By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 7/3/23

Following the attempted coup in Russia carried out by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner group, US President Joe Biden “made clear that we were not involved. We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”

It is not quite so clear that Russian officials believe him. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says that Russia’s security services are investigating whether Western or Ukrainian intelligence services were involved in the rebellion. Former President and current deputy chairman of the Russian security council Dmitry Medvedev released a statement that it is likely that Western intelligence services were working with Prigozhin.

It is very unclear what happened in Russia that day. But whether or not the US, Ukraine or other Western intelligence services were working with Prigozhin or actively involved in the rebellion, there are other ways to be complicit in a coup. Before the coup, you can enable it by not sharing intelligence that it is being planned; after the coup, you can take advantage of it with information or disinformation that exploits or creates cracks.

Because what happened in Russia is so unclear, what is happening in response in Washington is unclear. But it would be concerning if the US was taking advantage of the attempted coup.

One thing that has become clear is that US intelligence knew in advance that Prigozhin was planning some sort of rebellious military action. CNN reported that US intelligence was aware of Prigozhin’s planning “for quite some time” and that they saw signs of the preparations, including the massing of weapons and ammunition. The New York Times reported that US intelligence briefed military and Biden administration officials that Prigozhin was preparing military action against senior Russian defense officials. But both CNN and The Times say that they did not brief Moscow.

Two reasons for the decision not to inform Moscow are given. Both CNN and The Times report that the motivation was to prevent Putin from weaponizing US knowledge to imply US involvement. The Times adds the second motivation that the US “clearly had little interest in helping Mr. Putin avoid a major, embarrassing fracturing of his support.”

But both explanations are troubling. Not sharing the intelligence with Moscow may create the appearance that the US was not involved. But it also risks, if that lack of sharing becomes known, as it very quickly did, creating the appearance of complicity. And it is complicity. What better way could there have been to demonstrate a lack of complicity in a coup – if you really don’t want it to happen – than to inform Moscow of the intended coup?

The second explanation makes that complicity clear. The US didn’t share the intelligence because – whether or not they thought the mutiny could succeed – they didn’t want to help Putin avoid, at least, the embarrassment.

The denial of knowledge of the coup planning was intended to prevent the appearance that there was complicity; the revelation of the knowledge of the coup planning appears to confirm that there was.

The charge of enabling could be upgraded to involvement if information in the Discord intelligence leaks turn out to be true that Prigozhin had offered Ukrainian intelligence, with whom he was alleged to have maintained secret communications, information on Russian troop locations in exchange for Ukraine withdrawing forces from Bakhmut. If confirmed, such reports would suggest that Prigozhin was collaborating with Western intelligence.

Whether or not the US was involved before the coup, they seem to be taking advantage after the coup. As The Times says, the US has an interest in embarrassing Putin and fracturing his support. Hence the many statements insisting, rightly or wrongly, that Prigozhin’s march reveals the cracks in the Russian military and the weakened position of Putin in Russian politics.

There is also the oddity of one of Prigozhin’s statements just before his rebellion in which he repeated the West’s claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. He said that “There was nothing extraordinary happening on the eve of February 24. The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block. The special operation was started for a completely different reason.” What was the real reason? “The war was needed … so that Shoigu could become a marshal, … so that he could get a second ‘Hero’ [of Russia] medal. The war wasn’t needed to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine.”

It is odd that Prigozhin, in the days leading up to his rebellion, was reading off the Western script. It is especially odd since Prigozhin is no supporter of Shoigu – indeed, the removal of Shoigu was one of his key demands – but has been a leading supporter of the war. Prigozhin has called, not for Russia to end the war, but for Russia to fight it more aggressively.

The West has repeated this rejection of Putin’s narrative uncritically, reinforcing the already set public doubt of Putin’s claims of provocation. As if Putin was deceived by an ambitious politician and had not been issuing warnings – along with Yeltsin and Gorbachev before him – about NATO expansion into Ukraine and demilitarization for decades.

The Western media has also shifted a key piece of the narrative to reframe loyalty to Putin at the highest levels to disloyalty to Putin at the highest levels, suggesting instability and cracks and a weakening of Putin’s hold on government.

