Russia - USA Relations

Romney’s self-fulfilling Russia prophecy, by Scott Ritter.

The degradation of the Russian-US relations is the byproduct of the American foreign policy.

A decade ago, then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was lambasted by the media for calling Russia “America’s number one geopolitical foe.” Today, he is being lauded for being a visionary. Romney’s self-fulfilling prophecy says more about bad US policy than Russian malfeasance.

It was the hot mic moment heard around the world. On March 26, 2012, as reporters were being led into a photo opportunity involving President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the eve of a global nuclear security summit in Seoul, South Korea, their microphones picked up an exchange between the two leaders.

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

The context of the conversation—delicate negotiations between the US and Russia regarding ballistic missile defense systems in Europe—was irrelevant to what happened next.

That night,while being interviewed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Obama’s Republican opponent in the 2012 US Presidential race, Mitt Romney, chided the Democratic incumbent for his comments. “Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage,” Romney said. “And for this president to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia, is very, very troubling, very alarming.” Calling Russia America’s number one geopolitical foe, Romney declared, “they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that [President Barack Obama] has some more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling, indeed.”

The issue of Obama’s hot mic moment came up again,during a televised debate on October 22, 2012. Obama, aware of the potential negative political exposure his hot mic incident could create, came loaded with a zinger. “A few months ago,” he told Romney, “when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia…and the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

All Romney could do was repeat his assessment of Russia being America’s number one geopolitical foe, before declaring: “I have clear eyes on this. I’m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I’m certainly not going to say to him, ‘I’ll give you more flexibility after the election.’”

Obama’s mic-drop moment was devastating for Romney, who lost the election in a landslide.

Years later, some of Romney’s biggest critics appear to have changed their minds about his “Cold War” moment. “Look, I’m willing to say that in 2012 when we all scoffed at Mitt for saying that, gee, Russia was our No. 1 geopolitical foe, think we were a little off there,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau noted in 2017.

In the aftermath of Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine, Mitt Romney’s 2012 pronouncements have been, in the eyes of many political observers in America, vindicated.

Romney certainly believes so, commenting on CNN’s State of the Union last Sunday that “a geopolitical foe they obviously were and continue to be, because Russia continues to fight us in every venue they have. They support the world’s worst actors.”

Romney expressed concern over a trend by three former presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—who sought to reset relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “John McCain was right,” Romney said. “He said he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw the KGB. And that’s what we’re seeing: a small, evil, feral-eyed man who is trying to shape the world in the image where once again Russia would be an empire. And that’s not going to happen.”

To the geopolitically uninitiated, Romney’s 2012 remarks, when viewed through the lens of the present, certainly seem prescient. What is missing, however, is the context of history over time, the factual connectivity between events circa 2012, and the moment. When Obama and Medvedev had their hot mic incident, the US and Russia were still in their “reset” phase of the Obama first term, where the US hoped against hope that they would be able to weaken Putin’s hold on power by promoting the political fortunes of Medvedev.

This gambit failed, not because of any malfeasance on the part of Russia, but the lack of integrity in the Obama administration when it came to fulfilling promises made to Medvedev concerning arms control and the NATO intervention in Libya. While the US notion that Medvedev could somehow supplant Putin as the leading political figure in Russia was always an American pipe dream (the brain child of none other than Michael McFaul, Obama’s foremost Russian expert in the national security council who went on to become Obama’s Ambassador in Moscow), the notion that improving US-Russian relations through meaningful diplomatic engagement was not far-fetched. Indeed, had the Obama administration delivered on missile defense, and limited the intervention in Libya to purely humanitarian pursuits, there was a good chance that relations between the US and Russia during Putin’s second incarnation as Russia’s President could have been constructive.

The duplicity and deceit of the Obama administration, when combined with the flagrant Russophobia that defined the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, so soured relations that even before Joe Biden took office in early 2021, the level of US-Russian discourse had sunk to Cold War-era levels. The Trump administration had inherited a dark mess from its predecessor when it came to US-Russian relations, colored not only by the false allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to steal the 2016 US Presidential election, but a proxy conflict in Ukraine which had emerged in the aftermath of the so-called Maidan Revolution. The 2014 US-backed insurrection overthrew the duly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, replacing him with ultra-nationalists whose anti-Russian stance led to the reabsorption of Crimea by the Russian government and the outbreak of fighting between the new Ukrainian government and pro-Russia separatists in the Donbass region.

