Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Russian FM Lavrov last week dismissed Team Trump’s floated peace proposals for Ukraine as unsatisfactory. Essentially, the Russian view is that the calls for a frozen conflict precisely miss the point: From the Russian perspective, such ideas – frozen conflicts, ceasefires and peacekeepers – do not begin to qualify as the type of treaty-based, ‘Big Picture’ deal the Russians have been advocating since 2021.

Without a sustainable, permanent end to conflict, the Russians will prefer to rely on a battlefield outcome –even at the high risk of their refusal bringing continuing escalatory – even nuclear – U.S. brinkmanship.

The question rather is: Sustained peace between the U.S. and Russia – Is it even possible?

The death of former President Jimmy Carter recalls to us that the turbulent 1970s policy ‘revolution’ which became encapsulated in the writings of Zbig Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser – a revolution that bedevils U.S.-Russia relations from then, until today.

The Carter era saw a major inflection point with Brzezinski’s invention of weaponised identitarian conflict, and his espousal of the same identitarian tools – as applied more widely – in order to bring western societies under the control of a technocratic élite “[practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with élite] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people …”.

Brzezinski’s seminal books, in short, advocated a managed cosmopolitan identitarian sphere, that would swap out communal culture – i.e. national values. It is in the hostile reaction to this technocratic ‘control’ vision that we can root today’s trouble breaking out everywhere, on all global fronts.

Put plainly, current events are in many ways a replay of the turbulent 1970s. Today’s march toward anti-democratic norms began with the Trilateral Commission’s seminal The Crisis of Democracy (1975) – the fore-runner to WEF(‘Davos’) and Bilderberg – with, (in Brzezinski’s words), international banks and multinational corporations being crowned as the principal creative force in the place of the “the nation-state as the fundamental unit of man’s organised life”.

Brzezinski’s jaundiced perception of Russia was nothing new. Rather, it reaches back to the Hudson Institute in the 1970s and to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, twice a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 1972 and 1976 Presidential elections. Jackson (of Norwegian descent) simply hated communism; he hated Russians, and he had had a lot of support within the Democratic Party.

Brzezinski, Polish by origin, shared Scoop Jackson’s Russophobia. He persuaded President Carter (in 1979) to insert a radicalised, jihadist identity-culture into Afghanistan to attrite the secular socialist culture of Kabul, which Moscow was supporting. The Afghan war outcome subsequently was portrayed as a huge American victory (which it wasn’t).

Yet – and this is the point – the victory claim nonetheless underpinned the notion of Islamic insurgents being the ideal ‘solvents’ in regime change projects (and still is, as we witness in Syria today).

But Brzezinski had yet more advice to give President Carter. In his 1997 Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski argued that America and Kiev might potentially leverage ancient cultural and linguistic complexities (as was done in Afghanistan) to form the hinge around which heartland power could be dissolved by denying Russia control of Ukraine:

“Absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power; but with Ukraine, Russia can and would [be a Heartland power]”, he insisted. Russia needed to be enmeshed in a similar Ukrainian cultural-identity quagmire, he advocated.

Why was this policy decision so damaging to the prospects of ultimate peace between the U.S. and Russia? It was because Kiev, egged on by the CIA, promoted the entirely false identitarian claim that ‘Europe ends at Ukraine’ – and that beyond it, lie ‘the Slavs’’.

This manipulation alone allowed Kiev to morph into an icon for total cultural-identity war on Russia, despite the fact that the Ukrainian language (correctly known as Ruthenian) is not a Germanic language. Nor is there any Viking (Germanic) DNA to be found among modern-day western Ukrainians.

In its desire to support Kiev and to please Biden, the EU jumped at this Ukrainian strategic revisionism: ‘Ukraine’ crafted as ‘European values’ defending against ‘Russian’ (Asian) values. It was a pole, albeit a false one, around which European unity could be forged at a time when the reality was that of EU unity dissipating.

So, is ‘sustainable peace’ with Russia possible? Were it to be attempted in terms of seeking to sustain a rump Ukraine as a bellicose isthmus of ‘Europe and its values’ ranged against the ‘regressive Slav sphere’, then peace is not possible. For its underpinning premise would be wholly fake and would assuredly lead to renewed conflict in the future. Moscow almost certainly would reject such a deal.

Yet, there is growing anxiety amongst the American public that the war in Ukraine seems locked into forever escalation, with palpable public fears that Biden and the ‘hawks’ in Congress are taking the U.S. towards a ‘nuclear holocaust’.

Are we – humanity – to continue teetering at the brink of annihilation if a Trump ‘deal’ – narrowly confined to Ukraine – is refused in Moscow? The urgency to halt the slide towards escalation is clear; yet the space for political manoeuvre continuously shrinks, as the compulsion of the Washington-Brussels hawks to land a fatal strike on Russia is not spent.

But seen from the perspective of Team Trump, the task of negotiating with Putin is anything but straight forward. The western public simply has never been psychologically conditioned to expect the possibility of a stronger Russia emerging. On the contrary, they have endured western ‘experts’ sneering at the Russian military; denigrating the Russian leadership as incompetent; and its leadership being presented on their TVs as purely evil.

Bearing in mind Brzezinski’s seminal contribution on democracy, and its later ‘concentrate’ in an élite techno-managed ‘identarian sphere’, it is not difficult to see how a country as fragmented as America finds itself back footed as the world slips towards a culturally-based multi-polarity.

Of course, it’s not exactly true to say that America has no communal culture, given the wide diversity of immigrant cultures in the U.S. But it is true that what is seen as traditional culture has been under siege. This, after all, was at the crux of the recent Presidential election – and of elections in many other nations.

The notion that once the Trump envoys have been initially to Moscow, and gone away empty-handed, that Trump will sweep in to conclude an Ukraine deal, does not reflect what Moscow has been endlessly highlighting. What is required is a ‘Big Picture’ treaty-based deal that settles the security architecture and frontiers between Heartland and the Rimland security interests.

But will such a deal be seen by many Americans as ‘weakness’; as conceding U.S. ‘leadership’ and ‘Greatness’? Of course, it will be perceived that way – because Trump would be effectively sealing America’s defeat and repositioning the U.S. as one state amongst equals in a new Concert of Powers – i.e. in a multipolar world.

It is a big ‘ask’. Can Trump do it – swallow American pride? One viable way forward would be to return to the original Gordian Knot, and to untie it: i.e. to untie the knot of there being no post-WW2 written treaty delimiting NATO’s ever-forward movement, and by so doing, ending the pretence that NATO’s displacement to wheresoever it choses is no one’s business but its own.

Unfortunately, the other possible way to ‘balance’ the appearance of American and NATO defeat over Ukraine, might be seen by Trump’s hawkish advisers to be to pulverise Iran – as a signal of American ‘virility’.

Negotiations, in the final instance, are about interests, and the nous to solve the riddle of two parties perceiving how ‘the other’ sees itself being perceived – as weakness or as strength. Trump, if stumped in a literal impasse over Ukraine, might simply escalate the metaphysical staircase to simply say that he alone has the vision to save America from WW3. To save America from itself.