Prigozhin’s forces were small. Not only much smaller than Russian forces, but much smaller than the picture that he projected. His force of 25,000 was less than a third of that. He probably hoped, if the coup theory is correct – and we don’t even know that yet – that elements of the Russian military would defect to his side. One of the keys to that hoped for defection was General Sergei Surovikin. Surovikin is powerful, influential and respected: even by Prigozhin who, in demanding the removal of Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, nominated Surovikin to replace him.

But rather than defecting and taking part of the Russian army with him, Surovikin publicly condemned Prigozhin, stayed loyal to Putin and implored Prigozhin’s mutineers to lay down their arms. In a video appeal, Surovikin said, “I urge you to stop. The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country. Before it is too late, it is necessary and it is needed to obey the will and order of the popularly elected President of the Russian Federation.”

Many expert commentators see this public appeal as a decisive moment in the rebellion. Many of the Wagner forces, when they realized they were in rebellion against the Russian government and military, reportedly laid down their arms and left. As far as is known at this point, no one in the Russian military, government or security services defected to Prigozhin. No Wagner commanders or officers joined the rebellion.

But the Western media has retold this story to undermine the loyalty narrative and recast Surovikin as the traitor and not the savior.The New York Times accepted the role of lead writer.

On June 27, The Times reported that, according to US officials, Surovikin “had advance knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to rebel against Russia’s military leadership.” Despite the richness of the innuendo, of course he had advance knowledge of the rebellion. Everyone at his level of command had advance knowledge of the rebellion. That’s how they made the plans to quickly and effectively stop it. Knowledge does not imply involvement.

The Times, engaging in implication rather than reporting, then says that US officials “are trying to learn if Surovikin “helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions.” That the US is trying to learn if he did does not mean that he did. Nor is it a “sign” that Russian generals “may” have supported Prigozhin, as The Times claims, that Prigozhin “would not have launched his uprising unless he believed that others in positions of power would come to his aid.” He likely did believe that. He was likely wrong.

Employing the word “if” as the foundation of their reporting, The Times then serves up the whole point of the innuendo: “If General Surovikin was involved in last weekend’s events, it would be the latest sign of . . . a wider fracture” in the Russian military and government.

Later in the article, The Times says that the US officials “emphasized that much of what the United States and its allies know is preliminary.” The reporters go on to say, “Still, American officials have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Surovikin.”

Days later, reports broke that Surovikin had been arrested. Many outlets, including The Times, picked up the story. Surovikin, several media outlets reported, has not appeared in public; though his daughter reportedly claims this is untrue and that he is “at his work location.” Stating that the “circumstances surrounding the status of the general, Sergei Surovikin, are still very murky” and that “the reports were not conclusive,” The Times reports that Surovikin “appear[s] to have [been] detained.” What is not often reported is that Surovikin seems to have been detained before The New York Times reported that he knew of the rebellion in advance.

The report then says that “American officials would not say – or do not know – if he was formally arrested or just held for questioning.” That’s a big difference.

Maybe Surovikin has been arrested and maybe he hasn’t. But the story is being used to take advantage of the coup to exploit or create cracks with information or disinformation. Surovikin may have disappeared, and he may have been detained. But if he has been called in for questioning or debriefing that is normal and not news. If he has been called in for interrogation because he is suspected of participating in the rebellion, that is news. But since US officials “do not know,” the headlines and the story seem to be being framed in such a way as to imply cracks and a weakening of Putin’s position.

Weakening Putin’s position may seem to be obviously desirable. However, there are many reasons why removing Putin could lead to a worse alternative for the West. A little discussed one is that the removal of Putin could lead to a replacement with a more hardline foreign policy toward the West. In line behind Putin are hardliners who pushed Putin to go further in 2014 and annex not only Crimea but the Donbas. Putin has been more a restrainer than a hardliner. The leader who emerges victorious from a coup, like Prigozhin, could be a worse hardliner.

It is still very unclear what happened that day in Russia. Time may tell if Biden is telling the truth that the US “had nothing to do with” the coup or if Russian concerns are warranted that they did. But whether they did or whether they didn’t, there are other ways to be complicit in a coup. The US may have been guilty of such complicity before the coup attempt by not sharing intelligence with Russia that the coup was taking shape. And they may be being complicit after the coup attempt by disseminating information or disinformation that exploits or creates cracks that could weaken the Putin government.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.

