The key issue of the current moment is the prospect of a meeting between the presidents of Russia and the United States, the idea of which was proposed by Joe Biden
In theory, any negotiation by definition presupposes the existence of a position, purpose and recognition of the equality of the interlocutors.
However, the entire subsequent set of actions by the American side suggests that Sleepy Joe intends to meet with Putin only in order to read an ultimatum. It is clear that speaking the language of ultimatums with Moscow is futile, especially in the context of the ongoing US withdrawal from the world arena. Therefore, as the experts of RUSSTRAT have repeatedly voiced, for example, here, the initiative is on the side of Russia, and it is Putin who can make such an offer to Biden that he cannot refuse.
This poses a major problem for the United States. Absolutely all the key components of the international policy of a country that actively aspires to global geopolitical leadership and also has one of the world’s largest strategic nuclear arsenal are losing their consistent clarity.
What are the fundamental goals of the United States ruling elite leadership group? In what ways does she consider it appropriate to achieve them? And in general, who exactly are these people, in whose hands is the “nuclear suitcase”?
The listed questions are not at all as abstract as it might seem from the outside. Without a clear understanding with whom and what we are talking about, it is impossible to judge the degree of reliability of any agreements reached.
Take, for example, the story of Biden’s invitation “to meet for negotiations in some neutral country.” It has long been no secret, and the Kremlin and the White House acknowledge that US-Russian international relations are at their lowest level since the days of the Cold War.
In practice, this means complete mutual non-recognition not only of each other’s initial negotiating positions, but even of the underlying value and ideological imperatives underlying them. In the American model of “the only correct arrangement of the planet” there is no place for an independent, strong, economically developed, actively, and with great profit, trading with the outside world of Russia, which has its own view of the righteousness of life. In turn, any other version of the world is no longer interesting to us.
In theory, especially after repeated statements about the desire of the new White House administration to decisively clean up the Augean stables of the negative consequences of Donald Trump’s erroneous international policies and restore the system of geopolitical agreements and alliances he had destroyed, at first it even seemed that the US president had offered the Kremlin an almost complete reset. Like, let’s start with a clean slate, otherwise the smell of gunpowder is too sharp.
However, other steps taken by America almost immediately pointed to the opposite.
In particular, Biden introduced a national security emergency in the United States. Although the meaning of this action was misunderstood by most foreign commentators – it was not about military patrols and curfews, but about expanding the president’s rights to manage the budget without mandatory approval by Congress – Russia was declared guilty of imposing a state of emergency, allegedly attacking American electronic resources and interfering with American democratic process.
It turns out that Washington is holding out an olive branch with one hand and whistling with a sling with the other. Whether it is possible, in these conditions, to trust America, the question becomes decisive. All indications are that the convulsive wobbling of American politics is the result of deep internal divisions within the American ruling elite. American experts came to the conclusion that within the “Politburo of Unknown Fathers”, apparently, four pro-government groups have formed with very different views on “a better future for America” and almost equally great influence not only in general politics, but also in specific elements of the state apparatus. Moreover, this influence is used by everyone independently, which is why outwardly there is a feeling of “swan, crawfish and pike”.
One of them can be considered the people “behind the back” of the current Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who is distinguished by a tough hawkish position on the entire gamut of significant external and internal issues. The one who occupied a prominent place in the Barack Obama administration had extensive effective ties with a variety of “international capital” (Middle East, including Saudi, Qatari and Israeli) and “helped solve slippery issues” to the son of the current President of America, Hunter Biden.
He is also the co-founder of WesExec Advisors, a consulting firm created by two other ambitious Obama Democrats, Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda. The first in two Obama’s terms got to the post of chief of staff Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN. The second reached the level of senior adviser to US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. By the way, another co-founder of WEA is the former Deputy Defense Minister for Political Affairs Michel Flournoy.
To better understand the essence, please note that the clients of WesExec Advisors are: an Israeli artificial intelligence firm, an anonymous drone surveillance company, Facebook, Uber, LinkedIn, McKensey, Boeing, Big Pharma titanium, Gilead, and the hegemons of the investment business Blackstone, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Canada and even Sotheby’s. Data is not from the ceiling. Tony Blinken told about this during the standard screening procedure for entering the civil service.
In general, this is a grouping of international money and the so-called Big Dates. With very radical views on how “America should be great again.” The slogan is of course Trump’s, but the position of the “Blinken group” fully corresponds to its essence.
Great America is obliged to become, and quickly and without liberal activity along the way. It is necessary to talk to others, first of all, from a position of strength, demanding complete and unconditional submission. And whoever disagrees – that with a club. And it’s good if just by economic sanctions, otherwise America is the most powerful military power in the world!
In a word, the classic story of the merging of big politics with big capital, characteristic of the last two decades, for mutual cover and mutual reinforcement. Another group is embodied in the “Hillary Clinton Man” – National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Former Swedish
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt calls him “the superpower of democracy in our world.” At Yale he received his Juris Doctor degree. He worked at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization and the US Supreme Court.
