Finally, thanks to the secret negotiations of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner between Moscow and Washington, always behind Brussels and kyiv, everything becomes clear in no time: the billionaires have taken power. The money elite does not need professionals in diplomacy and politics. Unlike its predecessors, this plutocratic diplomacy does not act as constructed by international institutions, treaties, constitutions or any other commonly accepted rules. From peace and solitary war, they are interested in the lucrative monetary rewards that can be extracted from investments in weapons and the future of reconstruction and the exploitation of resources.
The code replaced the sense of state that was to guide past governors and diplomats. The evil arts of extortion, corruption and all manner of mafia dealings impose themselves without reprimand on the general interest and good education that guides the leaders of ancient nation states. The conceptions and customs in force in diplomacy have not been broken since the end of the Second World War, even since the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, when the system of international relations between sovereign States was configured.
Twenty-first century peace and war are now in the hands of a few people hungry for commissions, perks, and access to markets or raw materials and eager to overcome the constraints of national sovereignty and international legality. A notable irony of our times is that these plutocratic elites are rising up through populist and nationalist anti-elitism, as demonstrated in the new national security strategy released last month by the White House with its pamphlet calling on the far right to destroy the European Union.
With the rise to global political power of these multimillionaire figures, the transition from an enlightened and progressive era, in which prosperity should lead to democracy, culminates to another dark and autocratic era in which oligarchs of all latitudes view democracy as an obstacle to prosperity. Everything is monetizable in this era, and even more so this applies and explains the success of Trump, who holds and maintains people’s attention, the currently most valued commodity. This is how the presidency was won, the absolute power he enjoyed and the personal enrichment that accompanied it. He’s a King Midas who makes everything pay, his old tourism businesses and his new digital businesses, arms deals and peace, presidential pardons for embezzlers and drug traffickers and the withdrawal of his billion-dollar demands.
The calculations on the evolution of his fortune over the past year since his second presidential victory are dizzying. Reuters estimates that its revenues increased 17-fold in the first six months, to $864 million, a modest estimate compared to the $3.4 billion reported by The New Yorker just a month later, in a detailed article on audit issues that had not been disputed. According to Democratic lawmakers, he became a crypto-multimillionaire through an unprecedented large-scale bribery and extortion scheme with which he pocketed enormous sums of money from “foreign governments, organized crime groups, large corporations, pardon-seeking criminals, and citizens seeking contracts, appointments, and other presidential favors.”
There is never a conflict of interest where private interests are confused with those of the government and the country. Even more so when the division of powers has ceased to function, independent institutions have been suspended and parliamentary, judicial or journalistic controls have been neutralized. Corruption is also a problem that cannot be addressed, because democracy and the rule of law either do not exist, as in Russia, or no longer function, as in the United States.
Trump discovered the promising business of peace, without wanting to profit from the new business of war, now added by the virulent military ministrations of his Caribbean backyard. The end of wars is also an opportunity to benefit from the reconstruction of destroyed countries, to obtain commercial advantages, economic concessions and access to raw materials and even to feed their narcissism by receiving honors from peacemakers for their false mediations between suitors.
Second neoconservative Bill Kristoll, who supported Bush in the Iraq war, is wrong to group all of Trump’s figures into a single category, even if there are three distinct ones, often undermined, as in the case of his boss: “community criminals (fraudsters and corrupt), sex offenders and war criminals”. Does anyone think anything good could come from these people? Won’t you be able to spy on Europe? Poor Palestine! Poor Ukraine!
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