“He will pay a price.”
Joe Biden addressing intelligence reports attributing election interference directly to Vladimir Putin.
There is a growing notion around the world, hyper-accelerated by Donald Trump’s failed “America First” bully-driven treaty/trade agreement approach, that the United States is a heavily polarized country in steep and precipitous economic and political decline. China has staked out the entirety of Central and Southeastern Asia (including the regional seas) as their sphere of regional control, despite the protests from other nations in the region. Their Belt and Road initiative outside Asia is aimed at securing necessary imports – particularly of raw materials and agricultural goods. President Xi Jinping is an autocrat building a personality cult and intending to rule China (including Hong Kong) with an iron hand. While China is interested in global prestige, it is more in its capacity of becoming the largest economy on earth. Its military is vast – including the largest number of naval vessels in the world – but heavily focused only regionally.
Russia, on the other hand, is a deeply troubled large economy with global power and influence at the fore. Economically driven primarily by its oil and gas reserves and its military technological advances, Russia simply does not have much else in the way of goods and services cherished by the rest of the world. It cannot remotely compete with the United States, the EU or China on an economic front. Formerly a colonel in the Soviet spy-organization/internal security arm (KGB), specializing in international disinformation and espionage, President/autocrat Vladimir Putin (pictured above) leads the Russian portion of the former USSR… with powerful aspirations to reinstate Moscow’s controls over most if not all of the rest of the former Soviet Union – currently identified as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
While China is competitive on economic and technological advancement with the United States, Russia knows that it cannot mount parallel success via economic size, so its focus has been to resume its former status as a superpower in terms of military strength and global influence. Since China has confined her military presence to the noted regions within Asia, only the United States poses a challenge across the rest of the earth. With fleets and military bases all over the world, reinforced with treaties (e.g., NATO), the United States poses the major threat to Putin’s global aspirations. Since Russia sees opposing “all things that the United States wants” as a path to that superpower status, you can see that seamy effort alive and well in undermining US efforts in the Middle East… rather successfully. But the ability to destabilize the United States internally was too attractive to miss, especially with a willing co-conspirator like Donald Trump.
Putin reveled in Trump’s political naivete (or was there a darker motive?). As Trump ignored his own intelligence agencies, even the opinions of members of Congress from his own political party – accepting at face value Putin’s denials (no bounty on US soldiers, no attempt to spread disinformation during US elections – all contrary to substantially-supported facts) – Trump effectively welcomed Russian involvement in American internal affairs. That Putin poisoned Russian political opponents, both inside and outside Russia, and commanded Internet/social media masterminds within Russia to spread lies during the US last election were simply ignored by the Trump administration.
Russian campaigns of misinformation, disinformation, bots able to identify individual voter vulnerabilities and fears and incite greater anger among the electorate expanded during the Trump years. And even as Donald Trump tried to shift the entire anti-US online hack attack blame to China, China only considered influencing the 2020 presidential election but actually elected not to pursue that path. The biggest miscreant was clearly Russia and to a much lesser extent, Iran. Russia rewarded Mr Trump’s seeming pro-Putin posture by attempting to discredit the Biden family and launch social media online assaults attacking Biden and uplifting all things Trump. When Trump continued to declare that the election was stolen from him by widespread fraud, Putin’s operatives seized on that theme and reinforced the relevant conspiracy theorists with disinformation pablum that they ingested with unparalleled zeal.
Enter Joe Biden, the primary victim of Putin’s campaign of disinformation and personal attack. Wanting to make sure Mr Putin got the point, Biden made sure that the Russian president was aware that the new sheriff in town was most certainly not the Russophile that Mr Trump was. As new intelligence reports and Congressional investigations confirmed a massive 2020 ramp-up of direct Russian interference in our election, as Biden held Putin clearly accountable for poisonings of the latter’s political opponents (most recently Alexei Navalny, now held in a Russian prison), the message was clear.
With the pro-Russian patsy gone, US-Russian relations – now dealing with Russia’s actual behavior as a matter of US policy (no presidential denial!) – began to unravel. Standard diplomatic warfare followed. “Russia is recalling its ambassador to the United States for consultations, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday without citing a specific reason… The move to bring Anatoly Antonov to Moscow comes amid rising tensions with President Biden’s administration, which has imposed sanctions over the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is now in prison.
“It also comes on the heels of a declassified report from the U.S. national intelligence director’s office that finds President Vladimir Putin authorized influence operations to help then-President Trump in November’s election… Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova did not cite specific reasons for Antonov’s return but said relations ‘are in a difficult state, which Washington has brought to a dead end in recent years… We are interested in preventing their irreversible degradation, if the Americans are aware of the associated risks…’” Associated Press, March 18th. Other than an attempt to reinstate nuclear arms limitations, Biden appears hell-bent to hold Russia accountable for its brazen missteps. How bad is it? “In a television interview aired Tuesday [3/16] in the U.S., Biden was asked whether he thought Putin is a killer. He nodded and said, ‘I do.’” AP. It’s about time. Oh, and Putin demanded an apology. It’s going take a long time to get back to détente.
I’m Peter Dekom, and outside of the volatility in the Central Asia/Middle East, which fires Russia is fanning vigorously, the most dangerous force against the United States today is not North Korea, Iran or China; it’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment