How and Why the Democrats Botched the "Reset" with Russia

 Every American administration since Ronald Reagan has attempted to get on the Russians' good side and normalise diplomatic relations with Moscow. 

Some presidents, most notably Bill Clinton but also Donald Trump, have been more successful than others in this endeavour. The worst performer in this area -until now- has been president Obama with his ill-inspired choice of advisers and Russia policies.

The key actor responsible for Obama's failure was Stanford professor Michael McFaul, a mediocre Russia expert. In 2007 he was approached by then-senator Obama and was subsequently put in charge of the Russian Department in the National Security Council after 2008. In this capacity he initiated the ill-fated policy of the "reset" of relations between the two countries. 

McFaul's main helper was Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State at the time. Together with the neocons still lurking within the State Department's structures after the Iraq debacle, McFaul and Hillary Clinton tried to torpedo Vladimir Putin's 2012 presidential campaign through a plethora of American-backed NGOs. 

Such gross interference in Russia's internal affairs was quite unprecedented, save for the brief Yeltsin interlude during the 1990s. 

For all McFaul's multiple academic credentials, he failed to grasp a basic fact, namely that liberal democracy is totally ill-suited for a country like Russia.

All Obama's intended "reset" policy achieved in practical terms, therefore, was a near-total breakdown of relations between Washington and Moscow.

Obama's vice-president at the time, Joe Biden, took over from McFaul and since 2014 until today he oversaw the Maidan Square coup d'etat and the gradual but relentless escalation of US and Nato conflict with Russia.

As much as his political enemies would like to assign all the blame on Joe Biden's administration for the disastrous state of America's relationship with Russia, the truth is that the seeds of the discord were planted more than a decade ago by Obama's decision to appoint McFaul as his top Russia affairs adviser. 

The Language of Losers

Political losers can easily be recognised by their propensity to level against their opponents the most far-fetched accusations.

 Up until now, one could rarely see in international politics leaders who debase themselves by calling their opponents names. But this is exactly what is happening lately, starting with Joe Biden's almost daily slur offensive against Vladimir Putin, and on to Zelensky in Kiev who calls the Russian soldiers "animals" in order to rob them of their humanity.

The most outlandish accusation Biden has levelled against Putin so far was to brand him a "war criminal", for the excesses attributed to the Russian army in the field, as if the Russian president personally instructed the soldiers to attack and kill civilians in Ukraine. 

To be sure, I have never heard anyone call George W. Bush a war criminal for the excesses made by the US army in Fallujah or Abu Ghraib, for example. Moreover, the United States refuses to be a member of the International Criminal Court and its military has quite a reputation of engaging in summary executions in all the wars it initiated or participated in, or in rapes even in peacetime.

The real butcher in Ukraine is actually Zelensky. From the outset he called on Ukrainian civilians to carry arms, produce Molotov cocktails and attack Russian troops and tanks. He encouraged women to bake and serve poisoned cakes to Russian soldiers. In so doing, Zelensky has transformed Ukrainian civilians into combatants. As such, he made them legitimate targets of the Russian army. How can any leader sacrifice his country's population this way ? In fact, Zelensky has armed the whole population because from day one he had the intention to provoke a high number of civilian casualties, in order to turn around and accuse the Russian army of war crimes. For Zelensky, the events unfolding in his country are everybody else's fault but his own or his team's. 

What we are dealing with here are two losers who cannot accept that their plans to bring Russia to its knees have backfired. One can recognise losers in domestic or international politics fairly easily. They usually launch outlandish accusations against their opponents and try to make public opinion believe that their targets are psychopaths, or war criminals and the like. Actually, all politicians resorting to such personal attacks have lost or are about to lose the allegiance or respect of their own electorates. Their handling of disputes, both in domestic and in international politics, is usually disastrous and leads to serious trouble for their own country or their allies.

The test of true leadership, however, also means having the guts to assume one's own shortcomings and errors and not blame these on one's opponents. 

Spare a Thought for Joe Biden

 " Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum"

The American president is in big trouble, both domestically and internationally. After only one year in office, Joe Biden is considered one of the most unsuccessful presidents since George W.Bush. On the home front, the Democrats' fortunes are going south in all major polls, the party risks losing a significant number of Congressional and Senate seats in the fall. Former allies are deserting the party in droves and no wonder: the current administration has mishandled both the pandemic and the American economy, with inflation having risen to a 40-year high long before the Ukraine conflict started. The president's approval rating is one of the lowest ever, proving that Obama's advice - who told Joe Biden he did not have to run in 2020 - was both prescient and timely. 

The bad news on the home front is more than matched by disastrous news from abroad. As soon as he moved into the White House, Biden brought the ill-famed team of neocons Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland into the State Department and the national security apparatus, together with whom he had masterminded the so-called Maidan "revolution" in Ukraine back in 2014. This team did not waste any time in botching diplomatic negotiations with Russia throughout 2021 and provoking it to intervene militarily in Ukraine. They are currently undermining any bilateral talks which might lead to a peace treaty being signed, if Blinken's declarations are any guide. As Victoria Nuland recently told Congress, they envisage a long drawn-out conflict in Ukraine. This would suit the neocons' strategy to torpedo Russia's economy and leadership.