The US had become so entangled in the Ukrainian web that Trump was impeached based upon a phone call he made in the summer of 2019 to newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During that call, he allegedly held US military aid hostage to a promise by Zelensky to investigate the relationship between Joe Biden’s son and a Ukrainian energy holding company, Burisma. The way the impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, described the importance of this aid was telling when it came to the state of US-Russian relations.

“This military aid, which has long enjoyed strong bipartisan support, was designed to help Ukraine defend itself from the Kremlin’s aggression. More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies, and the military aid was for such essentials as sniper rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, radar, night vision goggles and other vital support for the war effort,” Schiff said in his opening address to the US Senate presiding over the impeachment trial of Trump, on January 22, 2020.

He continued: “Most critically, the military aid we provide Ukraine helps to protect and advance American national security interests in the region and beyond. America has an abiding interest in stemming Russian expansionism and resisting any nation’s efforts to remake the map of Europe by dint of military force, even as we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there. Moreover, as one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry: ‘The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that they can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.’”

Seen in this light, there was nothing prescient about Mitt Romney’s 2012 categorization of US-Russian relations. Far from representing a maintenance of a decade-long status quo linked to the pernicious personality of a single Russian president, the degradation of relations between Russia and the US from 2012 to the present was the byproduct of an American foreign policy which was inherently anti-Russian in its construct. Romney’s 2012 pronouncements represent little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy, the consequence of a relationship marked by bad faith on the part of the United States.

https://www.rt.com/news/550981-russian-us-relations-degradation-romney/

kvs wrote:

Sh*t is getting real!  Lavrov is now framing US nuclear weapons in Europe as unacceptable.

Russia is not bending, it is flexing.

To quote Wendy Sherman's words today at US Congress hearings on returning NATO's expansion to 1997 levels: the Pentagon placing nuclear weapons on European soil is simply "ludicrous" (sic).

Moscow: US Embassy Handed Note With List of Diplomats Being Ousted From Russia in Tit-for-Tat Move, 23.03.2022.

The US and its allies began a new round of expulsions of Russian diplomats last month in response to Moscow's military operation in Ukraine, with Washington declaring Embassy #2 diplomat Sergei Trepelkov persona non grata and expelling about a dozen Russians working at the UN over claims that they engaged in "espionage."

The US Embassy in Moscow has been handed a note with a list of diplomats to be deported from Russia in response to the expulsion of Russians from the diplomatic mission to the United Nations, the Russian Foreign Ministry has announced.

https://sputniknews.com/20220323/moscow-us-diplomat-handed-note-with-list-of-diplomats-being-ousted-from-russia-in-tit-for-tat-move-1094127196.html

Megalopolis vs Russia: Total War, by Pepe Escobar. 10.05.2022.

Operation Z is the first salvo of a titanic struggle: three decades after the fall of the USSR and 77 years after the end of World War II, after careful evaluation, the Kremlin is rearranging the geopolitical chessboard to end the unipolar hegemony of the “indispensable nation”. It is not surprising that the Empire Of Lies has completely gone mad, obsessed with completely expelling Russia from the Western-centric system.

The US and its NATO offsprings cannot possibly assume their perplexity when faced with a staggering loss: there is no longer the right to allow the exclusive geopolitical use of force to perpetuate “our values”. There is no longer broad spectrum domination.

The micro-frame is also clear. The U.S. Deep State is milking into the fifths of Hell (Kingdom Come) its planned move to Ukraine to disguise its attack on Russia. The” secret " was to force Moscow into an intra-Slavic war in Ukraine in order to break Nord Stream 2 – thus breaking German dependence on Russian natural resources. This ends – at least for the foreseeable future – with the prospect of a Russian-German Bismarckian connection that would ultimately cause the US to lose control of the Eurasian continent stretching from the English Channel to the Pacific for a China-Russia-Germany pact.

So far, the US strategic move has worked wonders. But the battle is far from over. The psycho-neocon silos within the Deep State regard both Russia as a serious threat to the “rules-based international order” that are willing to risk, if not incur, a “limited” nuclear war outside their play. What is at stake is nothing less than the loss of the ‘rule in the world’ by the Anglo-Saxons.

Based on purchasing Power Parity (PPP), Russia is the sixth economy in the world – just behind Germany and ahead of both the UK and France. Its “hard " economy is similar to U.S. Steel's production-it may even be the same-but its intellectual capacity is vastly superior. Russia has about the same number of Engineers as the US, but these are much better educated.

