The U.S. has left itself very little negotiating room with Russia over Ukraine. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:
“Uncomfortable questions [we] are not yet prepared to answer”
President Putin has said that he is open, at any time, to talks with an American interlocutor.
Why then, has no one come forward? Why, when there is growing anxiety amongst the American public that the war in Ukraine seems locked into forever escalation, and fears are palpable that “Joe Biden and the ‘warmongers in Congress’ are leading the U.S. to a ‘nuclear holocaust’”? This was the stark warning from former Presidential Candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, on Tucker Carlson’s widely-watched show.
The urgency to halt the slide towards escalation is clear: Whilst the space for political manoeuvre continuously shrinks, the momentum amongst the neo-cons in Washington, as well as Brussels, to land a fatal strike on Russia is not spent. Far from it, the talk in the lead-up to the NATO summit rather is one of preparing for a ‘long war’.
Urgency? Yes. It seems so simple – start talking. But seen from the perspective of a putative U.S. mediator, the task is anything but.
The western public has not been conditioned to expect the possibility of a stronger Russia emerging. On the contrary, they have endured western ‘experts’ sneering at the Russian military; denigrating the Russian leadership as incompetent; and being presented on their TVs with the ‘horrors’ of the Russian ‘invasion’.
[T]he quaint old forms-elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of nonviolent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial . . . Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
Aldous Huxley