats to transcend conflict in our real world. 

Game of Thrones may offer some individual stories of redemption and noble sacrifice, but its bleakness, as was always the intention of its creator, was always meant to reflect more our own actual world than that of the staple worlds of the fantasy genre.  Perhaps it is with its deep reminders of our own world that Game of Thrones has managed to become such a phenomenon.  Even after the tropiest feel-good battle against the dead, we are so quickly brought back to the misery of human vs. human conflict.

Perhaps in making us appreciate how tragic our own world is, even when reflected in fantasy—and how rare the moments of uplifting transcendence can be—Game of Thrones may help us to appreciate how precious, and worthy to strive for, such transcendent moments of understanding, empathy, cooperation, and peace can be.  May the misery and death of Westeros inspire us to overcome the death and misery all too common in our own world.  If we can grow to love controversial characters like Jaime, Theon, and The Hound, perhaps we can find more room in our own hearts to understand, work together with, and even forgive our enemies in the real world, no matter how bad the sins of the past or the wounds inflicted, if we can find a real effort at redemption in them, as each of those characters in the show demonstrated with great effort and sacrifice after the many evils they had committed.  Having had, just before finishing this essay, a pointless argument in the Middle East (one of many I’ve had) with a friend on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and with my futile effort to try and engender some level of empathy and understanding of the other side within this friend falling far short, I can say that the rare empathy amidst the bleakness Game of Thrones gives us is just as precious, important, and in short supply in Westeros as it is in earth in 2019.  If the show (and books) can help many of its viewers (and readers) appreciate this and inspire them to keep trying or to try harder to create such moments of empathy, the show will have more than earned is viral fame with that kind of transcendence and heart.

See related article: Top Political & Foreign Policy Lessons from Game of Thrones

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), February 6, 2019

Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN—If you’re looking for a State of the Union summary, or a play-by-play, you can find many of these elsewhere.  What I am going to get into here today is the overall meaning of what happened last night, or, rather, the lack thereof.

Aside from the many (and diverse) Democratic women proudly attired in white to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the national success of the suffragette movement getting women the right to vote in America, what stood out to me as a highlight was not anything President Donald Trump said or did, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s so-called “sarcastic point clapback.”  To appreciate this moment, we must understand that this State of the Union speech transcended “normal” such speeches (which in recent years have already become increasingly pointless, even with a master orator like President Barack Obama at the helm) into the realm of the theater of the absurd.  I say this because Trump made a call for civility and bipartisanship when he has been, more than anyone else in Washington, the destroyer of bipartisanship and civility, even in ways we cannot have conceived of until he went there. 

Trump issuing a call on these issues would be like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman giving a joint speech on press freedom or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad delivering a formal address on limiting civilian casualties in war. 

Sure, we can all say “I would never be able to sit through such an absurdity,” but what if you had to?  What if a sacred office you held required you to be there? 

We don’t have to think about this in the abstract, but can just consider the case of Speaker Pelosi instead.

Throughout the speech, Pelosi showed a level of respect and decorum Trump has more often than not chosen to not show her or her office—with Trump routinely calling the Speaker of the House just “Nancy” in public, absent her title, while she refers to him more respectfully, generally with the word “president” in the mix—and at the slightest hint members of her caucus might have reacted more vocally than is the norm, she batted her hand at them to simmer down and they did.  One can recall the wholly unjustified example of Rep. Joe Wilson (R), SC, shouting and interrupting President Barack Obama in a 2009 joint-session of Congress with a scream of “You lie!” (Obama did not lie) and consider that, during Trump’s State of the Union last night, Democrats would have been justified on a factual basis of screaming all throughout his speech the very same at him, even if not on a basis of decorum.  I have written before that I am worried the left is allowing itself to be dragged down into the muck of Trumpism and extremism (most notably Bernie Sanders and his Sandernistas), but last night, I can thankfully say that that was not the case with the Democratic Party.  And to this warm feeling, we all owe a debt to Speaker Pelosi, who knew some of the more interesting personalities in her caucus would relish a Joe Wilson-type moment and thusly made decorum a central theme for the event for her Democrats.

And yet, here she was, standing right behind Trump as he called for civility and bipartisanship when he has been the largest obstacle to both.  On the one level, of course we should all embrace such a call. On another, the messenger does actually matter.  So Pelosi clapped in support of the statement, but in such a way that she let it be known that the gross irony of the moment did not escape her.  It was the perfect combination of class of subtle snark, one that allowed Pelosi to not be co-opted into the theatrical absurdity but even allowed her to fight it without disruption.

And yes, that is the highlight for me.  I could write about Donald Trump’s uninspiring, tired words, and uninspiring, tired delivery.  I could write about some of the most obvious lies and deceptions, including the total fantasy about illegal immigration on the southern border, how Trump tried to claim credit for Obama’s energy policy that made the U.S. the world’s number-one producer of both oil and gas before Trump was even elected, or Trump’s ridiculous claim that his election is the only reason we are not at war with North Korea.  Yet these topics are well covered by countless copycat articles published in the past hours.  Perhaps besides these lies, anyone who was there, who saw or heard him barely manage to deliver a laundry list of overall lies, would have been struck most of all by the unmemorable quality of the whole address, save for moments of absurdity that were not intended effects on the part of speaker.  I have expressed privately many a time before the cost of such a lack of great, or even decent, rhetoric coming from Trump as president, an office that more often than not has been essential in transmitting memory and history to new generations of Americans.  Sadly, today we live in an era where people are reading less and less, and especially less actual literature.  Our critical thinking skills are also sorely lacking and declining, and most Americans don’t even know their nation’s history (and truly, what better way for such a huge portion of Americans to show utter contempt for the societal value of language, thinking, reality, and history—together some of the hallmarks of fascism, I might add—than voting for Trump, a man who makes George W. Bush seem eloquent and intellectually curious in relative retrospect?).  Regrettably, for far too many Americans, one of the only times they will hear any of the words or stories of our Founding Fathers, past presidents, and other great American historical figures is when a current presidents quotes them or tells their tales.  Trump did none of this in his State of the Union speech: not once in his entire long speech did he quote one of the great Americans of the past, and apart from brief mentions of WWII, he did not discuss history.

