How Democrats and Progressives Undermined the Potential of the Biden-Putin
Summit
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
15 June 21
No matter what happens at Wednesdays summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir
Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have
already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening
dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict
Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent a depiction that squandered
vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits most Democrats in
Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers
human survival.
In the new light of atomic weaponry, Albert Einstein warned against the
outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. But the concept is flourishing as
both parties strive to outdo each other in vilifying Russia as a locus of
evil. Rather than coming to terms with the imperative for détente between
the two countries that brandish more than 90 percent of the worlds nuclear
warheads, the Democratic leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has
been heightening the bilateral tensions that increase the chances of
thermonuclear holocaust.
President Biden has excelled at gratuitous and dangerous rhetoric about
Russia. As this spring began, he declared on national television that
President Putin is a killer and boasted that he told the Russian leader
that he has no soul while visiting the Kremlin in 2011. It was a repeat of
a boast that Biden could not resist publicly making while he was vice
president in 2014 and again while out of office in 2017. Such bombast
conveys a distinct lack of interest in genuine diplomacy needed to avert
nuclear war.
Meanwhile, what about self-described progressives who see themselves as a
counterweight to the Democratic Party establishment? For the most part, they
remained silent if not actively portraying Russia as a mortal enemy of the
United States. Even renowned antiwar voices in Congress were not immune to
party-driven jingoism.
Never mind that the structurally malign forces of corporate America and
the numerous right-wing billionaires heavily invested in ongoing assaults on
democracy appreciated the focus on Russia instead of on their own
oligarchic power. And never mind that, throughout the Trump years, the
protracted anti-Russia frenzy was often a diversion away from attention to
the numerous specific threats to electoral democracy in the United States.
Two years ago, when the Voting Rights Alliance drew up a list of 61 Forms
of Voter Suppression, not one of those forms had anything to do with
Russia.
Capacities to educate, agitate and organize against the profuse forms of
voter suppression were hampered by the likes of MSNBC star Rachel Maddow,
whose extreme fixation on Russian evils would have been merely farcical if
not so damaging. Year after year, she virtually ignored a wide range of
catastrophic U.S. government policies while largely devoting her widely
watched program to stoking hostility toward Russia. Maddow became a favorite
of many progressives who viewed her show as a fount of wisdom.
Progressives who are supposed to oppose the kind of narrow nationalisms
that Einstein warned against at the dawn of the nuclear age mostly steered
clear of challenging the anti-Russia orthodoxy that emerged as an ostensible
way of resisting the horrific Trump presidency. Routinely, many accepted and
internalized the scapegoating of Russia that was standard fare of mainstream
media outlets which did little to shed light on how threats to democracy
in the United States were overwhelmingly homegrown, rooted in corporate
power.
Now, on the verge of the Biden-Putin summit, U.S. media outlets are
overflowing with calls to confront Russia as well as China, pounding on
themes sure to delight investors in Pentagon contracting firms. Leading
Democrats and Republicans are in step with reporters and pundits beating
Cold War drums. How much closer do they want the Doomsday Clock to get to
midnight before they call off their zeal to excite narrow nationalisms?
It scarcely seems to matter to anti-Russia zealots, whether progressive or
not, that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began this year with an
ominous warning: By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble
into nuclear war an ever-present danger over the last 75 years increased
in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential
threats what we called the new abnormal in 2019 tightened its grip in
the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of
catastrophe.
Far from the maddening crowd of reckless cold warriors, the American
Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord released an open letter last week that made
basic sense for the future of humanity: The dangerous and in many ways
unprecedented deterioration in relations between the United States and the
Russian Federation must come to an end if we are to leave a safer world for
future generations
. We believe that the time has come to resurrect
diplomacy, restore and maintain a dialogue on nuclear risks thats insulated
from our political differences like we did during the Cold War. Without
communication, this increases the likelihood of escalation to nuclear use in
a moment of crisis.
Its a sad irony that such clarity and wisdom can scarcely be found among
prominent Democrats in Congress, or among many of the groups that do great
progressive work when focused on domestic issues. The recent fear-mongering
over Russia has been a factor in refusals to embrace the anti-militarist
message of Martin Luther Kings final year.
In the United States, the political context of the Biden-Putin summit should
have included widespread progressive support for genuine diplomacy with
Russia. Instead, overall, progressives went along with Democratic Party
leaders and corporate liberal media as they fueled the momentum toward a
nuclear doomsday.