byJohn Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with via John Helmer
Excerpts
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The politico-military strategy driving the US negotiators and prompting Trump’s tweets, is not a peace deal with Russia, nor even US withdrawal from the war in Europe. It is a strategy of sequencing one war at a time – the war in Europe to continue in the Ukraine with rearmed Germany, Poland and France in the lead, supported by Trump; and the US war against China in Asia.
Sequencing these wars so as not to fight both enemies simultaneously – that’s the formula devised for Trump by Wess Mitchell, a former State Department appointee in the first Trump Administration, and his business partner Elbridge Colby, now the third-ranking Pentagon official as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. “The essence of diplomacy in strategy”, Mitchell has just declaimed in Foreign Affairs, “is to rearrange power in space and time so that countries avoid tests of strength beyond their ability. There is no magic formula for how to get this right, and there is no guarantee that Trump’s approach will succeed. But the alternative—attempting to overpower everybody—is not viable, and a good deal riskier.”
Mitchell and Colby have convinced Trump and his negotiators that Russia has been badly damaged by the Ukrainian war which the Obama and Biden Administration have fought. Russian weakness, especially the perception that President Putin is both politically vulnerable and personally susceptible to US business inducements, is Trump’s strong card, and he should play it now.
“Washington can start by reducing tensions with the weaker of its main rivals in order to concentrate on the stronger. That is what Kissinger and his boss, U.S. President Richard Nixon, did when they warmed ties with Beijing so the United States could better focus on Moscow in the early 1970s. Today, the weaker rival is Russia. This has become all too obvious as Ukraine has chewed through Moscow’s military resources. The United States should thus aim to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a détente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing. The goal should be not to remove the sources of conflict with Russia but to place constraints on its ability to harm U.S. interests.”
“This process should begin by bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that is favorable to the United States. That means that when all is said and done, Kyiv must be strong enough to impede Russia’s westward advances. To achieve this end, the American officials negotiating a peace agreement should learn from the failure of the 2022 Istanbul talks between Kyiv and Moscow, which treated a political settlement as the goal and worked backward toward a cease-fire. Doing that enabled Russia to make its political demands—neutering the Ukrainian state through caps on the size of its army and changing its constitution—a precondition to peace. A better model would be 1950s Korea: to prioritize an armistice and push questions about a wider settlement into a separate process that could take years to bear fruit, if it ever does. Washington should still be willing to push the Ukrainians to cede territory when doing so is necessary. But it should make Ukrainian sovereignty a precondition for talks and use U.S. sanctions, military assistance, and seized Russian assets to bring Moscow around.”
This is the same war against Russia which has been US strategy since 1945, but with a trillion-dollar premium to be paid to the US by the Ukrainians and the European and other US allies for Trump’s grand extortion.
According to Mitchell’s (right) paper, “[the Trump Administration] signed a mineral deal with Ukraine that increases the connection between the two countries without making Washington responsible for Kyiv’s defense. And its sterner tone toward Europe has prompted the continent’s largest increase in defense spending in generations: nearly $1 trillion. Trump’s opening tariffs have roiled the Europeans but could also restart talks about a new transatlantic grand bargain in trade for the first time in a decade. All this may well lead to better outcomes for the United States, provided that Washington keeps its eyes on the prize—which is not disruption itself, but disruption in service of strategic renovation.”
“The United States should pursue a defense relationship with Ukraine akin to the one it maintains with Israel: not a formal alliance, but an agreement to sell, lend, or give Kyiv what it needs to defend itself. But it should not grant Ukraine NATO membership. Instead, the United States should push European states to take responsibility for Ukraine—and for the security of their continent more generally.”
In this strategy, these American officials believe they are capitalizing on Putin’s special relationship with the Russian oligarchs and duping Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s negotiator with Witkoff, into pressing the Kremlin to accept a short-term military armistice which stops well short of the demilitarization and denazification goals of the Special Military Operation.
There is a faction in Moscow which believes the General Staff can also be persuaded to accept this because they need time to rebuild the Russian military forces. “Don’t give too much credit to [General Valery] Gerasimov and the General Staff. Putin for reasons unknown does have his foot on the brake; Russia was not ready for a full war. It might be in a few years but Putin might yet not be. Although his warnings to the Germans are now stark, Putin still wants a deal. If Trump does not withdraw any of the major sanctions, this is still favourable to Russia. [Putin will concede to Trump] some small deals and Witkoff will successfully lobby to favour his own US oligarchs and some of Putin’s. Musk and Boeing will benefit. The Europeans will obviously hold out on SWIFT and Open Skies. At the same time though, a few Russian national companies will benefit.”
Less susceptible than Dmitriev, sources in Moscow point out they are not as weak as the Americans believe. Nor, they say, are they as rattled as the faction-fighting betweeen US oligarchs reveals as their placemen in the Trump ministries compete for the money to be earned from the enrichment schemes of Witkoff and other Trump appointees — Stephen Feinberg at the Pentagon, Scott Bessent at Treasury, and Howard Lutnick at Commerce.
Read the whole article here.
