Moscow’s Mantra after Terrorist Acts -- ‘Cooperate with Us or Else’ – Reaches a Dangerous New Stage, Piontkovsky Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 18 – Moscow first used the mantra, “Cooperate with us or more explosions will occur,” after the explosion at the Boston Marathon in 2013, Andrey Piontkovsky says; but now it has made this slogan its first response to all terrorist actions in the West to promote “the zombification of the West.”

            Now, in the last month, Moscow has raised the stakes enormously, the Russian analyst says, it has moved from promising protection against terrorist attacks to arguing that only by cooperating with Moscow can the West avoid a nuclear Armageddon from North Korea because only Russia has enough influence there (svoboda.org/a/28913420.html).

            But the goals of this tactic remain the same, he continues: Moscow will provide the West with “protection” but only on its own terms – and those include among other things “a new ‘Yalta,’ the division of the world into spheres of influence, and recognition of the exclusive dominance of Moscow on the territory of the former Soviet Union.”

            The Russian government could plausibly make this offer regarding terrorism because it has thoroughly penetrated jihadist structures and can often direct them; and it can plausibly make this offer regarding North Korea because of its role in helping Pyongyang to develop its missile and nuclear weapons programs.

            Indeed, Piontkovsky continues, the Kremlin has truly had some remarkably successes: “the main goal of the ‘Trump is Ours’ Kremlin operation was to install in the Oval Office a useful bourgeois idiot who was ready to repeat ‘We need the Russians’” on every and all occasions.

            But if Moscow helped to install Trump, this “success” has rapidly turned into “a colossal failure” on its part because the Russian regime does not and cannot understand the political system of the US, the ways in which power is divided, and the manner in which too sharp a move in one direction generates a response pushing in the opposite one.

            Trump’s Russophilia and his willingness to accept the bargains Putin has offered have led to the adoption of a sanctions law that threatens the wealth of Putin’s closest friends and supporters and even of Putin himself. And that in turn, Piontkovsky argues, has prompted Moscow to raise the stakes of its “cooperate with us or else” effort.

           

            Hence the moves by Putin’s new ambassador Washington in speeches in San Francisco and Palo Alto at the end of November and the beginning of December to offer a new deal in which the US must cave to Russian demands as the price of preventing North Korea from attacking the United States. 

            This ploy at one level is truly genial, Piontkovsky argues.  Fifty-five years after the Cuban missile crisis. Moscow is exploiting a nuclear threat it claims it had nothing to do with producing and bears no responsibility for and thus is offering its help to the United States – but of course and just as with the promises on terrorism only if Washington accepts its conditions.