Sunday, July 22, 2018

Otherjones Changes Focus

Since my articles are freely available at New Eastern Outlook (journal.neo.org), henceforth I will be mainly reposting articles and videos from sources that get no exposure in the US media, mainly from Russia, China and other international players.

Below is a televised discussion about the Russian economy, which I don't think has a paralell in the US.   Comments are welcome,  I respond to all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmesaY8c8Y

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Cooperation versus Competition, or Left versus Right

Since the time of the French Revolution, the left-right divide has focused mainly on attitudes toward equity within nation-states and since the Russian revolution it has included competition between capitalism and socialism on the world stage.  With the demise of the Soviet Union, the West, which touts competition, was confident it had eliminated the notion that nations, like kindergartners, should cooperate to the benefit of all.

For almost a decade, our man in Moscow, the tippler Boris Yeltsin, solidified that conviction, as the majority lost much of their safety nets while a few in the new Russia got richer, as competition was anointed as the highest good by oligarchs like David Browder, who thought they could even get away with not paying taxes to the new Russian State.

Strongman Vladimir Putin started to change all that the minute he stepped into Yeltsin's wornout shoes: the oligarchs could keep their ill-gained wealth (they bought up the individual shares that had been distributed to financially unsavvy Russian citizens to gain control of the country's major assets) as long as they kept their noses out of the new president's plan to make his country a good place to live for everyone.

Somehow, the US found that attitude offensive. Under President Clinton (who tore up Yugoslavia) it adopted a new Security Doctrine: no country should even dream of challenging US world hegemony, and Russia, with its vast mineral wealth, was in a position to do just that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine.   (This document is worth reading in its entirety, not least because it describes the steps the US should take to ensure the fidelity of allies.)

By the time Vladiimir Putin had been voted in as President of the Russian Federation twice (in 2000 and 2004), it was becoming clear that the United States was not adhering to the promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that if the Soviet Union agreed to the reunification of Germany, NATO would not advance beyond that new country's eastern border.  At the yearly Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin denounced NATO's drang nach Osten, which for Russians represents a repeat of previous invasions by Germany through the Eastern European corridor.  To no avail.  NATO has continued its march right up to Russia's border, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  And in 2014, with an eye to eventually enrolling Russia's neighbor, Ukraine, in the Western alliance, we  (according to videod bragging by Victoria Nuland, Clinton's secretary for Eastern European Affairs,  to the Washington Press Club in December 2013), spent five billion dollars supporting 'pro-democracy' groups, efforts which, in Febrary 2014 culminated in 'The Maidan', weeks-long demonstrations backed by armed Neo-Nazi militias ressuscitated from World War II that forced the pro-Russian president to flee.  

Since then, the West has claimed that it was Russia that infringed on the post World War II rules, which stipulated that the agreed-upon boundaries of Europe were inviolate (never mind Yugoslavia), by backing the Russian speaking Donbas region that refuses to recognize the coup-installed Kiev government, and organizing a referendum in Crimea.  Never mind that at the end of World War II, Crimea was part of the Soviet Union until it was gifted to Ukraine by Khruschev in 1954!  And never mind that Russia is entitled to defend its warm water naval base in Sebastopol, which was created by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, to prevent NATO from adding a Black Sea fleet to the tanks lining Russia's land border with Europe!

The US's determination to maintain its hegemony over the world is closely linked to its devotion to competition over cooperation, and represents the twenty-first century front-line of the perrenial left-right divide: The world is one big community and Russia, together with its close ally China and a number of other large countries, believes that cooperation is the best way to ensure a fair distribution of wealth across borders.

Unremarked by the US media, as the G7 was under way, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that groups like-minded nations, was holding its 18th annual summit in Shanghai.  The organization was founded in 2001 by  the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and now also includes India and Pakistan. Iran, Aghanistan, Belarus,  Mongolia are observers, and the position of Dialogue Partner was created in 2008 for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Negal, adding Turkey in 2009.

And while President Trump was lashing out at the G7, in Shanghai, the other authoritarian leader he claims to be friends with, China's Xi Jin Ping, was discussing cooperation at an organization that covers three-fifths of the Eurasian continent and nearly half of the human population. 

Friday, July 20, 2018

How Russians Debate Foreign Policy



'Russian street fashions' from Google images
I'm so tired of hearing only one opinion about Russia and Vladimir Putin, over and over, on every channel, lilke so many broken records, that I asked a Moscow friend if the same thing was happening there.  His answer was: "Vat a kvestchun!"

Here is the link to a popular Russian television program with English captions that he sent me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmesaY8c8Y&authuser=0

Comments welcome!

P.S. Further on the subject of misperceptions, see this:

http://russiafeed.com/while-the-western-media-establishment-thinks-russia-is-still-communist/?mc_cid=e056ca116a&mc_eid=8f18f6cdd4

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Have You Ever Heard of 'The Wolfowitz Doctrine'?

If you are wondering why, almost two uyears after the 2016 election, Washington and its media are frothing at the mouth over 'Russian intervention in our democratic process', you will find the answer by Googling 'The Wolfowitz Doctrine' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine).  As I detailed in my book Russia's Americans,  it has represented official American security policy since the late nineties.  During the presidency of George Bush it was referred to as 'the Bush doctrine', which was carried over to the Obama president.  President Trump issued his own security doctrine, however it is only a slightly attenuated version of its predecessor, which makes clear what the current hysteria is all about.

In plain language, the 1992 document described as Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–99 fiscal years, which has never been superseded, states:


Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.



Paul Wolfowitz
And further:


There can be no challenge to U.S.'s world leadership.
“The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the means to deter potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”IS

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TO UNDERSTAND THAT WE ARE WITNESSING FAKE HYSTERIA?

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Living in the Truth

Posted on NEO Juune 30, 2018
The reunification of Europe was still three decades away when, in 1963, the playwright Vaclav Havel presented his first works in Prague’s Theater of the Absurd, ushering in the transformation of the historically staid Czech culture into a whimsical one that contributed to the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

The man who was to initiate Charter 77, criticizing the Communist government for failing to implement human rights provisions of a number of documents it had signed, including the 1960 Constitution of Czechoslovakia, the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Basket III of the Helsinki Accords), and 1966 United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights, was ultimately voted the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993-2003.

