Biden, Blinken, Kallas and the Death of Diplomacy
What happens when your "top diplomat" is more interested in pursuing war rather than peace?
In 2021, Antony Blinken assumed his post as Secretary of State for the United States of America. The Secretary of State is the US version of a “Foreign Minister” and is widely known as “America’s top diplomat”.
Yet, since taking office, Blinken has done the OPPOSITE of diplomacy. In fact, on every major front and in every conflict zone around the world, Antony Blinken has sought to escalate conflict, ruthlessly exploit relationships with allies, and shun all contact with adversaries.
Russia and the United States are not currently at war. Despite the fact that the US continues to impose punitive sanctions on Russia, the US maintains an embassy in Moscow; Russia maintains an embassy in Washington. These embassies have resident ambassadors; they maintain full ambassadorial staff and conduct consular services.
But no one is really talking.
In fact, in the 3–1/2 years since he took office Antony Blinken has travelled to Russia exactly ZERO TIMES.
None.
By contrast, Blinken has visited Kiev at least 4 times. Indeed, Blinken often uses his visits to Kiev to issue pronouncements to the Russians.
A foreign policy driven by domestic politics
American foreign policy is driven by its domestic political agenda. Major decisions involving life and death, war and peace, are often — if not always — made on the basis of the US electoral calendar, and are subject to the whims of the US “donor class.”
The Russians know this. They have been dealing with these issues for decades.
When Blinken assumed his office, it was as a dedicated, committed, highly partisan and unscrupulous Democratic Party operative; one who had engineered fakes, frauds and fabrications to make sure his “boss”, Joe Biden, came to power.
And as a dedicated Democrat, Blinken already had an entrenched hatred and suspicion of Russia and of Putin, thanks to seven years of propaganda and indoctrination of the “Russiagate” hoax, a conspiracy theory which told all loyal Democrats that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, and that Hillary Clinton would have defeated Donald Trump had it not been for “Russian meddling” in the elections.
Indeed, Blinken may be one of the majority of Democrats who still believe that Russia interfered to change the vote tally in 2016.
Blinken’s entrenched Russophobia meant that, in the run-up to the Russian incursion into Ukraine, he shunned speaking to his Russian counterparts, choosing instead to issue “written declarations” to tell the Russians what they needed to do or not do, lest they face “severe consequences”. Blinken’s one “candid meeting” in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in December 2021 resulted in nothing.
The two met one more time in January 2022 in Geneva, but again, nothing came of the meeting, and Blinken simply used his press avail afterward to brag about how “tough” he had been on Lavrov.
Since the launch of the Russian “Special Military Operation” in February 2022, Blinken has refused to meet with Lavrov — he even canceled a previously scheduled meeting with the Russian FM, saying: “we will not allow Russia to claim the pretence of diplomacy at the same time it accelerates its march down the path of conflict and war.”
“Now that we see the invasion is beginning and Russia has made clear its wholesale rejection of diplomacy, it does not make sense to go forward with that meeting at this time,” Blinken told reporters.
Just to be clear: that was America’s “top diplomat” stating that there would be NO DIPLOMACY with Russia.
And just to be more clear: that is America’s top diplomat cancelling a meeting with his Russian counterpart and claiming that he is doing so because the Russians have “rejected diplomacy”.
It is a clownishly obtuse and convoluted argument.
In fact, Blinken did not meet with Lavrov again until March of 2023, a year after the start of the conflict, in what CNN described as a “brief contact on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting”.
As the world hurtles towards nuclear Armageddon, the two antagonists are reduced to exchanging brief words in alcoves …
“No contact” with Russia is official policy
When Blinken issued the directive of “no contact” with Russia, he was 100% in lock-step with his boss, President Joe Biden, who famously uttered of his Russian counterpart: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.
Even now, Biden refuses to hold talks with Putin until he “changes his behavior”.
Administration officials like Blinken say the blanket refusal to talk to Russia is part of an overall strategy to “isolate” Russia on the international stage, but that is just a canard.
