Can Trump Save America From Itself? – OpEd

Alastair Crooke

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Russian FM Lavrov last week dismissed Team Trump’s floated peace proposals for Ukraine as unsatisfactory. Essentially, the Russian view is that the calls for a frozen conflict precisely miss the point: From the Russian perspective, such ideas – frozen conflicts, ceasefires and peacekeepers – do not begin to qualify as the type of treaty-based, ‘Big Picture’ deal the Russians have been advocating since 2021.

Without a sustainable, permanent end to conflict, the Russians will prefer to rely on a battlefield outcome –even at the high risk of their refusal bringing continuing escalatory – even nuclear – U.S. brinkmanship.

The question rather is: Sustained peace between the U.S. and Russia – Is it even possible?

The death of former President Jimmy Carter recalls to us that the turbulent 1970s policy ‘revolution’ which became encapsulated in the writings of Zbig Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser – a revolution that bedevils U.S.-Russia relations from then, until today.

The Carter era saw a major inflection point with Brzezinski’s invention of weaponised identitarian conflict, and his espousal of the same identitarian tools – as applied more widely – in order to bring western societies under the control of a technocratic élite “[practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with élite] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people …”.

Brzezinski’s seminal books, in short, advocated a managed cosmopolitan identitarian sphere, that would swap out communal culture – i.e. national values. It is in the hostile reaction to this technocratic ‘control’ vision that we can root today’s trouble breaking out everywhere, on all global fronts.

Put plainly, current events are in many ways a replay of the turbulent 1970s. Today’s march toward anti-democratic norms began with the Trilateral Commission’s seminal The Crisis of Democracy (1975) – the fore-runner to WEF(‘Davos’) and Bilderberg – with, (in Brzezinski’s words), international banks and multinational corporations being crowned as the principal creative force in the place of the “the nation-state as the fundamental unit of man’s organised life”.