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On The Delusion In U.S. Foreign Policy And What Might Change It
The current U.S. foreign policy is delusional. Its attempts to command the world are getting laughed at. How did this happen and what might change it?
Here are excerpts from two smart essays which discuss the theme.
Alastair Crooke asks why somehow nothing seems to be working within Joe Biden's United States. He then observes of its global policies:
At the international geo-political plane, things don’t seem to be working either. Team Biden says it wants a ‘managed competition’ with China, but why then send Wendy Sherman (who is not noted for her diplomatic skills) to China as Biden’s envoy? Why has there been this continuous chip-chipping away at the 1972 ‘One China’ policy with a series of small, seemingly innocuous moves on Taiwan if Team Biden wants contained competition (what he said he wants in a recent call with President Xi), but falters, time after time, to instigate a serious relationship?
Does the Team not understand that it is not ‘containing’ competition, but rather playing-with-fire, through its’ opaque hints that the U.S. might support Taiwan independence?
And then, why of all people, dispatch Victoria Nuland to Moscow, if the competition with Moscow was to be quietly ‘balanced out’ as Biden’s face-to-face with Putin in Geneva seemed to signal? Like Sherman, Nuland was not received at a senior level, and her ‘Maidan arsonist’ reputation of course preceded her in Moscow. And why decimate Russia’s diplomatic representation at NATO HQ, and why have Secretary Austin talk in Georgia and Ukraine of NATO’s ‘open door’?
Is there some hidden logic to this, or were these envoys intentionally sent as some kind of ‘kick-ass’ provocative gesture to underline who’s boss (i.e. America is Back!)? This is known in Washington as ‘capitulation diplomacy’ – competitors are presented with only the terms of their capitulation. If so, it didn’t work. Both envoys effectively were sent packing, and Washington’s relations with these key states are degraded to near zero.
The Russia-China axis have come to the conclusion that polite diplomatic discourse with Washington is like water off a duck’s back. The U.S. and its European protégés simply do not hear what Moscow or Beijing says to them – so what is the point to talking to ‘tin-eared’ Americans? Answer: None.
Prof. Michael Brenner recently sent a longer diagnose of the U.S. political sphere to his mailing list. He sees the same foreign policy problems as Crooke does and tries to answer some of the questions Crooke is asking:
The United States’ mounting hostility toward China should be understood in reference to the anxieties and anguish of a declining hegemon.
[…]
[T]he great American experiment itself is now obviously in jeopardy. [..] A country that held the world in awe as the land where the ‘common man’ reigned does not passively accept its degeneration into a predatory oligarchy. It does not experience the degradation of public discourse to the point where candor is an endangered species and truth itself homeless.
As the connection to reality loosens, disengagement approaches the point where reality ceases to have any claim of primacy over illusion. One inhabits an insular world from which other things, other persons only have meanings as players in the life drama that you have scripted. When those others resist playing those roles, they are cajoled, coerced and then punished. We literally refuse to take ‘NO’ as an answer. Let’s look at the tack repeatedly taken with foreign governments to discern how this dynamic works out in practice.
On China. Anthony Blinken flies to Anchorage to instruct his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Li, that Beijing should stop doing things that the United States objects to, and instead should do as we tell them. Wang’s response, in diplomatic language, is “shove it!” Some months later, Blinken calls Wang with the identical message – and gets the identical response. In between, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, flies to the PRC where she meets Foreign Ministry officials to whom she gives a familiar shopping list of American demands spelling out how we want Beijing to correct its misbehavior. Her interlocutor, in exchange, hands her a Chinese shopping list accompanied by a lecture that boils down to “shove it!” And so on.
On Russia: The exact pattern repeats itself in meetings between Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on the American side, and senior Kremlin officials – foremost being the formidable Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov. These exchanges are punctuated by an in-person summit between Presidents Biden and Putin held in Geneva at the White House’s request. Biden's main purpose was to calm the waters he himself had churned up by encouraging Ukrainian President Zelensky to make preparations for an assault on the Donbas. Caught by surprise at the stern Russian response, he was forced to backpedal. The diplomatic retreat was covered by a rote restatement of American criticisms re. Crimea, alleged electoral interference, Syria, human rights and Navalny (the born-again democrat who first made his mark as a rabid Muslim-phobic rabble-rouser). As per usual, Putin coolly refuted all the charges, noted some of Russia's own complaints, and make a concrete proposal to open a round of talks on strategic nuclear arms. Washington has shown no interest in the last. So, the two men parted ways. Product? Zero.
As a final tragic-comic twist, Biden subsequently sends Victoria Nuland to Moscow – yes, the same Nuland declared persona non grata by Russia for her role as provocateur in the Ukrainian coup and notorious vilifier of Putin and the Kremlin. Her rancorous visitation pretty much slammed shut the window insofar as any serious dialogue between Washington and Moscow is concerned [..].
