Washington, WikiLeaks and Russian Soft Power

Shortly before Edward Snowden shared eavesdropping secrets with Wikileaks agent Glenn Greenwald the famous Harvard soft power guru and regional Trilateral Commission president Joseph Nye wrote an article in Foreign Policy stating, inter alia, that Russia doesn’t understand soft power because it is not a free society and the United States does because it is.

What Nye failed to note is his article is that Russia is busy educating a new generation of diplomats with soft power skillsets within its institutional foreign policy establishment. Some have attended Harvard and have studied soft power.

As Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1986-1934) noted, learning, processing and adopting new concepts like soft power depend on culture and language. This considered, the overarching culture one finds in Russia today is quite different than the one that is currently operative as a social organization scheme in the United States.

In the context of economic institutions, soft power business diplomacy has already helped Russia become the world’s 5th largest economy according to a recent study by the World Bank.

Then too, reaching out to British culture, diplomat and consultant Lord Mandelson’s presence on the board of Sistema, Russia’s largest publicly traded investment company gives a new dimension to business relations with the European Union.

Lord Mandelson is a former minister in the Labor governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and is an ex-European Union Commissioner. He has the connections and soft power diplomacy skills to bridge cultures and help Russian companies expand their markets, and can help facilitate Russian enterprises get listed on the London Stock Exchange, Europe’s largest.

Washington’s negative public diplomacy directed against Russia was started 2010 by Walter Issacson, then chairman of president Obama’s Broadcast Advisory Board.

A former Chairman of CNN who was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, a publication where once served as Managing Editor, Isaacson regressed to Cold War rhetoric, calling Russia “the enemy.” Evidently, he was not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s ill fated “Russian Reset” that she rolled out in 2009.

Now, against this backdrop, a power struggle between Washington and the Kremlin is starting to shape up as both governments seek to influence the election of a new Secretary General of the United Nations.

Is A 40 Year Old Harvard Educated Serbian The Right Choice?

It is generally acknowledged dans le couloirs that it’s Europe’s turn to lead the organization and that Russia would like to see an Eastern European get the job. But making the right call won’t be easy.

Last year, Russia supported former Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic’s successful bid to become president of the General Assembly, which he won in a 99 to 85 roll call vote. China joined Russia in the vote.

Holding a degree Master’s Degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a PhD in Physics from Cambridge, the 38 year old Jeremic was born into an elite family; his father was president of the state oil company Yugopetrol during the Tito era. His term as President of the UN General Assembly expires next month.

The Obama White House conducted an unsuccessful campaign to block Jeremic’s election. Charges were raised that Jeremic was soft on U.S.-style democracy, and ambivalent about genocide and human rights issues. Serbia’s role in the Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims could come back to haunt him.

Ironically, during Jeremic’s watch, human rights and open secrets advocate Julian Assange addressed the UN by video conference on two occasions-- you can download them You Tube for free. Assange even called for an international effort for the release of U.S. intelligence analyst and convicted leaker-whistle blower-hero (depending on one’s personal view) Bradley Manning.

Manning was sentenced on August 21st by a military judge to 35 years in prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas for turning over around 750,000 classified documents of which less than 10 percent were classified “secret “ to WikiLeaks.

Reuters notes that Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and National Security, called the sentence "in line with sentences for paid espionage for the enemy." She has also shared her views on the Manning case with the China government-owned CCTV.

Anarchy and Plutocracy Hook Up

The presiding U.S. Army judge, a female colonel, did not convict Manning of the charge the military prosecutor pressed the most, namely, aiding the enemy. Ostensibly, this decision sets an important legal precedent, namely, that WikiLeaks is not considered an “enemy” by American military justice.

Julian Assange went on the record after the sentencing calling it a “victory” and predicted Manning will be free in around eight years, when he is 35 years old.

Last year Assange showed signs of being open to American style libertarianism.

In April last year Assange became the celebrity host of an interview program in English on the Russian RT network. Left wing libertarian Noam Chomsky weighed in on social problems caused by continued poor distribution of income in developed and emerging economies. Republican libertarian Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, offered his views about why less government and less taxes are important to the future of the world economy.

Johnson is close to David and Charles Koch whose oil, chemical and other businesses make them among America’s richest billionaires according to Forbes magazine.

The Koch brothers and friends who participate in their Billionaire Backers Club support conservative and libertarian politicians who Assange now endorses, like Kentucky senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul, a former U.S. Congressman.

Frederick Koch, their father of the Koch Brothers, was a founder of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, an organization that considers the United Nations an anethema to the American way of life.