He was an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, then moved to a similar position at Obama’s campaign headquarters. He was in charge of Hillary Clinton’s staff during her tenure as Secretary of State. In 2011-2013. he headed the Department of State Policy Planning. In 2013-2014 served as National Security Adviser to Vice President Joseph Biden.
In short, this is the person who directly shaped America’s foreign policy throughout the Obama presidency, including on Libya, Syria, Myanmar and on the nuclear deal with Iran. During the Trump period, he retired from politics and quietly consulted large corporations on international economic and political issues in the consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners. Then, in 2020, he became Joe Biden’s right-hand man on national security issues, thanks to which he got his post after his election victory.
During the Obama period, Sullivan was considered a very tough hawk. According to the sources of The New York Times, he managed to reach an agreement with Iran only thanks to the active interference in the negotiation process of the Deputy Secretary of State William Burns.
He, like Blinken, believes that “because of Trump’s policies,” America has gone too far into isolationism, because of which it has lost a fair amount of international influence. Which should be returned in the shortest possible time. But, surprisingly, in Biden’s team, Sullivan is much closer to pigeons, advocating a decrease in the military aggressiveness of American policy due to the excessive resource cost for the United States of implementing such a policy.
And this is, to say the least, strange, since in the past, in the design of the presidential apparatus, the national security adviser always turned out to be a hawk inclined to the dominance of force methods, while the secretary of state was a person who was firmly convinced of the superiority of diplomatic methods over force. But here it turns out on the contrary, the “chief diplomat” insists on the maximum expansion of the “space of war”, and one chief security official insists on moderation in brandishing a cudgel.
The third group consists of people in the Obama period in the big politics of heavyweights, but now, at first glance, are in the shadows. Such as, for example, the geopolitical mastodon – Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State and now the humble leader of the Hoover Institution and a member of the Board of Directors of Dropbox and Makena Capital Management, LLC. No, she does something and often interacts with the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, but what exactly remains under a veil of secrecy.
Or take another Rice – Susan – who once represented the United States at the UN, a big adherent of the imposition of sanctions, who greatly toughened them against Iran and North Korea, and in fact launched the American bombing of Libya. Now he is engaged in the Council on Domestic Policy, which officially generally serves as a kind of advisory body “for talking”, like PACE in Europe, which does not claim anything serious. However, she is there, and also periodically noted in contacts with Harris’s people.
And the very seemingly quiet position of the US President’s special envoy for climate issues, which is occupied by John Kerry. Here the planet is almost balancing on the brink of a nuclear war, and the most experienced heavyweight of American politics is holding some kind of negotiations about the carbon footprint.
True, knowledgeable people understand that he is preparing not just an international meeting for the sake of formality, but an event that should turn the world around, creating a completely new mechanism for America’s global domination, but based no longer on tanks and aircraft carrier strike groups.
The most important front, which will not be assigned to anyone, and it is impossible to achieve success without iron nerves, extensive experience and even broader connections in the business and political world. However, for the third month of Biden’s presidency is coming to an end, and Kerry has never flickered in front of large television cameras. Because of which there is a strong impression that somewhere here is the fourth pole of the above-mentioned “Politburo of unknown fathers”.
And most importantly, they are all busy with something of their own. The person responsible for the “climate” needs not just “all the countries of the world” to attend the 2021 climate summit, but that Putin and Xi certainly take part in its work. Why America with Russia and China would be better off not to quarrel. At least this year. Whereas Blinken wants to convince the rest of the world of the indisputability of American superiority as quickly as possible and at almost any cost.
First of all – power.
That, at the end, turns into a new diplomatic war between the US and the Russian Federation, with Lavrov’s recommendation to the American ambassador to Russia “go home for a consultation,” stunning in its depth of meaning. And an equally vivid response from the American Foreign Ministry, which expressed regret about the new anti-Russian sanctions, but immediately noted that Moscow’s attempt to respond to them in any way would inevitably result in even greater mutual escalation.
Above all this, in the form of a “bow on the side”, a declaration on the withdrawal of the US armed forces from Afghanistan (completely) and the Middle East region (in general). However, this conclusion is strange. First, almost three times the number of contract soldiers in Afghanistan still remains. A number of sources say that by the fourth quarter of this year, it may even be significantly expanded.
Secondly, the withdrawn troops will not go home to the United States, but will be returned to the points of permanent deployment in Western Europe, to which they are formally assigned in the structure of the Pentagon’s regional commands. And it may very well be that some of them will even have time to participate in the Defender of Europe 2021 global exercises, not without reason called a possible camouflage operation as part of the preparation of the official entry of American expeditionary forces into Ukraine.
Against this background, the national security emergency, on the one hand, seems like a mere trifle, almost empty bureaucratic formalism, but in reality signals a serious power struggle going on behind the scenes in the United States.
Because with this decree, Biden expanded his powers to manage budget money, in particular, to maneuver funds between expenditure items, without coordinating these steps with Congress. But it is money that is the basis of any power. And since the presidential decree “took place”, it means that the “Politburo of unknown fathers” managed to pull over even more of the imperious blanket.
But this also means that the process of changing the mechanism of power in the United States is far from complete. Although he goes extremely non-publicly, nevertheless, on most issues, America changes its official position literally like a weathervane in a good thunderstorm.