Obviously, Trump’s damage is hardly confined to the rhetorical presidency and historical memory.  I have long been quite upfront about the threat Trump is to Western democracy in general and democracy at home in the U.S., so on the one level, there is nothing surprising in this speech being yet another step on the downward-spiraling staircase that is our current era (even if I can certainly imagine worse States of the Union from him in the future).  But we must not become immune to these moments and acts of decline, and I write that as much for me as for the audience.  But that fact of the matter is that this is no small task, for Trump’s relentless war of attrition on decency and reality wearies the souls of those of us who have souls left and creates a numbing effect that is a common biological survival mechanism for engaging in deadly combat, and make no mistake: we are in deadly combat for the survival of the West, for democracy, for America.  As Freedom House just starkly noted the same day of Trump’s big speech, “the current president’s ongoing attacks on the rule of law, fact-based journalism, and other principles and norms of democracy threaten further decline.” 

In the end, as much as I am a fan of the oft-ill-covered Nancy Pelosi, I cannot claim the night belongs to her.  No, the night was still Trump’s, his meaningless words put together in meaningless sentences in a meaningless speech.  The speech—as bad and badly delivered as it was—did not inherently carry the quality of meaninglessness, no; that quality was entirely a result of the man who gave it and the Administration that helped craft it.  It was not even the lies that defined this speech.  No, more than anything else, the speech carried with it the searing awareness that we are listening to words come from the mouth of a man who keeps few promises or oaths, lies constantly both compulsively and in a deeply premeditated fashion, capriciously changes his mind on any given issue repeatedly in both the short and long-term, reneges on deals even to the point of causing multiple government shutdowns, and that, ultimately, this is all a farce.

As the late and singular Christopher Hitchens noted, “there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.” The problem with Trump is that we can damn well know he is not even engaging in this struggle.

In other words, this speech matters very little because more words from the mouth of that man will come that will surely contradict what was said last night (which contradicted who knows how many previous statements), and still more after that, to a point where we truly get to explore the word meaningless.  When the president’s words and actions change so rapidly that one must truly exert effort to keep track of, or define, a “position,” let alone a policy—on everything from the border “wall” to Syria—we really are in Game of Thrones’s Jon Snow trap, when Jon lamented: “When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies, and lies won’t help us in this fight” (video but big spoilers!).  We should lament, too, and, like Nancy Pelosi, solider on as gracefully as possible in dealing with that man, his words, and his actions, the meaning of which at times it seems no one, not even Trump himself, is capable of understanding.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcomeI

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

*****

You may not respect his message, his positions, or the man himself, but you must respect his candidacy for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 10, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 10th, 2015 UPDATED (see bottom)

Also published by Stupidparty Math v. Myth.

AP

AMMAN — In the ideal America, egocentric and eccentric billionaire and reality-TV personality Donald Trump would never have a realistic chance at getting the nomination of one of America’s two major parties to be its candidate for president of the United States. Many liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, would not dispute this statement.

However, this is not an ideal world, and America is far from an ideal society too. If you don’t understand the very real reasons why Donald Trump has a real chance at being the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, then you don’t understand the Republican Party, American politics, or American society. Below are the main reason why Trump isn’t going away and why he has a real shot at winning the Republican primaries, if not the general election.

1.) The Republican Party Is-A-Changin’

The Republican Party is in a state of open division and flux, and for all you Game of Thrones fans, remember: “Chaos is a ladder” (spoilers for GoT in this link). The whole significance of the Tea Party movement is that it was a bloody, forceful attempt to pry the steering wheel out of the hands of the establishment and the elites who had been in tight control of the party for years. This peaked in some ways with the 2010 midterm elections in which extremist Tea Party candidates (Christine O’Donnell, anyone?) lost some key and very winnable Senate races to vulnerable Democrats but still managed to win many elections and were the major factor in the Republicans taking the House of Representatives from the Democrats. However, Tea Party candidates were thought to have gone too far in the 2012 election, hurting the Republican Party and even Mitt Romney in Obama’s reelection. Much of the conventional wisdom maintains that the Republicans learned their lesson from the 2012 Tea Party-driven electoral disaster, and have since moderated. What has actually happened is that the Republican Party has lurched to the right, with the Republican Establishment coopting the Tea Party style and message (and lack of substance) out of the fear of being “primaried”: incumbents losing in primaries before even having a chance to go toe-to-toe with a Democrat and losing to extremists within their own party who accused them of being too moderate. The party was hardly moderate before, but even now, it still falls short of the extreme rightist platform and style envisioned by true Tea Partiers. So there is still a war going on within the Republican Party; before Trump’s meteoric rise, this was perhaps best exemplified by the clash between freshman Senator (and all-around disingenuous charlatan) Ted Cruz on the one hand, and more moderate republicans like Speaker of the House John Boehner, Representative Peter King, Senator John McCain, and the Republican leadership on the other. Cruz is hardly alone in his extremism, though: the likes of Representatives Louie Gohmert and Steve King are but a few examples.