I think most of my readers are aware that most western think tank “experts” on Russia are not the sharpest tools in the shed. But based on this survey of opinion it appears that they’re both dumb and under the influence of psychedelic drugs. – Natylie

By Branko Marcetic, Responsible Statecraft, 6/28/23

In 1998, in the midst of a years-long U.S. campaign to topple Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Gen. Anthony Zinni realized the United States had no actual plan for what would happen in the aftermath. Zinni filled this gap by commissioning a series of war games, which predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would be plunged into bloody chaos. The analysis, largely ignored at the time, would prove prophetic in the ensuing years.

This is worth recalling now, after long-standing hopes that the Ukraine invasion would spell the end of Vladimir Putin’s rule were nudged closer to reality over the weekend, with Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin carrying out a mutiny against the Russian president. The episode brings up several questions: What exactly is America’s plan should the Russian state collapse? What would follow a post-Putin power vacuum? And what measures should the United States take to manage its relationship with the country in such a scenario?

We can get some sense of the foreign policy establishment’s thinking on the subject by looking at what influential think tanks have had to say.

Take the Center for a New American Security, an arms-manufacturer-funded think tank closely aligned with the Democratic Party and from which the Biden administration has drawn many of its top foreign policy appointees. Shortly before Prigozhin’s coup attempt, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, director of its Transatlantic Security Program, co-wrote a piece outlining several scenarios for a post-Putin Russia, drawing heavily on her testimony in a Senate hearing in May.

In one scenario, Kendall-Taylor writes, Putin retains power and eventually dies in office, succeeded by a weak technocrat who changes little from current Russian policy. In another — the course of action she prefers — a Ukrainian military victory triggers a “seismic shift” in the Russian political landscape and galvanizes “a groundswell that could dislodge him,” leading to “the possibility of a more hopeful future for Russia and for its relations with its neighbors and the West.”

Kendall-Taylor admits the odds of a more liberal, democratic Russia emerging from this are “low,” pointing to the 2011 Egyptian revolution that ultimately resulted in Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s brutal dictatorship. And she acknowledges that if Putin was removed by an armed insurgency, “not only would the aftermath be violent, but the odds of a new dictatorship coming to power would also be high.”

Yet despite the risks “of violence, chaos, and even the chance of a more hard-line government emerging in the Kremlin,” Kendall-Taylor nevertheless concludes that “a better Russia can be produced only by a clear and stark Ukrainian victory,” which will “enable Russians to shed their imperialist ambitions and to teach the country’s future elites a valuable lesson about the limits of military power.” Whatever leader follows, she argues, the West should avoid rushing to stabilize relations and instead demand Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine, the payment of reparations and the prosecution of war criminals, while aiming to “constrain Russia and its ability to wage aggression beyond its borders” in the long term.

Despite dismissing the risks, Kendall-Taylor is an outlier in acknowledging the potential for violence, instability, and a more hardline government. The Center for European Policy Analysis, another hawkish think tank, has published several pieces since the war began declaring that the possible collapse and disintegration of Russia “will be good for everyone” and that the U.S. goal “should be decolonization,” a popular new shorthand for encouraging its break-up.

Likewise, while insisting it is “essential to prepare” for a coup in Russia, Pavel K. Baev of the Brookings Institution explicitly refuses to consider what he calls the “distinct possibility” of “a catastrophic breakdown of Russia’s autocratic regime and the break-up of this deeply troubled state.” Instead, he asserts that the hardliners around Putin “have neither economic foundation nor public support” to escalate the war, and whoever takes power would simply dispose of them and look for “a way out of the accelerating catastrophe.”

This new leadership, Baev predicts, would make a “series of territorial concessions,” reassess Moscow’s dependence on its nuclear arsenal, and move to restart arms control and strategic stability talks with the United States. Belarussian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko would be replaced by “an unequivocally pro-European government” in the aftermath, in turn leading Moscow to rescind Putin’s September annexation and fully withdraw from Ukraine. Finally, sans Putin, Russia would be less inclined toward confrontation with the West, dealing China a major setback.

