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"Useful idiot", minor but important distinction. At the end of the day yeah, he's an "asset" in the sense that he's doing what Russia wants. But he’s not doing it because he's a traditional intelligence asset who's taking marching orders from Putin. He has no ideological loyalty to Russia, hell, he can't even muster that for the country he supposedly runs.
Rather, he has to be finessed into doing what you want. That can be a bribe (as we've seen many world leaders figure out for themselves) or it could just be simple praise. Throwing some narcissistic validation into the howling void where his heart should be.
Thing is, that gets both easier and more complicated as he gets more senile. Easier in the sense that (to the extent he ever had one) his conception of reality is eroding. That means he's becomeing even more malleable as even this most baseline level of resistance degrades.
It gets more complicated in the sense that the same is true for everyone else too. Trump's always had a tendency to agree with whoever spoke to him last, even before the very obvious recent decline in his mental faculties. Dementia is probably only going to make that worse.
The main upshot here is that if you know what your doing this man is more suggestable than ever. Which effectively means you now have to account for what eveyone else around is telling him and trying to accomplish. At least, to a greater degree than you were before.
Just a thought here, but maybe we'd have a slightly better time with leaders who aren't suffering from extremely obvious mental decline. Anyways, I look forward to the 2028 presidential election, when America will finally elect Ronald Reagan for a posthumous third term via the proxy of a ouija board operated solely by Henry Kissinger's corpse.
Thing is, that's a distinction without a difference, at least in the eyes of analysts in the IC, the people charged with making a formal assessment. From that perspective, what you do is more important than why you do it because the effects aland the fallout are all the same.
Oh yeah no. If your working backwards from the end result I totally get that approach. I'm not making a moral defense here. All I'm saying is that while we're in it it's important to understand what's going on (and perhaps more importantly what isn't) in his head so that we have an understanding of what's possible. What he might be thinking. In that world, not that of the IC or one that's capable of assessing legal culpability, it's important to draw a distinction between a principled ideologically driven actor and one that's just floating on the whims of their shattered psyche.
Indeed, different approaches lead to different conclusions. Which isn't to say either or is exclusively valid. As I always like to say - two things can true at the same time.
Also, I get what you're saying and didn't mean to imply you were making a normative statement. I also didn't mean to imply that the aspect of understanding is not important. It's fundamental, including from a practical standpoint. In fact, in the past I used to be so much into figuring out the why that I ended up underestimating the what . Then I noticed that different whys can lead to the same or very similar whats, regardless of the content of the whys and I thought that was very interesting. And yet, trying to seperate them beyond the conceptual has tunred out to be nigh impossible.
Anyway, confusing internal monologue over.
Edit: Basically, I am sorta halfway retracting the "distinction without a difference" and going with the always safe "it's complicated"
The distinction with a difference is that anyone can flatter Trump's ego the exact same way. Mamdani seems to have done it. There's nothing particular about Russia that makes it work.
No yeah I didn't mean to imply that this is something that is particular to Russia, or any other entity for that matter. I think the functions and methods must be analyzed independently of who they concern on either side of the equation