Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other diplomats negotiating the Syrian issue in Geneva. Photo by US State Department.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a major institution of our society, a bulwark, a pillar of the establishment. The people who have led this institution over the decades are like American aristocracy, if we had one.

But we don't, so a lowly blogger like me can criticize some of the people in this hallowed think tank and foundation of Washington's Thinktankistan, as I call it — those research and opinion centers that work overtime to explain and explicate Eurasia to us, mainly Eurasia's power center, the Kremlin. In doing so, they sometimes fall into promoting Eurasianism, that special path and exceptionalism from universal values that Russia and its allies claim for themselves — all in the name of RealPolitik or OstPolitik as it used to be called — or the IR (International Relations) Realist school as it is called today.

I fully appreciate what Carnegie does, and have found many of their programs over the years interesting and helpful. I get their app on my phone and I visit their web site often. I totally get the role that Carnegie plays — they are the Establishment, they are the place where grayhaired highly credentialed men and women get together solemnly and decide matters of geopolitical strategy and problems like nuclear weapons and terrorism and form Task Forces and Study Groups and hold Conferences and Off-the-Record Meetings. As long as the breakfasts and lunches are good or even adequate — and they are always splendid — who could complain? The wealth of the previous centuries' tycoons are being put to good use here.

Given that the Soviet Union was our main antagonist for so many years, understandably Carnegie opened an office in Moscow after the collapse of the USSR, and that became a spearhead of its global programs. There are smart people producing research in Carnegie Moscow and I get all that.

But sometimes, the earnest explanation of Putin and his cronies for the American public edges over into promotion of Putin and his agenda, and then I have to cry, "hold, enough!"

Especially when it gets to the point of "Atlanticism" now turning into a threadbare cover for converting the West to Moscow's polar politics and Jan Techau (Carnegie Europe) and others essentially making common cause with Snowden, and when the young people in the New York office openly ridicule you for expressing the slightest problem with any pro-Moscow productions. It's going too far now.

Then there's Dmitry Trenin, who I think of as the quintessential perestroika liberal, thoughtful, clear, articulate, not uncritical of the Kremlin, but explaining things as they are, not as you'd like them to be. Carnegie Moscow isn't going to be mistaken for Human Rights Watch or Code Pink, of course, although come to think of it lately those two entities are singing along with the Moscow hymn sheet as well.  Still, it's doing its job.

Except, after awhile, it grates, and you have to say: "No."

Let's take Aeroflop, Trenin's piece on Snowden. In it, he takes an earnest and helpful tone, trying to reassure us that none of this is what it seems like, that Putin is really perplexed at having this American anarchist hacker land in his lap, that he really is keen to keep good relations with "our partner" as he calls the US, and that really, there's just a lot of confusion and unfortunate occurrences that really all happened because the US was nasty enough to pull Snowden's passport, declare him a fugitive wanted for felonies, and seek his extradition. Naturally, Moscow did the mature thing and took him in, which is what proper states do in fulfilling their obligations under the international refugee convention.

Except, this story is full of holes. Let's start with the glaring fact that Trenin doesn't mention, that Vladimir Putin himself opened his arms to Snowden by announcing on July 1st — 8 days before Trenin's thoughtful and articulate piece — that he would consider his asylum application. To be sure, it was "with a catch," as Simon Shuster reported — he couldn't keep leaking. But that didn't matter, because obviously even before he went public, Snowden had help from Tor developer and notorious hacker Jacob Appelbaum (now hiding in Germany and refusing to return to the US) to collate and move to a secure location all the files Snowden stole. In fact, as I've suggested, Snowden may have hacked to order, and when we contemplate his next leak, it might be what he stole — or it might be what pre-existing Russian moles in the NSA stole, and we'll never know the difference. 

Everyone knows that while thousands and thousands of Russians have fled persecution in Russia, few people go in the other direction to Russia unless they are in a far worse place, like Turkmenistan or Somalia. Russia is not overly concerned about people seeking asylum as we've seen recently from the rough treatment some labor migrants have received. There was no question that Putin signalled a big "Come Hither"to Snowden  — and it was no accident.

But Trenin doesn't mention that WikiLeaks was helping Snowden all along, and that WikiLeaks had already long been cooperating with Moscow, not only having a highly dubious representative, the notorious provocateur Israel Shamir, but giving Assange take a high-profile talk show on RT.com, Russia's state-funded world media propaganda program in English, widely viewed onthe Internet.

WikiLeaks has never leaked anything detrimental to Russia; anything about Russia turns out to be detrimental to Western countries. WikiLeaks' much ballyhooed leaks on Syria are slams against Western companies doing business with Syria, not about the murderous Assad regime. Trenin leaves all that untouched.

Of course, weeks later, Trenin might have been embarassed — if anybody remembered his op-ed in yesterday's newspaper — the way Snowden's lawyer and FSB cooperator Anatoly Kucherena was surely embarassed for his prevarications — because their portrayal of a surprised and even flustered Russian government all fell apart with Putin's own admission and confirmation that Snowden had come to the Russian Embassy in Hong Kong, had spent two days there and celebrated his birthday and that he had worked out his travel plans to Moscow. That he was supposedly going to go on to Latin American countries isn't a persuasive story for the simple reason that had Snowden really wanted to wind up in those countries, he could have *started* with them instead of going to Hong Kong, then leaking to the Chinese the US plans for how to retaliate against rampant Chinese hacking, then go to Russia and at the very least, expose himself to intelligence there. He didn't.

Did Trenin wince at his past words after Putin told us "the truth" (or at least, that week's version)?