And despite their claims to the contrary, the goal of the Biden Administration is not to “punish” Russia, because the diplomatic failure only hurts Ukraine. Likewise, the sanctions imposed on Russia only hurt America’s European allies, and even the US itself.
Why, then, is the US pursuing this policy?
Russia, the EU, and the Ukrainian “Black Swan”
By claiming that Russia has “rejected diplomacy”, Blinken gives the US and its European allies an excuse for escalating the situation in Ukraine and indeed all of Europe.
As I mentioned in my previous article, “NATO is a Farce, Part 8: Europe Builds Its Own ‘Military Industrial Complex’”, the Ukraine conflict is being used by the European Union, NATO and the United States as a “black swan” event, a catastrophe that demands political, cultural and societal transformation, accompanied by rapid and comprehensive military mobilisation — all necessary to meet a unique, “existential threat”.
As I detailed in my earlier post, “NATO is a Farce, Part 4: Reviving Old Hatreds to Create New Conflict”, such a threat is EXACTLY what EU leaders are calling Russia.
The US leverages its transatlantic vassals
Those EU leaders themselves are self-described “transatlanticists”, US vassals who literally take their marching orders from Washington. As I explained in my article, “NATO is a Farce, Part 2: The Puppet Parade”, this system of traitorous US lackeys in key positions within the EU institutions has been in the making since WWII.
EU Foreign Policy fail: the rise of Kaja Kallas
Perhaps the queen of this court of US vassals is Kaja Kallas, the newly appointed EU “High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security”. This is an extremely powerful position. The High Representative is also a Vice President of the European Commission, and is responsible for bothe Foreign Policy and Defence (Security).
Imagine that: combining the responsibilities of both diplomacy and war-fighting in one position.
Of course, such a combo only seems incongruous if you believe that diplomacy is the art of avoiding war. This is, unfortunately, no longer the case in the collective West: the duties of foreign ministers is no longer to talk to adversaries and friends, but rather to issue statements and pronouncements, ultimatums and threats — all the while leading inevitably towards conflict.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the appointment of Kaja Kallas.
Forget that she is young and inexperienced, a jaded elitist who got her position thanks to her well-connected father, Siim Kallas, a two-time former European Commissioner. The selection of such an unseasoned person to take on the role of High Representative would be bad enough.
But it gets worse. Much worse.
An unpopular politician
Like so many other EU politicos such as Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa, each of whom are facing scandals at home as they scurry off to Brussels, Kaja Kallas is leaving Estonia as one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers the country has ever had.
In fact, she currently has an approval rating of only 16% among Estonian voters — the lowest rating of any PM since the poll began. Moreover, a poll in December showed that 71% of Estonians polled wanted her to resign.
That 3/4 of the Estonian population have now gotten their wish.
A “fierce Russia hawk”
Like Antony Blinken, Kallas has a seemingly ingrained antipathy (if not outright hatred) for Russians. In Blinken’s case, it may be due to his grandparents having suffered under pogroms as Russian Jews living in Kiev in the 19th century.
For Kallas, it may be because of the fact that her grandmother and mother were forcibly deported by Stalin after WWII and spent 10 years in Siberia. As I explained in my earlier article, “NATO is a Farce, Part 4: Reviving Old Hatreds to Create New Conflict”, Kallas has never forgotten this, and appears unwilling to forgive and move on.
Like the other Baltic Leaders, Kallas holds the modern day Russian Federation responsible for the misdeeds of the USSR, and she views Vladimir Putin as nothing more than a modern-day Stalin.
In any case, Kallas has used her position as Prime Minister to make life for ethnic Russian Estonians (who comprise around 25% of the total population) increasingly difficult and humiliating.
Starting in 2022, Kallas has embarked on a “de-Sovietisation” campaign to remove all Russian war monuments celebrating the Red Army and ist victory over the Nazis in Estonia in 1944.