Vaclav’ Havel’s movement was associated with the notion of ‘living in truth’, which implied ceasing to cooperate with official Communist claims of democracy. At a time when American intellectuals increasingly disregard facts that are part of the public record, historian Timothy Snyder publishes a pocket-sized book titled On Tyranny, in which (after saluting the great philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism) he urges Americans, among other things, to support the mainstream media, realizing that “some of what is on the internet is there to harm you”. He further advises his readers to “make eye contract and small talk as a way of breaking down social barriers”, “contribute to good causes”, “be a patriot” and “be calm when the unthinkable arrives”.
Snyder, who specialized in Eastern Europe, began his crusade for ‘the truth’ by drawing western attention to Vaclav Havel’s philosophy back in the eighties. For Havel, ‘living in truth meant keeping a sacred space for what you can prove to be true and for truth-tellers, and Snyder runs with the notion that self-deception enables tyrannies to spread. And yet, with his string of goody-two-shoes recommendations, he implicitly protects media intellectuals such as Fareed Zakaria, who have access to a much larger, and even less educated public.

In his latest weekly program, MSNBC’s authority on truth reported on the Scandinavian countries’ recent decisions to beef up their military and instruct their citizens in how to behave in the event of war with Russia.

WITHOUT ONCE MENTIONING the presence of thousands of NATO troops on Russia’s borders with Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Zakaria wants Americans to know that even the historically neutral Scandinavia countries are taking a stand against ‘Russian aggression’. Here is a map from my book Russia’s Americans that shows the location of US bases most significant for Russia. from among its thousands around the world.



This stark reality is kept from the American people, although it accounts for Vladimir Putin’s decision to ‘stand Russia’s ground’ on its side of the border. That decision, reflecting the first duty of any responsible leader, is presented by the Western media as ‘Russia poised to overrun Europe’. Vaclav’ Havel’s principal of ‘Living in Truth’, espoused by Cold War activists across Eastern Europe proved so inspiring that in 2018, intellectuals still invoke it to justify positions that are the exact opposite of those Havel espoused, as the drumbeat of war continues uninterrupted from the time the world was divided between socialists and capitalists.

It has become clear to at least a few of us that although it’s no longer ideology that’s at stake, it’s still ‘Russia’, a country whose open plains were invaded from the East, the South and the West. To accuse Russia’s leader (who has been in office only two years longer than the Turkish President just re-elected for the third time in a process of dubious legitimacy) of seeking to ‘recreate the Russian Empire’ is a curious way of describing repeated US-led efforts to gnaw at Russia’s European borders. In 2008, the US backed Georgia’s separatist neighbors, and when that effort fizzled, the US State Department openly funded democratic forces in Ukraine, but allowed them to be subsumed by Neo-Nazi militias. When these militias attacked its countrymen living there, Russia defended them and was promptly accused of invading its neighbor, as when it permitted those living in Crimea to hold a referendum on reunification.

Although the Crimea referendum relies for its legitimacy on the 1996 Kosovo referendum organized by NATO to formalize that region’s independence from Serbia, the US accuses Russia of modifying the post World War II borders agreed upon in Yalta by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, while, advising Russia to ‘get used to’ seeing US warships off the coast of its main warm water naval base in the Black Sea….

It took Vaclav Havel, the Polish historian Adam Michnik and the trade union boss Lech Walesa, who would become Poland’s first post-communist president, two decades to reclaim their countries’ respective realities (together with the Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians). Those of us who compose today’s American opposition are powerless to end our government’s selective use of information, as well as its physical abuse of the world outside our borders, whether in post-United Fruit Central America, the rape that drives Africans into Europe, or attempts to persuade Pacific nations that the China Sea is not Beijing’s Mare Nostrum.

Our voices can scarcely be heard, as the personal space reserved for truth closes in around us.

P.S. July 3, 2108:

It seems that the publication of Timothy Snyder’s pocket-sized book was the start of something. (‘Tyranny’, by the way, was a much-used word during the American (and French) revolutions, and thus has a more solemn ring to it than the words ‘dictatorship’ or ‘oligarchy’ or ‘authoritarianism’, commonly used today to express the same notion of injustice.)

In the last few weeks, there has been a concerted campaign by the US media to promote itself. This must mean that the readership of progressive websites is reaching an alarming rate. On July 2, the New York Times ran an add on the internet stating that The Truth Demands our Attention (sic).

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

New Leaf!

I keep having to play catch-up with this blog.  Now that I've not writing any more books,  I'm going to concentrate more on near-daily observations of the big picture, after they are posted on NEO.

Today, I'm taking the liberty of reposting a short but fundamental analysis of the reasons for the migration crisis that is affecting both Europe and the US, by the internationally known known foreign policy analyst,  James Petras.

 It is illustrated by this beautiful French poster disseminated by Giuseppe Zambon, an Italian left-wing publisher located in Frankfurt Germany,  who for years has been ensuring that contributions by a wide range of observers reach a wider audience through his mailing list.  (His email address is zambon@zambon.net, the company is Zambon Verlag.)

As for the poster, it illustrates Zambon's years' long backing of the Palestinian cause  via the importation of Palestinian olive oil which is made available to his readership.  This is but one example of how much more intimately European progressives are involved in the Palestinian struggle than those of us in the US, for obvious geographic reasons.

