https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/26/patrick-lawrence-what-just-happened-in-moscow-is-big/
What Just Happened in Moscow Is Big
Now that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have concluded their summit in Moscow– an unusually long series of meetings over three days–are those purporting to lead the United States prepared to drop their wishful thinking, their miscalculations, and their illusions as to the significance and durability of the Sino–Russian relationship and get with the 21st century?
Our no-hesitation answer is, “Not a chance.” The policy cliques in Washington signaled daily last week their determination to misread the Russian and Chinese presidents’ 40th summit so as to carry on hallucinating as to America’s “global leadership” and its position at the center of a Ptolemaic universe, the U.S. the earth around which the sun and all other planets revolve.
The magnitude of the Putin–Xi summit lies beyond question. They got a lot done in all sorts of spheres—trade, energy, resources, infrastructure, investment, high-technology collaborations. If TASS, the Russian wire service, is to be believed, and I don’t see why we should not take its word on this occasion, Sino–Russian relations just took a surprising turn on the security side by way of the depth of their mutual commitments. More on this point anon.
Of these matters you have read little to nothing if you rely on our corporate media. What you have read is a lot of truly bad reporting—this because if Washington is into the game of pretend, so must be the media that serve it.
This degree of willful blindness is getting to be simply too much. My take on this collective psychosis, if by “psychosis’ we mean a disrupted relationship with reality: The policy people and the baying Russophobes and Sinophobes on Capitol Hill know very well that America’s global preeminence wanes by the day, but no one in power wants to say so. “Not on my watch” is the watchword.
“Not a chance” it is, immediately, but getting to “Not a chance” is interesting nonetheless. What went on in Moscow during the first half of last week such that Washington and the clerks in the media who serve it were so intent on not understanding what went on? What didn’t go on, equally, and why were our “influencers” and “thought leaders” —I just love these two terms for “the people who tell us what to think”—so chagrined that what didn’t go on didn’t go on?
As was widely misreported, Xi was supposed to travel to Moscow to discuss a “12–point peace plan” the Chinese Foreign Ministry supposedly issued late last month. Here’s the thing about the Chinese peace plan: There is no Chinese peace plan. I have considered the document in question elsewhere. Its title is “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.” As this implies, it is a statement of China’s views, nothing more, and was made public, I would say, with a pronounced air of detachment.
So, no peace plan. China has not put up its hand to intervene in Ukraine and solve the crisis. You cannot fail at something you have not attempted.
The Ukraine conflict came up during Putin and Xi’s exchanges, certainly. In a sprawling joint statement signed midway through the talks, Putin acknowledged Beijing’s February 24 position paper and “welcomes China’s willingness to play a positive role for the political and diplomatic settlement of the Ukraine crisis.” The statement goes on to note, “The legitimate security concerns of all countries must be respected, bloc confrontation should be prevented and fanning the flames avoided.”
The best translation of the entire statement I have seen, with useful interpolation throughout, comes from the China Briefing newsletter written by Chris Devonshire–Ellis at Dezan Shira & Associates, a consultancy with offices all over East Asia and the Subcontinent.
What are we reading here? I see three points to note.
One, it falls to Moscow and Kyiv alone to make peace. This can be accomplished by way of the 12 points in China’s position paper—a ceasefire, negotiations, a mutually satisfactory settlement, adherence to international law, provisions for reconstruction. Two, Putin has opened the door to China as a mediator should such a role make sense at some future point. Three, and this is implicit in the document, although Moscow has been clear enough on the point elsewhere: The U.S. and the other Western powers are not acceptable as mediators given the proxy war they are waging against the Russian Federation.
We find ourselves in Orwell country when we consider the U.S. response to Xi’s “journey of peace,” as the Foreign Ministry in Beijing advertised his trip to Moscow beforehand. Xi didn’t advocate a peaceful settlement in Ukraine and make China available as a mediator should Moscow and Kyiv agree to seek one. No, Xi went to Moscow to signal Beijing’s support for the Russian intervention. Got it?
Don’t say old George didn’t warn us: War is peace in the world he imagined in 1984. Thirty-nine years on, peace is war.
