The Bygone World of Europe and Zelensky

 

The Bygone World of Europe and Zelensky
Ukraine was a project for regime change in Russia
Jim Kavanagh

 SAUL LOEB/AFP

This New York Times piece epitomizes the dangerous delusion underlying the brouhaha over the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office fiasco and the “West’s” Ukraine project in general:

Here are the highlights:

The gathering took on greater urgency after Mr. Zelensky’s heated Oval Office meeting with President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Friday raised fears the U.S. would try to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into making a peace deal on whatever terms the Americans dictated…

Mr. Starmer told the BBC that he, Mr. Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron of France had agreed they “would work on a plan for stopping the fighting and then discuss that plan with the U.S.” Any peace agreement “is going to need a U.S. backstop,” Mr. Starmer added, saying that British and U.S. teams were discussing the idea…

Mr. Zelensky “found every opportunity to try to ‘Ukraine-splain’ on every issue,” Mr. Rubio told on ABC News, “ 

Can you guess what’s missing here? Once Zelensky and the Europeans craft a plan, they have to present it to the U.S.? They're afraid the U.S. is going to dictate difficult terms of a peace deal to Ukraine?

News flash: If anybody is going to dictate tough terms or a peace deal to Ukraine, it will be Russia, not the U.S.—and certainly not the Europe of Macron and Starmer. Russia is winning the war on the battlefield. Russia has defeated the largest and best-equipped US/NATO army in Europe, manned by Ukrainians. Russia has set forth its specific objectives and its conditions for a ceasefire and negotiation (if Zelensky ever removes his self-imposed ban on negotiating with Russia).  Any plan that Starmer, Macron, Zelensky, and/or Trump “present” to Russia that ignores the Russian position will be dismissed by Lavrov and Putin. They hold the cards.

The Europeans (at least, Starmer and Macron) still presume that they, the Euro American Masters of the Universe, having negotiated the definitive “peace plan” among themselves, will then have Donald Trump, Grandmaster of the Universe, “present” it to the Russians, who will accept it as the default position to which they will have to accommodate themselves. They cannot imagine that the Russians will look at a plan the president of the United States presents them and tell him, politely, to shove it.

It is delusional, Euro-American, self-centered arrogance. Starmer, Macron, and Zelensky are projecting their own lapdog relation to the U.S. onto Russia. They just cannot believe the Russian bear is not intimidated by their kennel. They cannot imagine a world in which they don’t set the terms.

Surprising and strange as it is to say, it seems (don’t count any chickens yet) that Trump does understand that Russia is an powerful independent actor, in a dominant position in this situation and worthy of respect in general—the country that is going to make a peace deal, not have one “presented” to it.

The central point of what’s been going on with Macron, Starmer, and Zelensky over the last week, which culminated in the Oval Office slamfest, was stated by Starmer: “Any peace agreement [the lapdogs concoct] is going to need a U.S. backstop.”  Which is pipsqueak for: “The war is lost unless the U.S. joins it.”

Critical Hour Discussion of Zelensky's Demands on Confused & Scared Europeans (6/6/2022)

Discussion with Dr. Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon of Zelensky's demands on the confused & scared Europeans, who are trapped in the delusional narrative web of their own spinning. (15 mins)

Critical_Hour_988_seg_3 on Ukraine  (06 June 2022)

Press TV Discussion of Worsening EU-Russia Relaitions (6/16/2021)

 EU believes relations with Russia will get even worse

[Related article: The Warm War: Russiamania At The Boiling Point]

PressTV Discussion of EU Coronoavirus Recovery Plan (7/19/2020)

EU summit on post-coronavirus economic recovery plan ends without breakthrough

The EU leaders gathering together in Brussels to discuss the €750-billion coronavirus recovery package, but they didn't manage to reach an agreement on a deal.

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (9/6/19)

The Complex, Wrongly Told Life of Freedom Fighter Robert Mugabe, Dead at 95

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.
[I come in at 16:35]

The Washington Post reported it this way: “Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president who rose to power as a champion of anti-colonial struggle but during 37 years of authoritarian rule presided over the impoverishment and degradation of one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most promising countries, died Sept. 6 at a hospital in Singapore. He was 95.” That statement disgusted me - did not surprise me but disgusted me, because I know better. We'll discuss the man, the freedom fighter, the myth and how the US contributed to the reputation of Mugabe.

The US economy added a disappointing 130,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said Friday, heightening fears that US President Donald Trump’s trade war is starting to bite. The jobs report has taken on greater significance as concerns grow that the US economy has entered a rough patch. Economists had predicted a gain of 160,000 jobs in August, but anemic hiring in manufacturing, mining, truck driving and retail — industries that are most directly affected by the trade war — helped drag employment gains down this summer. That 130,000 number is not truly representative of the strength of the economy, since hiring in August was boosted by the federal government adding part-time workers for the 2020 US Census. Without the addition of those temporary jobs, the new data reveals private sector companies added 96,000 jobs, the weakest total in many months.