Immigration:  Western Wars and Imperial Exploitation Uproot Millions
James Petras
Introduction
“Immigration” has become the dominant issue dividing Europe and the US, yet the most important matter which is  driving millions to emigrate is overlooked - wars. 
In this paper we will discuss the reasons behind the massification of immigration, focusing on several issues, namely (1) imperial wars (2) multi-national corporate expansion (3) the decline of the anti-war movements in the US and Western Europe (4) the weakness of the trade union and solidarity movements.
We will proceed by identifying the major countries affected by US and EU wars leading to massive immigration, and then turn to the western powers forcing refugees to ‘follow’ the flows of profits.
Imperial Wars and Mass Immigration
The US invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq uprooted several million people, destroying their lives, families, livelihood, housing and communities and undermining there security.
As a result, most victims faced the choice of resistance or flight.  Millions chose to flee to the West since the NATO countries would not bomb their residence in the US or Europe.
Others who fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East or Latin America were persecuted, or resided in countries too poor to offer them employment or opportunities for a livelihood.
Some Afghans fled to Pakistan or the Middle East but discovered that these regions were also subject to armed attacks from the West.
Iraqis were devastated by the western sanctions, invasion and occupation and fled to Europe and to a lesser degree  the US , the Gulf states and Iran.
Libya prior to the US-EU invasion was a ‘receiver’ country accepting and employing millions of Africans, providing them with citizenship and a decent livelihood.  After the US-EU air and sea attack and arming and financing of terrorist gangs, hundreds of thousands of Sub-Sahara immigrants were forced to flee to Europe.  Most crossed the Mediterranean Sea to the west via Italy, Spain , and headed toward the affluent European countries which had savaged their lives in Libya.
The US-EU financed and armed client terrorist armies which assault the Syrian government and forced millions of Syrians to flee across the border to Lebanon,Turkey and beyond to Europe, causing the so-called ‘immigration crises’ and the rise of  rightwing anti-immigrant parties.  This led to divisions within the established social democratic and  conservative parties,as sectors of the working class turned anti-immigrant.
Europe is reaping the consequences of its alliance with US militarized imperialism whereby the US uproots millions of people and the EU spends billions of euros to cover the cost of immigrants fleeing the western wars.
Most of the immigrants’ welfare payments fall far short of the losses incurred in their homeland. Their jobs homes, schools, and civic associations in the EU and US are far less valuable and accommodating then what they possessed in their original communities.
Economic Imperialism and Immigration:  Latin America
US wars, military intervention and economic exploitation has forced millions of Latin Americans to immigrate to the US.. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras engaged in popular struggle for  socio-economic justice and political democracy between 1960 – 2000.  On the verge of victory over the landed oligarchs and multinational corporations, Washington blocked popular insurgents by  spending billions of dollars, arming, training, advising the military and paramilitary forces.  Land reform was aborted; trade unionists were forced into exile and thousands of peasants fled the marauding terror campaigns.
The US-backed oligarchic regimes forced millions of displaced and uprooted pr unemployed and landless workers to flee to the US .
US supported coups and dictators resulted in 50,000 in Nicaragua, 80,000 in El Salvador and 200,000 in Guatemala.  President Obama and Hillary Clinton  supported a  military coup in Honduras which overthrew  Liberal President Zelaya--- which led to the killing and wounding of thousands of peasant activists and human rights workers, and the return of death squads ,resulting in a new wave of immigrants to the US.
The US promoted free trade agreement (NAFTA) drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers into bankruptcy and into low wage maquiladoras; others were recruited by drug cartels; but the largest group was forced to immigrate across the Rio Grande.
The US ‘Plan Colombia’ launched by President Clinton established seven US military bases in Colombia and provided 1 billion dollars in military aid between 2001 – 2010.  Plan Colombia doubled the size of the military,
The US backed President Alvaro Uribe,resulting in the assassination of over 200,000 peasants, trade union activists and human rights workers by Uribe directed narco-death squad.Over two million farmers fled the countryside and  immigrated to the cities or across the border.
US business secured hundreds of thousands of Latin American low wages, agricultural and factory workers almost all without health insurance or benefits – though they paid taxes,
Immigration doubled profits, undermined collective bargains and lowered US wages.  Unscrupulous US ‘entrepreneurs’ recruited immigrants into drugs, prostitution, the arms trade and money laundering.
Politicians exploited the immigration issue for political gain – blaming the immigrants for the   decline of  working class living standards  distracting  attention from the real source :  wars, invasions, death squads and economic pillage.
Conclusion
Having destroyed the lives of working people overseas and overthrown progressive leaders like Libyan President Gadhafi and Honduran President Zelaya, millions were forced to become immigrants.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,  Colombia ,Mexico witnessed  the flight  of millions of immigrants  -- all victims of US and EU wars. Washington and Brussels blamed the victims and accused the immigrants of illegality and criminal conduct .
The West debates expulsion, arrest and jail instead of reparations for crimes against humanity and violations of international law.
To restrain immigration the first step is to end imperial wars, withdraw troops, and to cease financing paramilitary and client terrorists.
Secondly, the West should establish a long term multi-billion-dollar fund for reconstruction and recovery of the economies, markets and infrastructure they bombed
The demise of the peace movement allowed the US and EU to launch and prolong serial wars which led to massive immigration – the so-called refugee crises and the flight to Europe.  There is a direct connection between the conversion of the liberal and social democrats to war -parties and  the forced flight of immigrants to the EU.
The decline of the trade unions  and worse, their loss of militancy has led to the loss of solidarity with people living in the midst of imperial wars.  Many workers in the imperialist countries have directed their ire to those ‘below’ – the immigrants, - rather than to  the imperialists who directed the wars which created the immigration problem.
Immigration, war , the demise of the peace and workers movements and left parties has led to the rise of the militarists, and neo-liberals who have taken power throughout the West.  Their anti-immigrant politics, however, has provoked new contradictions within regimes, between business elites and among popular movements in the EU and the US.  The elite and popular struggles can go in at least two directions – toward fascism or radical social democracy.













Thursday, June 7, 2018

Donald Trump: An Unstoppable Force Meets an Unmovable Object

Posted on NEO on June 6, 2018 
Stormy Daniels
Never in America’s two hundred years plus history has the country been seen as heading toward a constitutional crisis of comparable gravity. The Constitution is evoked to justify a myriad of actions on the part of the three branches of government, and public servants, hand on the bible, pledge to defend ‘it’ rather than ‘the country’.  Although several high-level government officials have been impeached during the country’s two hundred plus year history, with Presidents Nixon and Clinton standing out as the most egregious, nothing comparable to the present situation has occured, leaving the most prestigious legal authorities splitting hairs. 
The notion of fealty to the constitution has repeatedly led to disputes over free speech (cited in the First Amendment), and the possession of firearms (the subject of the Second Amendment), however recently it has inspired the creation of political formations devoted to ‘taking the country back’ to the time of its drafting. 
Under America’s complicated system of ‘checks and balances’ between the three ‘co-equal branches of government’ questions of interpretation often arise. However the case of Donald Trump is unprecedented, in that his punishable offenses include both business dealings and possible ‘collusion’ with ‘foreign powers’. (An iron-clad US rule is that presidential candidates may not accept anything of value from foreigners, especially foreign governments!) However, as the investigation headed by the Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller enters its second year, Trump’s personal life has been harnessed by a brilliant California lawyer who believes his case on behalf of a sex worker can prevent the president from finishing his term because it involves illicitly arranged payments. There are days when Stormy Daniels, as she is known, relegates ‘Russiagate’ to the back burner, to the chagrin of those determined to make war with Moscow.
As the year-long investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign lurches from one rocky shoal to another, daily revelations require the media to repeat old facts, such as the indictments of thirteen private Russian citizens and three Russian companies.  Since the US cannot compel them to appear in US courts, and the Russian government requires more hard facts than it has received to agree to extradite them, the law’s only recourse is to intercept them when they land at American airports and harass them with questions, providing mini-headlines that allow the media to constantly rehash the entire story, even though surveys show that ‘Russiagate’ is low on voters’ list of priorities, behind health care, jobs, and trade.