As to a ceasefire, a standard prelude to negotiations for centuries, no again, we can’t have that. John Kirby, the National Security Council’s chief spokesman, put it this way on numerous occasions last week: “While a ceasefire sounds good, it actually ratifies Russia’s gains on the ground.”
I have to say, Kirby has struck me as a dim bulb since he complained years ago that the problem on Europe’s eastern flank is Russia is too close to NATO. Once again, he has it upside down: A ceasefire sounds damn good to me and does not ratify an f’ing thing.
“Ignorance is strength” was another of Orwell’s warnings. Alas, let us contemplate this as John Kirby purports to speak for us.
Global Times, a reliable reflection of official Chinese perspectives, published an interesting piece last Thursday, a day after Xi and Putin concluded their summit. Now that the Saudi–Iranian accord is signed and Xi has made China’s Ukraine case clear in Moscow, Beijing is now intent on more such initiatives. “China’s diplomacy has pressed the ‘accelerate button,’” it begins, “and sounded the clarion call in the spring of 2023 with a series of major diplomatic activities that bring positive changes to a world in turbulence.” The piece goes on to explain that the project now is to put the flesh of tangible achievements—“real actions and notable results”—on the bones of the new world order Beijing has made its top priority over the past two years.
Whether Ukraine will turn out to be another such notable result must remain an open question. People such as John Kirby tell us Kyiv will consider a ceasefire only when Russia withdraws all its troops and repudiates its claims of sovereignty in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. This is another Kirbyism—a way of saying Kyiv is interested in a ceasefire except it has no interest in a ceasefire.
This is not so clear as it seemed a short while ago. Volodymyr Zelensky, president of the Kyiv regime, has long been eager to have his own summit with Xi. It is obvious that China could make a huge contribution to a reconstruction effort the World Bank priced last Wednesday at $411 billion. Kyiv has not come out and said point-blank “No,” American-style, to China’s offer to serve as a mediator. This is to be watched.
Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s premier, weighed in on this topic last Friday. “China is a global actor,” he said, “so obviously we must listen to its voice to see if, between all of us, we can put an end to this war and Ukraine can recover its territorial integrity.” Let’s not miss the circumstances here. Sanchez, a right-wing Socialist, spoke in Brussels after a meeting of the European Council; this week he travels to Beijing for talks with Xi. Does Sanchez reflect a body of opinion in the European Union, then? Does he want to use his Beijing visit to put himself across as a global statesman?
This is not hard to say: Pedro Sanchez has just underscored the greatest threat the Xi–Putin summit presents to the U.S. This is the threat of a peaceful settlement—the threat that China, having trumped Washington big time in the Middle East just a few weeks ago, may eventually do so in Europe. I imagine the rhetoric coming out of the policy cliques in coming months could become wildly nonsensical, John Kirby’s stupid utterances the least of it. Remember, Antony Blinken, a proven master of the nonsensical, is our secretary of state.
Washington has had the Sino–Russian relationship wrong for years. Policy people ignored it back when the two sides began drawing closer in the mid–2010s. When policy heads finally woke up and smelled the mai tai, the thought was to disrupt the relationship by pulling the Chinese away from the Russians. Everything they tried had the effect of pushing the two Eurasian nations closer together.
Illogic breeds more of same. After Russia launched its intervention a year ago, Blinken’s first effort went to persuading Beijing to turn against Moscow. This was a year after the secretary managed to turn his Chinese counterparts dead against him at that disastrous encounter in Anchorage, about which I have written severally. I loved a Twitter note some clever observer sent out to summarize Blinken’s position after the Ukraine conflict began: Help us attack Russia now so we’ll be free to attack you next.
When that ill-fated démarche failed after many attempts, Washington took to threatening the Chinese with “consequences” if they supported the Russians diplomatically, economically, technologically, or, certainly, militarily. This has turned out to be nothing more than a failed bluff, to state the obvious. Now the policy cliques are stuck with the line that the would-be maker of peace is eager to help Russia make war. I would wish them good luck with this except that I don’t.