Discussion on The Critical Hour about Boris Johnson and Brexit (8/20/19)

Same Game, New Tactic: Trump Goes After Legal Immigrants, States Fight Back & Sue

New York state, New York City, Connecticut and Vermont sued the federal government Tuesday over new Trump administration rules blocking green cards for many immigrants who use public assistance, including Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers. The states and city join a growing list of entities suing over the change, one of the Republican administration’s most aggressive moves to restrict legal immigration. The rules set to take effect in October would broaden a range of programs that can disqualify immigrants from legal status if they are deemed to be a burden to the US. What’s the real impact behind this action? 

Planned Parenthood announced on Monday that it will drop participation in a federal program that supports family planning services because of new restrictions placed on it by the Trump administration, calling a recent regulation an "assault on access to birth control and reproductive health care, especially for people struggling to make ends meet." What impact will the administration's actions have on access to women’s health care for poor women and women of color? 

Week in Review discussion on Loud & Clear (6/28/2019)

Kamala Harris Takes Down Biden…And Then Affirms Neo-Con Foreign Policy

On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Jim Kavanagh, editor of thepolemicist.net, and Sputnik News analyst and producer Nicole Roussell.

Friday is Loud & Clear’s weekly hour-long segment The Week in Review, about the week in politics, policy, and international affairs. Today they focus on the democratic debates from last night, where they examine Kamala Harris’s attack against Joe Biden’s ongoing and recent embrace with the most notorious racists and segregationists in the US Senate. They also look at Kamala Harris’s own record as a prosecutor and her neocon political positions. Plus, they talk about the decline of European centrist parties and the announced shift back by European elites and capitalists to democratic socialism, and about US-Iranian tensions, including an Iranian saying today that they’ve examined North Korea’s trajectory as a lesson for their own next move.
[My related articles: For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left, 
Eve of Destruction: Iran Strikes Back]

Listen to "Kamala Harris Takes Down Biden…And Then Affirms Neo-Con Foreign Policy" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (3/22/2019)

The Mueller Report Finally Drops, Dems Prepare List Of Demands

On this episode of The Critical Hour, Dr. Wilmer Leon is joined by Jim Kavanagh, political analyst and commentator and editor of The Polemicist; and Michelle Hudgins, communications strategist, producer, media consultant and writer. 

It’s Friday, that means it is panel time! 

The SYRIZA Moment: A Skeptical Argument

Mehran Khalili/http://www.redpepper.org.uk

The victory of Syriza in Greece is an important moment.¹ Indeed, I think it is going to be a historic turning point for Europe and the world, for better or for worse. Syriza defines itself explicitly as “as a party of the democratic and radical Left,” and radical it is. It’s comprised of “many different ideological currents and left cultures,” “has its roots in popular struggles for Greek independence, democracy and labour and anti-fascist movements,” and includes serious and influential socialist, marxist, and generally anti-capitalist currents.² As Catarina Príncipe remarks: “The success of Syriza is the success of the Left that refused compromises with liberalism.”³ Thus the rise of Syriza corresponds to the collapse of Pasok [acronym for Panhellenic Socialist Movement], the Greek “Socialist”--i.e., liberal capitalist—party, which went from the largest party in Greece to 13% of the vote (2.6% among 18-24 year olds). It’s a sudden and dramatic shift of working-class voters to the left. To put this in American terms, imagine the Green Party winning the next election, with the Democrats reduced to 20% of the vote.

Everyone understands, then, that Syriza’s victory represents the Greek people’s rejection of the devastating austerity program that has been imposed on Greece and Europe by all the major capitalist-to-the-core political parties, no matter what name they go by.

In a wide-ranging interview with Jacobin (which I recommend to everyone), Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of Syriza’s Central Committee and its Left Platform, emphasizes Syriza’s radicalism thusly:

[W]hat Syriza is putting forward has very little to do with any agenda of any European social democratic party today. It is an agenda of really breaking with neoliberalism and austerity. Syriza appears as bringing a type of political culture that is linked to a social, political, and even ideological radicalism still very much inscribed in the DNA of the party….

Syriza is an anticapitalist coalition that addresses the question of power by emphasizing the dialectic of electoral alliances and success at the ballot box with struggle and mobilizations from below. That is, Syriza and [its component] Synaspismos see themselves as class-struggle parties, as formations that represent specific class interests.⁴

So there we have Kouvelakis’s portrait of the radical Syriza as a new type of political movement that will use a synergistic dialectic of electoral victories and popular mobilizations to break with neoliberalism and austerity.