As pundits argue over whether the Constitution allows a ‘sitting president’ to be indicted by the justice system; whether he can fire the special counsel who is investigating him; whether he can be compelled to testify and finally, if convicted in a court of law, whether he can actually pardon himself, Trump voters talk about taking the country back to the time when the Constitution was drafted, instead of finding a way to extricate itself from the situation it has enabled.

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Russiagate: Manipulating Globalization

Pulished on New Eastern Outlook on June 1, 2018

Forget election tampering; forget Hillary’s emails and the role a recluse in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London may have played. Realize that the ‘attack on our democracy’ was all about playing for high stakes on the international game board.

The US cannot be sanctioned for playing world policeman, and its president can simply be impeached for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ instead of being sent to jail for ‘white collar crimes’. Either way, realizing that the US is unlikely to soon become the cooperative political player called for in the UN charter, Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa have begun designing a new world order that takes UN principles literally: instead of an eleven-member Security Council, five of which can veto resolutions, the BRICS are constructing a multi-polar world in which the most influential countries in each region cooperate to ensure the peace and development of the world.

Russiagate has revealed the ease with which globalization’s rules can be exploited, overshadowing the world’s real political and economic problems. And as long as audiences — especially in the US — are obsessed with the pursuit of political ‘crimes’, war crimes will continue unabated. I’m not saying that this situation was created deliberately, however it is impossible to deny that it has pushed the Iran Nuclear Treaty into a background where National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can ensure that it is never revived, making way for eventual ‘regime change’ in Teheran, and making it less likely that North Korea’s young leader will give up the weapons that forced the US to talk to him.

These and other nefarious plans, such as fomenting color revolutions in Russia’s near abroad (one recently came to fruition in tiny Armenia), can be all the more easily pursued that the public associates international money laundering and bank fraud with ‘Russian oligarchs close to Putin.” Americans have never been told that when he came to power in 2000 on the back of state pilfering under ‘our man in the Kremlin’ Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin made a deal with those who had become ‘oligarchs’ via those privatizations: “You will be free to continue your games as long as you leave politics up to me.”

Vladimir Putin has kept his part of the bargain, bringing Russia up to speed economically and militarily, but here’s the thing: while it is the largest country in the world, with eleven time zones, its population is relatively small, as is the ruling coterie. Inevitably, the oligarchs’ business may bring them in proximity to the Kremlin, making it easy for the US to link Putin with their criminal activities. A comparison of the Russian population’s standard of living then and now, as well as the country’s defense capabilities compared with eighteen years ago should make clear that Vladimir Putin has been fulfilling his promises to the Russian people, who recently returned him to power for the fourth time. (After being asked to take over the leadership of the country by an ailing Yeltsin in 1999, he was elected for the first time in 2000.) But while it is the largest country in the world, with eleven time zones, its population is relatively small, as is the number of movers and shakers in Moscow. Inevitably, the oligarchs may move in proximity to the Kremlin, making it easy for the US to link Putin with their criminal activities.

All those Russian names that are (with difficulty) coming out of the mouths of English-only American anchors have nothing to do with the war in Syria or the rebellion in eastern Ukraine, let alone the impending reunification of the Koreas after 65 years of a barbed-wire truce. They have to do with bank fraud and money laundering, which were once the realm of gangsters. What the Muller investigation has revealed is an international ‘crime syndicate’ whose claim to fame is its association with the President of the United States (and suggestions that is associated with the President of Russia).

But rather than being a strongman who uses his power for personal enrichment, such as for example Panama’s President Noriega, Putin’s relations with shady oligarchs are probably more like those of the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Robert, with Meyer Lansky and his cohorts based in pre-Castro Havana. (When, fifty years later, I read about the mob’s ‘interest’ in the Cuban revolution, I realized with a shudder that they were lurking in Havana when I arrived there a week after the Kennedy assassination.)

Russiagate shows how far the US has regressed since the days of Camelot.  On the day I submitted this article to NEO, the US media played and replayed a tape of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen threatening a journalist who was gathering information for an article about his client in the tone and using the language of a typical mobster.....


Monday, May 28, 2018

The Annual international Economic Forum in St Petersburg, Russia

I'm publishing Doctorow's review, because it brilliantly captures the reality of waning US influence, illustrating the Russian President's totally different appraoch to human relations from White House inmates: open-ended discussions of crucial issues among friends, which include thousands of political and business figures from around the globe.  Even the had of the IMF, Christine La Garde is present!

This event, as well as the yearly Valdai Discussion Group, constitutes President Vladimir Putin's answers to the Davos Forum and the Bilderburg Conference. Unlike these US-backed gatherings, the Russia-led events are available for public scrutiny.
I watched the panel discussion that included Vladimir Puitn, French President Emanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, China's Vice President Wang Quishan and the General Director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde.  From the pictures, I did indeed get the impression that there were literally thousands of attendants.  Unfortunately, translations and original languages neutered each other so it was very difficult to follow.  What I got was mainly the positive body and facial language of the participants as well the attention of the audience.  Participation in thisyearly conference is in the thousands of dollars, therefore it is not accessible to the public.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Building a Trust Economy' and that title was reflected in the dialogue between the leading and other countries, which seemed to constantly underline the fact that tomorrow's world was being created without the US.  The difference between the familiar attitude of representatives of American power and those on-stage in St Petersburg was stark: these people all treated each other with egalitarian familiarity, President Putin, the convenor and host, relaxed in his chair.  As related by Doctorow, the current between Putin and Macron, often took the form of banter between two generations.

The following report, published by the on-line journal Russia Insider, whose editor in chief, Charles Bausman, is an American, is worth reading in its entirely, although it is very long. It opens a window onto the world outside America's borders, with all its subtleties and revelations.


Putin's Big Economic Conference Is a Very Big Deal This Year, by Gilbert Doctorow

"Macron said loudly and clearly that ... France has the authority and the obligation to exercise its sovereignty and pursue an independent foreign policy. And ... that trust between nations ...  is possible only when nations ... assert their sovereignty.

This year’s 22nd edition of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum was the largest ever, numbering 17,000 guests by the last tally.  Among them were corporate CEOs and chairmen of the world’s largest companies, the top leaders of less famous multinational corporations, as well as of medium and small enterprises.





They came within national business delegations from around the globe led by senior government officials. There were sector and national round tables at which they met with their Russian counterparts. There were grand signing ceremonies for some of the 500 contracts and agreements concluded at the Forum, which had a combined value of 2.365 trillion rubles, or about 30 billion euros.


A revealing moment where Macron says that France is sovereign, and Putin explains quite convincingly that neither France, nor Germany, nor Japan, truly is.