Beyond icing the new Cold War with Russia, did she succeed in the ancillary objective to scare the Kremlin away from too close an embrace of Beijing with a show-down over Taiwan in the offing? Anybody who believes that is possible never has bothered to study Vladimir Putin or to examine Russian history. Sadly, that category includes Washington’s top decision-makers. By comparison, name-calling is more fun and much less taxing on the gray cells.
[…]
The American plan to construct a cordon sanitaire around China exhibits a similar type of repetitive, unyielding behavior. Vietnam, a candidate to join the anti-China alliance, is paid visits by two high-powered American leaders. First, Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin flies into Hanoi to make the case for the Vietnamese to throw in their lot with the United States – the two parties familiar with each other from the last movie. Nothing doing. A while later it’s the turn of Vice-President Kamala Harris who punctuates her fruitless discussions with press conference remarks denouncing China and implying support for an independent Taiwan. Her hosts are not pleased.
This is not normal behavior; it is pathological. It speaks of the disengagement from reality noted above. And it is exceedingly dangerous since it disregards the actual attitudes and actions of others in the relentless effort to project onto them caricatured images, simplified conceptions of who they are and how they can be manipulated suited to the crude script we authored. Information from without, and the understanding that it encourages, are filtered and excluded whenever inconvenient. Instead, it is the introverted world of self-delusion alone that sources our distorted cognitive maps.
America’s political elites have fostered a phantasmagoric approach to the world as increasingly is evident. Its multiple manifestations in regard to China seem to include the unfounded belief that Beijing’s leaders are bluffing when they solemnly avow that moves toward Taiwan independence are intolerable, that they are prepared to go to war if necessary and expect to win any contest of arms were it to occur. While it is more likely that Washington is the one bluffing, our greatest fear should be that Biden et al actually think that they can intimidate China. That conceit conforms to mythic notions of American exceptionalism.
Until now, the war-against-China imaginings have been an elite pastime. The public has been kept in the dark as three successive Presidents have inched the country closer and closer to conflict. How Americans react when they find themselves on the brink is the crucial, unknowable ‘X’ factor in the equation.
Alastair Crooke closes his essay with a rather hopeful view:
It seems that Russia and China, seeing all this, will remain aloof and patient – waiting upon structures to crack.
That crack in U.S. structures however may become a very dangerous moment for Russia and China. Professor Brenner thinks that only the threat of a potentially very violent scenario can cause the 'structural crack' that brings things the U.S. back to sanity:
I fear that we’ll need something like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the U.S. and Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war in order to get peoples’ heads screwed on straight. At both the elite and popular level, it is only fear of war that, on a purely pragmatic basis, will break the comatose intellectual/political state that the United States is in.
What follows is a segment of Putin’s Valdai Club Speech and parsing by Saker that relates to the topic:
Putin: “Well, if someone likes this [gender change], let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism. That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed – precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.” [My Emphasis]
Saker: “Same message: enjoy your wannabe Wakanda but stay away from us, our families, our traditions and our children above all!”
Putin: “This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell. It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, in the impending period of global reconstruction, which may take quite long, with its final design being uncertain, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it. It will inevitably change at some point, but so far, do no harm – the guiding principle in medicine – seems to be the most rational one. Noli nocere, as they say.” [My Emphasis]
Saker: “First, ‘do no harm’ should not be a controversial notion. But the West and all its ideologies and incarnations has dealt with that basic rule in a very simple way: ‘when WE do it, it is not harm, axiomatically, by definition’. This sums of 1000 years of western imperialism, violence and intolerance: ‘when WE do it, it is good, because we are good’ – and that is dogma.” [My Emphasis]
Putin: “Again, for us in Russia, these are not some speculative postulates, but lessons from our difficult and sometimes tragic history. The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation. Such actions can destroy not only the material, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time.” [My Emphasis]
Saker: “That is a last warning: keep going on and you will leave nothing such a moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for a long time. Who are these words addressed to? Not the leaders of the Empire. Not the Woke folks, and not the braindead ‘Don’t tread on me’ either. Not the Greta Tunberg types for sure. I think that this is a warning to those who still have something to preserve: Mediterranean countries, the Middle-East, Latin America and much of the entire Asian continent.”
And this isn’t just about Wokeness; it’s about the whole shebang. Saker uses the correct term: Dogma. And as most of us know, Dogma can blind, stupefy, just like the followers of Tommy’s Church at the outset before he cites his rules they must obey. Clearly, many in the West have joined Tommy’s Church and don’t mind obeying his rules, although more are saying We’re Not Going to Take It, but not enough to reach the point of a Critical Mass.