Similar predictions abound. Should Putin’s rule collapse, asserts Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “the jingoists will be fighting an uphill battle” while democratic demands will gain steam. A decisive Ukrainian victory could usher in new leadership that “open[s] the door to revived economic partnership with the West,” William Drozdiak, founding executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center, writes for the Wilson Center.

Some urge more ambitious plans. William Courtney, senior fellow at the influential and Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, suggests sanctions should only be eased if Russia withdraws its troops from both Ukraine and Belarus. Rather than draw down U.S. forces in Europe, as was done after the Soviet collapse, the United States should consider “augment[ing] its forces in Central and Eastern Europe” and keeping the door open to further NATO expansion, while engaging Russia’s new leadership on democratic reforms.

Surprisingly more conciliatory is the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent establishment think tank that nonetheless recognizes the grave risks of violence and instability in a Russian power vacuum, and calls for a “careful confidence-building dance” and maintaining a pledge to “welcome back” Russia into Europe if it reforms. (In a less surprising turn, CSIS still insists on maintaining sanctions, continuing military aid to Ukraine and pursuing Russian war criminals in case of a complete Russian collapse.)

In some cases, the predictions and policy suggestions seem at odds. At an event sponsored by the German Marshall Fund last year, analysts reportedly came to a consensus that “a post-Putin Russia would be worse than it is today,” with the possibility of “an even more Stalinist state,” a civil war, and “the disintegration and fragmentation of Russia, with pockets controlled by militias and warlords.”

Yet more recently, the Fund’s nonresident Senior Fellow Bart M. J. Szewczyk has argued that NATO governments primarily “need to step up their efforts to help Ukraine win” without mentioning these dire warnings raised during last year’s event. He dismisses as a “fallacy” that reciprocal security guarantees for Russia are essential for a viable peace and urges using a Russian military defeat to “end the so-called frozen conflict in Moldova, dissolve the Russian puppet statelet of Transnistria, and help Belarus democratize,” as well as to find this generation’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a Russian “successor they can do business with.”

Some common themes stand out. Few consider that what may follow Putin is not just violence and the country’s dissolution, as several experts have warned, but a more hardline government led by hawks more inclined to escalate the war and even less open to rapprochement with the West — and those who do barely dwell on the prospect, sometimes treating the possible negative consequences as an acceptable risk. This is despite the fact that, as Prigozhin’s munity has viscerally reminded us, almost all of Putin’s Russian critics today are more extreme, even ultranationalist. The Atlantic Council only mentions these hawks to urge Russian elites to “move beyond today’s misguided imperialism,” as if it would simply be a matter of will.

Several view Russia’s collapse as less a risk than an opportunity, either to extract concessions from Moscow beyond a withdrawal from Ukraine, or to further weaken and contain Russia. It’s assumed that any instability will play to the West’s advantage, whether by producing a liberal democracy in Belarus or undermining a Chinese government that, it’s presumed, would simply stand by and watch events unfold.

Maybe most striking, there is no mention of how the West can try to resolve the long-simmering grievances that have fed into today’s Russian aggression, or even that it should. Some advocate doubling down on ignoring Russian concerns about NATO expansion. It’s implied such grievances are exclusive to Putin, even though CIA Director William Burns has explicitly said NATO enlargement is widely opposed in Russia, and Gorbachev himself and other Russian liberals have echoed many of Putin’s criticisms of Western foreign policy.

It’s fair to ask whether the U.S. and European foreign policy establishments are repeating the mistakes of Iraq, when overly rosy predictions about the aftermath of regime change left them blindsided by the cascading repercussions of Hussein’s ouster. Those included a civil war and long-running ethnic conflict; the renewal of corrupt, authoritarian rule; a boost to the regional influence of a U.S. adversary; and violence and instability that spread inside and beyond the country’s borders, necessitating more open-ended military commitments, undermining U.S. global standing, and entailing steep human and economic costs.

Similar outcomes would be magnitudes more disastrous in the case of Russia, which is several times larger than Iraq, is more central to the global economy, sits on the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, is located on Europe’s doorstep, and spans virtually all of Eurasia. We can only hope there’s more serious analysis inside the Pentagon than what’s coming out of Western think tanks.

