Back to Cold War 2.0 with Joe Biden and His "Diplomacy-Favoring" Secretary of State Blinken by Dave LIndorff!
(2021-02-04 at 03:23:44 )

Back to Cold War 2.0 with Joe Biden and His "Diplomacy-Favoring" Secretary of State Blinken by Dave LIndorff!

Who Is the United States to demand that Russia free anyone?

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist "Doomstay" clock is at 100 seconds to midnight, suggesting that renewing the SALT agreement by Feb 5 would be in the interest of both the United States and Russia.

A fawning liberal media and a passel of well-endowed "peace" organizations like Plowshares and Council for a Livable World and self-described "progressive" organizations like MoveOn have been hailing Joe Bidens cabinet picks, many of them veterans of the Barack Obama administration, claiming they will steer the United States in a new direction under which diplomacy, not bluster and military threats, will be the default policyBa.

And yet right out of the box we see the Joe Biden administration "demanding" that Russia release Mr. Putin critic and political challenger Alexey Navalny from a just-ordered 32-month sentence for jumping bail and leaving the country? Is that supposed to be diplomacy? Is Moscow likely to cave in to such an imperious demand? Is the United States prepared to act in some fashion to enforce its demand?

Of course not.

Typically on issues like his, at least with the United States, one sees sanctions being placed on the offending country, or on individuals in power. But while that tactic might cause enough pain to get results against some third world country, it does not work so well when the target is a nation like Russia, which does not do much business with the United States, which has reduced its holdings of United States debt significantly and that has actually been with other countries to develop a banking system that does not rely on United States banks. Furthermore, Russia has a product - oil and especially natural gas - which Europe is hungry for.

Making threatening-sounding demands does not work either when the target country has a long history of resisting being pushed around.

Now if Secretary of State Antony Blinken seriously wants to engage in diplomacy, he should start off the new United States Biden administrations relationship with Moscow not by making a blustery demand it cannot enforce. He should instead offer a carrot of some kind, which could then be withheld. Perhaps he posits such a carrot is President Bidens offer over the phone to President Vladimir Putin to extend the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). This decades old pact reached by President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev is set to expire in three days, potentially setting off a new arms race in nuclear warheads, bombs and intercontinental missiles.

But using that treaty as a carrot would make no sense. Mr. Putin, a seasoned international leader, knows the United States needs SALT renewed as much as Russia does. The Doomsday Clock was just moved down to 100 seconds by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and more weapons of ultimate destruction are the last thing either country or the rest of the world needs.

So what gives here? Is this just more Cold War posturing of the kind we saw so often under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, George HW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush and Obama and, in North Korea, China and Venezuela at least, Trump?

Seems like it.

Meanwhile, is there not some major hypocrisy going on here when the United States has the largest prison population in the world (2.3 million locked up and far more struggling to survive as unemployable felons who have served time in this nations vast prison industrial complex and have either completed their sentences or are out on parole)?

More to the point, is the United States still not hounding journalist Julian Assange, keeping him locked up in the hell hole of a British prison while it appeals a decision blocking his extradition to face espionage charges in the United States for, among other things, exposing war crimes by United States forces in Afghanistan and Iraq?

There is apparently no recognition in the White House or the State Department of the huge irony that the charge the United Kingdom is using to accommodate the United States and continue holding Mr. Assange, whom a British magistrate already ruled could not be extradited to the United States, is for having jumped bail (in a case that has long ago been dropped by Swedish prosecutors). That is the same "crime," in other words, that the United States is demanding that Russia release Mr. Navalny for committing.

Now here is how to be diplomatic, Secretary Blinken: Propose that if Russia releases Navalny and drops its charges against him, the United States will drop its (let us face it, embarrassing and trumped up) espionage charge against Mr. Assange and concede the loss of its extradition case.

Of course, at this point, Russia might up the ante and suggest that the United States also drop its similarly outrageous charges against Edward Snowden. You remember him I am sure. He is the NSA whistleblower who has been a guest of Russia, which in 2013 offered him asylum from United States espionage and other charges that had led to his passport being revoked while he was transiting through Moscow enroute to asylum in Ecuador.

You and President Biden might win diplomatic points by suggesting such a deal. Doing so would go a little way towards restoring the United States currently tattered reputation as a land where freedom of the press is honored, while also getting credit for winning Mr. Navalnys release, while vastly improving United States-Russian relations.

That, sirs, is how diplomacy works, not by blustering and making demands that can you cannot expect will gain you anything.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!