Diplomacy Matters

For Sachs has just published another immensely important article: Entitled “The Urgency of Diplomacy”, it points out that the United States, with its neutered eunuch European allies tamely in tow, has now long since abandoned all pretense at any kind of serious diplomacy, negotiations, dialogue or efforts to achieve and maintain mutual coexistence in the world with either Russia or China.

As usual, Sachs does not mince his words:

“There has been a complete collapse of diplomacy between the US and Russia, and a near-total collapse between the US and China,” he writes. “Europe, which has made itself far too dependent on the US for its own good, simply follows the Washington line. The absence of diplomacy creates a dynamic of escalation that can lead to nuclear war.” 

The current president of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, Sachs noted, recently tweeted, “Russia must be destroyed.”

Latvia is a tiny postage stamp country of less than 1.9 million people. It would not make more than a tiny proportion of New York City, Washington, London, Los Angeles or Paris. It could not maintain its prosperity and security for five seconds without enormous inputs every year from the European Union, the United States and NATO. Yet there it is, with its president and diplomats eagerly – even enthusiastically – fanning the flames for thermonuclear war between America and Russia. This is no mere joke: It is an obscenity.

The practice of diplomacy in the United States has shriveled into a sick joke for decades. General Colin Powell was the last secretary of state who practiced it responsibly and seriously.

Hillary Clinton happily reverted to the ludicrous global bullying and bigoted ultraliberal intolerance of her bosom buddy Madeleine Albright. In Michael McFaul she even appointed to Moscow and fully supported a US ambassador who openly ridiculed, sneered and sought to discredit the established leader of a thermonuclear superpower capable of incinerating the United States, as if this could and would have no consequence. President Barack Obama, a vain, superficial and ridiculous man, did not care.

John Kerry was a weak, even farcical secretary of state in his priorities and passivity in the face of the hijacking of his department by mad neoconservative and neoliberal lunatics such as McFaul, Victoria Nuland and other personal favorites of Hillary Clinton.

Yet even Kerry recognized the need to get on personally with and maintain communication and a modicum of respect towards his immensely experienced and responsible Russian opposite number Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

However, since Kerry left office at the beginning of 2017, there has not been even that.

President Donald Trump briefly toyed with appointing a responsible, dignified secretary of state in Rex Tillerson at the very beginning of his administration: It did not last. Trump tired of Tillerson, the way a petulant child tires of a boring toy and dropped him after only 14 months. Thereafter, Trump threw the reins of diplomacy over to his CIA Director Mike Pompeo, another fake macho, ignorant, brutish boor and simplistic clown in whom he was well pleased.

In fact, neither the liberal Democratic fake Left nor the ignorant, blundering, fake macho Right has a clue as to how serious diplomacy in the national interest can and should be conducted.

The Left has long chased after vague, multilateral, global will o’ the wisp agreements to abolish all nuclear power and weapons, deindustrialize the globe and create a new fantasy sustainable green prosperity without any recourse to oil, coal or natural gas power sources at all. The idea of promoting and safeguarding the genuine national interests of the American people is abhorrent to it.

The Old Right reveres Free Trade as if it was handed down by the Founding Fathers, rather than swallowed wholesale under Ronald Reagan after being a Liberal Democratic Idol for the previous two centuries. And it has never yet found a defenseless country it could resist bombing into catastrophic collapse. There are no human rights to be gallantly defended when their supposed recipients have been killed and crippled beneath millions of tons of rubble.

The Liberal Left and the Neocon Right alike endlessly preach the value of human rights wildly seeking to destabilize major powers from Russia and China to India while lacking the guts and practicality to ever take any concrete action to prevent the most monstrous genocides and collapse of societies triggered by Western aggressive actions around the world from Biafra in the 1960s to Syria and Libya over the past decade.

As for the current President of the United States, he early on set the standard for global dignity and reduction of international tensions by publicly referring to the President of Russia as “a crazy SOB”.

In fairness to Biden, he was probably just looking in a mirror and mistook himself for President Vladimir Putin when he made that remark.

Biden then set a new standard for imbecility when he stated, as Professor Sachs also noted, about President Xi Jinping of China, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” before sending 100-year-old former secretary of state Henry Kissinger to Beijing to please beg the Chinese to stop selling US Treasuries. 

“It has been the US and its allies that have broken agreements and refused diplomacy. The US violated its solemn pledges to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to Russian President Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward,” Sachs noted.

Professor Sachs of course is doing no more than repeating what should be an obvious truth. I covered those negotiations at the time and often interviewed many of the key negotiators on both sides. And I can certainly confirm the accuracy of Sachs’ account.

Sachs further recalls, “The US cheated by supporting the violent coup in Kiev that toppled Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. The US, Germany, France, and the UK, duplicitously refused to back the Minsk II agreement.”

Indeed, they did so refuse: And the awful slaughter of half a million Ukrainian boys and young men in a war that Washington’s neocons and neo-libs still want to fight to the last drop of blood – of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples – never of their own – still continues.

Further, it was, as Professor Sachs also records, the United States that unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2022 and from the Intermediate Force Agreement in 2019. And it was the United States, not Russia that refused to negotiate when Putin proposed a draft Russia-US Treaty on Security Guarantees on December 15, 2021.

Amazingly, as Sachs documents, there has been no direct diplomacy whatsoever between Biden and Putin since the beginning of 2022. And when Russia and Ukraine negotiated directly in March 2022, the United States and the United Kingdom stepped in to block any agreement that would be based on Ukrainian neutrality – a dignified and freedom-preserving future for that great people and tragic land.

Diplomacy Matters – And so does its Lack.

The political leadership of the United States, Right and Left, Republican and Democrat, male and female, is now in the hands of a generation of ignorant, spoiled brats who are incapable of ever admitting their own incompetence – and that they are ever, indeed always, wrong.

America’s leaders, serene in their stupidity and impregnable self-righteousness, continue to self-indulgently fan awful, endless wars that they refuse -on what they think is principle – to ever settle or end. 

They have set the whole world ablaze. And soon the fires they have lit everywhere, like the Biblical Fool excoriated in the Book of Proverbs, will devour them.