The war is a difficult subject in Estonia because so many Estonians enthusiastically volunteered for the Nazi Waffen SS to go and fight the Russians in Stalingrad and elsewhere.
The removal of the Soviet monument from a park in Narva, a Russian-speaking city and Estonia’s third largest metro area, almost caused riots. But Kallas was unbowed:
“It is precisely to ensure public order that all of these monuments need to be removed, before tensions or anxiety builds to the point that it has a much higher price already.”
Kallas has also ordered the exhumation and reburial of Soviet Red Army graves in normal cemeteries.
Kallas cannot even enter Russia
These actions didn’t jut anger the Russians in Estonia. The Kremlin also reacted, placing Kallas on a list of wanted criminals guilty of the crimes of “rehabilitation of Nazism” and “falsification of history” that include punishing the desecration of war memorials.
Due to her status as a wanted criminal in Russia, Kaja Kallas cannot visit the Russian Federation for fear of being arrested and charged with the above mentioned crimes.
That’s right — the chief of Foreign Policy for the EU cannot even travel to Russia because she is a wanted criminal there.
This decision to put a person who is a vicious Russophobe, hated for enraging the Russian speaking quartile of her own population, who appears determined to go to war against Russia, to be in charge of Foreign Policy for the European Union.
This is “proof positive” that the EU (backed by the USA) is embarked on a one way road to war with the Russian Federation.
But, again one may well ask, WHY?
The overall strategy is to destroy Russia
As I described in my article, “Slaughtering Russia is U.S. Policy”, the collective West has been plotting to destroy the Russian Federation since 2000. They see Russia as a vast “treasure trove” of wealth and resources, ripe for exploitation and plunder.
“The greatest give-away in history”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the billionaire oligarchs and Western elites descended on Russia like a pack of ravenous hyenas, and proceeded to extract as much wealth and resources as possible.
In what has been widely defined as the “economic rape” of the former USSR, Western forces formed shady alliances with corrupt Russian oligarchs and snatched up all the great institutions, along with all the financial and natural resources, of the former Soviet state. Under the pitifully misguided rule of Boris Yeltsin, Russia became the “wild east” for a new breed of western carpetbaggers.
Mortimer Zuckerman, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), owner of US News & World Report, described what took place in the looting of Russia under Boris Yeltsin as “the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history”.
“The giveaway, or more precisely “theft,” was done through outright robbery, currency war, and a fraudulent loans-for-company stock shares program that was a precondition demanded by Washington to getting aid and loans from the World Bank and the IMF — aid and loans that ‘never touched ground in Russia,’ as Zuckerman noted.”
Putin saved Russia — and enraged the West
When Vladimir Putin took over the Presidency from Yeltsin in 2000, he immediately put an end to the economic rape by Western financial vultures allied with corrupt Russian oligarchs. The gravy train ground to a screeching halt; the days of wild, rapacious profiteering were at an end. As I noted in my article, “Why Putin is a Hero to Russians”:
“Putin was the new sheriff in town, and he started cleaning house, bringing criminal charges against Marc Rich’s oligarch proteges for unpaid taxes and illegal dealings. Under this new regime, some oligarchs were convicted, some fled.”
Because he literally saved Russia, the Russian state and the Russian people from permanent subjugation and political dismemberment, Putin became a hero to his people.
But the West never forgave him.
Indeed, when we look at the visceral Putin-hatred expressed by Western leaders like Biden, Blinken and Kallas, it seems that the real reason for their disdain stems from two decades of anti-Putin propaganda. Since 2000, Putin has been demonised and defamed in the Western media and in Western political circles.
In short, the West’s hatred for Russia is inextricably linked to — and possibly caused by — the West’s anger at having been “kicked out” of Russia and denied access to Russia’s wealth and resources.
This hatred has festered over the years, causing a type of advanced mental illness in many Western leaders, who have now lost all perspective when it comes to dealing with Russia.