Into this struggle for the soul of the party strode Donald Trump. Among other things, he is very aggressively taking on the Republican Establishment in a way that electrifies the base, insulting John McCain, feuding with Rupert Murdoch, attacking both George W. and Jeb Bush, and, in addition, he has enough money (“TEN BILLION DOLLARS,” to quote Trump directly) that he is not at all dependent on the establishment for financing or support. Trump also has no experience as part of the Washington, DC, political machine, thus, he can avoid having to check the rather unpopular box of “Washington insider.” So can Jeb Bush, but he has the last name Bush (and will be reluctant to criticize his brother or father) and will be tainted with that label as a result. Other candidates who want to draw the non-Washington insider vote will most certainly be competing with Trump.

2.) Divided They Fall

History is full of weird winners. In particular, it is not difficult at all to find examples of when one faction or person was able to triumph because its numerous opponents could not unite and stop fighting among themselves. Ancient Rome, for example, was eventually brought down by much weaker “barbarian” factions because its intermittent civil wars among different Romans devastated Rome’s strength and left it vulnerable in ways it should never have been. The Egyptian opposition to Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood could not unite in elections during the Arab Spring, and thus paved the way for Morsi’s victory and troubled presidency, which, in turn, paved the way for General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s countercoup/counterrevolution and the destruction of a nascent Egyptian democracy. Al Gore lost to George W. Bush because immature liberals in Florida and New Hampshire voted for Ralph Nader—a realistically hopeless liberal alternative to Gore and thus a merely symbolic vote that gave Bush victory in both states—because they viewed voting as a masturbatory act of self-gratification instead of a duty to vote with an eye towards the real world impact of voting and not as act designed to make you most pleased with yourself and your conscience, the real world be damned… I’m sure you can think of other examples easily.

As for the Republican primaries, there are currently seventeen Republican candidates. Though Donald trump is nowhere close to garnering support from a majority of Republicans, he still has a commanding lead over his rivals in the latest round of scientific national polling, and even if a full third of the candidates dropped out tomorrow, that would still leave ten other candidates among whom to divide the non-trump vote. The latest polls have trump with the support of about 25% of Republicans nationally. That means the other 75% of support is currently divided among the other sixteen candidates (if that vote is divided equally, each candidate would have only roughly 4.7% of the vote). Jeb Bush, in second place, barely broke into double-digits, and the other fifteen candidates did not break into double-digits. Trump is doubling (or more) the level of support of the candidate right behind him in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, what are supposed to be the first three contests for the Republican nomination.  And in Florida, where Jeb Bush was governor for eight years and Marco Rubio has been a sitting U.S. senator since 2011, Trump is ahead of Bush by 1 % and ahead of Rubio by 20 % as of the latest poll! The first three contests are just six months away or less, and Florida just seven; a lot can change, and a lot must change, for Trump to lose at least the first three contests. But if he manages to stay ahead—and it’s his to lose and the burden is on other candidates to rise up—and wins the first three contests (let alone carry that momentum into Florida and prevail there), it’s very hard to see him losing the nomination.

Normally in the Republican primaries, there is one frontrunner or two candidates duking it out, maybe one dark horse candidate, and everyone else is on the bottom. In this case, there are fifteen candidates currently averaging in single digits. Where normally the few bottom dwellers would drop out and lose campaign cash relative to those on the top, almost all the candidates here are bottom feeders feeding on scarce resources. What this means is that almost all of them are close in both polling status and resources, making the incentive for staying in the race that much higher and the incentive for dropping out that much lower. This, in turn, means that they will likely continue to divide the non-Trump vote among them for months into the primaries, only helping Trump’s chances. The battle for being number #3 (or #4?) , with enough delegates at the convention to dictate things to the eventual nominee, including maybe even forcing the nominee to pick a certain vice presidential nominee, could thus carry a significance that no recent election has shown and bring us back to the old days of backroom wheeling, dealing, and kingmaking of the old-school political conventions. A divided or unpredictable convention, in the world of twenty-first century media, would be a political spectacle like nothing we’ve seen since the Florida debacle in 2000. In such an atmosphere, a man like Trump who seems to thrive on his cantankerous relationship with the media could indeed use the chaos to his advantage and that could very well mean a Trump ascension of the Littlefinger ladder to the Iron Throne of the Republican nomination (if you’re interested, read my take on the political and foreign policy lessons from Game of Thrones).

3.) Republican Primary Voters are a Different Breed

They Republican base voters are in an active revolt against their party’s establishment, and are in a perpetual revolt against the media. Trump picking a fight with Fox News—yes, even Fox News—and debate moderator/Fox News personality Megan Kelly (who did, frankly, in some ways seem hostile and out to get him even if her questions were totally legitimate)—works brilliantly for him in important ways. See, two things members of the Republican base hate are 1.) being told by The Republican Establishment/Elites who to vote for and 2.) being told by The Media Establishment/Elite who to vote for. They way they and Trump see it, both the Republican and Media Establishment (Fox News combines both of these) are out to get Trump, and this is actually true in a number of ways. Mainstream America thinks of Fox News as representing Republicans, and compared to most media, it does in a relative sense. But the base really gets its kicks from media sources like Breitbart and Drudge that have been quite friendly to Trump. They are also even generally older and whiter than the Republican Party in general, a party already known for being older and whiter than the average American, proportionately speaking. This makes them an extreme element in a party that has, as discussed, already become more extreme. In flocking to Trump and his extreme statements, along with Trump the GOP base is giving a big proverbial middle-finger to their own party’s Establishment and to the media in general, who both seemed eager to dismiss him as a farcical sideshow. All this leads directly to the final point…