But diverse as the activities of the Forum may have been, none of the Forum venues, none of the Forum participants were as important to the success of the event as the four leaders who joined President Vladimir Putin on stage to address the Plenary Session Friday afternoon:  President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Chinese Vice President Wang Quishan and IMF General Director Christine Lagarde.

If we shift our consideration from protocol rankings to political bellwethers, there is no question that the man to watch from his arrival in St Petersburg on Thursday, 24 May through his departure on Friday evening the 25th was Emmanuel Macron.  The close working relationship with Russia of the leaders of China and of Japan has developed incrementally over the past couple of decades, in the first case, and over the past several years in the second case. 


A light-hearted moment from the conference
France, by contrast, had since the ascent of Francois Hollande to the presidency in 2012 experienced ever more frosty if not conflictual relations with Russia, while it fell wholly in step with every policy position coming out of Washington. This alignment has continued under Emmanuel Macron straight up to French participation in the US-led military strike on Syria 13-14 April over alleged use of chemical weapons by the armed forces of Bashir Assad.

Therefore, in this essay, I will begin with a close examination of what Macron said in his two major addresses and what he may have achieved in negotiations with Vladimir Putin.  We will then consider what the other featured guest of the Forum, Shinzo Abe, said, which contrasts sharply with Macron’s positions.case, and over the past several years in the second case. 


A TV News Report about Macron's visit from Russia's most influential journalist, Dmitry Kiselyov
A light-hearted moment from the conference
France, by contrast, had since the ascent of Francois Hollande to the presidency in 2012 experienced ever more frosty if not conflictual relations with Russia, while it fell wholly in step with every policy position coming out of Washington. This alignment has continued under Emmanuel Macron straight up to French participation in the US-led military strike on Syria 13-14 April over alleged use of chemical weapons by the armed forces of Bashir Assad.

Therefore, in this essay, I will begin with a close examination of what Macron said in his two major addresses and what he may have achieved in negotiations with Vladimir Putin.  We will then consider what the other featured guest of the Forum, Shinzo Abe, said, which contrasts sharply with Macron’s positions.case, and over the past several years in the second case. 

The principal source materials for this analysis were the live, complete and uncommented broadcasts of events within the Forum and on the sidelines by the Russian state television channel Vesti-Rossiya 1.

Emmanuel Macron presents a “sovereign” France with an “independent foreign policy”
Emmanuel Macron’s statements both at the press conference in the Constantine Palace on the 24th following his tête-à-tête talks with Vladimir Putin and at the Plenary Session of the Forum on the 25th oblige me to revise and refine my two previous appreciations of who he is and what he can achieve dating from the days immediately following his election a year ago and from his speech to the joint session of Congress in the USA a month or so ago. 

To be specific, it now appears that Macron is delivering a strong, not the weak France on the international stage that I had supposed. It further appears that whatever assistance he may have received in his electoral campaign from the US intelligence services, and however much he has justified their wager on him as a committed globalist and as a person unlikely to relax sanctions on Russia anytime soon, he is a more complex personality, with greater ambition and greater determination to write his own roadmaps than they assumed. This affects his relations with Vladimir Putin in ways no one in Washington could foresee.

Every edition of the Forum has a theme or leitmotiv that is supposed to guide the addresses of the keynote speakers and the agendas of the round tables and working groups. This year the theme was “Building an Economy of Trust.”  Of all Plenary Session speakers, apart from Vladimir Putin, who was after all the host and surely the author of the leitmotiv, Macron was the most focused on this topic, which he chose to approach from an unusual angle but one highly relevant to the thinking of his hosts: that the precondition for “trust” between nations building a shared global economy is national self-confidence and the assertion of national sovereignty.

We will explore this in a moment. But first I consider it important to go back a year to the days immediately after his assuming office as president when Emmanuel Macron invited Vladimir Putin to their first summit meeting.  What Macron said then bears directly on what he has said these past few days in St Petersburg.

The pretext or rationale for inviting Putin to Versailles in May 2017 was to jointly commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the visit to Paris by Peter the Great.  In his speech at the joint press conference held in Versailles, Macron exhibited thinking processes which are evidently deep-set since they recur in his major addresses, such as before the joint session of Congress a month ago and during his speech at the press conference in the Constantine Palace, Petersburg on Thursday:  namely a highly intellectual approach that searches out affinities with the country he is dealing with in their historical interconnections and shared cultural experiences going back centuries.

As he said on 29 May 2017:
“Dialogue between France and Russia has never ceased since [1717] – a dialogue between our intellectuals, between our cultures sowed the roots of relationship that has endured to this day.”

At the end of the day, the Putin-Macron meeting a year ago may not have done much to improve trade relations or to resolve international conflicts including in Syria and Ukraine, but it did result in the launch what is now called the “Trianon Dialogue” which has as its mission to bring together thinkers, intellectuals, young people in exchanges that are expected to foster greater mutual understanding between French and Russian civil society. Though from his own short speech at Versailles, Putin was clearly more interested in trade figures, he went along with Macron’s initiative and invited him to a return visit, specifically to Moscow.

Who may have influenced the change in venue to St Petersburg is not clear. But both sides had much to gain. For Vladimir Putin, bringing Macron into the annual St Petersburg Economic Forum would be a great catch, raising by far the international visibility and interest of the event. And Macron could be delighted with the opportunity to indulge his passion for history by meeting Vladimir Putin for their private talks ahead of the Forum at the Constantine Palace originally built for Peter in the suburbs of the Northern Capital, replete with extensive gardens laid out in the French manner of Versailles. 

The Russians needed no prompting to provide an historical setting worthy of their meeting quite apart from the Forum. They arranged a gala performance of the ballet Raymonda in the Mariinsky Theater on Thursday evening, 24 May to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great French-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa. The Marseilles-born Petipa was the author of the principal classical ballets that established the renown of the Russian imperial theaters in the last decade of the 19th century and are performed worldwide to this day. In another overlay of symbolism, the selected ballet just happens to deal with the uneasy relations of Christian (French and Hungarian) West and Saracen East played out at the level of their respective nobility.
The first of Emmanuel Macron’s two addresses during his visit to St Petersburg was at a press conference presenting the results of the private meetings of two presidents. It was delayed by two hours, given that their meeting lasted twice as long as planned and ended in key understandings on Syria and Iran that I will describe in a moment.

In fact the event resembled more an appearance before the joint session of Congress than a normal press conference. It was long on speeches and short on question time for journalists. And the audience consisted heavily of Russian ministers and leading members of the two houses of the Russian legislature. This is because in parallel with the meeting of presidents there were meetings of officials from the two governments discussing in particular the progress and future development of the Trianon Dialogues, with its people-to-people component.

