(The following was first published on Cumberland Advisors’ website and via LISTSERV. For details, visit https://www.cumber.com/.)

Biden and Trump: They have been and are being observed in real time by Putin, Kim, Xi, Khamenei, et al.
 
Disclosure: as this is written, Cumberland has an overweight position in US defense-aerospace.  For details talk with Matt McAleer.
 
Academy Securities’ Peter Tchir asked this question: “How do we think our main adversaries/competitors including China (Xi), Russia (Putin), Iran (Khamenei), and North Korea (Kim) will react to what they think they’ve learned from campaigns and debates? These bad actors may be incentivized to act sooner than later, raising the Geopolitical Risk.”
 
Bob Brusca posed the dilemma: “The intolerance of one part for the other is a defining feature of the new political landscape. Intolerance and Democracy do not mix. No one reaches ‘across the aisle.’ And this is why the choices seem so stark and the economy is so divided. There is nowhere good to go from here. The risk is that we will be taken advantage of in the foreign policy sphere while we wage internecine warfare at home. And the risk is growing…”
 
I will focus on Putin because he is the one who continually raises the nuclear threat in public pronouncements. But also note that Kim tests his developing nuclear capability, and Khamenei would dearly love to have one. I’ll offer my personal view at the end and after some others are quoted.
 
Here’s an excerpt from a message that I received from GM, who asked to remain anonymous. He was accurately reacting (IMO) to Putin’s Nazi characterization of Ukraine. He wrote:
 

It boggles my mind that I’ve never read or heard anywhere in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine about the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the “Pact”). I hope that’s attributable to my having missed it, and Putin’s characterization of the current Ukrainian leadership as Nazis. Not only did the Soviets not win WW2 singlehandedly, but they were arguably singlehandedly responsible for the Nazi invasion of Poland which triggered it! As I expect you know (in which case why aren’t you writing about it?), that the Pact was a mutual non-aggression agreement between the Nazis and the Soviets, which opened the door for not only the invasion of Poland by the Nazis but also for the partitioning of Poland and other states between the Soviets and the Nazis. That led, among other atrocities, to the Massacre of the Katyn Forest in May of 1940 in which the Soviets murdered approximately 22,000 members of the Polish officer corps, members of the Polish intelligentsia and Polish prisoners of war. Has no one asked themselves why, of all the members of NATO, Poland is the country most passionately committed to the defense of Ukraine? The Poles know the Russians. The rest of us had better learn.
 
I offer the following thumbnail sketch from Wikipedia for anyone so startlingly undereducated as to be unaware of this critical piece of history: Officially, the Pact between the Nazis and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a non-aggression pact with a secret protocol that partitioned between them the sovereign states of Central and Eastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania. The pact was signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Unofficially, it has also been referred to as the Hitler–Stalin Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Eight days later, Hitler invaded Poland and WW2 became a fait accompli. Coincidence? I think not.
 
There’s NOTHING Putin hates more than even the suggestion of Russia being associated with, or in any way similar to, the Nazis. When Prince Charles (as he then was) compared the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 to Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938, Putin foamed at the mouth with his vitriolic denials and denunciations of the Prince’s entirely apposite remarks – remarks which would have occurred to anyone with a scintilla of historical knowledge, but which very few people other than Charles had the wit and/or the courage to voice. I note with approval your reference to Putin’s use of “Hitler’s playbook”, but there’s much more that can be stated, and restated, in that vein. Putin pumps out self-aggrandizing lies by the nautical mile and Western media doesn’t even have the gumption or the knowledge (I’m not sure which is scarier) to rub his nose vigorously and repeatedly in the truth. No wonder he thinks we’re soft, stupid, and generally inferior. Why is the media not repeatedly and incessantly reminding the world of this pivotal piece history? History: a subject in which I have found America to be strikingly deficient over the decades. Even American history appears to be a mystery to many of its citizens. There seems to be no historical lesson so big that America isn’t capable of forgetting and repeating it – quickly.
 