The Mossad (Israeli spy service) attributes Israel's economic miracle to creating a Silicon Valley equivalent of one million Russian immigrants. This Israeli Silicon Valley was a key asset of the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-media-Academia-Think-Tank complex)-as it was indelibly named by Ray McGovern.

The Natostan media saying that Russia'S GDP is the size of that of Texas is nonsense. PPP is what really counts; that and the fact that Russia's top engineers are the reason why its hypersonic weapons are at least two or three generations ahead of the US. Just ask the indispensable Andrei Martyanov.

The Empire Of Lies has no defensive missiles that deserve this name and no equivalent to Mr. Zircon and Mr. Sarmat.  The sphere of Otanost simply cannot win a war, or any war, against Russia for this reason alone.

The deafening Natostan "narrative “that Ukraine is defeating Russia does not even qualify as an innocuous joke (compare this to the Russian strategy of”getting in touch and touching someone"). The corrupt system of the SBU fanatics, mixed with the Ucronazist factions is over. The Pentagon knows that. The CIA cannot admit it as possible. What the Empire Of Lies has kind of won, so far, is a “victory” in the media for the Ucronazists and not a military victory.

General Aleksandr Dvornikov, famous since Syria, has a clear mandate: to conquer the entire Donbass, fully liberate the Crimea and prepare the offensive in the direction of Odessa and Transnistria, while reducing the rear of Ukraine to the status of a failed state without access to the sea.

The Sea of Azov-connected with the Caspian Sea by the Don-Volga canal – is already a Russian lake. And the Black Sea is next, the key connection between the continent and the Mediterranean. The system of the five seas – Black, Azov, Caspian, Baltic and white – enshrines Russia as a de facto continental naval power. Who needs warm water?

Moving “at the speed of war”

From now on, the pain dial will rise without stopping. The reality – like facts on the ground-will soon become apparent, even to the comprehensive LugenPresse (Media of Lies - Lugen) of Natostan.

The “woke” chief of Staff of the US Armed Forces, Gen. Mark Milley, expects operation Z to last for years. That's nonsense. The Russian Armed Forces can afford to be quite methodical and take the necessary time to properly demilitarize Ukraine. The collective West, for its part, is pressed for time – because the counter-coup of the real economy is already operating and is bound to become vicious.

Defense Minister Shoigu made it quite clear: any NATO vehicles that bring weapons to Kiev will be destroyed as “legitimate military targets”.

A report by the scientific service of the Bundestag proved that the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil can be considered as participation in war under international law. And this becomes even more complicated when it is coupled with NATO weapons deliveries: “only if, in addition to the supply of weapons, the instruction of conflict participants or their training for the use of such weapons is also an issue, this leaves the safe area of”non-war".

Now it is at least irreparably clear that the Empire of lies “moves at the speed of war” - as was publicly described by an arms salesman turned Pentagon chief – Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin [US Defense Minister]. In Pentagonese [the language of the Pentagon], this was explained by the proverbial “authority” as “a combination of call-center, an observation center, meeting rooms. They run a battle rhythm to support decision makers.”

The Pentagonese” pace of battle “offered to a supposed” credible, resilient and combat – able military force " is fueled by an EUCom system that essentially passes weapons orders from Pentagon warehouses in the U.S. to Empire subsidiaries of Bases in Europe and, from there, to NATO's Eastern Front in Poland-from where they are shipped by truck to Ukraine, just in time to be properly incinerated by Russian precision strikes: the plethora of [Russian] options include P-800 Onyx supersonic missiles, two types of Iskander [missiles] and Mr. Khinzal launched from Mig-31ks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that Moscow is perfectly aware that the US, NATO and the UK are transferring not only weapons, but also heaps of intelligence information. In parallel, the collective West turns everything upside down 24/7, shaping a new environment totally against Russia, regardless of even some semblance of partnership in any area. The collective West does not even consider the possibility of dialogue with Russia.

Consequently, talking to Putin is “a waste of time” unless a “Russian defeat” in Ukraine (echoing Kiev's raucous public relations) makes him “more realistic”. For all his flaws, The Little King (Le Petit Roi) Macron/McKinsey has been an exception, when he spoke to Putin on the phone earlier this week.

