U.S., Russia "Reset" the Convergence Agenda

“We have an excellent opportunity to reset the relationship between the United States and Russia on a whole host of issues,” Obama told reporters after his meeting with Lavrov. Those issues, according to the president, include nuclear proliferation, the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East, and the worldwide economy.

The “reset” trope has become a major item in the administration’s foreign policy parlance vis a vis U.S.-Russia relations. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have started it at the Munich Security Conference on February 7 with his comment that the U.S. wants to “press the reset button” with Russia. When Secretary Clinton met with Lavrov in Geneva in March, she presented him with a yellow box with a large red reset button. Clinton and Lavrov then mugged for the cameras while both of them pushed the button together, symbolizing the dawning of a new cooperative relationship between the two powers.

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Following her May 7 meeting with Lavrov in Washington, the two held joint press conference at which Clinton told reporters:

We exchanged views on a range of important issues, from Afghanistan, North Korea, the Middle East, Iran, so many other areas where we have common interests and common concerns, even on areas where our views may diverge…. Now Russia has just assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council and will be leading some important efforts there. We look forward to working with you on piracy and other matters.

Our bilateral agenda is expanding to include the financial crisis, our changing climate, and the Arctic. These are areas where we think it is in our interest to cooperate and it is in the interest of the world that the United States and Russia do so.

Mr. Lavrov likewise affirmed the need for Moscow and Washington to cooperate on these pressing economic, security, and environmental issues. But it is especially the security issues – Iran, Gaza, North Korea, Afghanistan, Georgia, nuclear disarmament and proliferation, etc. – on which he intends to focus. Concerning nuclear weapons proliferation, Lavrov stated:

We have a lot to do in the field of nuclear nonproliferation. This is a field which is one of the most successful areas of our cooperation. And today, we have outlined some preliminary steps which will enable us to strengthen security around the world, which will allow us to lower the risks of nuclear proliferation around the world…. In the context of our agenda, we have looked at prospects of preparing the conditions for progress on the Iranian nuclear program. We also need to resume our negotiations on the nuclear issue of the Korean Peninsula.

Yes, Iran and North Korea do pose some thorny problems concerning nuclear proliferation. However, before we go falling all over ourselves in a rush to invite Putin, Medvedev, Lavrov & Company to merge with us in a great cooperative effort to “solve” these problems, a little honesty is in order. To the extent that North Korea and Iran present genuine nuclear weapons threats, it is thanks to Putin, Medvedev, Lavrov & Company (and their Kremlin predecessors), along with the Beijing Boys. The missile programs in Iran and North Korea would still be back in the slingshot stage without the crucial, long-running (and ongoing) help provided by Russia and China. (For background on assistance by Moscow and Beijing for Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, see here, here, here, and here.) But our “wise men” of foreign affairs – both Democrat and Republican – at the State Department, CIA, Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, Rand Corp., and other centers of enlightenment, are more than happy to overlook that elephant under the doily. They pretend we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude reliably that Russia and China are arming these “rogue” states. Besides, acknowledging the Moscow-Beijing role in creating the “rogue” nuclear threat would play havoc with the “convergence” plans of our one-world guiding elites, plans which propose a steady integration and merging of the communist and “former” communist states (most of which are still run by the same Communist Party nomenklatura) with the increasingly socialist Western “capitalist” states into a global government.

Mr. Lavrov broached this subject more explicitly than usual in his speech last September 24 at Pratt House, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) headquarters in New York, where he called for “international law” and “global government” under a strengthened United Nations.

This will require “global leadership,” said Putin’s foreign minister, “but this can only be achieved through joint effort of Russia, EU and US. Legitimacy of any system of global government and any leadership will be determined by their efficiency in confronting the entire gamut of challenges of our time. Conditions, I believe, are getting in place for a new momentum of convergence in the Euro-Atlantic.”

Lavrov’s globalist message was one with which the CFR crowd, naturally, was muy simpatico; convergence and world government have been, for the past several decades, major themes of Pratt House luminaries, such as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Strobe Talbott, Walt Rostow, Richard Gardner, et al. Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (a high-level CFR member) echoed Lavrov’s convergence message in an interview with Russia Today during a recent trip to Moscow. According to Baker:

… there are plenty of ways in which Russia and the United States can cooperate. There are a lot of points of convergence, I call them points of convergence, where the interests of the two countries are very much aligned. We cannot, you’re not gonna deal with climate change without Russia and the United States cooperating. You’re not gonna deal with the current economic crisis without Russia and the United States cooperating. You’re not gonna deal with the question of nuclear weaponry. We still have, the two countries, Russia and the United States, 95% of the nuclear weapons in the world. So if we’re gonna have a substantial reduction or maybe ultimate elimination years from now of nuclear weapons you don’t get there unless there’s cooperation between Russia and the United States. So there are many, many areas of convergence.

Convergence and global government are the main products that Mr. Baker has been pushing with his Baker Institute for Public Policy, in much the same fashion that his fellow CFR globalists (Democrat and Republican) do at the Carter Center, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the Nixon Center, etc.