Vladimir Putin’s introductory speech was relatively short. He said that they had discussed at length global issues, then he moved quickly to the issues that are close to his heart and to the Forum the next day: the economic relations between France and Russia, their bilateral trade and investment.

Putin characterized the talks as “business like” and held in “an atmosphere of openness.”  In diplomatic code, this means that there were real differences in views on many points. Nonetheless, they reached agreement on coordination of efforts in Syria and over saving the Iran nuclear deal. Progress was made in a wholly new area:  working together to regulate cyber space.
Emmanuel Macron may have been a Rothschild banker before moving into government but his speech at the Constantine Palace, on the day before an economic forum, was focused not on business and economics but on France’s international status as a world power with an identity quite apart from its membership in the European Union.

In effect, Macron’s programmatic statement was a well-considered response to Vladimir Putin’s insistence over the years that Russia is one of the very few genuinely sovereign nations in the world, whereas others, including the member states of the European Union are vassals of the United States with whom one cannot successfully negotiate anything of primary importance. 
Macron said loudly and clearly that as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council France has the authority and the obligation to exercise its sovereignty and pursue an independent foreign policy. And in a very clever association with the leitmotiv of the Economic Forum, he explained that trust between nations necessary to build the global economy is possible only when nations are self-confident and assert their sovereignty.

One other quote from his speech on that day is also worth repeating: “History is greater than us.”  In the given context, the modesty implied by that statement is misleading. As we shall see, Macron uses history as a cloak of personal grandeur; he envisions himself as an historic personage, an agent of History, following in the footsteps of none other than Charles De Gaulle.
Macron’s interest in history does not mean that his reading is fastidious.  In his speech to the U.S. Congress, he said that the United States and France fought World War I to defeat imperialism, which is utter nonsense.  At the Versailles speech a year ago, he spoke of Peter the Great’s visit as a start of French-Russian relations. Putin, who must have known what was coming, reminded him that French-Russian relations could be traced back to the 11th century, when the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev and Prince of Novgorod gave his daughter Anne to the French king Henry I, so that the French royal line of Valois carried Russian genes for centuries.
At the end of the day, the Putin-Macron meeting a year ago may not have done much to improve trade relations or to resolve international conflicts including in Syria and Ukraine, but it did result in the launch what is now called the “Trianon Dialogue” which has as its mission to bring together thinkers, intellectuals, young people in exchanges that are expected to foster greater mutual understanding between French and Russian civil society. Though from his own short speech at Versailles, Putin was clearly more interested in trade figures, he went along with Macron’s initiative and invited him to a return visit, specifically to Moscow.

Who may have influenced the change in venue to St Petersburg is not clear. But both sides had much to gain. For Vladimir Putin, bringing Macron into the annual St Petersburg Economic Forum would be a great catch, raising by far the international visibility and interest of the event. And Macron could be delighted with the opportunity to indulge his passion for history by meeting Vladimir Putin for their private talks ahead of the Forum at the Constantine Palace originally built for Peter in the suburbs of the Northern Capital, replete with extensive gardens laid out in the French manner of Versailles. 

The Russians needed no prompting to provide an historical setting worthy of their meeting quite apart from the Forum. They arranged a gala performance of the ballet Raymonda in the Mariinsky Theater on Thursday evening, 24 May to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great French-Russian choreographer Marius Petipa. The Marseilles-born Petipa was the author of the principal classical ballets that established the renown of the Russian imperial theaters in the last decade of the 19th century and are performed worldwide to this day. In another overlay of symbolism, the selected ballet just happens to deal with the uneasy relations of Christian (French and Hungarian) West and Saracen East played out at the level of their respective nobility.
The first of Emmanuel Macron’s two addresses during his visit to St Petersburg was at a press conference presenting the results of the private meetings of two presidents. It was delayed by two hours, given that their meeting lasted twice as long as planned and ended in key understandings on Syria and Iran that I will describe in a moment.

In fact the event resembled more an appearance before the joint session of Congress than a normal press conference. It was long on speeches and short on question time for journalists. And the audience consisted heavily of Russian ministers and leading members of the two houses of the Russian legislature. This is because in parallel with the meeting of presidents there were meetings of officials from the two governments discussing in particular the progress and future development of the Trianon Dialogues, with its people-to-people component.

Vladimir Putin’s introductory speech was relatively short. He said that they had discussed at length global issues, then he moved quickly to the issues that are close to his heart and to the Forum the next day: the economic relations between France and Russia, their bilateral trade and investment.

Putin characterized the talks as “business like” and held in “an atmosphere of openness.”  In diplomatic code, this means that there were real differences in views on many points. Nonetheless, they reached agreement on coordination of efforts in Syria and over saving the Iran nuclear deal. Progress was made in a wholly new area:  working together to regulate cyber space.
Emmanuel Macron may have been a Rothschild banker before moving into government but his speech at the Constantine Palace, on the day before an economic forum, was focused not on business and economics but on France’s international status as a world power with an identity quite apart from its membership in the European Union.

In effect, Macron’s programmatic statement was a well-considered response to Vladimir Putin’s insistence over the years that Russia is one of the very few genuinely sovereign nations in the world, whereas others, including the member states of the European Union are vassals of the United States with whom one cannot successfully negotiate anything of primary importance. 
Macron said loudly and clearly that as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council France has the authority and the obligation to exercise its sovereignty and pursue an independent foreign policy. And in a very clever association with the leitmotiv of the Economic Forum, he explained that trust between nations necessary to build the global economy is possible only when nations are self-confident and assert their sovereignty.

Direct quotation here is worth the time:

“France and Russia occupy a special place in relations as permanent members of the UN Security Council. We are obliged to defend grand multilateralism. We are obliged to maintain a permanent and independent dialogue.
“As President Putin knows, the foreign policy of France under my direction is completely independent…We make our decision by ourselves and for ourselves. We believe in Europe to multiply the force…We take into account the interests of our partners. And our dialogue with Russia is an element of this independence…We speak to everyone. We do this frankly and directly, and this is the mark of our trustworthiness. …We must defend our collective security, defend our values everywhere, and must respect the sovereignty of the people….I respect the enhanced role which Russia assumes in its regional environment and in the world, in particular in the Middle, which entails heightened responsibility…..I hope Russia understands that France is its credible European partner, now and in the future. Our talks have been held in this sense.”

