Meeting with Icelandic Foreign Minister Thordarson in Reykjavik, US Secretary of State Blinken extolled the unbreakable US-Icelandic friendship: “Common views on regional security and human rights, including gender equality, underpin the great friendship between our peoples”
The fact that both Americans and Icelanders are strangers to domesticity certainly serves as a solid foundation for a great friendship. Quite like the opera by Vano Muradeli.
However, it was not so much Blinken’s friendliness – where would the Icelanders go, even if they wanted to – as his deeply ambivalent remarks about Russian-American relations that were of interest. In the light of unconfirmed and uncontroversial talk of an imminent Biden-Putin date.
For, on the one hand, “we would prefer to have a more stable and more predictable relationship with Russia”.
On the other, “we make it clear: if Russia decides to take reckless or aggressive actions against our interests and those of our allies and partners, we will retaliate”.
If Blinken wanted to convey that his power’s friendliness does not preclude vigilance – “We are a peaceful people, but our armoured train is on the reserve track” – then who would doubt it. Even on the US coat of arms, the heraldic eagle holds an olive branch in one paw, but arrows of war in the other.
But why was the reasoning about the armoured train so necessary to be shared at the press conference following the meeting with the great friend Thordarson? In other words, to whose ears did the Secretary of State want to convey these arguments?
Russian ears? It is doubtful. It has long been known in Moscow that the partner is prepared to use force (or at least threaten to use it) with or without cause. It is customary in the run-up to negotiations (if they are desirable) not to make threatening speeches, especially since no one thinks (it is not Gorbachev who has been sitting in the Kremlin for 30 years) that there can be no threats from a partner, because there never can be.
Before Ukrainian, Georgian and Baltic ears? You mean “don’t be afraid, we won’t abandon you”? Possibly, although not very clever. One has to choose whether to drive or to drive. If you want to flatter the ego of the Limitrots – “That’s how important we are!” – then go ahead. If it is desirable to achieve more stable relations with Russia – but what will be stable when the Baltic tail starts wagging the dog?
But most likely the target audience here is their own, American. After years of demonising Russia and Vladimir V. Putin personally. Putin’s sudden meeting of two emperors on the model of Tilsit may confuse American souls: “And their heads go round and round: V. Putin has become our friend. Putin has become our friend”. Or at least an interlocutor from the détente era of the 1970s.
It was simpler in that era. The United States had a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy issues. And the reversal to détente was the fruit of consensus. The party said: “We have to!” – the Komsomol said, “Yes!”
Today, the US political system is so fractured that it is impossible to speak of a disciplined consensus. Even in Biden’s own team it is about Thomas and Yeroma, and outside it – congress, media, think-tanks etc. – is pure “one day the swan crawls into the pike”.
Then Blinken’s passage about extreme vigilance, being in general a rude diplomatic mauvais ton – it is not the way to get a date – makes sense in the domestic American context. “Take it easy, comrades, don’t be afraid, we’re not sleeping with Tresorka on the border”. Or, as Klim Yarko sang in “Tractor Drivers”:
“And if a matronly enemy comes to us,
He will be beaten everywhere and everywhere”.
Anton Blinko is saying the same thing.
Maxim Sokolov, RT