As far as the libertarian Pirates, the libertarian Pirate Party of Sweden did host WikiLeaks servers for a while in 2010 when he ran out of money. One of the founders of the group, Rick Falkvinge, is a former officer in a Swedish signals intelligence unit.

WikiLeaks or WikiDrone… Who Will Assange Target Next?

All of the political figures in the libertarian ultraconservative vector Assange is courting assign a low importance level to human rights, the cause which, up until now, has been a big part of his cult of personality and the WikiLeaks brand equity. They also harbor considerable mistrust for the United Nations. The turnabout by Assange exposes a major contradiction in his stated raison d’etre.

In another integrity-related issue, The Atlantic Wire, published in the United States by the respected Atlantic Monthly, reports that a before he agreed to the RT interview show deal Assange had squandered a $1.3 million advance to participate in a book written by a ghostwriter Julian Assange, The Unauthorized Biography in less than 6 months.

After the money ran out he then tried without success to stop publication of the book. According to The Atlantic Wire, he said “all memoir is prostitution.” One can ask the question of whether the WikiLeaks leader is prostituting himself.

The Assange pivot toward the libertarians also poses an ethical dilemma for traditional American “liberal” publications like The Nation, The New Republic and Mother Jones and The New York Times, who have published articles supporting WikiLeaks and empower people who provide the group with information and funding in the name of press freedom.

At the same time, the “liberal” media in the United States and Britain have a long history of spiking, delaying and embellishing news coverage to influence the result of important elections.

A case in point being British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government manipulated the mass media. The PM’s media adviser, Aleister Campbell, orchestrated a misinformation campaign overstating the size Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs and coordinated it with a similar campaign by run by the Bush White House that led to prosecution of the $3 trillion Iraq War.

The Need To Need Assange

In a downwardly mobile economy it seems nobody wants to outgrow their need for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, except Russia, where he seems to have fallen from grace.

The United States and Britain need Assange and WikiLeaks to continue their surveillance programs and “black programs,” and maintain budgets in a cost cutting environment.

Traditional and online media need Assange and WikiLeaks to sell product and add value to their incredible shrinking enterprise. Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon.com purchased the WikiLeaks-friendly Washington Post and its real estate for bargain price of $250 million, less money than the $287 million contract of New York Yankees baseball star Alex Rodriguez.

Some “daily” newspapers operated by the holding company of the Newhouse group in the United States have quietly gone to publishing just three times a week. Many versions of online newspapers and magazines now operate behind a paywall, promoting the “digital divide.” Some major French newspapers on the internet now charge 14 Euros per month for unlimited access.

The black hat and ethical hackers and cybercrooks need Assange as their icon because most of them want to stay anonymous and are too anarchistic to lead anything. Gary McKinnon, who got far deeper into Pentagon systems than Assange claims he has done, is doing 70 years in jail for his exploits.

And the infiltrators and provocateurs need him and WikiLeaks to help insure their job security.

Finally, the American justice system needs Assange to continue the legal machinery that wants to extradite him to the United States even though many Americans who support his actions wonder if he has broken any law.

Obama’s Hour of Power

Pulitzer Prize journalist and national security expert Samantha Power is now the Obama administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Known as a hardliner who pushed for U.S. military intervention in Libya, Ambassador Power will be charged with opposing the probable candidacy of General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic for the office of Secretary-General. She has spent time on the ground covering Bosnia and the genocide that took place at Srebrenica.

Ms. Power was forced to resign from her position on the Obama transition team 2008 after calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.”

With relations between Moscow and Washington at an impasse a “Khruschev thaw” might come about after the election of the next American president in 2016.

But due to the gravity of the Snowden leak to WikiLeaks outing the secret Prism program, the surveillance issue is and will still be out there. Prospective Democratic candidates like Vice President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as mainstream Republicans like Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will have to run the gauntlet of a “free press”-- committed to advocating a world order with open secrets-- as to who among them knew what and when they knew it.

With around 11 months left on his one year permit to stay in Russia things are starting to look troublesome for Edward Snowden.

Media Crackdown by Ecuador’s Correa

In Ecuador, which has offered Snowden and Julian Assange asylum, President Rafael Correia wants to shut down all major daily newspapers to save wood and promote sustainability and force them to operate only on the internet.

Since this will cause them to lose advertising revenue and most of the newspapers lack the capital to make the transition to operate online the policy could cause some newspapers to shut down.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is reporting that the Ecuadorian Congress caved in to President Correia and passed new laws that impose regulate media content and impose censorship on newspapers and bloggers.

Ecuadorian Embassy in London, has said nothing. As for Snowden, he might want to reconsider that famous “Snowden will you marry me” Tweet from one time Facebook spy “Anna Chapman.”

That’s all I’ve got to share with everybody for now.