US incapable of negotiating – Russian diplomat
No amount of negotiating with the US has been able to bring about meaningful results, as Washington has repeatedly broken the trust of its partners and refused to respect agreements, acting solely in its own interests, Russian diplomat Aleksandr Kramarenko has said.
In an article for International Affairs published last week, Kramarenko, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry Institute of Current International Problems, said that despite decades of trying to maintain strategic dialogue with the US, Russia has ultimately been unable to achieve any results in ensuring its national security, and neither has China.
He added that trust between Moscow and Washington was undermined long ago. In 2011, Russia allowed the passing of what seemed to be a humanitarian UN resolution on Libya, which was then used by the West to lay ruin the country.
In 2015, Russia was deceived by the Minsk agreements, which were meant to resolve the internal conflict in Ukraine, but instead were used to buy time to build up Kiev’s army with the goal of inflicting a military or strategic defeat on Russia.
“What kind of trust can we talk about here? Where is the principle of pacta sunt servanda [contracts must be respected]? And what then is the meaning of contracts when everything happens regardless and in spite of any contracts? Apparently, it turns out that Washington is simply unable to negotiate,” Kramarenko wrote, noting that Russia is not the only country to come to this conclusion.
Commenting on the conflict in Ukraine, he recalled the words of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the recent Aspen Security Forum, who said that the US and its allies are willing to “take risks” with their arms supplies to Kiev. What Sullivan meant, according to Kramarenko, was that Washington is willing to risk nuclear escalation, and that it is willing to do so because the principle of nuclear deterrence does not work for Russia.
“This means we need to think about how to restore trust in it.”
Kramarenko went on to suggest that all the arms control systems that have been destroyed by the US in attempts to maintain strict control over other nations while remaining ambiguous with regards to its own nuclear potential, could soon be replaced by a new process based on a multipolar world.
“It is already clear that it will be multilateral, at least with the participation of China, which by that time will overtake the US and Russia in the number of warheads deployed on strategic carriers. American experts themselves admit this will happen by 2030, when China can no longer be contained.”
“We need freedom from the West and its ideological oppression,” Kramarenko said.