I wrote about this long march to depravity in my article, “How the West Descended Into Idiocy”, and how it has warped the perception of the Ukrainian conflict:
“No Russian villainy was too cartoonish, no Russian atrocity beyond the pale; no Russian defeat too improbable — while no Ukrainian virtue was too romantic, no Ukrainian anecdote too heroic; no Ukrainian victory too outlandish to be believed.”
Breaking up Russia
In my article, “NATO is a Dangerous Farce — and We All Know It”, I explain how NATO has gone from being a defensive alliance to an offensive military arm of the American Empire, and is used to project and enhance US military expansionism in what NATO euphemistically calls “out of area” operations.
Then, in my follow up article, “Kosovo Exposes US-NATO Hypocrisy”, I go on to explain how NATO was used to “break up” Yugoslavia into disparate pieces, to be exploited by Western interests.
Now, the West wants to do the same thing to Russia.
In fact, “decolonizing” Russia is official US policy. For example, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an independent commission of the US Federal Government, held a conference in June, 2022, called simply “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative”.
These people believe that the socialist USSR was not a force for “liberation” but rather one for “colonisation”. It assumes that Putin is a deranged megalomaniac trying to “reconstitute the Russian Empire”, and whose days are now numbered.
“This is it, boys, this is war”
When I was living in West Germany in the early 1980’s there was a major hit song by Nena called “99 Luftballons” (in English, 99 Red Balloons”). It was (and is) a very powerful anti-war song that first appeared on the charts in 1983, not coincidentally the year that the US stationed its “Peacekeeper” intermediate range nuclear missiles in Germany.
1983 was also the year we came closest to nuclear war in Europe thanks to NATO’s Able Archer Exercise, which almost triggered an attack by the frightened Soviets.
Nena’s song is about uncontrolled militarism, and a devastating world war that breaks out by mistake, when a group of balloons are mistaken for UFOs. The song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a single balloon.
Victory or death?
It seems that both the US and the EU have decided to forego diplomacy and simply make plans to go to war. As I explained in my previous article, “NATO is a Farce, Part 8: Europe Builds Its Own ‘Military Industrial Complex’”, the European Union has decided to make Ukraine a world-changing “black swan” event, one that will transform the EU into an authoritarian, militarised superstate ruled by unelected officials in Brussels.
Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas are two such officials.
For its part, the United States is bent on pursuing its over-arching strategy of defeating and then breaking up Russia into digestible chunks to be exploited by Western financial interests.
In both cases, there appears to be no alternative to an all-out conflict with a state and a leader which everyone agrees pose an “existential threat” to “Western civilisation”.
Indeed, in April, former British PM Boris Johnston spoke for all “transatlanticist” leaders when he laid out the conflict with Russia in historic terms:
“If Ukraine falls, it’ll be a catastrophic turning point in history — and an utter humiliation for the West…the moment when the West finally loses its post-war hegemony”.
The stakes are high, because our incompetent clownish leaders have made them so. It is now all or nothing. And I fear that there are too many Western leaders who would rather have World War III than be remembered as the ones who “lost Europe” to the hated Russians.
The Ukraine conflict may lead to a lot more death than just that of diplomacy.
#End
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Thank you for this well-researched and reasoned article. I wish our so-called "diplomats" would read and learn from your work. What the West considers "diplomacy" is just another form of "military intervention", and it could get us all nuked someday soon. Maybe that's the idea, but for some reason most ordinary folks just want to live to see their kids and grandkids grow up.
I remember duck and cover. I never remember a time when Russia was not considered our enemy. And like Chomsky said, usa will always need an enemy. Even now,seems like they still are. The eleven years spent there,enlightening. Russians think it was silly of US to take their threats seriously. Were there when the white house was stormed. Fall of ruble. People in our little world, did not like putin. We lived not in a US compound. Husband met P when Carnegie and other orgs were told, no longer welcome and Rus could manage now. The harvard scandal, the russian enviro ppl winking at western sloppy messes in oil,making themselves a bribed fortune. Fascinating subject!