I have to say that I am both amazed and amused at the fantastically stupid manner in which US politicians have reacted to the Snowden affair. Without pausing for a single second to think of the possible reaction to their attitude, they began to demand, threaten and otherwise bully not only China and Russia, but even any other country which in the future might render some assistance to Snowden. Apparently, US politicians fail to realize a few very simple things:
a) By openly bullying and threatening China and Russia they are making it impossible for Chinese or Russian politicians to cave in to their demands and render Snowden back to the USA.
b) The White House is threatening Russia and China with unspecified “consequences” as if for the past several decades the USA did not use very dirty trick in the book to threaten, subvert, confront, antagonize, blackmail and otherwise piss off not only the Kremlin but the entire Russian population. Seriously – what else could the USA possibly do to Russia? As for China, Snowden just made public that the US had been engaged in a massive spying program against China, something which the Chinese authorities definitely knew, but which the Chinese general public did not know for a fact. And now they want to make demands on the Chinese about the person who revealed that?
c) The USA and the UK are chock full with Chechen terrorists, Jewish oligarchs and even Russian bankers who have all run away from Russian justice and who have all received political asylum (yes, even bankers on the run!). And, of course, there are plenty of real Russian defectors there too. How can they seriously think that they can ignore any and all demands from the Russian justice system and then have Snowden rendered just because they now are banging their fists on the table?!
d) In legal terms Russia has no extradition treaty with the USA and therefore no obligation at all to render Snowden. But then, the Brits actually had the arrogance to demand that Russia extradite a Russian citizen (Andrei Lugovoi) even while they were refusing to extradite Boris Berezovsky.
What amazes me, and diplomats all over the planet, is that, simply put, this is not how “things are done”. Normally, a request for extradition is made rather quietly, in as low profile as possible, and usually after behind closed doors political consultations. In the case of defections from intelligence/security organizations there is an “understanding” between the countries that these are never subject to rendition. Take Poteev for example, a truly huge defection with nothing short of apocalyptic consequences for the Russian external intelligence agency SVR: neither Putin, nor Medvedev nor Lavrov have even mentioned his name in any public statements. The only exception was Putin who said that “traitors always end up living miserable lives” and he did that to a domestic audience. But Russian diplomats are mature enough to understand that once a guy like Poteev makes it to the USA, they have to accept the loss, correct the mistakes they made and turn the page. What you do not do is have hysterical fits of rage and indulge in threatening the entire planet with fire and brimstone if they help your traitor.
The way the USA treats this Snowden affair shows that US politicians are poorly educated idiots with an insular mentality combined with a god complex. They have the mentality of a bully who simply cannot accept that there are rules which everybody else follows and which apply to him too. Beyond any doubt, the US diplomatic corps is the worst, most illiterate and incompetent of any major power and as a result of all that, the US foreign policy is clumsy, irrational, self-defeating and fundamentally dysfunctional. Hence the long series of political defeats the USA had to cope with recently.
Long gone are the days of James Baker who truly was a born diplomat, an effective and refined negotiator and a politician with an acute sense of “the other” who brilliantly succeeded in putting together a large international coalition against Saddam Hussein (which even included the Syrians!). Following Baker all the USA had is a mix of arrogant and bellicose women like Madelaine Albright, Condi Rice or Hillary Clinton, or spineless fake-heroes like Colin Powell or John Kerry who were supposedly war heroes but who never showed any individual courage or leadership qualities and who, as a result, were easily bullied into doing that which they fully knew was the dumb and wrong thing to do.
So here we have it. The USA, biggest superpower on the planet, is reacting to a fundamentally minor annoyance like some crazy mix of a women with PMS and a 5 year old spoiled brat. In a way, of course, it is funny. But in a deeper way, this clearly illustrates something very serious.
Any good student of history will tell you that regardless of the moral and ethical merits of any political system, one can judge the viability of that system by the kind of people it promotes to its top positions. The better the ability of any system to identify, promote and place the correct people at the correct position, the better the overall viability of the system. Judged by this criteria, the USA clearly has lost its former ability to place the best people possible to key position. Instead all it offers is a long list of mediocre, arrogant, ignorant and outright nasty individuals who simply do not have what it takes to get things done.
Yet another welcome sign that the Anglo Empire is running out of gas.
The Saker
That the US and its puppets are the bully on the block with no respect for anyone else is a well known fact. I wish I’d share you optimism about them ‘running out of gas’ though. The bullying and threats seem to have worked vis-a-vis Russia at least. RT is reporting that they’ve left their naval base at Tartus in Syria and that there’s presently ‘no Russian officers nor any other military personnel in Syria’. That seemed a bit frighting to me. I can only hope that they are playing a chess game here and making a strategic retreat to later be followed by an attack…otherwise their credibility is gone and so is the hope for a change toward a more multilateral world. We shall have to wait and see…and hope for the best.
The US .. the worlds largest power but also increasingly poorly managed… shades of Habsburgian Spain or Russia before the revolution?
@FkDahl:Habsburgian Spain or Russia before the revolution?
Exactly! These two also ended up having a system which was pushing the best people aside while promoting the most mediocre and obtuse. History is full of such examples..
I would say that one of the lessons of history is that there often comes a time when a political system finds it impossible to reform itself because of the three “Is” – ideology, inertia and vested interests. You end up with an overprivileged and incompetent ruling class who find it easier and believe it safer to stick with a status quo long past its sell by day and the live on past capital until it runs out. They eventually lead their country into terminal decline. Eventually even their own class gets caught in the wreck.
The ideology of the American Empire is market fundamentalism and it has enabled a class of corrupt plutocrats to preside over the degeneration of the great Republic into an ever more brutal an decadent Empire.
I just discovered your excellent blog and have been engrossed in your past articles, especially about Russia Islam and the Orthodox Church which are topics that the alternative media seem to lack a deep understanding of.
A few of the sources that I follow believe that the Edward Snowden saga has been deliberately played up by the MSM to distract the general public from events in Syria or maybe even to pressure Obama into taking a more active role in the conflict. Have you considered that the Edward Snowden drama might simply be part of a media psyop?
The maker of this video subscribes to this view, and he articulates the theory particularly well I thought.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7PxEuYUUMJI
I believe it was Stiglitz who coined the term “An Ungovernable World”.
You raise many good points, and miss others, of importance.
US/UK arrogance will result in No SFA with Afghanistan, thus all forces leaving ala Iraq.
US/UK arrogance visavis Syria, is part of the blowback regarding Snowden.
US/UK meddling in China’s near abroad, is part of the blowback regarding Snowden.
It is in Russia/Chinese interest to know as much as Snowden knows about how NSA works. So keeping him dangling is the best way to achieve this.
There was no way Snowden could take a commercial flight to Havana from Moscow, and be certain of arrival in Havana, because the US set the precedent when forcing down a Russian airliner transiting Turkish airspace at altitude.