A really good deep dive into these dynamics!

Below are my thoughts:With the world becoming more interconnected and more limited in diversity, some particular individuals privileged by providence could buy, influence, or control or even own entire regions of the world, not just be satisfied by making space shuttles and going to the moon, or just buying entire islands. They could buy this world out!  

Also, Putin can see that a lot depends on the transmission of data and information, he will go after cyberwarfare as well as disinformation machinery. I believe he is again ahead, like the careful and savvy opponent he is. 

So when a US president kowtows to him while also trashing NATO, European democracies need to understand that they must make efforts towards their own defense. Their main ally the US has trouble of its own as a struggling democracy since one of its central political parties is proving to now be an autocracy.

To be fair though, the US would find it very irritating should there be a USSR’s presence close to the continental US. The Pigs Bay invasion created increased Russian support for Castro’s Cuba in the early ’60s. The US’s attempt to destabilize Cuba’s nascent communist Cuba, back then just 2 years old in order to eliminate the southern itch had flopped, and there was a serious crisis between the 2 superpowers of the time.

IMO, for Putin what he needed was to get Trump elected. Hillary, just like Obama were seriously upsetting him. It is now easy for a man who only plays three-dimensional chess to get so many of his goals accomplished in a very remarkable way! As I keep hearing no one knows what Putin is thinking. The truth is that they aren’t able to connect all the dots and those who do become his enemies.

As I said the day Trump came down the elevator, Americans will take a long time to see the full scope of what had just happened. In these matters of international geopolitics, it is nonsensical to think that an undisciplined American businessman with a half-baked education and very modest intelligence could even reasonably process all such information and data then make a politically balanced decision. 

Torpedoing the Iran treaty just because of bigotry towards his predecessor proves to be more disastrous, but a different topic. Or being televised saying that “the Ukrainian people want to be with Russia”! 

Here is more on the INF mentioned in the documentary:

INF Treaty

US drops out of INF in WikiBut Russia was the purported sabotager. 

Quote from the above wikilink:The US suspended its compliance with the INF Treaty on 2 February 2019 following an announcement by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo the day prior. In a statement, Trump said there was a six-month timeline for full withdrawal and INF Treaty termination if the Russian Federation did not come back into compliance within that period.[76][66] The same day, Putin announced that Russia had also suspended the INF Treaty in a 'mirror response' to Trump's decision to suspend the treaty, effective that day.[citation needed] The next day, Russia started work on new intermediate-range (ballistic) hypersonic missiles along with land-based 3M-54 Kalibr systems (both nuclear armed) in response to the US announcing it would start to conduct research and development of weapons prohibited under the treaty.[77]