4.) Trump Knows How to Play the Media to His Advantage Like a Harp

Trump is also brilliant at playing the media here; his provocations ensure he is dominating the news coverage and this is depriving oxygen to other candidates desperate for attention and airtime and who are at risk of suffocation, while at the same time any hostility from the media plays into his narrative that the media is out to get him and is trying to control the election, a narrative that the Republican base is only too eager to believe. That the Republican Establishment’s principal way to go after him is through the media itself is not lost on the base here, either. So in many ways, what others see as mistakes that will “doom” Trump’s campaign are actually nice big plates of red meat for the Republican base, the exact type of people whose support he needs to win primary contests and win the nomination. He is the incarnation of their resentment and they seem eager to support him because of that. And the more these feuds continue, the more that the media, frankly, can’t look away from him because they know covering him will draw viewers and make them lots of money, as the recent debate’s ratings proved (see below). The satirical newspaper The Onion captured the sentiment the best with a faux piece satirically “written” by Trump for parody purposes titled: “Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You?”

*****

I am not here to say that I think Trump will win. I am here to simply say that dismissing him as a sideshow is naïve. Currently, he is the show (not only was the debate featuring Trump the most-watched primary debate ever with some 24 million viewers, it was the most watched program ever broadcast [only] by cable news and easily beat the NBA finals’ and a typical Monday Night Football game’s ratings). Again, as mentioned, someone has to climb up from the pack and beat him. Bush had (see below) been the second highest in the polls, and has raised a lot of money ($100 million+ including his PACs). But he has not been impressive thus far and would need to greatly improve his performance for him to win, and his greatest advantage—his name—is also his biggest curse. Walker had (see below) been third generally, but not even generally above 10 %; he, too, would need to cover a lot of ground to reach first and hardly distinguished himself during the debate even if he did ok. Both Rubio and Fiorina had a good night (the latter only at the kids-table debate where no rivals treated her as a threat or challenged her), but one good night for candidates so low in the polls does not bestow a crown upon either, and they are both quite vulnerable in their own ways (to be discussed in a forthcoming piece). With early signs showing Republican voter support strong and not falling for Trump in multiple unscientific flash polls and in the first scientific poll released since the debate (the latter showing him still nearly doubling the second-place candidate who is now Ted Cruz!), with Bush and Walker falling to be tied now for sixth place, the burden is on one of these problematic candidates or another to make up the gulf in popular support between them and The Donald. Love him or hate him, just don’t be writing Trump off yet.

UPDATED: Another national poll just released today taken wholly after the debate has Trump up to 32 % with a big post-debate boost, almost tripling the support for second-place-Bush who is at 11 %. Ben Carson (!?) has jumped to third place with 9 %, and Walker and Rubio tie for fourth place at 6 % each. In addition, a new Iowa-specific poll has trump increasing his lead, putting him at 19 % to Walker’s and Carson’s tied second-place 12 %, followed by Bush at 11 % and a big boost to Carly Fiorina nipping at Bush’s heels with 10 % and Cruz just behind her at 9 %… As I suggested above, one can almost see Trump as a Roman emperor watching his rivals hack at each other as gladiators in the Colosseum in the sense that he rises above the (polling) fray and the rest take votes away from each other…

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 16, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 16th, 2015

Republished by Movie Pilot

SPOILERS for the first five seasons, including the season 5 finale, but NOT for season 6

Varys: You have many admirable qualities- self-pity is not one of them. Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power, but earning it for yourself? That takes work.

Tyrion Lannister: I’m not well-suited for work –

Varys: I think you are. You have your father’s instincts for politics- and you have compassion.

Tyrion Lannister: Compassion? Yes. I killed my lover with my bare hands, I shot my own father with a crossbow!

Varys: I never said you were perfect.

AMMAN — Game of Thrones, the award-winning hit HBO series that keeps setting new internet piracy records, is an incredibly unique show for many reasons. And though it has dragons and magic and frozen zombies, one of the reasons it is so unique is that it dares to tell us harsh, uncomfortable lessons about the very real world in which we live. Below, ten of the most important and salient will be discussed.

1.) A revolution, a campaign, and winning a war are all far easier than actually governing

“King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have…a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing.” —Tywin Lannister

_____

“Killing and politics aren’t always the same thing! When I served as Hand of the King, I did quite well with the latter, considering the King in question preferred torturing animals to leading his people. I could do an even better job… advising a ruler worth the name, if that is indeed what you are.” —Tyrion Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen

_____

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Politics is the art of compromise, Your Grace.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m not a politician. I’m a queen.

Hizdahr zo Loraq : Forgive me. You’re right, of course. Still, it’s easier to rule happy subjects than angry ones.

Those who are good at climbing the path (or ladder, if you will) to power often find that exercising power or holding onto their new seat of power is far more challenging than the climbing process that got them there in the first place. In the same vein, often the skillset that allows one to ascend to power is not the same skillset that allows one to hold onto power and/or effectively govern. From Robert Baratheon to Daenerys Targaryen, we’ve see powerful characters stumble and struggle to maintain control and to rule the lands they have conquered (and for Jon snow, how many days did he last as the Lord Commander?). An army and dragons can’t govern. Robert’s hold on the Seven Kingdoms was short-lived, and Daenerys’ ability to govern her eastern cities seems precarious at best.  Let’s replace dragons with fighter jets and we can see the same basic experience for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. We can also see echoes of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and both Barack Obama (he is better at campaigning than governing) and Nelson Mandela (legendary as a non-violent civil rights leader and revolutionary, not-so-great as South Africa’s President once in power). Americans were fortunate that their revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers could both lead a revolution and lead a government exceptionally well. France’s Revolutionary leaders during the French Revolution fell far short of the American mark when it came to governing. This show reminds us starkly the difference between getting power and using it well.