European political leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, were shocked when Joe Biden launched his savage personal attack on Vladimir Putin in Poland, advocating for regime change in Moscow. This, however, was consistent with the neoconservative agenda regarding Russia, despite Blinken's official denials. By calling Putin a "butcher", Biden is desperately trying to determine American feminists to vote Democrat in the midterm congressional elections. Sure enough, the importance of geopolitics in international affairs is hard even for seasoned politicians like Olaf Scholz to grasp, let alone for feminists. This is the reason why they have reduced the entire Ukraine situation to an issue they have been nursing for some time, that of Vladimir Putin's "toxic masculinity". According to leading American feminists, a kind of hormonal reaction of the Russian president explains Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 

Neoconservatives deserve another special mention, however. Affected as they are by the virus of global hegemonism that destroyed Napoleon's France in the 19th century and Hitler's Germany in the 20th century, they continue to push a "USA uber Alles" unipolar agenda in international affairs. Their hate towards Russia is not racial in nature, rather it is based on the realisation that the two other major hegemonic drives in the West's modern history were stopped only with the help of Russia. By refusing to accept NATO's expansion up to its doorstep, Russia - together with China - became the biggest obstacle to their global hegemonic plans.

Any sane American administration would have relegated the neocons to the dustbin of history long ago, not recycled them as they did. Instead, Joe Biden gave them center stage in framing American foreign and defense policies once again, and the results are nothing short of disastrous. Small wonder, therefore, that leading neocon figures are calling this period in US political history "the neocon moment". Walking back American foreign policy from its current predicament seems to be a tall order, which, unfortunately, will have to wait until the next US presidential elections. Let us hope that after so many decades of overseeing US foreign policy, Joe Biden will at least be able to avoid igniting World War III.

The United States' Mad Drive for Unipolarity

 After the collapse of the USSR, unipolarity was supposed to last for no more than a decade. By extending it for two more decades, the US got embroiled in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine. This has to stop before it's too late.

Over the last few days I have watched in disgust the sorry spectacle of an American president visiting the Old Continent in order to prove to the world -and probably to himself, too- that Western countries stand united behind the US in its latest proxy war. On Friday he met up with young American soldiers deployed in Poland at the border with Ukraine, he ate a pizza with them and had the cheek to lie to them with a straight face as he tried to explain why the United States are putting them in harm's way, some 8,000 kilometres from their home country. He told them that they are there to  fight for democracies against autocracies, which - it goes without saying - the US is ready and willing to spend blood and treasure to defend.

Well, not quite. The real reason why US soldiers are being posted in Eastern Europe is to defend American unipolarity against multipolarity, which has been the natural state of affairs in international relations for centuries. As we know from the examples of Napoleon and Hitler, power is a heavy drug which makes political leaders act in dangerous, if not always catastrophic ways. Unchecked, unrestrained power - because this is what unipolarity is all about - is far worse, however, and that's what has brought the world to the brink of a fully-fledged nuclear war this time.

I have also watched in disbelief over the past few weeks how the US - which has interfered irresponsibly in Slav and in European affairs since 2014 - is propping up a Kiev regime bent on starting WWIII in order to weaken its larger neighbour, Russia. The US has not made the slightest effort to lean on the Ukrainian leadership to sue for peace, but is instead using Ukrainian people as cannon fodder, and the rest of Europe as a refugee camp only to provoke regime change in Moscow. Russia's cardinal sin, it appears, is that of being one of the main challengers to the unipolarity of the US in world affairs.

Unfortunately for all concerned, unipolarity cannot be saved. Regardless of how many allies the US enlists in this quest and how many inept sanctions they pile on Russia, (which are sure to be extended to China in the future, as well). As no sane political leader can disregard geopolitical imperatives in the conduct of foreign relations, like the US has for the past few decades, nor can unipolarity be enforced for long against multipolarity. Thus, although Zelensky wants Joe to be the "leader of the world", the truth of the matter is that this is not his choice or Joe's to make. 

After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, an American geopolitician friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, described him as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". After watching the American president for about one year go about "solving" international crises from Afghanistan to Ukraine, I can now confidently confirm that my American friend's assessment was an understatement. The US president is not only overwhelmed by the crisis in Ukraine, but his neocon team is a menace to world peace, and his monumental misunderstanding of the US's place in international affairs is there for all to see.

For most of us from Europe, the conflict in Ukraine is an internal problem of the Slav world. The other major ethnic groups that compose the EU - the Latins and the Germans - do not exhibit such fratricidal tendencies and get along fine with each other and with Russia. Similarly, an armed conflict between the countries of the Anglosphere has been inconceivable for more than 200 years. The attitude of the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks in this conflict is -for the rest of the Europeans - puzzling, to say the least. Furthermore, neighbouring countries like Hungary and Romania see no valid reason why they should become involved in the Ukrainian mess, were it not for American pressure. In hindsight, the inclusion of Slav nations of Europe in NATO might have been another major error, on top of the admission of Baltic states.

I cannot call myself a Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his loss of the 2020 elections proved to be an unmitigated disaster, both for the United States and the world as a whole. As a businessman, Donald Trump at least understood the fact that the US cannot go about invading countries indefinitely or sponsoring pointless resistance movements, like in Syria or now Ukraine, and he was willing to adjust American foreign policy accordingly. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House, the Russian intervention in Ukraine would possibly have never happened.

The sooner American elites and foreign policy circles can acknowledge the huge risks involved in keeping up their claim to unipolarity, the better it would be for the world as a whole. I say this because by keeping up the fight to remain sole hegemon, the US runs the risk of not only losing its current (undeserved) status, but also of destroying large areas of the world in the process.