Russian political elites on their U.S. counterparts: card cheats!

The 19^th century American showman P.T. Barnum is best known for his aphorism “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  This is precisely the kind of cynical card cheat who epitomizes America’s political establishment today in the view of Russian expert observers and legislators appearing on the widely watched talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. They have in their crosshairs not just what they call “the Collective Biden,” meaning the senile, disoriented fool who has his finger on the red button plus the Deep State that writes his speeches and steers him to and from his speaking engagements. It also takes in scoundrels in the U.S. Senate like Chuck Schumer, my classmate (Harvard ’67) Mike Blumenthal and the ever notorious Lindsey Graham. Their sound bites are very frequently put up on the screen for the audience to better understand what Russia’s erstwhile “partners” abroad are saying.

Those of you who had experience watching RT (Russia Today) have never been exposed to this kind of trenchant analysis and utter contempt for the American political classes. This goes much farther than what you might imagine when Western mainstream media concede that ‘there is little trust between the sides.’

If we dig a bit deeper, the contempt of the Russian political commentators, many of whom hold advanced academic degrees, is built on their conviction that American politicians, like their European Union counterparts today, are poorly educated if not simply ignoramuses. By a curious irony of fate, the Americans appear to Russian sophisticates to be the conniving rubes that Americans once saw in the Soviet leaders of Khrushchev’s time in power.

We all may have had a laugh at the expense of the utterly stupid German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who said several months ago that “Vladimir Putin must change his course by 360 degrees.” But then in Moscow the biggest laughs have come at the expense of the seemingly well-turned out, Yale-educated Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser to the President, and his never to be lived down quote from a couple of weeks before the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel that “the Middle East is quieter now than it has been in two decades.”

However, these Russian panelists are laughing through their tears. The value of an Ivy League education, once considered the nec plus ultra by ambitious oligarch parents in Moscow, has been shown to be nil. More to the point, they see no alternative to preparedness for the worst atrocities to be unleashed by the United States against Russia’s allies, like Iran, at any moment. That is the unsubtle hint they read into the stationing of a nuclear-armed U.S. submarine in the Red Sea at present. They foresee the outbreak of direct warfare with Washington at any moment. Hence, the Russians are determined to further increase military expenditures and to boost the military industrial complex several times over in the immediate future. To put things in the perspective of Lev Tolstoy in his Epilogue to War and Peace, Vladimir Putin is the instrument of Russian elites as much or more than he is their pathfinder.

I mention all of the foregoing to help readers appreciate how the Russian political elites and the Kremlin look at the suggestions now surfacing in U.S. and Western media that the Russia-Ukraine war has reached an impasse and that it is time for the sides to negotiate a peace.

The Russians take this to mean that the United States has shifted its priorities to the conflict in the Middle East and to preparing for the coming armed confrontation with China. Kiev can now be let go without calling undue attention to America’s unreliability as defense guarantor, because global media are focused on the Hamas-Israel fight.

However, from the standpoint of Russian elites the war in Ukraine has tilted decisively in Moscow’s favor now that Kiev has largely exhausted its human and material reserves for waging war. These elites have no interest whatsoever in a Korea-like solution, in a ‘frozen conflict’ that could be warmed up again at some time in the future when Washington so decides. No, they will not sit down at a negotiating table until and unless Kiev capitulates and accepts what amounts to neutrality and removal of the neo-Nazi directed Zelensky regime. Moscow is ready to fight on ‘as long as it takes’ to achieve its objectives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023