2.) Bad and good can and do coexist, even within the same person, policy, or country

Tyrion Lannister: So here we sit, two terrible children of two terrible fathers.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: I’ve heard stories.

Daenerys Targaryen: Why did you travel to the other side of the world to meet someone terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: To see if you were the right kind of terrible.

Daenerys Targaryen: Which kind is that?

Tyrion Lannister: The kind that prevents your people from being even more so.

_____

“You were a hero, and a smuggler. A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good.” — Stannis Baratheon to Ser Davos Seaworth

_____

Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?

Ser Davos Seaworth: I’d say my parts are mixed, my lady, good and bad.

Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.

When it comes to Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark, two of the show’s most beloved characters, most people are ready to sing their praises. And yet, when Tyrion had a chance to escape he murdered both his former lover and his father without needing to do so to escape. Arya herself seems driven by revenge and little else, and was content to let The Hound—the closest thing she’s had to a friend for a long while—die a slow and painful death. At the same time, we have Jamie Lannister—poster child for incest and attempted child murder (remember Bran?)—making us swoon by helping Brienne of Tarth, sticking up for his incest-love-child Myrcella, and standing up to both his father and Cersei on behalf of Tyrion. Sandor Clegane has many awful deeds on his resume, including murdering the butcher’s boy who was friends with Arya—yet he also saved Loras Tyrell from his own brother, Gregor Clegane, when Gregor (The Mountain) was being a sore loser in a jousting tournament, and Sandor also showed more kindness to both Arya and Sansa than arguable anyone else in recent memory except for maybefaceless-man Jaqen. Who here didn’t feel sympathy for The Hound when Arya just left him to suffer? Who didn’t come away from that scene feeling at least a little different about Arya? Then we have Stannis, touchingly showing Jon Snow respect and giving him a lot of leeway even as he sacrificed his own daughter to fire and a stake and murdered his own brother. Even Catelyn Stark killed an innocent girl who was Walder Frey’s ill-treated wife as her last act just before she herself was killed. Perhaps the most conflicted character still alive is Theon Greyjoy, now the shadow of a human being known as Reek. Even one of the Sand girls, who had poisoned Bronn and who was ready to murder a young Myrcella just because she was a Lannister, was willing to save Bronn with an antidote to that poison and didn’t mind showing a man who was down and in jail her lovely breasts as a pick me up.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so unique is its complex portrayal of characters as something more than simply “bad” or “good,” to which so many other shows and movies tend to reduce things. Human beings seem to always have had a tendency to lionize or demonize their heroes and villains in an oversimplified way that bears little resemblance to reality. Robert E. Lee is revered by most white American Southerners as some sort of saint, even as he fought to destroy much of what was the United States and the Constitution in favor of preserving aa society based on race-based chattel slavery. Russians today seem to revere Putin. Ronald Reagan is practically deified as a saint even though his record as president is highly questionable and often shameful. Richard Nixon is demonized even as he made peace with China, created the E.P.A., and ended the Vietnam War (though clearly not in the best way possible), hardly an all-bad legacy and full of significant, commendable achievements. George W. Bush may have objectively had one of the worst presidencies in American history, but he did more than any other president (including Obama) to combat AIDS, spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives. Billions worship Jesus of Nazareth without really factually knowing much of anything about him, and billions others revere the Prophet Mohammad even though they factually know very little about him. The United States often tries to do good, but does more bad in the process. The NSA spying program helps to keep Americans safe but also violates their privacy. Even Pope John Paull II—literally a saint—had a pretty bad record on the child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is in our DNA, but it makes us poor judges of character more often than not and blinds us to the very real truth when we try to make so many public figures into either heroes or villains. We can love or revile characters for certain reasons, and then feel the opposite about the same characters for other reasons. And that’s ok. It’s better than reducing people to simply “good” or “bad.”

In particular for policymakers, this can help people in power to realize that making deals with people who can actually make a positive difference should not be based simply on whether or not they are thought of as “good” or “bad.”

3.) Sexual violence against women is pervasive and often there is no justice for either the victims or the perpetrators

“And to my son, the stallion who will mount the world, I will also pledge a gift. I will give him the iron chair that his mother’s father sat upon. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my Khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt water as no Khal has done before! I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak! This, I vow, I, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness! As the stars look down in witness!”­ —Khal Drogo, translated from Dothraki

_____

“Have you ever seen a war in which innocents didn’t die by the thousands? I was in King’s Landing after the sack, Khaleesi. You know what I saw? Butchery. Babies, children, old men, more women raped than you can count. There’s a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” —Ser Jorah Mormont

_____

“Elia Martell. I killed her children, then I raped her…then I smashed her head in, like this! ” —Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane

I will simply link to feminist writer Amanda Marcotte’s brilliant and very true MUST READ article shooting down all of the specious arguments about why Sansa’s rape scene and others in Game of Thrones are somehow “wrong,” should be done “differently,” or are “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Does anyone think that Steven Spielberg is an anti-Semite because he showed Jews being killed in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List? Today, even in 2015, sexual violence is pervasive all over the world, and even often in the most progressive and modern societies, from the U.S. to Sweden (Stieg Larsson, anyone?) Only about 5% of cases are even ever reported to authorities, which means that for 95% of women even in the modern world, justice for the raped and the rapists almost never happens. Yet people get furious with Game of Thrones because it displays a medieval world (where rape was pretty much institutionalized and far more widespread than it is today) that shows us just that. Whether with Sansa or Wildling women, the show should make us damn uncomfortable with rape, and it does.

