Of all the recent ironies, the greatest is the contrast between a Congress mesmerized by the impeachment process against President Donald J Trump and the state of the world which the US — as indispensable nation — still claims it must lead.
A media that knows ‘which side its toast is buttered on’ analyses an unchanging series of events day after day, as Congress passes through the stages of the third presidential impeachment, appearing not to notice two far-off catastrophes that were graphically documented in a June issue of the illustrated weekly ‘Time’ and continue to this day: a million Rohingya Muslims evicted from their home in Myanmar, only to end up in camps in Bangladesh; and boys of the Syrian Yazidi minority being forcibly enrolled by ISIS to fight the West.
Currently, no mention has been made of President Trump’s denuclearization talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Quite the contrary, every television anchor continues to pay daily dues to Russophobia, declaring over and over that ‘Russia is our enemy’ because (in reality) it defended its near abroad against American-backed rebels. (In the lead-up to yesterday’s meeting of the ‘Normandy Four’, Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany, thousands were encouraged to turn out on the Maidan to warn their new President Zelinsky not to ‘cross any red lines’ (a warning originally issued by Obama to Syria’s President Assad….). Not surprisingly, Poroshenko, the president installed by the US after its 2014 coup, and would-be president Timoshenko are sponsoring this display of popular foreign policy expertise.
Whether or not President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudi Giuliani, contributed to this charade while he was investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Kiev, as Trump had asked Zelinsky do, may never be known, however the Trump administration now claims that it was not Russia, but Ukraine, that meddled in the 2016 election. (Astonishingly, it failed to point out the obvious fact that the two antagonists each had a reason to try to influence the 2016 US election: Ukraine would have favored Hillary Clinton, who was shouting from the rooftops that Russia must be brought to heel, while Moscow favored Donald Trump, who for all his serious faults, was known to prefer a deal to build a tower in Moscow over bombing the Kremlin.
The world is in a sorry state when the official leader of the most powerful nation the world has ever known — as US politicians have been emphasizing recently — is forced to engage in duels with a bureaucracy intended to be subordinate to him, in order to prevent the world from going up in smoke. Television relays Trump’s tweets as they appear, feeding his high-school level base more effectively than any written analysis, while his decision to withdraw from the Paris commitment to combat global warming, if allowed to stand, will eventually make the plight of the Rohingas and Yazidis look quaint.
Finally, with Europe powerless to prevent brown Muslims from outnumbering the descendants of the Greeks, Romans, Francs and Germans who eventually fathered the Enlightenment, the leader of the ‘free’ world obsesses over the coming ‘replacement’ of the white race, having realized that for all its might, it accounts for a mere 16% of the world’s population, the target not of tanks and drones but of terrorist attacks.
As the second of three phases in the impeachment of Donald Trump gets under way, the ‘Loneliness of American Exceptionalism’ only increases: the media has become the latest revolving door for former government officials, ignoring the concept of a multi-polar world that could replace American hegemony. Three hundred years after Voltaire admired its philosophers, China is becoming a major player in Europe.
As Congressional testimonies drone on regarding Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate the presumed Democrat candidate in the 2020 elections, the presidents of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine were meeting over dinner at the Elysee to try to undo the consequences of the US-engineered 2014 coup against a democratically elected Ukrainian government. According to Alina Polyakova, a Brookings fellow born in the Soviet Union, the meeting ‘strengthened Russia’s hand’, while the daily press dismissed it as irrelevant. In fact, the three experienced heads of state backed a cease-fire between Ukraine’s young president and Eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking majority to take place by the end of the year, with a new meeting scheduled four months hence to take stock of Kiev’s road map toward peace.
The American President who is being impeached for defending Russia was not invited to the meeting that signaled Europe’s turn toward Moscow.
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
