The Lead

The Poetry of Diplomacy: What Do Zelenskyy, Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump Have in Common?

by David Shavin (EIRNS) — Jul. 12, 2024

The just-concluded NATO summit in Washington, D.C., was just the proverbial “nail in the coffin” on the ideological commitment of the “permanent warfare” gang to go down with the ship. As President Biden put it yesterday, in announcing the new “Ukraine Compact”: “Russia will not prevail in this war. Ukraine will prevail in this war. And we will stand with them every single step of the way. That’s what the compact says loudly and clearly.” Absent is the previous language of militarily defeating and breaking up Russia. Rather, the industrially-challenged West is to hang on by their fingertips, converting whatever capacity is left to years and years of warfare, selling their populations on their grand mission, while the future of their families and children disappear. Hitler in his bunker, praying for the salvation of Wunderwaffen, had better odds.

To keep Russia from not prevailing, much less having Ukraine prevail, the West must keep fighting, regardless of the cost. In normal English, it means that the Atlanticists know they can’t survive in a world with a functioning Russia (or China), as they can’t stop the rise of the Global South if a functioning, advanced nation-state is a living example of the possibility of conquering poverty and disease, and realizing solid, long-term physical-economic progress. This gang cannot engage in diplomacy, cannot negotiate a peace, as they have nothing honest to say to Russia. Rather they have evil in their heart.

Sergey Ryabkov, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, played the role of the finger on the wall, warning that those attempting to expand NATO into a global military force will pay the price for such ambitions: “They persist in their delusions, persist in their own sins. They will get what’s coming to them.”

While Biden was guaranteeing Russia’s defeat, Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary—a country with fewer than 10 million people—got on a plane to Mar-a-Lago to meet in Florida with former President Donald Trump. For 12 days now, Orbán has waged a diplomatic campaign that would make a General Sherman jealous. Simply by putting to one side all the reasons nothing can work, sitting down in person with the participants, and opening up a dialogue, he has broken open the conceit of the “permanent war"/"diplomacy is dead” gang. Admittedly, neither Orbán, nor for that matter his collaborator, China’s President Xi Jinping, pretend they have an easy answer or that they know how everything will end up. As with Martin Luther King going to jail, or a black child desegregating a school, or Rosa Parks sitting on a bus, some actions radiate way beyond any normal calculation, due to their poetic power, because they have struck a mystic chord.

But, oh, the screams of outrage, as the bureaucrats in Brussels search for thuggish methods to silence EU Consilium President Orbán—of course, in the name of democracy and the rule of law. However, the only rule that Orbán has violated is the grim rule that there will be no discussion of a peaceful settlement with Russia. This was the rule that Boris Johnson enforced in breaking up Türkiye’s mediation of a peace in April 2022; the rule that turned a deaf ear to President Putin in December 2021, when he called for jointly settling security concerns in Europe; the rule behind eight years of the West’s low-intensity warfare against the Donbass, while pretending to Russia that they’d honor a Minsk Accord pathway to keep Ukraine whole and peaceful; and the rule in the 1990s when Western financial system decided to prop up its financial bubbles by looting Russia and breaking it apart.

Today, the German economist and perhaps statesman, Folker Hellmeyer, struck by Orbán’s diplomacy, provided a provocative explanation. First, he derided the shallowness of current Western leaders as addicted to the black and white—e.g., that history began on Feb. 24, 2022, or Oct. 7, 2023. History and human events are more complex, more multi-dimensional. He said “that there are no white and black pictures, but that these are all shades of gray—and the shades of gray offer precisely the possibilities that we need. Shades of gray offer exactly the possibilities for a solution, and in this respect I very much welcome what Mr. Orbán is currently doing.”

Those who pretend it is all black or white not only fool themselves, but actually don’t have the capacity—nor the interest or curiosity to develop the capacity—to guide their society out of the woods. Hellmeyer concluded: “We have to talk to each other in the end.…” The reality is that Europe is getting slaughtered economically and “Ukrainians are paying for it every day with a blood toll that is intolerable and that is also what it is about: We are humanists, so what solution is here that is appropriate and that also serves the real interests of the people on the ground.” Orbán’s “exploratory talks for potential peace talks” are great “because you can see that the box we’ve been moving in since February 2022, with sanctions and with bellicose measures and always further escalation, does not work. It only leads to more dying.” So, climb out of that box—"that is exactly what Orbán delivers.”

At today’s International Peace Coalition, Helga Zepp-LaRouche identified an efficient pathway in this complicated world to perhaps exert some real leverage. She advised the gathering: “I would really like people to use the Orbán initiative, and get support for Orbán also in other countries, not only Türkiye and Erdoğan, but let’s say many people in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, would express that they absolutely support what Orbán is doing. Going to Ukraine, to Moscow, to Beijing, to Washington, and then trying to put a different agenda on the table. If there would be massive support from the Global South for Orbán at this point, it would make it much more difficult for those people in the EU who are trying to kick out Orbán from his position and who are trying to demonize him.”