Was it the search for the road to peace or the continuation of war?
From the G7 summit in Italy to the conference in Switzerland on Ukraine: no tangible results, while the armed conflict is claiming more and more victims
International press branded G7 in Italy the “seven dwarfs”
The search for this road started in a beautiful location in Italy with the G7 meeting and ended with 80 participants in another spectacular one in Switzerland. Two positive adjectives used for these events end right here. The negative ones are numerous.
Let’s start with G7. Those who watched the 1960 blockbuster The Magnificent Seven with superstars including Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, and Robert Vaughn recall the plot when the seven brave characters are hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of marauding bandits.
Fast forward to the present, when another self-proclaimed “Magnificent Seven” group met to figure out how to protect the whole planet from what they call the new “Axis of Evil,” mainly Russia and China. The summary of media reaction to this meeting can be presented as “G7 leaders gather in calm and serene Bari – but storms at home batter them.” There were more humiliating expressions like seven dwarfs, dead men walking, lame ducks, etc.
Interestingly, everyone noted that Georgia Meloni was the least dysfunctional of the G7 company. All other participants are in trouble, as seen in their approval polls. Some, like French Emmanuel Macron and German Olaf Scholz, were battered by the populist right in the recent European parliament elections; British Rishi Sunak, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Japan’s Fumio Kishida are on the edge of defeat in the next elections as their approval ratings have never been worse.
As for the “leader of the free world,” US President Joe Biden, more and more people in the know wonder if he will last the course of the election, let alone another four years in office. The recent guilty verdict against his son Hunter added another massive blow to Biden’s chances, and contrary to the 2020 elections, this time, it would be impossible for his team to accuse Russia of facilitating this problem. For those who forgot, it was Biden’s campaign chair, Anthony Blinken, who orchestrated the letter by the 51 top US intelligence officers who testified that Hunter’s laptop with gigabytes of embarrassing kompromat on the whole Biden family was Putin’s provocation.
Speaking of the decisions reached by the G7, one is to send $50 billion to Ukraine using interest from frozen Russian assets, and a 10-year bilateral security pact between the US and Ukraine is another.
Stealing money is always a bad thing, but many wonder if, in this case, in the long run, it might hurt the robbers more than its victim. Moscow keeps saying it has good ideas for retaliating. At the same time, even the New York Times, obviously not Russia’s friend, admitted that “since the dollar is probably the most valuable US strategic asset, it exercises a degree of control over the world economy. However, if Russia, China, and other essential world players were to decide that their dollar assets were vulnerable and that they could no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, we would feel the pain of that $34 trillion in debt in a way that we don’t know. Retaining the advantages of a reserve currency depends on behaving as a trustworthy and neutral custodian of others’ assets. If we start stealing people’s money, that could change.”
Besides Russia, the final communique criticized China for its belligerence in the South China Sea and admonished Beijing for quietly helping Putin’s war effort by trading dual-use products. One didn’t have to be a political strategist to predict that Beijing would ignore this threat, and it was proven the next day when it ignored the Swiss conference despite tremendous pressure from the organizers to take part.
Of the 10 points initially proposed, only three made it into the final communiqué, which was not signed by many country-participants
This event claimed to be the “summit” when it wasn’t, as the previous two of Biden’s “summits for democracy vs autocracy” failed miserably. Most likely, it will meet the same fate since half of the 160 invites preferred to pass. Also, only 3 out of 10 advertised agenda items were mentioned in the final communique. Moreover, representatives of 13 such vital countries as Saudi Arabia, India, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Vatican and many others declined to sign even these three items.
Mentioned in these were “any use of nuclear energy and nuclear installations must be safe, secured, safe-guarded and environmentally sound; global food security depends on uninterrupted manufacturing and supply of food products, as well as access to sea ports in the Black and Azov Seas, are critical, and that all prisoners of war must be released by complete exchange. All of them are obvious, but the countries mentioned above refused to sign it because, to some extent, it is not Russia but Ukraine that violates these provisions. The document could be produced quickly via online Zoom conference without wasting time and money.
Finally, the only important conclusion that many participants of this event and those who followed it from outside is that Washington, who is in the driver’s seat of this war and can stop it immediately by reaching a deal with Moscow, is unwilling to do it.
However, one should assume that many participants understood that the situation might change only after the November US election and if they resulted in Trump’s victory. His opponents are trying to prevent it, not only with lawsuits and smear media fakes, but by attempting to exaggerate Trump’s intentions to annul all the G7 stands for, dismantle NATO, and pursue his famous 2016 campaign slogan that “getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing,” to which he later added, “only fools, don’t understand this.”
Of course, Trump is wrong about that. Plenty of those are not fools but beneficiaries of this and other US wars, and they are searching for enemies rather than friends. It is they who are primarily responsible for ruining Trump’s first term and who will try anything to prevent his victory or, in case of failure, destroy his presidency again.
The following five months are fateful ones; fasten your belts!