If you want a rape story with a happy ending, watch an network TV movie-of-the-week or Lifetime. If you want to be taught an adult lesson about the real state and results of sexual violence in the real world, and walk away with the obvious truth that rape is a mostly unpunished crime suffered by unknown and silent victims, internalize that, be far more outraged about rape that you would with a misleading happy ending complete with justice and healing, and use that outrage to both care and do even more about rape in society, then watch the show. If you want to childishly be coddled and made to “feel good” that rape, actually, isn’t a silent, hidden, mass horror, don’t watch the show. But don’t pathetically try to claim the showrunners or George R. R. Martin are misogynistic, patriarchal, bad people who are encouraging rape simply by portraying it realistically and who have failed in their “duty” to give us stories that reinforce and reward our smug, modern sense of self-righteousness that cries “BAD” whenever things turn out in a way we don’t like. I’m all about women’s empowerment, but the ever-present public talk of women’s empowerment has led too many to believe that this empowerment is a common reality in many places and instances where it is not. A huge portion of the women on earth—perhaps a majority—are not “empowered” and are at risk of abuse committed with impunity, including rape; that’s the unfortunate reality. All (the mostly unknown and unheard) victims of rape are lucky that a show is as brave and bold as this one to make people realize just how terrible and pervasive rape, with its near total lack of justice for its victims, truly is.

4.) The noble path does not necessarily lead to success and the good guys often don’t win

“Poor Ned Stark- brave man, terrible judgement.” —Jamie Lannister

_____

“I’m not Ned Stark, I understand the way this game is played.” —Tyrion Lannister

_____

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” —Ramsay Snow

There is perhaps no other show on television that reminds us as starkly that the good guys don’t always win and following moral and ethical principles does not guarantee success; heck, in real life it often maybe even usually does not. It began with Ned Stark losing his head. And it has hardly ended there, as any fan of the show or books can tell you. Among the ranks of the powerful, there are more Joffreys than Neds. George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns used some pretty dirty and shameful tricks to falsely smear two decorated war veterans—John McCain and John Kerry—and we all remember who won those contests. It is easy to lose track of how many crimes Silvio Berlusconi, longtime Prime Minister of Italy, has been accused of over the years. We have many states ruled by murderous dictators, from Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Putin and the Koch Brothers have immense wealth and power, and can hardly be considered nice guys. Many of the brave people who stand up to these people and challenge them simply lose. Other times, they don’t simply lose, they lose their lives as well (see, quite recently, Boris Nemtsov). Or see Benjamin Netanyahu winning re-election in Israel through race-baiting. Or Hamas winning an election, period. It is useful to remember that, more often than not, this is the way the world works. Ned and Robb Stark, after all, were naïve to proceed as they did and it cost them their lives.

5.) The most horrible acts are often done for the most predictable reasons

“Just how safe do you think Myrcella is if the city falls? Do you want to see her raped and butchered like the Targaryen children?! Make no mistake, they will mount her pretty little head on a spike right beside yours.” —Tyrion Lannister to his sister Cersei, mother or Myrcella

_____

Petyr Baelish: Tell me, Ser Loras., what do you desire, most in this world?

Loras Tyrell: Revenge.

Petyr Baelish: I have always found that to be the purest of motivations.

We often hear the term “senseless horror.” But, quite disturbingly, horror often has a purpose behind it that is fairly banal and predictable, even as it is still often inexcusable. Stannis sacrificed his own daughter to be burned to death, but it was almost boringly easy to explain why: he wants to be king, the one thing which defines him more than other aspect of his character. Joffrey has a bunch of babies killed, simply and predictably because he doesn’t want any competition. Jamie Lannister almost murders little Bran Stark, simply because he doesn’t want his incestuous secret to get out and also to protect his love: his sister. Daenerys reopens the fighting pits to keep the peace and lets her dragons burn a man alive to make an example. Lord Bolton wipes out most of the Starks and their supporters at Robb Stark’s wedding because he wants to be warden of the North. And Theon betrays the Starks to win the affection and respect of his father (which he didn’t).

Likewise, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in large part because it hoped these acts would end WWII faster and to intimidate a muscular Soviet Union. The U.S. much more recently invaded Iraq because it hoped it could bring democratic reform to the Middle East through invasion and occupation in order to reduce the root causes of terrorism and help stabilize a region ripe with fossil fuels. Israel invades and occupies the Palestinians for close to fifty years now mainly because it is afraid for its own survival. Terrorists often use terror because they are weak, oppressed, and have no hope of fighting a conventional military force. ISIS kills dissenters so it can maintain its grip on power more easily. Even the Rwandan Genocide was carried out mainly by one group (Hutu) against another (Tutsi) that was oppressing it, and then a reverse countergenocide was launched in revenge. One can hope that because of the sheer predictability of these crimes, they might at some point become easier to anticipate and prevent, especially for policymakers.

