Russiagate: Post-mortem
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It’s finally official — Trump and his team didn’t “collude” with Russia like the Democrats and their supporters incessantly claimed for nearly the past three years. Positive coverage of candidate Trump’s promising foreign policy platform by Russian international media and truthful reporting about Clinton’s aggressive one don’t amount to “hacking” an election, nor do some internet researchers from Russia supposedly sharing some political memes on Facebook. It’s now been revealed that Russiagate was one long series of hoaxes designed to discredit Trump and pave the way for his impeachment after it first failed to stop him from winning the presidency. Like the American leader himself has said on several occasions already, Russiagate was an unconstitutional coup attempt against the country’s democratically elected leadership, which deserves to be analyzed more in depth.
Russia, and specifically President Putin, were presented as the ultimate global bogeyman after Crimea’s 2014 reunification and Moscow’s 2015 anti-terrorist military intervention in Syria changed the balance of power around the world and unquestionably ushered in the multipolar era after two and a half decades of American unipolarity. It was therefore thought by the ruling anti-Trump faction of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) at the time that they could easily convince the electorate to vote against the seemingly “anti-systemic” political insurgent by implying that he’s a “Russian puppet” and then later, after that didn’t work, manufacturing so-called “evidence” purporting to prove this through unverified fake news claims designed to defame him.
According to the Mueller report and taking its findings at face value, it does indeed appear as though there was some factual basis to several of the claims, but that the events themselves that were manipulatively spun as “collusion” by the “deep state’s” media surrogates were actually nothing of the sort. Take for example the “Track II” diplomatic outreaches that former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos and former National Security Advisor Flynn were allegedly involved in. There’s nothing illegal, or even unethical, about them because that’s just how the world of international diplomacy actually works, yet to the unaware American who had never thought about these things or heard of them before, it might have seemed like something suspicious was really going on behind the scenes.
That wasn’t the case, but the innuendo and optics were enough to frame those events as something conspiratorial and therefore “legally” warrant an investigation, even though the argument can now convincingly be made that George Papadopoulos was set up by Joseph Mifsud (a shadowy academic who’s since disappeared) in order to create the pretext for Obama’s Clinton-allied “deep state” to spy on the Trump campaign. Once the billionaire won, his “deep state” opponents transformed from political operatives to actual coup plotters just as their strategy morphed from “proving” the “collusion” that they knew all along didn’t exist to triggering Trump into committing “obstruction of justice” so that they can dramatically take him down in a Nixonian fashion.
His “deep state” foes hate his nationalist policies that are the polar opposite of their liberal-globalist ones, and they feared his promised rapprochement with Russia would undermine the global system that they’ve been endeavoring to build since the end of the Old Cold War. This explains the obsession that they have with getting rid of him in spite of Trump actually buckling under some of this same “deep state” pressure into “modifying” his foreign policy by taking a tougher stance against Russia. Regardless, he’ll always be “public enemy number one” to them because he beat Hillary and stopped her from ascending to the presidency that she and her “deep state” backers truly believe that she was “entitled” to.
All countries have their own political scandals and this has been a mainstay of the human story since the very first political entities were created and primitive societies were formed, but what makes Russiagate so unprecedented is that it finally dispelled the greatest myth about America by proving to the world that it isn’t a “shining city on a hill” and that it’s much-touted “democratic” system isn’t “exceptional”. “Democratic proselytism”, the public excuse for “justifying” American interventions all across the world, has now been discredited, dealing an enormous self-inflicted wound to the US’ soft power from which its international reputation might never recover.
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This article was originally published on InfoRos.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.