The New Sea People

This week Marco Rubio will meet with Russian officials to kick-off what Western media is calling Ukraine peace talks, but should properly be called normalization talks, as in the normalization of relations between Russia and America. The topic of Ukraine will be a part of the process, but not the focus of it. This is something that both sides have said regarding the hour-long talk between Trump and Putin. It was about much more than the war in Ukraine and how to end it.

This is what gets missed in Western media coverage. They are still operating by the old system where everything revolved around Ukraine. It was the lens through which all diplomatic relations were conducted. The new way of doing things is for the major powers to have a framework within which they can work out issues of common interest and settle issues where they are in dispute. For that to happen they must rebuild diplomatic relations between the major countries.

This is why Europe is not included. The EU is not a real place. It is a vague concept that has no sovereign authority. Ursula von der Leyen imagines herself as the empress of Europe, a managerial version of Napoleon, but in reality, she is a bureaucrat who failed up into a position that probably should not exist. As for the major powers of Europe, they will eventually play a role in the new security architecture, but they need to join everyone else in the 21st century before that can happen.

There is another reason the Europeans have been shut out from the talks. It is clear that they do not want anything to change. For them, the new world order is an existential threat so they will do what they can to booger up the process. Amazingly, the Trump people anticipated this. That was one reason for the one-two punch delivered by Hegseth and Vance last week. It has the Europeans reeling, and they are unprepared to do anything about the meetings between Russia and America.

This is right out of the Trump business handbook. The Trump organization was infamous for operating like a whirlwind. Once they got into a deal, they moved so fast and in so many directions, the rest of the parties had no choice but to go along with what they were doing. Not every Trump deal was a smashing success, but all of them were Trump deals and Trump got what he wanted from them. That is clearly what they are doing with regards to the Russia talks.

The other thing you see here is the deliberate minimalization of Ukraine dictator Zelensky by the Trump people. They do not treat him like an equal or even as a European head of state. Instead, he is being treated like a subordinate. He flew to Qatar thinking he could weasel his way into the talks in Saudi Arabia but was told that he would not be invited. Someone might call him if the Trump team felt the need to inform him of anything that happened in the talks.

This is part of the process of minimizing Ukraine. Instead of it being the top priority of the American government, it is now one of many issues that must be discussed between the great powers, once there is a process in place. It may be why the Brits have started to blame Zelensky for squandering the weapons given to him. It has dawned on them that for Trump, Ukraine is not going to be a priority. Now it is time for the political class in the UK to catch up and get with the new program.

Of course, the Russians are clearly uninterested in changing course in Ukraine without resolving the root causes of the war, so they will fight on, even as they are working with the Trump people. The Russians are old school and look at the battlefield as part of the negotiating table, so something like a ceasefire is for the end of the process, not something to be traded away in the middle. This means every day the situation for Ukraine grows worse and thus better for Russia.

That may not be so bad for Team Trump. If Zelensky were to suddenly turn up dead or deposed, replaced by a new ruler free of past errors, the Trump team would have more options as far as working out a peace deal. It is why they keep insisting on elections as soon as possible. Everyone knows that elections mean the end of Zelensky, so the sooner there are elections, the sooner the world is free of the little green man who has held the West captive for three years.

Another fascinating aspect of this revolution in global arrangements is the usual suspects have been marginalized. The attack on the financial superstructure is one reason for it. You cannot rent a mob to make loud noises in front of the media if you no longer have billions from the blob to pay for them. More important, the assault on the administrative state has the media spinning, so they are ignoring the usual suspects, leaving them to complain amongst themselves.

What knits it all together is the Trump whirlwind. The reason there has been so much progress in a short period of time is there are so many things happening in so many places, the "resistance" does not have time to figure out what is happening to them, much less organize to defeat it. The first month of Trump 2.0 has been the most exciting period in politics since FDR's first one hundred days. It is like the Sea People swarming the brittle empires of the Bronze Age.

That is, perhaps, the way to look at this. Over the last thirty years the troubles for the managerial regime built up to the point where they were facing a tidal wave of enemies, but thought they had them under control. Once the walls were breached, those enemies are flowing in, and they are not interested in having a meeting of the executive steering committee to plan meetings for how to proceed. Like the Sea Peoples, the enemies of the managerial state just want to dismantle it.