6.) Even in a brutal world, random acts of kindness are powerful

“I’ll stand for the dwarf.” —Bronn, volunteering to fight for Tyrion as his champion

 _____

“Leave him be!” —Sandor “The Hound” Clegane as he rushes to defend Loras Tyrell against his brother, The Mountain

____

“I will be your champion. ” —Oberyn Martell to Tyrion Lannister

Even in as brutal and cruel a world as that of Game of Thrones, there are still random acts of kindness that can surprise even the most cynical. Perhaps the biggest was when Bronn offered to fight for Tyrion at the Eyrie in front of crazy Lysa. Just a few episodes ago, a big hulking beast a fighter, who had no relationship with Tyrion, cut Tyrion free from his shackles so he could join Jorah in the arena and make his case to Daenerys. I already mentioned Bronn’s new love interest saving him from poison, and then there’s Jamie risking his neck to help out Brienne. The Hound saves Sansa and Loras as I’ve also discussed. Ser Davos sticks up for Robert Baratheon’s bastard after Melisandre sets her sights on him, and Sam goes way out of his way to help the wilding girl Gilly and her baby. Robb stark shows mercy to Osha the wildling who almost captured Bran, then she ends up helping to save Bran and Rickon Stark and is still looking after Rickon. And Tyrion goes out of his way to treat Sansa with kindness, passing on sex with her even though, within Westeros, he was well within his rights to insist, as we can tell from the distasteful bedding ceremony. All of these acts of kindness either do or presumably have big consequences for the show, too, and the characters receiving them (many of whom would have died without the help). The big exception, of course, is Oberyn Martell fighting for Tyrion as his Champion in Tyrion’s (second) trial by combat, since Oberyn loses, dies, and then Tyrion is found guilty.

The real world is also full of random kindness, of the type that’s sometimes just enough to not lose hope. As Gandalf says in The Hobbit, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Then again, sometimes good deeds don’t go unpunished. Ned Stark thought he would give Cersei the courtesy of a heads-up that he had figured out Joffrey was an incest-bastard borne of her and Jamie. Lot of good that did him… Similarly, the U.S. had little to gain in Somalia helping hundreds of thousands fend off starvation and ended up with the Black Hawk Down episode, dead Americans, and an Osama bin Laden emboldened by the American withdrawal…

7.) Religion is dangerous

“Trial by combat: deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the Gods, by having two other men hack each other to pieces. Tells you something about the Gods.” —Tyrion Lannister

_____

“We all must choose, man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same. We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false.” —Melisandre

_____

“Death by fire is the purest death.” —Melisandre

_____

“Belief is so often the death of reason. ” —Qyburn

The world of Game of Thrones may be fictional, but it is deadly accurate at showing how dangerous and even deadly religion can be. The Lord of Light priests/priestesses, especially the vampy Melisandre, are clearly fanatics willing to do anything to further their agenda. Getting a major character like Stannis to sacrifice his own daughter by burning her alive was just the latest of her outrages and atrocities. Stannis quite literally played with religious fire, and now he and his wife and daughter are dead. With Melisandre, we see when a cause and religion are united, there are no more rules of decency for the fundamentalists and fanatics. And face-changing Jaqen and whatever sort of Many-Faced-God temple-cult he has brought Arya into seem to employ magic and death and assassination in equal measure. Not to be outdone cult-wise, Jonathan Pryce’s Sparrows—more or less the Taliban of Westeros—are about to turn King’s Landing into the 1990s Kabul of the Seven Kingdoms. They already seem all too happy to murder people who are gay (good luck Loras!), among other fanaticisms. Religious-backed or religion-associated violence are omnipresent not just throughout human history, but in the present day as well, and studies show that religion tends to amplify cruelty and violence in conflict, rather than the reverse, a point I have made before. Groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the (Christian) Lord’s Resistance Army, Srebrenica, both Buddhists and Hindus killing Muslims in South(east) Asia, and, not too long ago, the (Christian) Ku Klux Klan, the IRA/UDF and Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Ireland, and Europe’s pogroms against Jews (just to name a few examples!) are all indicative of this trend. 

Politicians too often simply focus on religion’s positives and blame its negatives on outside forces, but this is specious reasoning at best. The better leaders will be able to recognize the perils and pitfalls of religion and the faithful and be able to guard against them. Cersei Lannister unleashed a demon with her supporting Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow, not wholly unlike the U.S. when it supported mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Fiction that inspires fanatics can be dangerous in both the fictitious and real worlds, it would seem, and the more rational would do best to try to wield and engage such forces cautiously, if at all. Better to avoid playing with fire. The U.S. did not, and 9/11 was one of the long-term results, while Cersei suffered her own personal 9/11 as a result of her poor decisions with that naked walk of shame she had to endure. Thus, the problems with religion in Game of Thrones mirror the problems with religion in our own world.

8.) Trust, loyalty, and friendship are possibly the most prized commodities and they are also among the rarest, while backstabbing and secret agreements are much more common

“Backstabbing doesn’t prepare you for a fight and that’s all the realm is now: backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing. Sometimes I don’t know what holds it together.” — King Robert Baratheon

_____

“People work together, when it suits ’em. They’re loyal when it suits ’em. They love each other when it suits ’em- and they kill each other, when it suits ’em.” —Orell (the Wildling)

_____

“Yes, Ned Stark had many admirers- and how many of them stepped forward when the executioner came for his head?” — Olenna Tyrell

It’s rare, but friendship still shines in Game of Thrones. Tyrion and Varys, unlikely duo that they are, seem to have really bonded on that ship even more than before. Sam and Jon of the Night’s Watch are also quite the bromance, and even Sam and Maester Aemon Targaryen were getting quite close before Aemon died with same at his side. Podrick is touchingly loyal to both Tyrion and Brienne. King Robert and Ned Stark had a touching friendship, too, so much so that Ned Stark was almost the only person Robert Baratheon thought he could trust towards the end. Hodor’s undying loyalty to the stark children is also touching (kind of like a mentally challenged Samwise Gamgee à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings). Ser Davos gets an honorable mention for his deep loyalty to Stannis, though the loyalty is not returned and Stannis seems to be pretty unworthy of Davos’ fidelity, who even lost his son at Blackwater Bay fighting for Stannis. Perhaps more interesting is the bond he developed with Stannis’s daughter, Shireen.