These curious but valid formulations were meant to catch the attention of his hosts, which they surely did. But they also constituted a major claim by Macron addressed over the heads of those in the hall to the home audience in the European Union. Macron was unmistakably setting out his claim to take over the mantle of leadership of foreign policy in the EU that has been held unchallenged by Germany for the last six years due to the weak and witless government of François Hollande. Germany is not a member of the Security Council. Germany is essentially an occupied country given the large presence of US bases on its territory. And Angela Merkel would never say that Germany has a foreign policy of its own. For Merkel, only the EU can have a foreign policy, which she quietly manages from behind the scenes through her minions, the likes of Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker.

In fact, Macron’s vision of French leadership also has a military component, where, again, his country puts Germany to shame, raising questions about who should truly call the shots on European foreign policy. This came out on the second day of his visit during the Plenary Session, when Vladimir Putin playfully took up a remark by Macron that Europe has obligations to the United States in return for its securing the defense. Said Putin, teasingly: “Emmanuel, don’t worry, we are ready to help you with security.”  Macron was taken aback by the Russian’s wit, but found his response:  “We, France, have our own army to look after our security.” Germany, as we all know, does not have an army worthy of the name.

Otherwise, Macron’s speech included a large section devoted to historical patterns and continuities binding France and Russia together. It is more than curious that Macron chose to highlight the fact that when his predecessor Charles Charles De Gaulle decided to visit Russia in June 1966 he chose St Petersburg (Leningrad at the time) because of the city’s heroic resistance in the great siege of World War II. Macron announced that he would be visiting the Piskarevo cemetery where more than a million unidentified victims of the siege are buried to lay a wreath of remembrance.

Mention of his following in the footsteps of De Gaulle during this speech in Petersburg aligns perfectly with his mentioning one month ago in Washington De Gaulle’s address to the joint session of Congress in 1967, an honor that had been granted to no other French head of state in the intervening 51 years. It is remarkable that Macron, who started his government career as a Socialist and served under Hollande, has chosen De Gaulle, the iconic figure of the French Center Right, to be his avatar. The common denominator is surely national sovereignty, which De Gaulle went very far to promote.

Otherwise, Macron’s talk on continuities relied heavily on mutual cultural influences between Russia and France.  Russian schoolchildren grow up with The Three Musketeers, he said.  French schoolchildren grow up with Peter and the Wolf. But he went well beyond these commonplaces. He noted that French tourists traveling by boat down the Volga are known to ask where is the building that Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers,  stayed in during his sojourn in Russia.  And the bottom line of all these evocations of common cultural traditions was Macron’s overriding point that the countries are both European.  Indeed, Macron’s explanation to journalists of his mission to Russia in separate interviews on the sidelines was to ensure that the country did not turn in upon itself or abandon Europe for its friends in Asia.

To anyone with a good knowledge of Vladimir Putin, that is a wholly artificial risk. But so be it, it reads well in Paris or Brussels. In any case, one of the concrete results of the discussions in the Constantine Palace was an initiative to drop all visa requirements for young people of both countries below age 18 who wish to visit the other country. If implemented, this will be a very important step forward in normalizing relations and preparing the grounds for mutual understanding.

For a Rothschild banker and for a participant in an Economic Forum, Macron’s preparation of remarks on the economy and trade relations was far weaker than his historical and cultural research. He was pleased to remind the audience that France is the largest foreign employer in the Russian Federation, which may well be a function of its particular activity in service industries including retailing (Auchan, Decathlon, Castorama),  hospitality (Novotel) and banking (Société Générale-Rosbank) which employ large work forces as opposed to manufacturing industry. He boasted that notwithstanding the difficult times, meaning sanctions which France has supported and enforced, the 500 French companies active in Russia have stayed in place. He avoided entirely the question of trade turnover, which is only a fraction of that between Germany and Russia. He claimed that France is the second largest foreign investor in Russia, but here he was later corrected by Putin, who noted that first place is held by China, after which comes Germany. Putin went on to say that French investment has to be weighed in context:  all French companies together have invested 15 billion euros while one Finnish company alone, Fortum, has invested 6 billion euros.
Despite all of the independence that Macron insisted is enjoyed by French foreign policy, in the key issue for his hosts of sanctions, the French President laid down the hard EU line: that no progress on sanctions is possible before progress is made on implementing the Minsk Accords on the Donbass.  However, on other international issues where his hands are not bound by EU policy, Macron obviously showed flexibility and a keen interest in arriving at understandings with Putin. The following points of agreement which he laid out are worthy of note:
  1. Iran
Macron re-stated the commitment of the 3 European signatories of the nuclear accord to remain in the Agreement, despite the withdrawal of the United States. Here their interests coincide with Russia’s. Macron made reference to the decision the week before at the European Summit in Sofia to activate mechanisms that will protect the Agreement and also European companies from extraterritorial application of the American law on sanctions. In answer to questions from reporters on both days of his visit, Macron explained that compensation against losses imposed the US applied only to companies which are not quoted on US exchanges or otherwise heavily invested in US operations which might be shut down. That would entail unacceptable expenses for the European taxpayers. Accordingly such very large companies will decide for themselves on how to respond to US sanctions while small and medium sized companies could be protected. It remains to be seen whether this approach will be sufficient to ensure that Iran continues to benefit commercially from the Agreement in a way that justifies its continued participation. 

Macron noted that he and Vladimir Putin discussed the other issues surrounding Iran that Trump had raised to justify US withdrawal: namely Iran’s regional activities, its nuclear course after 2025 and its ballistic missile program. He said he has introduced these questions directly to Iranian prime minister Rouhani and assumes they are discussable on condition that all sides continue to observe the nuclear deal as concluded in 2015.
  1. Syria
There is potential importance to the agreement Macron reached with Putin to put in place a coordination mechanism to arrive at a common agenda for the two current formats on a political solution in Syria with the objective of arriving at convergence. These are the Astana format overseen by Russia, Turkey and Iran, and the so-called “Small Group” initiated by the French and including the UK, Germany, Jordan, the United States and Saudi Arabia. The two groups both claim to seek an outcome that preserves the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Syria while not imposing solutions from the outside with respect to the future role of Bashar Assad. The main difference in approaches would appear to be which Syrians will participate in the political solution. The Astana process embraces only the Syrian forces and movements on the ground in the country today. The “Small Group” promotes also the Syrian population that has fled abroad.  It will be an enormous challenge to finesse these differences, but better to start now. 

Macron also used the opportunity to announce the start of French participation in humanitarian assistance for Syria. So far, the number he put out, 50 million euros, is just a drop in the bucket of the tens if not hundreds of billions needed to restore Syria to its situation before the civil war.  But it is noteworthy that France’s funding of NGOs for humanitarian work will also include those operating on territory under the control of Damascus.