Perhaps the most important recent convergence apologia is “The Right Direction for U.S. Policy toward Russia,” a report from The Commission on U.S. Policy Toward Russia, which is a joint project of The Nixon Center and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Commission members constitute a bi-partisan Who’s Who of the CFR globalist thought cartel: former Senators Chuck Hagel, Sam Nunn and Gary Hart, along with Brent Scowcroft, Maurice Greenberg, Peter G. Peterson, Carla Hills, Lee Hamilton, Dmitri Simes, Dov Zakheim, Thomas Pickering, to name a few.

The Commission floats another familiar globalist meme, “interdependence,” finding new opportunities for convergence in the present global economic crisis. The Commission believes “a new sense of our interdependence may well be the silver lining in the dark economic clouds over both our countries and

the rest of the world.”

But the Commission does not want to limit the “new and cooperative relationship with Russia” merely to economic matters. It has a far broader convergence vision that calls for U.S. policies that will:

• Seek to make Russia an American partner in dealing with Iran and the broader problem of emerging nuclear powers.

• Work jointly to strengthen the international nonproliferation regime …

• Pursue closer cooperation with Russia against terrorism and in stabilizing Afghanistan …

• Move promptly to graduate Russia from trade restrictions under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment …

• Work to bring Russia into the World Trade Organization …

• Intensify scientific and technical collaboration …

These objectives are completely in line with proposals that have been advocated by Soviet and Russian proponents of convergence (as for instance Pyotr Kapitza and Andrei Sakharov) for the past several decades, as integral to the strategy of “peaceful” merging of East and West. While Obama/Clinton Democrats tend to embrace these proposals fairly openly, globalist Republicans are more surreptitious, pretending to be cautious and skeptical, in order to mollify concerns of their core constituency. But there can be little doubt that socialist policies of both Democrats and Republicans have been taking us toward convergence for some time. This was approvingly acknowledged as far back as 1970, in a TIME magazine essay on convergence, which noted:

In some areas, especially economics, there is evidence that the U.S. and Russia have a great deal more in common today than they did a generation ago. America now accepts a degree of “socialism,” bureaucratic regulation and welfare statism that would have been considered unthinkable not so long ago. The large corporations that dominate the U.S. economy often resemble branches of government far more than they do textbook examples of free-enterprise capitalism.

According to TIME, East-West convergence is almost an ineluctable certainty:

In the limited sense that capitalist societies are heading inexorably for more state planning and control and that socialist ones must inevitably allow for more decentralization, the convergence theory is true. It may well be that both Russia and the U.S. will come still closer to sharing a common economic model.

Contrary to TIME’s claim, there is, of course, nothing “inexorable” about this; God (or Nature) has not foreordained it. The convergence we are witnessing is beinn implemented purposely and gradually (but with increasing acceleration) by a power-grasping cabal. As Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither (CFR) admitted to congressional investigator Norman Dodd in 1953, he and his fellow globalists were laboring unceasingly to “so to change the economic and political structure of the United States that it can be comfortably merged with Soviet Russia.” (For more information on the important Dodd/Gaither revelation, see the brief account in The Shadows of Power or the more detailed retelling of the Congressional investigation in The Tax Exempt Foundations).

The Republicans, especially under George W. Bush, took us many miles further down the road to socialism (with spending, debt, and regulations) and convergence (particularly with U.S.-Russian partnership in the so-called War on Terror). The Obama administration is now pushing ahead with undisguised, full-blown socialism, as the federal government takes over virtually every sector of the economy and initiates a welter of new Soviet-style projects and programs.

Meanwhile, the warnings of the most authoritative and prescient critic of convergence, Anatoliy Golitsyn, go unmentioned and unheeded by our elected leaders in both major parties. Mr. Golitsyn, a former top-level KGB operative in the inner circle of Kremlin convergence strategists, is arguably the most important Soviet insider ever to defect to the West. His two important books, New Lies for Old (1984) and The Perestroika Deception (1995) have proven so extraordinarily accurate and so uniquely perceptive and prophetic that they should be required reading for all of our elected federal officials and all of our military, foreign policy, and economic professionals.

“The essence of the strategy,” Golitsyn wrote of perestroika (Russian for “restructuring”) convergence in The Perestroika Deception (page 10), “is to introduce a calculated and controlled false democratisation and to revive a discredited regime by giving it an attractive aspect and a ‘human face.'” The probable impact on the West of this Soviet “reform,” the Kremlin strategists correctly reasoned, “would be equal to or greater than that of the October Revolution,” a reference to the original Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In fact, Golitsyn posited that the impact of the convergence strategy would be even “greater and deeper because it would not be alarming but disarming for the West…. It might eventually lead to the realization of the final goal of Soviet strategy, namely the convergence of the capitalist West with the Communist East on Soviet terms and the creation of a World Government as a solution to the arms race and nuclear confrontation.”

Americans who wish to preserve what’s left of our constitutional republic and then restore it (along with our vanishing liberty), had better stop listening to the politicians and pundits of convergence (Obama, Bush, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Baker, et al) and start reading, understanding, and utilizing Golitsyn.

Photo of Hillary Clinton with Sergey Lavrov: AP Images