Link here.

Here is the article discussing the survey of the number of Ukrainians who personally know someone who has been killed or wounded in the war. Mercouris makes reference to this survey more than once in the above video. – Natylie

Survey Reveals Impact of Russian War: Nearly 80 Percent of Ukrainians Affected by Loss and Suffering

Kyiv Post, 7/1/23

In a recent survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), the devastating toll of Russia’s war against Ukraine has come to light. {https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=1254&page=1]

The study found that an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents have close relatives and friends who have either lost their lives or suffered injuries as a direct consequence of Russian aggression.

On average, each of the interviewees named seven such people.

Furthermore, the survey revealed that 64 percent of Ukrainians have at least one close relative or friend who sustained injuries during the conflict, with an average of five wounded loved ones per respondent.

Equally poignant is the revelation that 63 percent of participants have experienced the loss of at least one close relative or friend, amounting to an average of three deceased loved ones per respondent.

Gee, this whole neoliberal elitism and disdain for the general population thing sounds awfully familiar. – Natylie

By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 6/18/23

Theatre director Konstantin Bogomolov likes to shock. At the end of May, he was at it again, publishing an article denouncing his one-time ideological allies in Russia’s liberal intelligentsia for their attitude towards the Russian people and towards the war in Ukraine. Bogomolov was obviously out to provoke. Still, beneath its insulting rhetoric, his article contained a germ of truth about the prospects for Russia ever turning into a liberal democratic state.

Offending people on a regular basis has made Bogomolov famous, but whereas once he targeted conservatives, Putin, and the Russian state, more recently he’s been targeting the West and Russian liberals. Aggrieved by Western political correctness, in 2021 Bogomolov took up arms against it in an article entitled “The Rape of Europe 2.0.” In this, the director complained that Western Europe was constructing a “new ethical Reich” dominated by an “aggressive mix of queer activists, fem-fanatics, and eco-psychopaths.” Then in November 2022, the Financial Times described a play that Bogomolov directed as “clearly heralding the start of a new era in Russian culture, with new people and new authoritarian values centre stage.” “The uproarious laughter of the audience at jokes about blackface and homophobic slurs was nauseating,” said the FT.

In his latest article, Bogomolov writes that Russia contains a “society within a society” made up of people who perceive themselves as special. This is the intelligentsia, 90 percent of whom “call themselves Europeans and enlightened liberals. But in the depth of their souls, they despise their insufficiently successful, insufficiently advanced compatriots.” These “special people” would never agree to listen to the ordinary people, says Bogomolov, because if they did, ordinary people would tell them that “empire is good, and a whole lot of other things that are simply unacceptable in civilized European society.” Consequently, “the people must be silent.”

The war in Ukraine has horrified liberal intellectuals, writes Bogomolov, but not because they dislike the bloodshed. What really bothers them, he claims, is that it has deprived them of the opportunity to get subsidies from the state to produce works saying how terrible the state is. Russia’s intellectuals lament the loss of their former lives in which they could “sit on two stools, be progressive thieves, intelligent murderers, corrupt philanthropists, uneducated aristocrats, actors with conscience (an oxymoron), Europeanized racists … and so on and so forth.” The war has deprived them of the ability to “live in luxury” and sip “pumpkin lattes.”

The intelligentsia wants to go back to its good old life, says Bogomolov. But, he concludes: “In February 2022 [when Russian invaded Ukraine], the past died. … There is no turning back. … It’s necessary to stop viewing one’s country and one’s people with contempt and to listen to the hum of history and the voice of the people. Because their opinion matters.”

While exaggerated, Bogomolov’s complaints will ring true among many Russians. The sad fact is that the social gulf dividing the liberal intelligentsia and the mass of ordinary Russians is enormous, and the two parties do indeed often view each other with undisguised contempt.