One of the striking things about the Xi–Putin summit, their joint statement, and many other comments the two leaders made is how little of their time they devoted to the Ukraine question. Assessing the whole of the encounter, the war comes over as a subsidiary question in the context of the two sides’ focus on the larger relationship and their shared concern about the extraordinary disorder the Biden regime’s “rules-based order” has produced.
I get the impression this leaves the big-think people in Washington somewhere between nonplussed and miffed. Maybe it is some of each at this moment. What? You mean the proxy war we’re waging does not command all of your attention? So, once again, will the U.S. miss what is going on between the non–West’s two most prominent powers.
The overarching objective of the summit was further to strengthen “the China–Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” as the two sides called it in a nine-point joint statement made public at the summit’s conclusion.
This document made prominent mention of the Treaty of Good–Neighborliness the two sides signed two years ago and, notably, the Joint Statement on International Relations and Global Sustainable Development in the New Era Putin and Xi made public in Beijing a year ago last month. As I have said previously in this space, I rate this the most essential political document to be issued so far in our century. Last week’s mention of it makes the core vision of the summit plain: It is to build out on the ground the new world order the Joint Statement described.
Putin and Xi had large delegations sitting at what must have been many mahogany tables in the course of their three-day encounter. Trade, investment, high-technology, nuclear power, space exploration, an Arctic sea route: The two sides signed 14 agreements committing themselves to collaborating in such areas. These are the kind of things Beijing might call “real actions and notable results.”
Two topics are worthy of special note. Russia is to begin denominating trade with third countries in Chinese yuan, indicating the seriousness the two sides attach to the long-term project of de-dollarizing international trade. Further talks were held on a pipeline that will deliver 50 billion cubic meters of Russia’s natural gas annually to China via Mongolia. But, the Chinese being second only to the Japanese as tough business negotiators in my estimation, price of product and which side will construct the pipeline seem still to be determined.
I do not know why I read that there is plenty in the summit to Russia’s advantage but little to China’s. Russia needs new markets for its resources to compensate for the damage Western sanctions have done this past year, true enough. It also needs China’s technology. But isn’t the flip side just as obvious? China needs to secure supplies of oil, gas, foodstuffs, minerals, and other resources, not to mention a large non–Western market, in response to signs that the U.S. could—this threat is real, believe it or not—one day impose a naval blockade in the Strait of Malacca or along the Chinese coast. Either would choke off China’s foreign trade.
Is Washington accomplished or what when it comes to deepening the Sino–Russian relationship?
This leads to that TASS report mentioned earlier. It brings remarkable news.
“Moscow and Beijing will help each other to defend their core interests,” it begins. Citing a joint statement, it then notes that these include “territorial integrity and security.” Next paragraph: “According to the document, Russia and China are poised to ‘provide resolute mutual support with regard to matters of defending each other’s core interests, primarily sovereignty, territorial integrity, security and development.’”
This is a very big deal. When Putin and Xi made public their Joint Statement last year, they famously described a “no limits” friendship. “No limits” would seem to take in every eventuality, but the two leaders then and since have avoided the term “alliance.” This has a very specific meaning in the lexicon of statecraft: It describes two or more nations’ commitment to defend one another militarily. The TASS report is similarly coy, but read the quoted language again. Moscow and Beijing have just agreed to form an alliance, staying three syllables short of a formal declaration.
There are some oddities to note. TASS says the Kremlin published the joint statement Tuesday, midway through the summit. And it quotes directly from it, persuasively enough. But such statements as this are normally made public simultaneously in Moscow and Beijing, and TASS did not mention the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which typically does corresponding duty. Neither “Kremlin.ru” nor “fmprc.com,” the Chinese ministry’s website, has to date published the statement—not, as is their custom, in English translations and to my knowledge not in Russian or Mandarin, either.
A conundrum, then. Did the two sides decide in the end against signing the document? Was the TASS report a trial balloon? Did they sign the statement but remain in no hurry to put it out in English? I have no answers to these questions. But this much appears to be clear: There is a joint statement on mutual defense, TASS saw it and acted responsibly by quoting from it, and, whatever the formal status of the agreement described, Russia and China are very close to advancing their ties in the direction of an alliance, if they have not already done so.
Big, as I say.
