Eurasia note #21 - UK Foreign Flub

Diplomatic trek to Moscow fails to build understanding on Ukraine

There are two problems in Russia, maybe three. Liz Truss found them all.
UK Foreign Secretary put cart before horse: failed to build relations.
Charged into laundry list of topics and left empty-handed.
Ukraine’s president asks U.S. to provide proof or shut up about invasion.

Tbilisi, Feb 13, 2022

You can wear anything in Moscow: it’s a free-fire zone for fashion. Mix and match to your heart’s content.

The only rules are the weather and the roads… British foreign minster Liz Truss broke both.

She turned up like a gap year schoolgirl. She wore furs at zero Celcius which is far too warm, and her feet seemed to sport heels that only the toughest devushki would risk in Red Square during the city’s famous annual high-heels race.

Weather, roads… and fools: дураки́ и доро́ги, as many have observed, from great writers to foreigners who have lived in Russia.

Then Truss sauntered into a meeting with Russian foreign minster Sergei Lavrov which for any person truly interested in diplomacy should be a masterclass, our Liz proved to be a poor student.

What a world it is when a Russian foreign minister should expose his British counterpart as a blithering idiot. Her ignorance of geography was revealed when Sergei Lavrov asked if Britain would recognize Voronezh and Rostov as Russian territory — being where its troops are stationed, not in Ukraine but well within southern Russia — to which Liz ticked the box, ‘no’. She obviously didn't read her Lonely Planet guidebook before setting off.

Even if you have not read much, some names from popular culture would tickle the neurons of an alert person: soccer team FC Rostov; maybe the novel or movie "And Quiet Flows the Don" or the Cossak folk song "The Quiet Don", which was Anglicised by Paul Robeson [1]

This was not the low point sadly. Lavrov described his meeting with Truss as “talk of mute with deaf.”

Without a dialogue, Britain has no chance of influencing Russia. But instead of seizing the opportunity to improve relations that Lavrov said were “at the lowest point,” Truss presented a laundry list: Ukraine, the Russian-Belarusian military exercises, the Iran nuclear deal, and Russia's cooperation with China.

Like a teenager in a hurry to get it on, Truss came on too strong and went home alone. Except that her fault is not to be too eager but overestimating her abilities. Perhaps she suffers the curse of modern youth: doesn’t need to learn anything because Google.

Or does she lack life experience? Someone remarked she should not be provoking conflict as she has never been to war. “War,” I answered? “She has never been to work.” She was running the local Conservative Assoc within two years of leaving Ox-bored.

There are still people of talent in politics but they’re not generally in the top positions. It’s as if somebody spotted her absence of character and said... that's the kind of blancmange we can mold.

Anyone who has worked in Asia or Central Asia knows that you cannot walk cold into a meeting and expect to come away with anything worthwhile. It is a land where relations are cultivated, trust is earned. It is not like North America where a team of executives meet for the first time, exchange contracts and leave.

Furthermore Russians, like many central Europeans with their diplomatic academies, take statecraft very seriously. This comes naturally to countries whose land borders require them to treat with their neighbours every day. In the introverted British isles, the Institute for Statecraft is merely a propaganda outfit.

What the British take for statecraft can be seen plastered over the pages of The Guardian and The Washington Post this weekend: the same photograph of flares and torches, and banners draped from a bridge in Kyiv declaring, “resist”.

Perhaps fear, certainly not organic, whipped up by the propagandists of press and NGOs who are manufacturing a conflict — Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Western fearmongers of provoking panic: provide proof of invasion plans and stop talking up war.

As I wrote before the Truss trip, “The important visits are those of France and Germany. Simply by taking place they show that the U.S., UK, NATO attempt to isolate Russia is not working. It is not clear what the British hope to achieve except to appear relevant.”
See Moneycircus, Feb 8, 2022 — Eurasia Note #20 - Making It Rain In Ukraine: It's obvious who is pushing for war but they're linked to several agendas\

Oh, and Joe Biden called the Russian president from his retreat at Camp David. There was “no breakthrough”. Excuse the cynicism but was it even Joe on the phone?

The meat comes on Monday as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visits Kyiv and then Moscow on Tuesday.

Miseducation

The motive for war talk is plain as day.

Event Covid is unraveling, by force of honk in Ottawa, amid lying and nose-stroking in London. One can only imagine what passes in the globalist’s outdoor latrine secreted amid the snowy forests of Davos.

The technocrats are showing themselves to be incompetent or demonic, perhaps both. Sometimes it seems their very incoherence weaves a spell, a siren attracting our attention, demanding we make sense of their incantation of nonsense, like a psychopath gaslighting a target.

If something doesn’t make sense — The Great Reset, Build Back Better, the contradictory Covid policy — perhaps it’s not intended to. The objective is to ply us with distraction while they hijack power and filch our wealth.

Now we have the “pivot” to climate. We are supposed to take at face value the simultaneous tightening of Covid rules in Austria and Germany and their abandonment in Britain and Denmark. Meanwhile the goblin Greta spits curses of doom, urging us to speed up the bonfire of society by lighting it now.

Dumbing down of education has stolen our poets: the ancient Greeks would have created a hexous spirit to personify Covid and, at the same time, damned the politicians for using it to justify their warmongering and overreach, as did Aristophanes of Cleon.

What are these technocrats of which you speak? They are a spectre, disturbing yet temporary, an illusion trying to take permanent form. This is the digital financial oligarchy created by the money printing of the Federal Reserve private central bank since the 2008 financial crisis.

The attempt to support insolvent banks and corporations by creating money and purchasing their “underwater” assets has instead fracked money into every crevice of society. Everything has been financialised, from food, energy and commodities to education and government.

This wealthy oligarchy now believes it has the right, through ownership, to tell the rest of society how to live.

Some within them are trying to destroy the middle class, the small and mid-size business sector, because this is a center of resistance, a pole of competition that rivals the centralized state controlled by oligarchical collectivists. In the past they have used war. Today their weapon is inflation.

Even if central bankers act with the best intentions they cannot raise interest rates by enough to slow inflation — a jump in rates sizeable enough to quell it would kill the stock market and our indebted, insolvent corporations.

You don’t hear this because academics and government advisors are political animals, always looking for the next grant approval or jolly, membership of a committee or directorship.

In Europe the banking sector which accounts for 80 per cent of business lending, is collapsing under negative interest rates. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve has prioritized job creation over inflation: forgetting that no investor will create jobs if he cannot earn a return after inflation. I heard this at a hotel investment conference in Moscow a decade ago. It’s obvious but stark to hear them say flatly that inflation of 15 negates your return on investment.

The Democratic Party knows the Fed has no say over how the Green New Deal-Build Back Better “infrastructure” Bill would spend money, but expects it to create money until the end of time.

Professor Richard Werner has argued that policymakers misunderstand the relationship between interest rates and growth: higher rates are a symptom of growth. You cannot stimulate growth by endlessly lowering rates.

Europe has been very lucky that its currency has never fallen below one dollar despite printing twice as much money under quantitative easing, with its sclerotic economy and overextended welfare state. The reason is that Europe has a current account surplus and it hasn’t had the pandemic blowout. Europe plans to spend 700 billion euro while the U.S. spent $5 trillion in just the first year of Covid.

This is the perceived position of strength from which Europe thinks it will dictate the state of play to Russia. It is a sandcastle. The tide is coming in.

[1] Paul Robeson — Oh, How Proud Our Quiet Don