Take, for instance, Moscow professor Sergei Medvedev, author of the Pushkin Prize-winning book The Return of the Russian Leviathan. Medvedev writes that the Russian “mass consciousness” is “embittered, alienated and provincial,” “undeveloped,” “archaic and superstitious.” In liberal discourse, the masses are often described as having the “morals of slaves,” and as such compared unfavourably with the enlightened intelligentsia, a contrast that is sometimes referred to as the “Two Russias Theory.” As one-time liberal icon Boris Nemtsov put it in his book, Testament of a Rebel, before his murder in 2015: “The Russian people, for the most part, is divided into two uneven groups. One part is the descendants of serfs, people with a slavish consciousness. There are very many of them and their leader is V.V. Putin. The other (smaller) part is born free, proud and independent. It does not have a leader but needs one.”

As for the idea that what liberals really hate about the war in Ukraine is the loss of their pumpkin lattes, that too contains a tiny bit of truth, although the point of complaint is more often cheese than coffee, good European cheeses having disappeared from Russian shops as a result of the sanctions and counter-sanctions that followed the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Medvedev again provides an example, writing that “Among the losses of recent years—the free press, fair elections, an independent court—what has hurt especially hard has been the disappearance of good cheese. … a piece of brie, a bottle of Italian chianti and a warm baguette … drew him [the Russian] close to Western values and were acts of social modernization. … Striking against cheese was equivalent to a strike against the quasi-Western idea of normality.”

Similarly, in a 2015 article Masha Gessen lamented the loss of Western cheeses in Russia due to sanctions, but found consolation in the fact that they could still be purchased at the Caviar House & Prunier Seafood Bar in a departure lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport. As she wrote:

“It’s my first time in Europe after all that’s happened,” the journalist and filmmaker Inna Denisova, a critic of the annexation of Crimea, wrote on her Facebook page …. “And of course it’s not seeing the historic churches and museums that has made me so emotional—it’s seeing cheese at the supermarket. My little Gorgonzola. My little mozzarella. My little Gruyère, chèvre and Brie. I held them all in my arms … and headed for the cash register.” There, Ms. Denisova wrote, she started crying.

Suffice it to say that the non-brie eating, non-Chianti sipping majority has a rather different perspective. While sentiments such as those above might not be the norm, their occasional expression has given Russian liberals a serious image problem.

Bogomolov’s article thus draws our attention to something quite important. Russian liberalism can never hope to gain power without finding some common ground with the Russian people, or at least of a sizeable section of it. But liberals and the rest of the population are so far removed from one another that this seems impossible. Doing what Bogomolov recommends—listening to the people—would mean accepting the unacceptable, including the war in Ukraine. Liberals don’t want to do this. Instead, they pin their hopes on the war going so badly for Russia that the Russian people changes its point of view. But that means wishing for their own country’s defeat in war, a stance that alienates them even further from the public. Frankly, it’s hard to see how they can escape from this conundrum. For now, all they can do is wait and pray for a miracle.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

By Rick Sterling, Antiwar.com, 6/27/23

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is arguably the key person driving US foreign policy. He was mentored by Hillary Clinton with regime changes in Honduras, Libya and Syria. He was the link between Nuland and Biden during the 2014 coup in Ukraine. As reported by Seymour Hersh, Sullivan led the planning of the Nord Stream pipelines destruction in September 2022. Sullivan guides or makes many large and small foreign policy decisions. This article will describe Jake Sullivan’s background, what he says, what he has been doing, where the US is headed and why this should be debated.

Background

Jake Sullivan was born in November 1976. He describes his formative years like this:

“I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the later Cold War – of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and ‘Tear down this wall’. The 90s were my high school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world.”

Sullivan’s education includes Yale (BA), Oxford (MA) and Yale again (JD). He went quickly from academic studies and legal work to political campaigning and government.

Sullivan made important contacts during his college years at elite institutions. For example, he worked with former Deputy Secretary of State and future Brookings Institution president, Strobe Talbott. After a few years clerking for judges, Sullivan transitioned to a law firm in his hometown of Minneapolis. He soon became chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar who connected him to the rising Senator Hillary Clinton.

Mentored by Hillary

Sullivan became a key adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign to be Democratic party nominee in 2008. At age 32, Jake Sullivan became deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning when she became secretary of state. He was her constant companion, traveling with her to 112 countries.