On the Russian side, there is no indication that China has made a judgment on the fraught question of Russia’s and Ukraine’s territorial integrity as regards the breakaway republics that voted in referendums last year to join the Russian Federation. In my read, China continues to suspend its judgment on this question. On the Chinese side, things seem clearer. U.S. media are forever referring to Taiwan as a self-ruled island “which China claims as part of its territory.” This is true but evasive. China does claim lawful sovereignty over Taiwan—and with many centuries’ history behind its claim.
To put the point plainly, since American officials and journalists never do: Taiwan is part of China. There is ambiguity on this point only among those who wish this were not so. The joint statement on which TASS reported thus has major, major implications for Moscow as all the phobes in Washington raise the temperature on Taiwan every chance they get.
It is just a guess but are such questions as Taiwan and Ukraine why an agreement on mutual defense was drafted but… not yet signed, not yet made public, or not yet something else?
Can you hear the wind whistling past your ears as China steps forward as a global diplomatic power, and as relations such as China’s and Russia’s advance? I can. My seatbelt is fastened, for there is more, much more to come.
Comment to article:
" Patrick, my hat goes off to you again, as your journalistic integrity and admirable understanding and comprehension (is that redundant?) of the recent summit between Putin & Jinping is “first-cabin,” as my friend Mac would say. You nailed our Fantasy World of Denial U. S. government, (I won’t tarnish the word, “diplomat” ) bunch of clownish employee buffoons, our tax dollars are being wasted on. The accolades will come, Mr. Lawrence, as you deserve them.THANK YOU! And scheerpost (the great Robert Scheer) for publishing your articles.The Empire of Chaos is bewildered, and can’t fathom a peaceful, multi-polar world. "
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https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/25/matt-taibbi-people-can-win/
People Can Win
We've been trained to think that endless rule by tiny minorities of really horrible people is the natural order of things, but that turns out to be just another lie.
Earlier today Susan Schmidt and I published an article about a series of changes at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a creepy sub-division of the Department of Homleand Security. It turns out that CISA, which just a week or so ago was busted for scrubbing embarrasing text from its website by the Foundation for Freedom Online, quietly eliminated its so-called “MDM” or “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation” subcommittee.
Just a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security was going all-in on the fight against “MDM.” The notion that America is fatally infected with “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation” was in fact the animating idea begind the asinine plan the Biden administration announced last April to institute a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled Mary Poppins of digital rectitude:
America took one look at Jankowicz and at most a few fleeting moments considering the “Disinformation Governance Board” plan before concluding, correctly, that it was a beyond-loathsome expression of aristocratic arrogance that needed shutting down before the first Jankowicz presser. Characteristically, the press lied about the public reaction, claiming that the only displeasure was heard from the “GOP.” In fact, all sane people across the spectrum were instantly nauseated, their distress loud enough that the DHS hit “pause” on Jankowicz and the batty MinTruth plan after just three weeks.
Even that might not have been fast enough, as was discovered by my co-author Sue Schmidt, who’s formerly of the Washington Post but joined Racket this month for a special report a team of us are preparing on what fellow #TwitterFiles reporter Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” (More on that later). Looking through the minutes of CISA’s subcommittee meetings last year, Sue found that the DHS’s little team of self-appointed information guardians was deeply worried about the “rollout” of their war against MDM, worrying repeatedly about how to “socialize” or “pre-socialize” various parties to the idea of a federal truth squad, realizing that just presenting the actual plan to a sentient person without lots of sweeteners wouldn’t go well.
One subcommittee member, whose name in the spirit of our times is of course redacted, seemed to realize the concept was too hot to discuss in public. She “suggested removing mention of MDM” — this, from a member of the “MDM subcommittee”! — and “framing” the subcommitee’s efforts more in terms of “directing people to clear information about elections procedures.” Another member recommended CISA “point more to state officials and state laws to make the authoritative source of information less controversial. In other words: “Let’s make it sound like someone other than the hated us is running this thing!”