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 26 2021 19:27 utc | 16
powerandpeople @17–
Good listing! Lavrov’s in Norway for the Barents and Euro-Arctic Council. He’s asked a general question about relations with Norway and what follows is part of his answer:
“On the other hand, Norway is a member of NATO. NATO is no friend of Russia. They decided that they don’t want to be friendly, they decided that they don’t want to have the Founding Act between NATO and Russia to be the basis of our relations. They called Russia, and now China, and, actually, Russia and China together, a threat to NATO. NATO is looking for the meaning of its future existence. My good friend Jens Stoltenberg, who used to be an excellent Prime Minister of Norway, is now saying that NATO must be responsible for security all over the world, including in the Indo-Pacific and Latin America….
“Quite a number of differences which we have are in the area of ideology. Who is the Number One, who is to rule the world ̶ this is what we hear from our NATO ‘friends.’ We believe that we have to concentrate on real life. As far as the imagination of NATO going in the direction of containing Russia, preparing to attack Russia, German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said that they have to be ready to threaten Russia with nuclear weapons. These are fantasies. If it gives her some pleasure, maybe this can satisfy some of her fans.” [My Emphasis]
Seems the hashtag is #Reality. How Russia will deal with NATO is the next answer Lavrov provides:
“As for Russia-NATO relations, I wouldn’t say they are catastrophic. To be catastrophic, you need to have some relations. We don’t have any relations with NATO, but we do have relations with Norway, on the security front as well, as I mentioned. And we would like to raise them to a higher level between the ministries of defence, in addition to the security consultations, which are regular.” [My Emphasis]
Bilateral relations with individual NATO members is now the policy as was anticipated. Look for Lavrov and others to emphasize NATO has no real reason for existing anymore and is part of the fantasy–disreality–constructed since Putin’s 2007 Munich speech. It appears these series of meetings on Arctic issues will replace Russia’s attendance in COP26. In another speech, Lavrov speaks to that opportunity:
“Close cooperation at the scale of the entire North European Region, including the activities of relevant intergovernmental councils and partnerships, is essential for accomplishing the tasks we are facing. Apart from the BEAC, as you know, these are the Arctic Council, the Council of the Baltic Sea States, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, but we should not forget about the Northern Dimension partnerships either. We are in favour of resuming the political meetings of all these northern formats.
“Our suggestion is that we should contemplate large-scale crosscutting initiatives. In two years time, as I said, Russia will be “on the bridge” in two regional organisations at once – the Barents Euro-Arctic Council and the Council of the Baltic Sea States. I can already say with confidence now that we will focus on enhancing the importance of both councils’ applied activities and their commitment to practical projects geared to socioeconomic development and a better quality of life in the North that we share, including to keep women from leaving the area, as Madam Minister has just said. At the same time, we intend to act in the spirit of continuity and support the priorities of all the said formats.”
Looks like Russia will aggressively expand its diplomatic and other initiatives in the Arctic region as a signal that it means business about strengthening cooperation. Working together and commonality of views are additional points Lavrov stresses in “his”>https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4917581″>”his talk at the Barents Youth Summit, which IMO is very sincere:
“I was asked to provide my personal point of view. Frankly, it is hardly different from the official one. The official approaches of the countries of our Council mostly rely on understanding that we should focus on practical matters that unite us, primarily those of us who live just within several kilometres from each other, but are separated by the state borders. The issues we have to deal with in the North are complicated due the climate and remote location of the regions and can be resolved only by joint efforts. It is a good example of a situation with specific issues that need to be addressed in order to be able to live a normal life. There is no place for ideologies. Nobody starts geopolitical battles. This is an example of neighbourliness and mutual assistance. We need to support each other. I think this approach is typical not only of our countries, but also of all ministers and other officials in their personal capacity. This is our common conviction – this is what makes us strong.
“Also important is the fact that the Barents Euro-Arctic Council covers national and municipal levels. Regions in each country cooperate with each other as well. There is a special mechanism, namely, the Barents Regional Council which is a major advantage of ours, because the problems and needs, including of women, are clearly visible at the local level. Women must be kept in the North so that men do not flee. But jobs must be created for both women and men. Moreover, now, with advances in research and education, there are no jobs that can be done only by men. In this sense, the local needs are fundamentally important so that the national governments can have proper benchmarks, and we can implement them via our project activities in organisations such as this Council. Thank you for supporting Russia’s initiative to create a financial mechanism. It is still modest, but, as we say, the hardest thing is the beginning. It is the first step that matters.”
I find it very difficult to visualize any recent US Secretary of State sitting down and saying the same things, primarily because the Outlaw US Empire places little weight on developing cultural ties with ALL the nations it interacts with. In his closing remarks after the Plenary Session, Lavrov had this to say:
“I do believe that this session was quite useful and has proven yet again that when we work on practical matters, we can deliver results, without being distracted by ideological differences and geopolitical games.”
I wonder how many other foreign ministries of NATO nations will note Lavrov’s words? I’m sure they didn’t go unnoticed in Brussels.
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 26 2021 20:22 utc | 26
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