The Clinton/Sullivan foreign policy was soon evident. In Honduras, Clinton clashed with progressive Honduras President Manuel Zelaya over whether to re-admit Cuba to the OAS. Seven weeks later, on June 28, Honduran soldiers invaded the president’s home and kidnapped him out of the country, stopping en route at the US Air Base. The coup was so outrageous that even the US ambassador to Honduras denounced it. This was quickly overruled as the Clinton/Sullivan team played semantics games to say it was a coup but not a “military coup.” Thus the Honduran coup regime continued to receive US support. They quickly held a dubious election to make the restoration of President Zelaya “moot”. Clinton is proud of this success in her book “Hard Choices.”

Two years later the target was Libya. With Victoria Nuland as State Department spokesperson, the Clinton/Sullivan team promoted sensational claims of a pending massacre and urged intervention in Libya under the “responsibility to protect.” When the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the US, Qatar and other NATO members distorted that and started air attacks on Libyan government forces. Today, 12 years later, Libya is still in chaos and war. The sensational claims of 2011 were later found to be false.

When the Libyan government was overthrown in Fall 2011, the Clinton/Sullivan State Department and CIA plotted to seize the Libyan weapons arsenal. Weapons were transferred to the Syrian opposition. US Ambassador Stevens and other Americans were killed in an internecine conflict over control of the weapons cache.

Undeterred, Clinton and Sullivan stepped up their attempts to overthrow the Syrian government. They formed a club of western nations and allies called the “Friends of Syria.” The “Friends” divided tasks who would do what in the campaign to topple the sovereign state. Former policy planner at the Clinton/Sullivan State Department, Ann Marie Slaughter, called for “foreign military intervention.” Sullivan knew they were arming violent sectarian fanatics to overthrow the Syrian government. In an email to Hillary released by WikiLeaks, Sullivan noted “AQ is on our side in Syria.”

Biden’s Adviser During the 2014 Ukraine Coup

After being Clinton’s policy planner, Sullivan became President Obama’s director of policy planning (Feb 2011 to Feb 2013) then national security adviser to Vice President Biden (Feb 2013 to August 2014).

In his position with Biden, Sullivan had a close-up view of the February 2014 Ukraine coup. He was a key contact between Victoria Nuland, overseeing the coup, and Biden. In the secretly recorded conversation where Nuland and the US Ambassador to Ukraine discuss how to manage the coup, Nuland remarks that Jake Sullivan told her “you need Biden.” Biden gave the “attaboy” and the coup was “midwifed” following a massacre of police AND protesters on the Maidan plaza.

Sullivan must have observed Biden’s use of the vice president’s position for personal family gain. He would have been aware of Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of the Burisima Ukrainian energy company, and the reason Joe Biden demanded that the Ukrainian special prosecutor who was investigating Burisima to be fired. Biden later bragged and joked about this.

In December 2013, at a conference hosted by Chevron Corporation, Victoria Nuland said the US has spent five BILLION dollars to bring “democracy” to Ukraine.

Sullivan Helped Create Russiagate

Jake Sullivan was a leading member of the 2016 Hillary Clinton team which promoted Russiagate. The false claim that Trump was secretly contacting Russia was promoted initially to distract from negative news about Hillary Clinton and to smear Trump as a puppet of Putin. Both the Mueller and Durham investigations officially discredited the main claims of Russiagate. There was no collusion. The accusations were untrue, and the FBI gave them unjustified credence for political reasons.

Sullivan played a major role in the deception as shown by his “Statement from Jake Sullivan on New Report Exposing Trump’s Secret Line of Communication to Russia.”

Sullivan’s Misinformation

Jake Sullivan is a good speaker, persuasive and with a dry sense of humor. At the same time, he can be disingenuous. Some of his statements are false. For example, in June 2017 Jake Sullivan was interviewed by Frontline television program about US foreign policy and especially US-Russia relations. Regarding NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government, Sullivan says, “Putin came to believe that the United States had taken Russia for a ride in the UN Security Council that authorized the use of force in Libya…. He thought he was authorizing a purely defensive mission…. Now on the actual language of the resolution, it’s plain as day that Putin was wrong about that.” Contrary to what Sullivan claims, the UN Security Council resolution clearly authorizes a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians, no more. It’s plain as day there was NOT authorization for NATO’s offensive attacks and “regime change.”