During the questioning on the first day of his visit, Emmanuel Macron confirmed that he would be acting on the wishes of his French intellectual supporters and meet representatives of Russian civil society working for human rights.  Indeed, on that same day he met with the director of the iconic human rights organization Memorial.  But he spent more time with the widow of the great dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom he invited to the gala ballet performance that evening. 

The selection of Natalya for the purpose of talking with society is particularly significant because dissident that he had been before his exile and critical of modern Russia as he had become upon his return to his homeland, Solzhenitsyn was ultimately a sincere admirer of Vladimir Putin. The Russian president has met several times with Natalya Solzhenitsyn in recent years to discuss the use of her husband’s writings in Russian secondary schools among other issues. If this is what constitutes staying in touch with the Russian people as distinct from the Russian government, then Macron is performing it with sensitivity and realism, meaning that he is getting good advice, better than ever came the way of Barack Obama or of his ambassador Michael McFaul.

Of the four guest speakers at the Forum’s Plenary Session on Friday, Emmanuel Macron’s was by far the longest. There were no new directions in his speech compared to his address to the press conference on Thursday. He emphasized repeatedly his keen interest in maintaining an ongoing dialogue with Vladimir Putin and with Russia even if their respective positions were in contradiction. 

He invoked once again the historic bonds between the countries in the cultural sphere.  And he made an interesting detour into literature, specifically into Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with references to the meeting and exchanges of views between one of the novel’s main characters, Pierre Bezukhov, a complex personality who is widely taken to be a stand-in for Tolstoy himself, and the peasant Platon Karataev, a figure who makes a brief appearance and is the spokesman for Russian folk wisdom.  Macron’s attraction to their philosophical dialogues is indicative of how strongly his own studies in philosophy in college shaped his intellectual interests to this day, as a complement to his work in finance and in government.  One can be sure that none of this escaped the attention of his hosts, all the more so that Macron can keep straight the characters and the titles of Russian novels, unlike the Russophobe British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson, for example. In this regard, Macron fits into the intellectual world of Vladimir Putin and Russian elites far better than he does in the casino culture world of Donald Trump.

Shinzo Abe: Japan’s regression to US vassal spoils chances for the much-desired peace treaty
Whereas Macron and France emerge from his visit to the Forum with potentially important progress in cooperation with Russia on two of the most important international security issues of the day, the timidity and lack of imagination which Shinzo Abe exhibited at the Forum and in his follow-on visit to the Kremlin for talks on Saturday render utterly unrealizable his hopes to reach a peace treaty with Russia more than 70 years after the end of WWII.

All of this was so precisely because Abe, unlike Macron, has gone backwards rather than forward and is pursuing a foreign policy heavily dependent on the United States.  Macron was pushed to evoke French national interest and to oppose the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal because of the security risks failure of the Agreement poses to France and Europe. At the same time he had to scramble to find solutions to the likely threat of US sanctions against French and European companies which may persist in trading with Iran after the imposition of the US embargo. And his thinking was further defined by the trade war on Europe that Trump has threatened to unleash with imposition of tariffs on aluminum and steel, pending a fundamental review of terms of trade between the EU and the USA more favorable to the latter. As Macron’s Minister of Foreign Affairs had said with undiplomatic clarity, Europe refused to negotiate trade terms when being held hostage over steel tariffs.

Meanwhile, the crisis over the growing nuclear and missile delivery systems of North Korea has driven Abe in the opposite direction: straight into the waiting arms of the US administration as he pleads for more, not less protection from US weapons systems and personnel against a perceived threat from Pyongyang.

In his speeches to the Forum and at the press conference following his talks with Putin in Moscow, Prime Minister Abe noted that this is his 21st meeting with Putin and that the issue of a peace treaty remains high on the agenda. However, his determination to arrive at a peace treaty by first conditioning Japanese and Russian publics to the benefits from their joint cooperation through concrete deeds has not gone beyond his 8 identified areas of cooperation.

These projects to raise Russian labor productivity, improve health care and so extend the average life expectancy, all have relatively low budgets and low visibility. The additional joint cooperation over humanitarian measures facilitating visits of Japanese citizens to the Kuriles to visit the graves of their ancestors and projects to jointly improve housekeeping on the islands, including better waste disposal – are all still smaller, one might say insignificant steps.

In answer to a question from a Russian CEO already in business cooperation with Japanese partners on when Japan will raise the funding of an investment fund from its present one billion dollar level to something more in keeping with real demand, Abe made clear that absent a peace treaty he has no intention to allocate large sums of money to Russian projects. 

At the end of last year, as the project to build the Crimean Bridge was entering its final phase, there was considerable speculation in the Russian media that early in the new year 2018 an announcement would be made that the redoubtable bridge-building team assembled by Putin’s business ally Arkady Rotenberg for the Crimean Bridge would next be given a contract for rail bridge to connect Sakhalin Island with the mainland in the West and that agreement would be reached with Tokyo on an additional rail bridge connecting Sakhalin with the Japanese island of Hokkaido to the East. This vast project, it was said, could alter logistics of Japanese trade with Western Europe in a dramatic manner. It could capture the imagination of the Russian and Japanese peoples for a generation.  In short, it could prepare the way for the hoped for peace treaty.

However, Shinzo Abe made no suggestion during his latest visit to Russia that his government is giving any thought to such a major joint infrastructure project with Russia, one which surely would not be welcomed by his American friends since it would work against the sea power that the US considers its own ace at the card table.

Shinzo Abe’s ambition for a peace treaty to be concluded with Russia during the time in power of his generation is entirely empty so long as he is unable to say what Emmanuel Macron said at the Forum: that he heads a sovereign country which has its own independent foreign policy.
  • There are many observers who shrug their shoulders and cannot comprehend why Russia, the world’s largest nation by far, with more than 10% of the world’s land mass, is unwilling to hand over four small islands to Japan which it took over under the terms of an agreement among the WWII Allies to bring Russia into the war in the Pacific in its final phase. However, it is not land greed or even concern over losing sovereignty over the related mineral rights for hydrocarbons on the bottom of the sea surrounding those islands. 
For Russia, the sticking point is the security consideration of allowing these territories with their important location in the sea lanes giving the Russian navy access to the wider Pacific coming under possible control of the United States occupation forces in Japan. For Russia, Abe is an undependable partner precisely because he is not a sovereign party but subject to decisions taken in Washington.

The Japanese government’s reticence to invest in trade facilitation with Russia has results. As Vladimir Putin noted, bilateral Russian-Japanese trade falls far short of its potential. In the last year it came to just 15 billion dollars, and already fell behind Russian-South Korean trade figures, while Russian-German trade stood at 50 billion and Russian-Chinese trade reached 80 billion.