by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
This week’s brouhaha in Brussels saw the Foreign Ministers of NATO emerge from their holes in the ground looking for food now that things are finally warming up for Spring.
And they had a message for us: more for them and less for us. They were ready to steal the food from our mouths, our children from our homes, to give Ukraine the aid it needs to beat Russia in a war only they seem to want.
They would strangle the political process at home to make this so. They would betray their basic roles as diplomats, speaking with forked tongues, to confound the conditions for dialogue with Russia and end the fighting.
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In fact, with all the war mongering going on you would have thought this was a convocation of military commanders, not diplomats. But that’s where we are in this process.
The message of NATO’s foreign policy is simple, “War first. Talk later.” Facts on the ground don’t matter. Budget deficits don’t matter. Plunging public support for Ukraine doesn’t matter. All that matters is what these people want.
And they want war. But at the same time, they won’t admit that that is exactly what they are waging.
The doublespeak has gotten to the point where even Pinocchio is looking at outgoing General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg going, “Dood. Your schnoze!”
Then again, Stoltenberg is a year past his ‘use-by’ date. He’s even more a lame duck than French President Emmanuel Macron at this point. The problem for those who actually run NATO, they can’t agree on who to replace him with… a British Neoconservative or a Dutch Neoliberal?
In the same week where the French and Russian Defense Ministers had a frank conversation about Ukraine, the attack in Moscow on civilians, and how quickly Russia will vaporize French troops sent into the fighting, we’re treated to the complete abandonment of all diplomatic pretense.
And even then, that discussion was more of a diplomatic endeavor than anything coming out of Brussels, if Mark Wauck and Alex Mercouris are correct.
Mercouris, of course, has a lot more to say, but that’s the long and the short of it. It was all a pathetic game, transparently so. The Russians were forced into this war, but now that they’re in it they’re in it to win. Mercouris sums it up:
The Russians are not under any pressure to negotiate. They are winning the war and they know they’re winning the war. The West, if it wants to avoid a spectacular geopolitical disaster—which is what a defeat in Ukraine would be— in its own interests needs to talk to the Russians. But coming up with half baked proposals such as a return to Istanbul or a Frozen Conflict is going to get nowhere. It is only going to annoy the Russians even more. The logical and right thing to do is to ask the Russians what it is, exactly, in Ukraine that they want to achieve, and see whether it might be possible for the West to meet them halfway. I would have thought that is basic obvious diplomacy.
It’s been so long here in the US where we’ve had a Secretary of State who wasn’t hell bent on a war with Russia, Iran, or China (or all three consecutively and concurrently) we’ve forgotten what having diplomats looks like.
I mean think about it. Antony Blinken’s sad dog-eye technique makes you wistful for the days of Condoleeza Rice’s angry diversity hire routine.
The difference between then and now is Putin hadn’t quite told NATO to “piss off.”
Again, can anyone remember that as late as 2007 Vladimir Putin was invited to speak at the annual Munich Security Conference. Back then he was just as willing to tell the West what they needed to hear rather than wanted to hear as he is now, but at least we put up the pretense of listening to him.
Blinken is only competent in the role of anti-diplomat. And why he’s worse than Rice or even *shudder* Hillary Clinton, is that he’s not even consistent. One week looking for an off-ramp after the terror attack in Moscow. This week mouthing words about Ukraine joining NATO knowing that that’s the road to a US war with Russia.
But, Mercouris and Wauck both believe this is some kind of bluff by Blinken. I’d like to believe they are correct. Nat. Sec. Adviser Jake Sullivan cracking a rib canceling his trip to Saudi Arabia may speak to that. I mean, there’s a high probability of that when you “fall down the stairs” or whatever excuse he gave.
