While all indications are that the US, regardless of who the next president is, will continue to support Israel’s rampage through the Middle East, as well as more confrontation with China, less sure is the direction that Russia policy will take.
We’re now getting a lot of pieces about the new and improved foreign policy team coming in should Kamala win the presidency. Philip Gordon, the odds-on favorite to replace Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor, is supposed to be a pragmatist who understands the “limits of American power.”
Gordon and deputy national security advisor to the vice president, Rebecca Lissner, have a vision for a “humbler approach to foreign policy.” Yes they’re Blob neocons, but they’re the more responsible type, we’re told. I wrote last week about Gordon and reasons to doubt the puff pieces about his more reasonable approach, but wanted to expand on that here.
That’s because implicit in these articles championing Kamala’s potential foreign policy team is the idea that the reason that the world is in such disarray and the US is at risk of direct confrontation with Russia is because of Joe Biden. Economist Philip Pilkington on his always-interesting podcast Multipolarity recently took up this argument making the case that Biden, due primarily to his senility, failed to keep the Blob crazies on a leash; instead Biden let them loose allowing Ukraine to spiral out of control.
While Biden is no doubt a senile, angry old man, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is quite stupid, are there reasons to believe that their exits will lead to a less belligerent foreign policy?
While some sort of detente with Russia would certainly be welcome, here are three reasons it is unlikely.
1. We need to remember that the puff pieces about smarter Democrat foreign policy advisers are a genre at this point. The same type of things being said about Gordon and Lissner were being written about Biden’s team four years ago. Sullivan, for example, was supposedly wary of foreign adventures and believed that “the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class.”
He was lauded for visiting 112 countries with Hillary Clinton. And what was his focus going to be in the Biden White House? According to Politico, the Covid-19 pandemic:
The “major focus” of the Biden NSC’s work, at least initially, will be on beating the coronavirus pandemic and restructuring the NSC to make public health a permanent national security priority, Sullivan said.
So all these pieces about the foreign policy brain geniuses on Kamala’s team really mean nothing. These people do very little deciding on priorities or policy. So who does?
2. American plutocrats have wanted to return to the pre-Bolshevik days for more than 100 years. The goal to plunder Russia briefly became a reality upon the breakup of the USSR. In the 1990s, The US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country with devastating results. The number of Russians living in poverty jumped from two million to sixty million in just a few years, and life expectancy plummeted. It made the Great Depression in the US look comparatively like a walk in the park. Putin put an end to this national catastrophe inflicted upon the country by the West, and they never forgave him for it. Why is the US and company so dead set on removing Putin and theoretically getting someone more “friendly” in power? Here are the leading countries based on natural resource value as of 2021(in trillions of dollars):
Source: Statista
In the eyes of American plutocrats, Russia is too valuable a prize, and they have now backed themselves into a corner by helping drive Moscow and Beijing together. If the thought of Russia controlling its own resources was intolerable, China having privileged access is unfathomable. The anti-Putin policies have been pumped out of corporate-financier think tanks in the US for two decades. Both of Kamala’s foreign policy brain geniuses, Gordon and Lissner, for example. have had stints at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). CFR’s funders, according to Influence Watch, include Accenture, Apple, Bank of America, BlackRock, Chevron, Cisco, Citi, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hess, Meta, JP Morgan Chase, Moody’s, and Morgan Stanley.
It also has corporate affiliations with Bayer, Blackstone, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Dell, Eni, KPMG, Mastercard, McKinsey and Company, PayPal, Sequoia Capital, Veritas Capital Fund Management, and others in its President’s Club program. CFR’s corporate affiliates include American International Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, FedEx, Johnson and Johnson, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Microsoft, Pfizer, TikTok, Twitter, United Airlines, and Wells Fargo.
Think tanks like CFR then steer legislation and foreign policy.
The RAND Corporation, which shares many of the same benefactors as CFR, laid out a plan to weaken Russia and topple Putin in its infamous 2019 paper, “Extending Russia.” It involved economic pressure, as well as starting conflagrations all around Russia — in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and in Central Asia. RAND’s blueprint has largely been followed — more successful in some areas than others.
And while it’s not mentioned in the RAND report, who’s to say the US won’t try to lead Europe or a portion of it (the Baltics, Poland, Germany?) from behind into more of a direct confrontation with Russia (as long as the US could wiggle out of Article 5 commitments)? Sure, it would be a disaster for any and all of them, but does the US care if the goal is to force Moscow to keep putting out fires?
The key question is do US plutocrats view their fight against Russia as existential? Judging by the RAND paper, they likely prefer a world on fire rather than accepting that they must live in a multipolar world. As the RAND report shows, there exists a clear line of thought in the Blob that overextending Russia by upping the chaos all around it will destabilize the country and bring about the downfall of Putin. The opposite has happened so far, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
As I pointed out in a recent piece examining Philip Gordon’s career, a major aspect that supposedly makes him smarter than those on the Biden team is that he’s more in line with Obama and believes in limits of America’s power. But when you really look at what they’re talking about, it’s not that they want to give up on regime change in Russia; it’s that they want to make sure the US isn’t getting too involved, that it isn’t Americans dying in a direct confrontation. One of the things they hung their hat during the Obama years was “leading from behind.” Is that not what the US is doing now? No direct confrontation with Russia, Ukrainians and mercenaries doing the dying, and working on setting the Caucasus on fire via Armenia. The flavor of the month is that the US is a responsible actor that might desire a “reset” with Russia at some point while it’s now the UK leading the escalation charge. France was recently the most gung-ho with Macron calling for troops. The Baltic states are always crazy. The US has largely been enacting the RAND plan while adhering to Obama’s lead-from-behind credo. To the last Ukrainian, as they say.
Speaking of Obama, he’s given credit for being “smarter” about Ukraine. That’s because he uttered some true words back in 2016:
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”
What Obama was arguing was that the US should not go to war directly. But in the same interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic he also echoed the RAND strategy, arguing that the US was successfully overextending Russia:
“Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp. And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there,” he said. “He’s done the exact same thing in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country. And the notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on.”
Obama also oversaw the 2014 coup in Ukraine as the Blob was likely working from the same script the whole time. It just so happened that Russia started its special military operation while Biden was president rather than Obama. The Blob was able to continue its efforts to bring about a Ukraine-Russia conflict in the interim under Trump despite the freakout over Russiagate. What indication is there that Trump would be able and willing to take these forces on should he become president again?
So is there any reason to believe whatsoever that the plutocrats funding the DC think tanks and fueling this new Cold War strategy are going to rethink the plan because Ukraine is defeated on the battlefield and a new administration takes over in Washington?
Or is it more likely that the US will continue trying to destabilize regions all around Russia? Is it more likely that the US will accept defeat in Ukraine or try to ensure that Ukraine remains a steaming pile of rubble that Russia must commit men and money towards pacifying Ukraine? Recently the Duran’s Alexander Mercouris and Alexander Christoforou were talking about the possibility that Zelensky will be replaced with the former Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Arsen Avakov, because he’s someone who could effectively keep up a terror campaign in a failed state due to his close ties with neo-Nazi groups and his penchant for collecting damaging information on people.
3. Was it just the fact that Democrats were apparently too lazy to update their platform in several areas, including on Russia, or are they trying to tell us something when the Kamala platform reads:
President Biden will never turn his back on our allies. In his second term, he will continue to strengthen NATO and stand with Ukraine to stop Putin’s atrocities and constrain Russia’s threat to allied nations and America’s vital interests.
If there was any doubt, here’s Harris in her nomination acceptance speech:
And that we strengthen—not abdicate—our global leadership. Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could—quote—“do whatever the hell they want.” Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response — over 50 countries — to defend against Putin’s aggression. And as President, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.
Meanwhile the oligarch-funded think tanks keep pumping out material arguing for an open ended Cold War with Russia. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that advocates for a sustained strategy of “containment.” Gordon co-authored a Council on Foreign Relations report with the Russia hardliner Republican Robert Blackwill. They called for the kitchen sink to be thrown at Russia, including sanctions, weapons, an undying commitment to Ukraine and Europe — basically what the US has done since.
While Kamala and the Democrats might not be the ones setting the agenda, they are letting the US oligarchs know that they will adhere to their agenda and continue the Russia policy, which could be a decades-long effort. The think tanks are saying this, that the new Cold War is here to stay. Maybe Gordon and Kamala’s Obama-esque team is more crafty and takes a step back to regroup but policy will not change. It could potentially get even worse, as a new emphasis on leading from behind could help remove the US from the plan’s consequences.
For now, the narrative works out well. Biden can be blamed for Ukraine’s defeat and the new and improved Kamala team can arrive to enact a smarter policy that’s pretty much the same as the old dumb policy. I would love to be wrong.
