DIMPLOMACY

The warmonger in chief standing—looking a bit lost—before a sympathetic audience.  (Gage Skidmore)

Diplomacy, that high and elegant art, the refined, polished form in which solemn, elevated matters of state are conducted by grand viziers deemed the wisest wardens of nations’ fates, has always carried with it a subtle, vaguely unpleasant aroma of chicanery. 

Since the era of the Congress of Vienna, the ruling class of the world has known that hidden motives guide the manipulations of such consummate wizards as sly Talleyrand who, with infinite guile, had his way by the uncanny splendor of his deceptions.  So beguiling was he in his intrigue that when he died, Metternich was moved to ask, “What do you suppose was his motive”?

The aristocratic style is dead, replaced by the straightforward, hard-nosed joust of the Big Three at Yalta, the “who’s tougher?” Kitchen brawl of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the plodding tedium of Kissinger and Tho, but though the tone is now that of bourgeois business, it had not become less devious and tricky.  

That is, until Trump and Biden.  These demented nincompoops, both clinically diseased, and convinced of the dominion of The Exceptional Nation boasting the longest string of lost wars since Carthage and all in for bluster and braggadocio, hired repulsive, incompetent buffoons, let them eschew all restraint in a rough, insulting, ex-cathedra style with no persuasion in it, and no prospect of success, that is better described as dimplomacy.

That the ethically rotten, rabidly warmongering, xenophobic Democratic Congressional coven is matched with the morally diseased, dishonest, genetically corrupt, racist, sexist Republican whores for Capitalism, makes one despair for the nation.

Trump’s Pompeo had all the charm of a Poland China Hog and the finesse of a Cape Buffalo.  Biden’s Blinken is a Men’s Wear Mannikin, a Tailor’s Dummy, the embodiment of insignificance.   Their encounters with skilled diplomats from Russia and China have ranged from futile to disastrous, and their humiliations have charted the slo-mo descent of this arrogant country into its new status as the world’s laughing stock and a universal joke butt.

Lindsey Graham, US Senator from South Carolina. A vicious and utterly corrupt Neocon warmonger, he has few peers for vileness, except perhaps his colleague Adam Schiff, or the late John McCain. Moral rot and stunning mediocrity defines the US political class.

But better was to come.  Our impaired President, in the depth of his debility, is now blurting out high policy himself, upstaging his house nebbish.  To witness Biden’s flights of rhetoric is disturbing even when he’s coherent, but he has plumbed a startling new low in what passes now for statecraft.  Historically, it was understood that what was said diplomatically concealed hard truth.  You lied first, and lived with truth that leaked out later.  Biden’s method is to blather the truth first and lie about it later, when it’s no use. This, of course, defeats the whole purpose of diplomacy.

Case in point: the Nordstream 2 pipeline bombing.  Months ago, when asked what would happen when the second pipeline was installed, Biden smirked, saying the U.S. would stop it.  When asked how, he said, “I promise you…we’ll stop it.”  That’s pretty clear.  One presumes there was some policy basis for it.  Yet after the pipeline was blown he flatly denied responsibility.  His two statements are irreconcilable, as any intelligent child could see, but that didn’t seem to bother him.  Not until Sy Hersh blew the whistle, called bullshit, and cited chapter and verse in the deceit.

Someone with some acuity in an administration notable for want of same, cried alarm, and Biden tardily discovered that a sailboat of skindiving “Ukrainian patriots” had done the noble deed.  And America eagerly swallows this hogwash.  There is not even a whimper of protest at so egregious and infantile an act of official moral seppuku.  Further, Hersh’s revelations were debunked and suppressed, and at the U.N., America’s valet vetoed investigation of a massive criminal sabotage that was an act of war. 

That the ethically rotten, rabidly warmongering, xenophobic Democratic Congressional coven is matched with the morally diseased, dishonest, genetically corrupt, racist, sexist Republican whores for Capitalism, makes one despair for the nation.  And the American people—who, it used to be said, was not stupid, until that was clearly shown to be untrue—who vote for these monsters—can it be they are not so much stupid as actually evil?