William Burns for "Foreign Policy"

 The magazine "Communist" in the Soviet times, despite a visible thickness and demagoguery of its articles, performed a very important function. Through it, the Party and Government leadership as well as a few highly-placed propagandists explained and inculcated current policies of the Party and Government to the masses of its functionaries. Without teeth-crunching studies of the "Communist" articles during special workshops and Party meetings, the functionaries would be left without a guiding light on a frequently changing and, sometimes, contradictory Party policies. 

    Currently, the Washington blob, uses "Foreign Policy" for essentially the same purposes. But the pronouncements, which can easily emerge from large and empty heads of Blinken and Nuland, look really odd when coming from William J. Burns, the only remaining foreign policy whiz in the Biden administration. Basically, it affirms the triumph of Bushism-Bidenism: a complete merger of the foreign and military-intelligence policies with no place for diplomatic conflict resolution and/or mutually beneficial economic cooperation. 

    In his article, Burns advocates a complete destruction of Russian Federation and the reduction of China to semi-colonial status, as the implicit goals of American foreign policy. It is hard to imagine many Russians or Chinese agree with that agenda or not employing every resource to forestall this conclusion. In fact, since the first enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1998, the American polity was steadily degrading into something very much resembling a traditional Eastern European or Latin American society. We now have domination of the moneyed elite, political parties, which do not recognize the legitimacy of each other and freely appropriate any instrument of control. That includes secret police methods to displace the opponent, kangaroo courts, judging entirely on their political persuasion and ignoring the law, universal surveillance by the police, secret blacklisting, etc. etc. So the unrestrained imperialism of the neocons was hurtful to the majority of the US population. 

   But the most risible is the suggestion that CIA is "totally unpolitical". English language has a distinction between "politics" and "policy", which is not translated to adverbial usage. If the "policy" meaning is in question, than everything what CIA does is "political". If the meaning of (un)political is derived from "politics" then what can he say about the infamous, Blinken-inspired letter of a hundred or so intelligence operatives claiming that information from Hunter Biden's notebook bears "classic features of Russian disinformation". As if Russian intelligence could monitor repair and recycling of laptops in all of the United States. 

  Again, I do not think for a second that Mr. Burns believes in such stupidities. But the fact that he must repeat them to occupy positions of power in today's Washington sheds a dark light on the current state of the US politics. In whichever meaning you take it.