This post initially included a corridor photo which was fake. My fault, but that made no difference at all to the argument.
It will definitely be good if the war in Ukraine draws to a close. Too many have died or been maimed, too many civilian assets have been destroyed. However the cynicism with which the conclusion of the war is being driven is quite extraordinary.
I am not sure there has been a sight in modern history equivalent to the way Europe’s “leaders” were pictured in the White House.
This is not an accident. There really is a craft to diplomacy; many countries in the world have foreign services consisting largely of people who have a degree in it. I have personally organised two state visits for the former Queen as well as head of government visits.
These things follow a careful choreography and an absolutely key part of that is to present a picture of equal status between state parties. Who will enter first, whether there will be a handshake, the precise spot where the handshake will happen, the setting of the table they meet around, flags of equal size, all that is plotted in great detail. It is fundamental to the job.
If I had put Robin Cook, for example, in a position where he was seated on a chair in front of an interlocutor enthroned behind a desk, I would have received a very fierce bollocking indeed. Yet here we have European Heads of State and EU leaders seated before a desk in the Oval Office.
This is just unthinkable to anybody familiar with the craft of diplomacy. I realise you don’t have to be a diplomat to feel there is something wrong in this picture: but you are probably not quite as stunned as I am.
The unequal interpersonal relationships are just the immediate physical manifestation of Trump’s instinctive ability to maximise the brutality of realpolitik. The deal which is being put together to end the war in Ukraine is a remarkable testimony to Trump’s ability to seize economic advantage for the USA, or at least for the class of people in the USA he cares about.
Trump’s Presidency is marked by an undisguised willingness to leverage the massive economic advantages which come from possessing the world’s reserve currency, which means you can just invent money to purchase any good you want from another country, the economy of which becomes addicted to this “cash” flow.
Trump’s trade war has displayed an ability to force other states to make enormous concessions, including reinvesting hundreds of billions of dollars back into US industry, rather than face tariffs which would make it harder to give up their goods as tribute to the USA in return for token dollars.
The reserve currency is essentially a confidence trick. It always works, if and only if the world believes in it. The world was starting to lose its faith in the power of the dollar, and Trump was smart enough to know that the way to maintain a confidence trick is to double down and be still more assertive.
Trump has undoubtedly prolonged, at least a little, American economic supremacy.
The Ukraine deal is a related trick. Part of the “guarantee” of Ukraine’s security is that the Europeans will purchase US $100 billion worth of weapons from US arms manufacturers in order to give said weapons to Ukraine.
It is not planned that any European weapons will be in the deal or that the USA will finance any weapons. A senior FCDO source tells me that Keir Starmer is saying the UK will put “well over” £10 billion into the pot to buy US weapons for Ukraine.
The hope on the European side is that they will be able to pay for this merchant-of-death bonanza with stolen Russian money – assets seized under sanctions. There are two obstacles to this. The first is the international courts, which are most unlikely to agree. The second is Vladimir Putin.
I have never bought in to the notion that Russia is militarily infallible and about to triumph quickly and simply. I have certainly never accepted the nonsensical propaganda that the initial disastrous Russian strike at Kiev was just a ruse or feint.
But Russia is indeed now winning and was always going ultimately to prevail on the battlefield. The delusional rhetoric of European leaders over the last few weeks, including from Keir Starmer, attempted to ignore this obvious reality.
Ukraine’s lines in Donetsk are now so untenable that Putin is able to attempt to insist on being given territory he has not conquered yet, because everybody knows that conquest is both unstoppable and imminent.
This is a realpolitik as hard as Trump’s.
The team Trump took to Alaska had substantially more officials connected with commercial policy than with military or foreign policy, and we should not underestimate the extent to which this attempt at agreement is cash driven.
Putin, who is winning the war, will insist on the lifting of economic sanctions and is simply not going to agree to US weapons being purchased for Ukraine by the Europeans with Russian money.
As support for the Ukrainian military is an essential part of the mooted “security guarantee” structure – as opposed to mutual defence commitment – funding will have to be found. This despite Rachel Reeves’s entire philosophy being to please the money markets by austerity.
My FCDO source tells me that plan B, for when the idea of paying with Russian money fails, is for the private financing of the UK’s purchase of US weapons for Ukraine. This has been an important point of preparation.
Just as with the aircraft flying out of Brize Norton, the idea is that a private equity consortium would finance the purchase of the weapons for Ukraine, with repayment by the UK over a twenty-year period.
This means that £10 billion of weaponry would eventually cost the UK about £38 billion. Yes, you read that right. Blackrock and Trump himself are among a variety of investors who would be brought in to the scheme as financiers.
There is of course no industry like the weapons industry for corruption: backhanders, directorships, service contracts to front companies, post-retirement jobs. Politicians love the defence industry.
That US $100 billion for weapons will provide lots of lovely pork for absolutely everybody in the picture. Look at the wealth of Tony Blair. Come back to me in ten years’ time and discuss what personal wealth was eventually amassed by each of the people in this photo.
Zelensky is probably the biggest profiteer of all (though he also has bosses to pay off).
I explain in specific detail in both my memoirs – Murder in Samarkand and The Catholic Orangemen of Togo – that international affairs is always driven not only by control of natural resources, but by the corrupt interest of politicians in the companies that acquire them.
That I found first-hand true for oil and gas in Uzbekistan and for rutile and diamonds in Sierra Leone.
With Trump, these background motivations step out of the shadows and into the spotlight. So here we have a war which appears, thank goodness, to be drawing to a close, but on the basis of overtly commercial deals.
I expect those European leaders will cheer up. Cash can buy a lot of indignity.
As I have stated frequently, it was and is simply impossible for Ukraine to recover all of its territory of 1991, without a NATO-fuelled war being waged on a scale that would have been certain to escalate to nuclear conflagration.
There will now be border adjustments, be they de facto or also de jure, with the integration of some Russian speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine into Russia, including Crimea and at least the large majority of the Donbass.
It is simply a statement of fact that there had never existed a Ukrainian state prior to 1991, and that there had never been any state with anything like the borders of 1991 Ukraine. I don’t know why people find incontrovertible historical truth so offensive.
We are going to have a modestly smaller, Western-aligned Ukraine. That seems to me something those Ukrainians who want to be Western-aligned ought to be celebrating. The percentage of the land area of Ukraine likely to be retained by Russia – something under 20% – is a fair approximation to the percentage of the Ukrainian population who would prefer to actually be Russian.
If the putative peace deal can be delivered, it will undoubtedly be better than continuing war. It will be slightly less advantageous to Ukrainian nationalists than the deal that was available in Turkey over two years ago, but NATO vetoed.
Hopefully Ukrainians have noted that sacrificing an entire generation as cannon fodder for NATO is not a good policy.
European leaders are still attempting to strut their stuff by threatening Putin with further sanctions if a deal is not reached. This simply does not work; Moscow is fine. It in no way counters the military advantage now enjoyed by Putin.
I should like to believe that peace in Ukraine might lead to a reduction in Russophobic hysteria across Europe. But the truth is, that cold-war style scaremongering is really all these failing European leaders have with which to terrify and control their disgruntled and impoverished populace at present.
They will, however, be ever less convincing.
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