Putin's Orwellian Hitlerization reduces him, even among the so-called Euro-intelligentsia, to the dictator status of a nation chloroformized in its nineteenth-century nationalism. Putin is a late Augustus, portraying his empire as a Republic.

At best, Europeans preach and pray – like chihuahuas obeying their master's voice – for a hybrid strategy of “containment and confrontation” to be unleashed by the U.S., clumsily papaguing the squiggles of the inhabitants of that intellectual No-fly zone, The Think Tankland.

In fact, Europeans would like to “isolate” Russia – as if 12% of the world's population were “isolating” 88% of the world's population (obviously, their fixed Western “view” completely ignores the Global South). ” Help " for Russia will come only when sanctions are effective (read: Never; counter-coup will be the norm), or – the last wet dream – when there is a regime exchange in Moscow.

The Fall

Ucronazist public relations agent Ursula von der Lugen presented the sixth package of sanctions of the (Dis)Europoodle Union.

The top of the ratio is to exclude three more Russian banks from SWIFT, including Sberbank. Seven banks have already been excluded. This will enforce the” total isolation " of Russia. It is useless to comment on something that only deceives the LügenPress.

Then comes the “progressive” embargo on oil imports. There will be no more crude oil imported into the European Union within six months, and no more refined products by the end of 2022. As it stands, the IEA shows that 45% of Russia's oil exports go to the European Union (22% to China and 10% to the US). The Voice of his Master continues and will continue to import Russian oil.


And, of course, another 58 “personal” sanctions are also put forward, targeting such very dangerous characters as Patriarch Kirill of the [Russian] Orthodox Church and the wife, son and daughter of Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.

This astonishing display of stupidity will have to be approved by all members of the European Union. Internal revolt is guaranteed, especially in Hungary, even if so many remain willing to commit an energy suicide and to mess up the lives of their citizens enormously to defend a neo-Nazi regime.

Alastair Crooke drew my attention to a surprising and original interpretation of what is happening, offered in Russian by a Serbian analyst, Prof. Slobodan Vladusic. His main thesis, briefly, is “ " the megalopolis hates Russia because this is not a megalopolis – it has not entered the sphere of anti-humanism and that is why it remains an alternative civilization. Consequently, there is Russophobia".

Vladusic claims that the intra-Slavic war in Ukraine is “a great catastrophe for Orthodox civilization” - mirroring my recent attempt to open up a serious debate about the Clash of Christianisms.

However, the major schism is not about religion, but about culture: “the key difference between the ancient West and the present Megalopolis is that the megalopolis programmatically renounces the humanist heritage of the West.”'

Now, then,” it is possible to erase not only the musical canon, but also the entire European humanistic heritage: all literature, the fine arts, philosophy “because of a”trivialization of knowledge". What's left is an empty space, in fact it's a cultural black hole, "filled with promotional terms like 'post-humanism'and' trans-humanism'.”

And here, Vladusic gets to the heart of the matter: Russia fiercely opposes the 'Great Reset' forged by the “hackable” self-styled “elites” of the Megalopolis.

Sergey Glazyev, who now coordinates the draft of a new financial / monetary system for the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU – Eurasia Economic Union) in partnership with the Chinese, adopts Vladusic for the facts on the ground - here in Russian (https://glazev.ru/articles/10-vlast-i-obshhestvo/101493-narod-plokho-ponimaet-chto-proiskhodit) and here in an imperfect translation into English (http://thesaker.is/sergey-glazyev-for-those-who-still-dont-understand/) .

Glazyev is much more blunt here than in his painstaking economic analysis. While pointing out the Deep State's goals of destroying the Russian World, Iran and blocking China, he stresses that the US “will not be able to win the global hybrid war”. A key reason for this is that the collective West “put all independent countries in front of the need to find new global monetary instruments, risk security mechanisms, restore the norms of international law and create their own systems of economic security.”

Yes, then, this is ' Totalen Krieg – - as Glazyev deciphers without attenuation, and as Russia denounced this week at the UN: “Russia needs to oppose the US and NATO in their confrontation, bringing it to its logical conclusion, so as not to be torn between them and China, which is irrevocably becoming the leader of the world economy.”

History may, 77 years after the end of World War II, record that the psychotic neocons/neoliberalcons in the silos of Washington who instigated the inter-Slavic war by ordering Kiev to launch a lightning war against the Donbass was what led to the fall of the US Empire.

Yandex Translate from Portuguese.

https://www.brasil247.com/blog/megalopole-x-russia-guerra-total.