Even two years ago, nobody was paying attention to this world and the public, if it cared at all, was probably inclined to welcome more “election procedures” (as CISA would later call them), not fewer. So the DHS, sensibly one must conclude, dissolved its incorrectly named “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force” — the group spent most of 2020 zapping domestic election posts — renamed it the MDM subcommittee, and began meeting and posting about the need to build “national resistance” to “domestic threat actors.” As Sue just reported, these folks saw “MDM” everywhere here at home, insisting “CISA should consider MD across the information ecosystem,” which included talk radio, cable news, mainstream media, and “hyper-partisan media.”
The architects of this plan not only genuinely believed themselves above such temptations, but saw nothing wrong with asking for massive sums of money — Joe Biden’s first economic proposal sought $690 million for CISA — to captain an open-ended war on American badthink, as defined by [names redacted]. Here again, take note of Jankowicz’s lyrics:
It’s like when Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine
Or when TikTok influencers said COVID can’t cause pain
They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note
And not support their lies, with our wallet, voice or vote!
This was a group of self-described experts in an utterly fictitious “anti-disinformation” discipline who were so sure it was okay for them to tell you whom not to vote for, one of them sang about it. This, despite the fact that of the ones whose names we know, like Jankowicz, many were open swallowers of the dumbest Russiagate hokum, like the Alfa-Server story.
I spent a long time covering the 2008 Wall Street crash, which meant devoting large amounts of energy to some of the world’s most unredeeming people. These were swindlers who sold snake-oil mortgage products that put millions out of their homes and wiped out retirement funds of people who spent decades working as toll operators, firefighters, teachers. Such predators were awful, amoral people, but all the same, I occasionally found myself writing with something like admiration. These crooks were creators of truly ingenious schemes who did what they did out of lust, greed, jealousy, and other (at least identifiably human) forms of depravity.
These [name redacted] would-be censors are different. They have no sense of humor, no imagination, and exactly one distinguishing characteristic: they know what’s best for you. Anti-disinfo work suits them because they all have a Poppins streak that quietly gets off on binning your digital dirty bits (after the voyeuristic thrill of logging on to watch them in secret, with special credentials, which they rub with pleasure in evenings). They’re the vilest kind of snobs, and when they finally were forced to show their real selves to the public — and here I feel safe in thanking Elon Musk for making that possible, via the #TwitterFiles — the public rightfully recoiled from these arrogant power-worshipping mediocrities.
The Governance Board was already dead, and now the whole MDM mission is being wound down, which feels like a win. Perhaps they’re just publicly retreating from the concept for now, but at this point, I’ll take that. Moreover there are signs everywhere that people are losing their fear of departing from the orthodoxy such types would like to impose, and pushing for a return to normalcy, which for the first time in ages feels within reach.
There was a ridiculous scene at Stanford law school recently, in which a conservative judge was muffled by a gaggle of future lawyers who’d been led by an assistant Dean in a characteristically moronic shouting-down exercise. The current strain of Junior Anti-Sex League-type protesters who fill campuses from coast to coast now sure do love their “heckler’s veto…”
The Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez was brilliant in response. Instead of doing what the heads of organizations have been doing for years in such situations, instead of doing, frankly, what I did during my own cancelation episode — frantically over-apologizing to people who have no use for or interest in apologies — Martinez sternly called the students out as clowns, reminding them in a long, serious, punishing letter that if they ever become officers of the court, they will be held to a higher standard than “lay people,” swearing to conduct themselves “at all times with dignity, courtesy and integrity.”
Martinez went further, saying that on her watch, the school would not be doing the usual and committing itself to starter slates of political positions out of fear of reproach. “Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues,” she wrote. The age of just giving in to mobs instead of insisting on our right to have different opinions and beliefs seems to be receding. It is beginning to dawn on sane, tolerant people everywhere that there are more of us than there are of them, and this still matters in a democracy.
There’s a reason why these people are so focused on technocratic solutions, from magic AI schemes to control information to deploying packs of Boston Dynamics robot-dogs, who’ll patrol suburban neighborhoods and peer in windows for visual confirmation of Alexa-overheard transgressions. General Mark Milley just said on a podcast that armies may be fully robotic in 15 years, arousing general neoliberal giddiness (Milley quoted Dylan). These people need tech, because you know what they don’t have? Friends. Organic support. Or, ways to win them, like art, music, literature, or comedy.
