MATRYOSHKA DOLLS
MATRYOSHKA DOLLS
July 1, 2020
“Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” – Senator John McCain, 2014
Inspector Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Inspector Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Sherlock Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
America has been presented with a gift from Russian President, Vladimir Putin: a set of Russian-made matryoshka dolls. We graciously accepted this Russian gift and placed the nested dolls on the shelf next to the framed copy of The Munich Agreement, signed by Hitler on September 30, 1938. Hitler pledged not to take any additional land other than the Sudetenland, a western part of Czechoslovakia, in exchange for peace. While Neville Chamberlain is remembered by political scientists as an example of an historic appeaser, the US and the European Union learned from his blunder and placed severe sanctions on Russia for implementing the same maneuver in Crimea, a strategic part of Ukraine. The annexation of Crimea is Putin’s Sudetenland.
These sanctions will continue until July of 2020. They have contributed to the collapse of the Russian ruble, and - with the subsequent collapse of the price of a barrel of crude oil, Russia - a gas station masquerading as a country - found itself in a bind in 2016. Enter Donald Trump – the US president who won the American presidency by 73,000 votes and with a little help from his friend, Vladimir Putin.
But in the political sandstorm that has engulfed America for the last three and a half years of the Trump Administration, our own self-image – our sense of American Exceptionalism – has blinkered Americans from seeing what sits atop this sandstorm. All we see are affronts to American Democracy; a death by a thousand cuts that obscures and conceals the plot. These are clues, but we lack a motive that explains why we are bleeding so profusely. We see White Supremacy and are appalled; we see militant racism in our police departments; and we see the vilification of immigrants and brown-skinned people. We watch the dismantling of hallowed governmental institutions and stand by as onlookers as we observe their pieces lying in a dusty heap on the side of the road. Our citizens are dying in the hundreds of thousands while we see a federal government refusing to use its resources to stop the carnage. We are by-standers, observing the construction of Donald Trump’s “American Carnage”, but the best explanation we have so far is that Donald Trump is some sort of deviant aberration in American political history. And worst of all, we stand next to the ghost of Neville Chamberlain and wait for November 3, 2020 to stop this species of carnage.
But there must be some Über narrative that solves this murder of American democracy. So, permit me to play the Penang lawyer in this mystery, and let me take a swing at it. I believe that this attempted murder of American democracy is only about one thing: Oil. It’s not that Trump hasn’t been conducting a war against American interests, foreign and domestic. But absolutely nothing hangs together if we don’t place oil at the apex of this pyramid in what Steve Bannon so aptly described as a plot for the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. Nothing else makes sense. Yes, Trump is presiding over a demolition derby of American democracy. And yes, each Republican is his co-conspirator. But as we sit in the bleachers of what appears to be a monster truck rally, something worthy of a John le Carré novel is where the real story can be found.
Oil is the Dog That Didn’t Bark.
Igor Sechin. Remember him? I have had a voice in the back of my head whispering the words “Rosneft” over and over again since January 10, 2017 when the Steele Dossier was published by BuzzFeed News. If the rueful last words of Charles Foster Kane were “Rosebud”, surely ours will be “Rosneft”. There was so much sturm und drang associated with the salacious disclosures in The Dossier that much of its verified allegations have since drifted off into the sand storm raging around us. But now, with the breaking news that President Vladimir Putin paid Taliban fighters a bounty for killing American soldiers, surely, it’s time to revisit The Dossier – and the unredacted Mueller Report itself.
Neville Chamberlain played dumb with the Nazis. He knew what was afoot, but he played dumb in the hopes that Hitler would only take a dainty bite out of Europe. Trump played dumb when he was told that Russia is paying foreign adversaries to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. And we are playing dumb as a nation, when we know that Russia offered a brokerage fee of 19.5% of Rosneft to….somebody. We know that Paul Manafort was involved, and we know that Igor Sechin was involved. We know that Russia was in financial extremis due to the sanctions. We know that Rosneft scrambled to find a foreign investor and held talks with more than 30 potential buyers from Europe, the US, Asia, and the Middle East. We know that Rosneft signed a deal on December 7, 2016 to sell 19.5% of its shares, or roughly $11 billion, to the multinational commodity trader known as Glencore Plc, Qatar's state-owned sovereign wealth fund. And we know that The Dossier says that Carter Page was involved. It says that Trump was offered that deal first. And we know from The Dossier that “ …Page had expressed interest and confirmed that, were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted."
And then, Donald Trump actually did try to lift the sanctions placed upon Russia by the United States and the EU. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on January 13, 2017, Trump suggested the sanctions could be lifted if Moscow proved to be a useful ally. He said: "If you get along, and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”
Today, Susan Rice, who served as the 24th U.S. National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama, from 2013 to 2017 - and as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2009 to 2013 – ask this in an op-ed she wrote in the New York Times:
“Is Mr. Trump running a rogue foreign policy utterly divorced from U.S. national interests? If so, why?”
Trump has failed to lift the sanctions on Russia so far, but nobody has ever asked why he took such a dangerous stance, given the decidedly non-dainty invasion of Crimea by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the why is already becoming obvious. My Rosebud question is this: How much of Rosneft was Donald Trump able to hide in off-shore LLCs in payment for doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding?