Note how short the above the list is… There are far more betrayals in the show and if I listed them here I’d be giving a summary of the whole series. I think anyone reading this already realizes the value of friends and allies in the real world because how many of us really have many especially close friends, but Game of Thrones can be a good reminder. In international relations and politics, true friends and allies are also incredibly rare. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK is a very rare example of steadfast allies staying together over time, for example. Japan and the U.S.are another good example. Most alliances, however, are borne out of convenience and last only briefly (think USSR and Nazi Germany, then USSR and the Allies in the same war!). This is true in politics too, as we can see politically how many Democrats were afraid to even be associated with Obama in the midterm elections of 2014 (to their detriment), even though Obama was a big part of the reason why many of them previously won in tight races. There is often a negative price to pay for staying loyal. It is hard to tell which city has more backstabbing: King’s Landing or Washington, DC. For non U.S.-readers, I am sure you can pick up your local paper and read similar stories of backstabbing about your own country’s politics. Political and geopolitical winds can shift faster than the power rankings for the houses of Westeros. In the real world, “Red Wedding” Bolton-Lannister style backstabbings are more common than true friendship, sadly. Now, with the Season 5 finale, we can also add Jon Snow’s backstabbing (to his face) at the hands of his own brothers of the Night’s Watch. The policymaker who is on his guard but also values true friends and alliances will be the one to listen to, then, in the end.

9.) The rich and powerful generally do not care about the masses and treat them as their playthings

Tyrion Lannister: Listen to me, Queen Regent, you’re losing the people. Do you hear me?!

Cersei Lannister: The people? You think I care?!

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Olenna Tyrell: If it’s equality you want, so be it. When House Tyrell stops sending our crops to the capital, everyone here will starve. And I’ll make sure the hungry know who’s to blame.

High Sparrow: Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain? Has anyone in House Tyrell? A lifetime of wealth and power has left you blind in one eye. You are the few, we are the many. (Walks away slowly and then turns back) And when the many stop fearing the few… (Exits)

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“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless- that’s how they became powerful in the first place. ” —Tyrion Lannister

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“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.” —Tywin Lannister

You don’t need to read Marx or agree with communism to know that the rich and powerful ruling classes care for little more than themselves (and if you don’t agree with this statement, there is a really good chance that you are rich or powerful and in the ruling class). This goes for most of human history and continues quite powerfully today. And there are even academic studies that prove those on top are more selfish and have less empathy in their bones. There are so many examples of this in Game of Thrones, the way each House and wannabe ruler is so willing to spend human lives to get what they want. Even Daenerys, who exhibits some concern for her new subjects, also expects them to serve her and die for her claim to a distant throne in a land almost none of them have ever seen. Mance Rayder cared for his people. And Mance Rayder is dead. Tyrion and Jon Snow (and the many departed Starks) seem be the only characters in positions of power who routinely try to look out for those less powerful than them. A lot of good it did Jon Snow, as this very compassion is what incited a rebellion of his own Night’s Watch brothers when they killed him at the end of season 5. But almost all the powerful leaders in Westeros seem to only think of their people as objects, breaking Kant’s rule to always treat people as ends themselves, not means to an end. That is still sadly how the world works most of the time, even today. Syria (and now Yemen) and its people have become one giant chessboard, it people all pawns in a deadly game of international rivalries. CEOs make billions and treat their many workers as poorly as they can get away with. The list goes on and on, but the point is, there are very few powerful people who really fight for the masses, and Game of Thrones does a great job reminding us of this.

10.) Preparation and organization are key

“Winter is coming.” —House Words of House Stark

Last, but not least, the show emphasizes that preparation is key. Daenerys has been prepping for her invasion of Westeros for five seasons now (but did not plan her occupations of Mereen and Yunkai well, and thus had revolts in both). Both Tyrion’s preparation for the Battle of the Blackwater and Jon Snow’s preparation for the Wildling assault on The Wall allowed each to save the day. Robb Stark was great at winning battles but Tywin outmatched him by planning for a long game and even turned the Starks’ bannermen Boltons over to his side, defeating his enemy with secret diplomacy. We see preparation paying large dividends. Likewise, in the real world, this also is very true. Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 with a meticulously planned political campaign. But the same man just recently failed to plan for, anticipate, or engage opposition enough for his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and the deal was voted down by the House as a result. The American occupation of Japan after WWII was planned well and far in advance, while the more recent occupation of Iraq was clearly not; the many and telling differences in results are clear. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis are famously well-prepared and organized, and have been for the entire conflict, compared to their famously disorganized Palestinian and Arab rivals. That is a big part of the reason why today there is a full and functional Israeli state, while the same can hardly be said of a Palestinian state, sadly. Game of Thrones mirrors our real world well in showing how serious preparation can really pay off, a lesson policymakers should never forget.

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In conclusion, we can see that the world of Game of Thrones is very harsh and brutal indeed. It is perhaps the most important thing about this work of fiction that is able to so powerfully remind us of how brutal and harsh our own world still is, and to stimulate discussion about these truths and how to address them, both in popular fictional culture and in terms of what we do in the real world.

See related article: Game of Thrones and the Gift of Empathy

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