Planning the Nord Stream Pipeline Destruction

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, filled with 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, was a monstrous environmental disaster. The destruction also caused huge economic damage to Germany and other European countries. It has been a boon for US liquefied natural gas exports which have surged to fill the gap, but at a high price. Many European factories dependent on cheap gas have closed down. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

Seymour Hersh reported details of How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline. He says, “Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.” A sabotage plan was prepared and officials in Norway and Denmark included in the plot. The day after the sabotage, Jake Sullivan tweeted

“I spoke to my counterpart Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe of Denmark about the apparent sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines. The U.S. is supporting efforts to investigate and we will continue our work to safeguard Europe’s energy security.”

Ellerman-Kingombe may have been one of the Danes informed in advance of the bombing. He is close to the US military and NATO command.

Since then, the Swedish investigation of Nord Stream bombing has made little progress. Contrary to Sullivan’s promise in the tweet, the US has not supported other efforts to investigate. When Russia proposed an independent international investigation of the Nord Stream sabotage at the UN Security Council, the resolution failed due to lack of support from the US and US allies. Hungary’s foreign minister recently asked,

“How on earth is it possible that someone blows up critical infrastructure on the territory of Europe and no one has a say, no one condemns, no one carries out an investigation?”

Economic Plans Devoid of Reality

Ten weeks ago Jake Sullivan delivered a major speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the Biden administration is pursuing a “modern industrial and innovation strategy.” They are trying to implement a “foreign policy for the middle class” which better integrates domestic and foreign policies. The substance of their plan is to increase investments in semiconductors, clean energy minerals and manufacturing. However the new strategy is very unlikely to achieve the stated goal to “lift up all of America’s people, communities, and industries.” Sullivan’s speech completely ignores the elephant in the room: the costly US Empire including wars and 800 foreign military bases which consume about 60% of the total discretionary budget. Under Biden and Sullivan’s foreign policy, there is no intention to rein in the extremely costly military industrial complex. It is not even mentioned.

US Exceptionalism 2.0

In December 2018 Jake Sullivan wrote an essay titled “American Exceptionalism, Reclaimed.” It shows his foundational beliefs and philosophy. He separates himself from the “arrogant brand of exceptionalism” demonstrated by Dick Cheney. He also criticizes the “American first” policies of Donald Trump. Sullivan advocates for “a new American exceptionalism” and “American leadership in the 21^st Century.”

Sullivan has a shallow Hollywood understanding of history: “The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide.” He believes “The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft.”

Jake Sullivan is young in age but his ideas are old. The United States is no longer dominant economically or politically. It is certainly not “indispensable.” More and more countries are objecting to US bullying and defying Washington’s demands. Even key allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are ignoring US requests. The trend toward a multipolar world is escalating. Jake Sullivan is trying to reverse the trend but reality and history are working against him. Over the past four or five decades, the US has gone from being an investment, engineering and manufacturing powerhouse to a deficit spending consumer economy waging perpetual war with a bloated military industrial complex.

Instead of reforming and rebuilding the US, the national security state expends much of its energy and resources trying to destabilize countries deemed to be “adversaries”.

Conclusion

Previous national security advisers Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski were very influential.

Kissinger is famous for wooing China and dividing the communist bloc. Jake Sullivan is now wooing India in hopes of dividing that country from China and the BRICS alliance (Brazil,Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Brzezinski is famous for plotting the Afghanistan trap. By destabilizing Afghanistan with foreign terrorists beginning 1978, the US induced the Soviet Union to send troops to Afghanistan at the Afghan government’s request. The result was the collapse of the progressive Afghan government, the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and 40 years of war and chaos.

On 28 February 2022, just four days after Russian troops entered Ukraine, Jake Sullivan’s mentor, Hillary Clinton, was explicit: “Afghanistan is the model.” It appears the US intentionally escalated the provocations in Ukraine to induce Russia to intervene. The goal is to “weaken Russia.” This explains why the US has spent over $100 billion sending weapons and other support to Ukraine. This explains why the US and UK undermined negotiations which could have ended the conflict early on.

The Americans who oversaw the 2014 coup in Kiev, are the same ones running US foreign policy today: Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan. Prospects for ending the Ukraine war are very poor as long as they are in power.

Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at RSterling1@gmail.com.