by Gilbert Doctorow at AntiWar.com
Thursday, shortly after the White House issued its four-page Fact Sheet on the sanctions about to be imposed on Russia (“Imposing Costs for Harmful Foreign Activities by the Russian Government”), I was invited by RT International in Moscow to be a “first responder” and provide an analytical comment at the top of their 16.00 news hour program.
I did this with considerable pleasure since before we went on air I was tossed an opening question that played into my game perfectly:
“The new sanctions come despite Washington saying it wants a ‘stable relationship’ with Russia…Are sanctions really a good tool to reach such a goal?”
As I pointed out, the question assumes that ‘stable relationship’ means a ‘good’ relationship and that is a fallacy. The American notion of a ‘stable relationship’ is one that they control unilaterally.
Question two was another soft ball pitch:
“Just days ago Joe Biden called Russian president Vladimir Putin – offering him a personal meeting. Why are we seeing such a swing in sentiment now?
Here I must admit that my first thoughts which I delivered on air were wrong. I saw the imposition of sanctions now as indicative of warfare within the Biden Administration between doves and hawks. No, the situation is more complicated as I will try to explain here..
Yes, one might conclude there is chaos in Washington decision making, with the advocates of caution in dealing with Russia, who no doubt urged upon the American President an outreach to Russia and a summit being undercut by the authors of the sanctions –the enemies of Russia camp in the State Department, where Victoria Nuland, once again calls the shots as Under Secretary for Policy, and the Treasury working group on Russia sanctions which have stayed in place since before the Trump administration was an active contributor of content.
Were the sanctions intended to sabotage the call for a summit meeting? As a practical matter the sanctions will at a minimum postpone the setting of any date for a summit, and quite possibly end in the cancellation of any meeting. But I doubt this was the intent of the sanctions’ sponsors or of Biden himself. Rather it is a demonstration of the utterly ignorant and self-focused way that U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle propose to deal with the world.
US policy is based on scenarios written by political scientists with the intellectual capacity and life experience of college sophomores. Victoria Nuland, is an outstanding case. In a recently issued article deconstructing the writings of Nuland and her Neocon ideologist husband Robert Kagan, my Canadian colleague Patrick Armstrong rightly compared these highly dangerous fools in high places with the idiot savants described by Jonathan Swift in the chapter on Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels.
The introduction of new and seemingly tough sanctions just after President Putin was invited to a summit meeting was surely intended to serve a specific US domestic purpose, namely to show that, unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden would meet with Vladimir Putin “from a position of strength,” the only negotiating stance that America’s anti-Russian political class accepts as legitimate.
Let us define this “position of strength” notion…
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