This poses a serious threat. The question arises – who is in charge of the notorious “nuclear suitcase” there? Who and how makes the decision to start a war? What and in what way guarantees America’s fulfillment of the terms of any agreements? And in general, except for the impudent impudence – everyone should stand, everything is mine, I am the only one in charge here – the American long-term realistic position concluded.
What is it about?
How to understand, for example, Washington’s desire at any cost to protect Europe from Russian gas supplies in conditions when it is unable to replace this volume with American because of the collapse of the shale revolution? Where is the logic in this? And we absolutely need to understand it, because otherwise, the risk of waking up one morning in the middle of a real nuclear war is exacerbated.
The world is in a state of global transformation, within which the aforementioned “four poles of the American Politburo” are clearly seeking to implement a complex multilateral plan, the top of which should be two key events.
The first is the summit of the League of Democratic Countries scheduled for 2021, which will have to replace not only the meetings of the “new international government” in the form of all kinds of Gs (G7 / G8 / G12 / G20), but it cannot be ruled out that even the UN. It is clearly seen that the “Yalta world” is living out its “last days.” For two decades, the United Nations mechanism has failed to prevent a single significant international conflict, starting with the NATO aggression in Yugoslavia.
What is important, the NATO military bloc is in the same pre-infarction state today. Washington succeeded in gathering 29 countries into it, but in terms of the level of real possibilities the expansion of the number of members did not lead to an increase in its quality. Rather, the opposite is true. And everything indicates that, after the establishment of a new “Western alliance of the most important” in the face of the League, the North Atlantic Alliance also expects a large-scale reassembly.
Because a situation in which, for example, the United States promises to accept Ukraine into NATO, and all of America’s European allies, with the exception of Poland and the Baltic countries, publicly speak out categorically against such a step. And the point is not that for Russia, Ukraine’s joining the Alliance may create additional foreign policy difficulties (most likely, even the opposite), just in a mishmash of almost instinctive momentary, and often even just hysterical, body movements, someone in the crowd can accidentally elbow the big red button on the remote.
The second is the very same Environmental Summit, at which John Kerry is going to officially consolidate the “international distribution of labor”, that is, divide the planet into the “first world” and highly specialized colonies, deprived of the opportunity to ever develop economically and technologically to a level that could pose a threat to domination United Shatov. With a flexible system of rules that allows transnational financial corporations to continue to parasitize on the international economy.
Then the question arises – what exactly is Biden going to talk with Putin about at the proposed meeting? The version that this is some kind of empty ritual curtsy does not stand up to criticism. The entire policy of the “unknown fathers” clearly shows their desire to abandon public rituals that have lost their meaning as quickly and on a large scale as possible.
Hence, it turns out that Biden there intends to offer something critical for the United States. Only the form of the offer remains unclear – normal bargaining or just a slightly polite ultimatum?
Both options are equally likely. And they stem from the situation with China, which was greatly mistaken in its strategic calculations. When launching the process of strategic development, Beijing proceeded from the fact that they have at least three decades to prepare the financial and industrial foundation.
This made it possible to formulate five-year plans, considering that before 2034–2035 any serious friction with the United States over international markets would not begin. Then yes. By 2039–2040, competition will take on acute forms. But by this time, China will firmly enter the top league in terms of money, technological equipment of production and scientific and technological development.
Plus, it will sufficiently modernize the army and acquire a full-scale advanced military fleet capable of equally opposing the Americans in the western part of the Pacific Ocean.
But the reality turned out to be different. Instead of 2034, the Americans, as competitors, began to fizzle out already in 2014. Two decades earlier than planned. This required the PRC to sharply adjust its plans, for which the system was not very ready. For there are things that cannot be accelerated in principle.
Yes, and American analysts caught on, realizing that in the current dynamics of the development of events, after 2027, the United States will definitely not be able to defeat China by military means. And if we do not break the process of forming a Chinese closed economic cluster based on the ASEAN countries, launched in November 2020, then the critical milestone “when everything was lost” has every chance to move to the left even by 2025.
So there is not much time left for Washington. Over the next couple of years at the most, including 2021, the “unknown fathers” need to have time to consolidate the “rear” in the form of a new system of “Western world order” in the widest possible space, including both Americas, Europe, decide on Turkey, the Middle East and, which is critical important – with Russia.
Most likely, Biden will try to persuade Putin to “take a place at the foot of the throne of American hegemony” in exchange for some vague and vague promises, such as “so be it, America will not support Ukraine too strongly.” Simply because Russia has nothing more to offer him. Whether we need to accept this proposal is a rhetorical question. Moreover, in the absence of at least some reliable guarantees of its implementation, and especially in light of the outrage that is currently happening within the ruling elite of the United States itself.
But to accelerate the process of leaving the zone of influence of the “Western world” (SWIFT, dollar, technology, software, etc.) is required immediately. Because America has no other instruments of non-military pressure on Russia. This means that she will try to hit precisely on these, still sensitive, painful points. Accordingly, the Russian “counter-proposal” should take into account these and other points in order to interrupt the proposal of Sleepy Joe and the forces behind him, and set its own agenda for world development.
Russtrat