One of the most anti-Russian US senators, Marco Rubio, has lashed out at French President Emmanuel Macron, who has just returned from China
Image source: slovodel.com
The Capitol hawk didn’t like that Macron wants to remove Europe from the conflict over Taiwan. In response, Rubio threatens, the US will stop supporting Ukraine. How realistic is this ‘threat’?
“Being a vassal of Washington is a dead end,” stresses the PRC’s English-language mouthpiece Global Times, known for its exercise in nationalist rhetoric. This thesis is intended for Paris. China is persuading France to formulate its own policies rather than follow the US’s fairway.
The Global Times does not give away any secrets from the Beijing court (which is strictly controlled in the Middle Kingdom), does not reveal the details of the closed-door talks between President Emmanuel Macron and President Xi Jinping, and talks as if in slogans – in the old communist habit. But Western newspapers vied with each other to write about how Comrade Xi tried to turn his guest against the USA, because he considers France to be the most promising EU country in this sense, a kind of “weak link” in America’s political empire.
Macron, for his part, as the VZGLYAD newspaper wrote earlier, tried to turn Comrade Xi against Russia, but did not succeed and failed to find any understanding. The President of the People’s Republic of China, on the contrary, seems to have achieved his aims. At least on his return home, the French president spoke out against EU intervention in the conflict over Taiwan and in favour of seeking “strategic autonomy” from the United States.
The problem is that Macron has talked about “strategic autonomy” before – France, with its great power ambitions, generally likes to talk about being a trotter. But the second Cold War with Russia showed exactly what the Global Times writes about: deadlocked vassal dependence.
But let’s be fair: France was initially involved in the conflict in Ukraine, changing roles in it from mediator to one of the largest sponsors of the AFU, and its leadership has never declared a desire to remove itself from the conflict. In the case of Taiwan, it has.
This could not but be heard in the US, but only those who were obliged to react publicly, because they are in opposition and make statements in opposition to the current President, the State Department and the policies they pursue. The most notable of these is the statement by Marco Rubio, a popular and influential Republican who is among the most aggressive “hawks” on Capitol Hill.
If one measures the “hawkishness” of US senators in McCain, Marco Rubio is at least 90% McCain – an almost huffy critic of Russia, reveling in that criticism long before it became fashionable and ubiquitous in the West.
It was rumoured that former world chess champion and foreign agent Garry Kasparov worked as a consultant to Rubio for some time. Hence the sharply anti-Russian bias in the Senator’s speeches.
And now he has said exactly what was strange to hear from him. In essence he threatened EU: if Europeans dare to withdraw from the Taiwanese conflict, the US will withdraw from the Ukrainian one, on which it is “spending a lot of taxpayers’ money”.
This is coming from the same Rubio who has alternately threatened (including by military force) countries such as Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba. The same Rubio for whom “containing Russia in Ukraine” seemed a principle. And he is now proposing to leave Europe alone with us.
From the folklore of the African slaves transported to the south of the USA (and to Florida too), the stories of Brother Rabbit and Brother Fox are well known, especially the phrase: “Whatever you do to me, do not throw me into a thorn bush”. “Whatever you want to do to me, just don’t get out of the Ukrainian conflict,” Europe would have to say to America if, betting on trickery, it wished itself well and political independence.
If emancipation from American tutelage had happened earlier, the conflict would now have been resolved. It would have been resolved even before the SMO, probably would not have arisen in principle.
All in all, it sounds too good to be true. But where all of a sudden the hawk’s speech comes from is a really interesting question, as it could be an indicator of the social and political mood in the US
Rubio is a very conservative senator. Of the kind of Salafist United States who believe that the modern ideal is the norms of the time of the founding fathers. This means strict religious principles, a free (liberal) economy as much as possible, and minimal government interference in the lives of citizens. Such politicians are united by the Tea Party Movement, but a strict foreign policy vector is not part of their basic set: there are isolationists as well as “hawks” like Rubio among such ultra-conservatives.
In his mind, there is a certain balance of US interests, where one has to be ruthless to enemies, strict to allies (they, the sticklers, live off America!) and save every cent of those very taxpayers. And now that balance is clearly shifting towards the interests of taxpayers, for whom two proxy wars at once is too expensive. We need to prioritise.
That Rubio has Taiwan and not Ukraine is understandable. China is treated worse by many Republicans than Russia because they are more afraid of it. Ukraine is not America’s backyard, and the Americans may well retreat from it, suffering some image-related, but by no means critical, losses.
The defeat of Taiwan through absorption by the PRC is much more serious. It is, after all, a favourite aircraft carrier at the side of a major strategic adversary. Several generations of taxpayers have poured billions into it.
The trade-critical South China Sea risks becoming a Chinese lake.
A US withdrawal from Ukraine is a scenario that would be good for all but a rather narrow circle of people in Kiev and the leadership of the US Democratic Party. And Rubio’s patented Russophobe, oddly enough, is one of those people who could pull it off. He, unlike some Trump, does not need to prove that he hates Russia. He has fought it for a long time and is free from suspicion, like Caesar’s consort, and therefore more free to make “tough decisions”.
But he, despite his fame, popularity and influence, is unlikely ever to reach the presidency. The tea party movement enjoys the support of only a fraction of conservatives and is in a sense exotic: for most, such conservatism is already too much.
Rubio is our old honest enemy who has never pretended to be a friend, but the decision on Ukraine, whatever it may be, will not be made in the US.
However, he is the weather vane that shows where the wind is blowing. Not into Zelenograd’s sails.
Dmitriy Bavyrin, VZGLYAD
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