United States-Russia talks: Peace between neofascists and war on oppressed peoples

First published in Arabic at Al-Quds al-Arabi. Translation from Gilbert Achcar's blog.

That Washington and Moscow have chosen the Saudi kingdom as the venue for a meeting between their delegations to discuss the prospects of the war that has been ongoing in Ukraine since Russian forces invaded that country three years ago, is evidence of the profound changes occurring in international affairs before our eyes. The manner of the meeting itself is entirely consistent with the venue: Donald Trump’s neofascist administration did not seek to promote peace between the warring parties within the framework of international law and the United Nations, as China has been calling for since the beginning of the conflict, but is rather seeking to conclude a direct agreement with the equally neofascist regime of Vladimir Putin, at the expense of the Ukrainian people. It is therefore only natural that the two parties did not choose a neutral arena consistent with international law, such as the United Nations, but one consistent with their nature, even if its despotic regime is of the traditional type.

What makes the scene even more hideous is that the United States is a full partner in the genocidal war that is waged against the Palestinian people in Gaza, with some of its momentum presently moving to the West Bank. The Trump administration has even rushed to cancel the limited measures that the previous administration had taken in an attempt to deflect the blame, especially the freeze on the export of one-ton bombs that contributed greatly to the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the extermination of its people, as well as to the war of elimination that Israel waged against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rather, as expected, except for those who tried to escape the bitter reality by projecting their dreams onto it, the new administration has outdone its predecessor in Zionist bidding with Trump’s call to permanently displace the residents of the Strip, i.e. to implement what international law calls “ethnic cleansing” — a crime against humanity.

The Zionist-US neo-fascist axis converges with Putin’s Russia in the racial hatred of oppressed peoples. Moscow has excelled in this area, not only by its colonial aggression against Ukraine, repudiating its national sovereignty, but also in the Arab region, where it played a key role in the destruction of Syria and the extermination of a huge number of its inhabitants, while being openly complicit with the Zionist state in allowing it to bomb Iranian sites in Syria at will (as part of the rivalry between Russian and Iranian influences in that country). Moscow’s foreign minister even equated Russia’s war on Ukraine with Israel’s war on Gaza, comparing the Putinist description of Ukraine’s rulers as Nazis to the Zionist description of Hamas as Nazis. It was likewise noteworthy that Moscow’s reaction to the criminal deportation project uttered by Trump has been restrained, even compared to the explicit condemnation issued by some of Washington’s traditional allies, such as France.

Here are now the Americans involved in killing hundreds of thousands of Gazans meeting with the Russians involved in killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the two parties sharing with the Zionist state a common contempt for the territorial rights of peoples. They are meeting on the territory of an Arab state that, if it were truly concerned for the Syrian and Palestinian peoples, should have been so averse to the two parties that it would not even occur to them to ask it to host their meeting.

What we are witnessing in reality is nothing less than a redrawing of the world’s political map, moving from the Cold War confrontation between a Western bloc that claimed to uphold the values of liberal democracy (and has consistently betrayed them) and an Eastern bloc in which dictatorial regimes prevailed — from that confrontation to the dissolution of the Western system, after the Eastern system, as a result of the deadly crisis that struck liberal democracy and the global rise of neofascism. The era of the New Cold War that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its bloc, provided the transition by combining the law of the jungle with unrestrained neoliberalism. Washington played the main role in giving both features prevalence over international law and development based on welfare and environmental protection.

We are now witnessing a convergence between neofascists at the expense of oppressed peoples, as the new fascism, like the old one, openly denies the peoples’ right to self-determination. The remaining liberal governments in Europe are stunned, after having relied for eight decades on US protection of the Western system without daring to form a global pole independent of Washington — not only militarily, but primarily in the field of foreign policy. The result is that the oppressed peoples of the world are no longer able to benefit from the rift between great powers that existed in the past but must now wage their struggles of resistance and liberation under more difficult conditions than ever before. The case of Palestine is the clearest evidence of this.