I am an Ameriphile. My mother and my maternal grandparents were American. My mother’s ancestors were represented on the Mayflower, following the promise of more religious freedom to America. Then they were United Empire Loyalists, so I’m a Canadian with many connections to America. I believe in its greatness, and the destiny that’s available to it, but I’m far from being alone in my fearfulness for its future. Its enemies are more focused, disciplined, and ruthless than it is, and they’re growing in numbers, emboldened by America’s apparent failure of vision and its internal divisions. Its allies are justifiably fearful of its reliability in a pinch. The mere fact that I felt constrained to take the time out of my retirement to write this note, about something that should be obvious, indicates the state of my concern. I always enjoy your pieces – usefully informative, generally nonpartisan (at least from my perspective), clearly, precisely, and engagingly presented. Keep it up, and please consider what I’ve said.

Let’s move the conversation to this Associated Press link. Readers are invited to spend 4 minutes for the Putin updates. “Russia presses its offensive in Ukraine and issues new threats as the West tries to blunt the push,” https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-putin-offensive-a0c813d0c5c3c05943d4bec9306dbcd6 
 
Here’s the Institute for the Study of War on June 28: “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 28, 2024,” https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-28-2024 . I will excerpt the opening and strongly recommend readers review the entire discussion. When you do, note the dates of events. Some were on Trump’s watch, others on Biden’s. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin directed on June 28 the production and deployment of nuclear-capable short- and intermediate-range missiles following the American withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in 2019, likely as part of the Kremlin’s ongoing reflexive control campaign to influence Western decision making in Russia’s favor.

John Mauldin gave me permission to quote from an interview with George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures. 
 

Finally, we’ll turn to old friend Dr. George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures. I asked him to share his outlook for the Ukraine and Israel wars.

“The Russian situation is a disaster for the Russians. After two years, they have not succeeded in defeating a miserable little country like Ukraine. They’ve had a coup d’état, tried to overthrow the government. And a whole lot of people dodging a draft. So, when you take a look at the Russian position, they’ve advanced somewhat, but they are unable to surge forward. When they take a city militarily, they should hit hard with everything they have to punch through to the end. And they don’t do it. They don’t do it because their military is not formed properly and because they got into this war with an intelligence failure of enormous proportions.
 
“They failed to understand how the Ukrainians would fight. They failed to understand that Germans were not more interested in oil than the United States. And they failed to understand that the United States had a way to fight a war that didn’t lead to casualties so that we wouldn’t have what’s called a ‘Dover problem’ of corpses coming back. So I look at Russia and I say, ‘You may win, but boy, you should have won long before this.’
 
“Ukraine can’t win. Russia is not winning. We have to have a negotiation. The problem is that Putin cannot admit that he didn’t take Ukraine. He expected to; he didn’t believe he couldn’t. So he wants to have some victory of some kind walking away from it. The United States is negotiating this, and the United States is not inclined to give him that, but in the end, we’re going to have to give him a little flag saying, ‘Oh, you’re a great guy’ or something. But the problem is he failed to take Ukraine, and the United States is in a position that it wants to get out of the war. It’s had enough. So we’ll have a negotiation.”
 
This is, again, hard to imagine right now. But George says negotiation is the best possible outcome for both sides, so that’s where it will go.
 
(Thoughts from the Frontline, June 29, 2024, subscriber email)
Kotok’s view: 

Of the bad actors, I believe Putin is the worst of a very dangerous lot. He has painted himself into a corner, and we all know the history of dealing with a cornered rat. A few readers have objected to my strident view of Putin. One said I’m a “neocon.” Call names if you will, but the reality is that we can see the results. Cyberattacks originate in Moscow or Pyongyang. Look at the recent ransomware attack on US auto dealers. Or previously on the British hospital system. Look at the use of cyberwarfare in our political system. We are open and vulnerable, and cyberwarfare is now rampant; just look at your inbox or your texts.  Just think about the fact that you are besieged with messaging of all types coming from machines.  You are on a public list if you are a voter in America.  You have no way to be sure who is sending you a message.  You are a target of continuous and innovative attempts to deceive you.  AI is a fantastic new tool in the hands of the benevolent: it is dangerous in the hands of the malevolent. 

Our American political divide is our worst enemy, and there seems to be no apparent pathway to closing it. That now costs us economically and threatens us geopolitically. And we are dealing with a growing debt-to-GDP ratio that may impair the financing of the defense budgets we will need and, IMO, need soon.

In sum, risks are rising worldwide. Our politicians in both political parties are failing us as they appear to be captured by the extremes within their caucuses and parties.

And those of us who are centrists (like me) may be politically homeless and don’t know what to do.