I have a theory about what happened to America in this regard. After 9/11, people were scared, and they fell for a succession of propaganda campaigns convincing them that the hole in Fortress America, the chink in our national armor, was our system of democratic rights.
The “MDM subcommittee” members think the same way: there’s a section in one of last year’s meetings in which a former Secretary of Washington State notes that the bad countries, “such as Russia, use the First Amendment effectively.” Moreover, in general, “our adversaries… use our Constitution effectively.” They’ve been telling us this stuff ever since the Towers came down. We were told our enemies will use even our open system of justice against us, so forget the admirable streak of America never having had an in-camera criminal trial. Let’s clear the court even for deportation hearings of suspected terrorists, they said. Let’s not even tell the public the names of the deported!
“The era that dawned on September 11th, and the war against terrorism that has pervaded the sinews of our national life since that day, are reflected in thousands of ways” the Third Circuit Court wrote in 2002, adding: “Since the primary national policy must be self-preservation,it seems elementary that, to the extent open deportation hearings might impair national security, that security is implicated.”
It was the same with torture, rendition, watch lists, drones, whatever. To respond to terrorism, we were told, we needed to be more “nimble” than old-school democracy allowed. We couldn’t wait for congress to declare wars, or build probable cause, or afford the right to face one’s accusers. The stakes were too high for such luxuries. Even giving “enemy combatants” Geneva convention rights would confer legitimacy to the opposition it didn’t deserve, and we couldn’t afford to give that legitimacy. Our grip on safety was that tenunous.
No: the new era of a West infected with a borderless evil returned from the 8th century needed a bureaucracy of super-empowered minders, who’d do torturing if it needed doing, and quietly make lists of who gets to fly or open a bank account. Most of all, these minders would make those terrible decisions about who gets to live and die in a drone-patrolled world. The Imitation Game from 2014, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and telling the awful tale of Alan Turing’s quest to crack the Enigma code, was a great movie, but perhaps also the ultimate portrait of the Obama-era political class, whose members all saw themselves as misunderstood geniuses quietly saving civilization through endless mathematical murder, committed from afar, by remote control, without fanfare or appreciation.
America balked some at George W. Bush as “The Decider,” but was more than happy to let the Community Organizer head up those secret decisions. With the genial and patient-sounding Obama in office, the deciders assumed a new brand of business-casual cruelty. I vividly remember going to a ballgame with a longtime Justice source in those years, someone I liked, who casually told me in between bites of a hot dog that of course we should just drone Julian Assange, because he was a “terrorist,” and the “reality is, you just have to kill them.”
Each year, more and more of government became classified, and we had less and less access to information about where tax dollars were being spent, or what was going on at places like the Federal Reserve. We let it happen, abandoning the democratic responsibility to govern ourselves, in the process willing the world’s smuggest aristocracy into existence. It wasn’t the worst time — a lot of good TV was made in those years — but while we were napping, these people were turning America into a secret administrative state committed to endless war, mass surveillance, social credit scoring, censorship, and other horrors, a system that’s only just now beginning to show itself.
The managerial state was held in place for over a decade by a kind of magic spell, which works thanks to the public’s faith in the competence of our minders. That spell held by default for an extra four years while Trump was in office, but it’s been broken now, in part thanks to refuseniks like Musk (who caused all kinds of havoc by opting out of an airtight information-control cartel), but mainly because we’ve now had enough opportunities to examine up close the loathsome nanny-staters to whom we surrendered all those years ago. Whatever hold these people had on us, and it was real — I spent years worrying about regaining the favor of people who were denouncing me as a Russian asset even as they demanded my vote — it’s gone now, and we can start thinking about moving on to something better.
This is what I choose to think, this weekend evening. We don’t have to concede to a future of always being at war somewhere abroad, and with each other at home. We don’t have to put up with a government that doesn’t tell us anything. Most of all, we can go back to enjoying life, on our own terms, without stressing over an endless succession of panics invented by politically insecure losers. We can do so much better, and we will, because this place is ours to run, a fact the singing censors should never have let us remember.
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