In hindsight, Russia
obviously miscalculated when it allowed Snowden to board the Moscow-bound
flight. It then managed to put on a brave face and demonstrated its ability to
stand up to the United States by refusing to bow to Washington's pressure.

No, he didn't. The dog barked, the caravan moved on. But it was never about US "pressure" — it was about the organization of Snowden's destination as Moscow from the get-go. Say, what kind of visa is Sarah on?

Then there's this piece by Trenin re-tweeted by the "progressives" and the "realists" – The West Just Doesn't Get Putin.  This, because Americans are rightly suspicious of this incredible "active measure" (or "troll," depending on the decade in which you learned about Moscow's tricks) that Putin pulled off getting Obama first to solemnly declare that he had to get the world's oldest Constitutional democracy to vote on his determination to make a military strike on Syria, then getting Obama to halt this contrived process and agree to a "peace initiative" engineered by Moscow, supposedly via a "gaffe" from Secretary of State John Kerry — but that's ridiculous as we all know.

So now we're supposed to hold a straight face while Trenin tells us Putin's purported mission — that he really only has America's best interests in mind when he stops it from lobbing a few missiles at Assad:

At a minimum, Putin seeks to prevent the Obama administration from striking Syria. He is convinced, and wants to convince Americans, that nothing good will come of it, pointing to the incontrovertible reality that the U.S. would de facto be making a common front in Syria with its designated terrorist enemies, the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. 

Yet such a tweaked claim leaves shrouded in silence the problem of the far more murderous Assad and his actual mass crimes against humanity (and his use of chemical weapons as has been amply established), and exaggerates the role of the Islamists — which I personally don't want to understate given the experiences we've already had in Tunisia and Egypt, which were supposed to be models for the Arab Spring.

Even so, if Putin didn't have a whole horrid bloody history pursuing terrorists of his own making in the North Caucasus, and endlessly declaring that Al Qaeda was behind every bush when it wasn't, we might find more credibility here. Roger that grave concern about AQ, Vlad, but you're hardly an honest broker on this question — and yes, let's do go back all the way to Moscow's claims that Bin Ladn was in Chechnya and you were tracking him. Say, if you were, why didn't you catch him before he orchestrated 9/11? Or was that, too, like the Tsarnaev brothers, a matter of letting Nature take its course to serve as an object lesson to your recalcitrant "partner"?

Then, Trenin tries to convince us that far from seeking cunning advantage, Russia is only after restoring the world order of peace and security:

Putin’s end goal is to put the U.S. back into the UN Security Council box. In his view, the U.S. has come to soar above this international system and doesn’t consider itself bound by institutions such as the UN. For Putin, whose idea of international stability is a concert of several major powers, this is inherently destabilizing. He targets American exceptionalism as the ideological underpinning of this special role the U.S. has carved out for itself, and believes that a combination of fatigue among Americans from overextension and the rise of non-Western powers will eventually result in a more normal pattern of international relations.

Anyone who has spent any time at all watching the UN Security Council — and you could just read the newspapers — would have to gasp in shock at this outrageous portrayal.

Amb. Samantha Power summarized it all very succinctly in her recent speech on Syria, but it's only things that Amb. Susan Rice was saying many times before her in snatches of media interviews or UN press briefings. In fact, for years Rice has stood up very bluntly to the Russians in ways that Obama himself and few Obama Administrations ever do, calling their bluff and calling out their outrageous behaviour at the UN.

For years, Russia has not only wielded its veto to prevent progress on all kinds of situations, even some not in its hemisphere and unrelated to its interests — it held up the renewal of a human rights component to the UN mission in Haiti merely out of spleen and a desire for "symmetry". It hates these components in other missions as its goal worldwide, at OSCE, the UN, the Council of Europe, is to eviscerate any human rights program that rises above states, particularly Russian interference, to serve as a conscience and monitor.

Emblematic of Moscow's bad faith and far from diplomatic and constructive demeanor is Russia's concerted, deliberate and sinister assault on the  human rights treaty body system, weakening its independence, through an intergovernmental working group that has just sadly gained a continuing resolution is one of those arcane processes at the UN that few are paying attention to but which perfectly exemplifies the malevolent role Russia has played at the UN.

Several years ago, Russia mischievously tabled a resolution condemning the killing of civilians in Afghanistan — but only by the US, which that week was involved in tragically killing some villagers. When the US and other UNSC members suggested a resolution that was balanced — and accurate and in good faith — to condemn ALL attacks on civilians and humanitarians, which would include the Taliban which killed the overwhelming majority of civilians and relief workers, Russia refused to support it — although ostensibly, Moscow doesn't back the Taliban.

When the US and the rest of the members again and again attempted to deal with the Libyan situation, Russia frustrated it every time by insisting on one-sided resolutions condemning only NATO's killing of 100 civilians in air strikes against Qaddafi, but never condemning the mass murders and tyranny of Qaddafi that led to the air strikes in the first place, or their atrocities during the war.  That's Russia all over the UN — one-sided, full of spite and spleen, using the international system merely to keep in power by destabilizing others and sticking it to the US. Russia had considerable oil interests in Libya.

Far from the US flouting the UNSC, it's been Russia doing that for months on ends, refusing to cooperate on the Syrian situation. In fact, what happened recently is that the Russians began to panic when Obama said he was finally forced to go outside the UN system and sanction military strikes because the UNSC was incapable of getting action from Assad.

THAT is when Russia finally came up with its contrived "diplomatic initiative" in order to lure the US back and put itself in the saddle. On the fateful anniversary of September 11, the Russian mission to the UN could then gloat as they not only saw Putin's op-ed piece in the New York Times, but get all the SC members come up to their mission for a meeting — something that usually the P3 diplomats avoid, precisely because of Russia's deliberate and nasty obstructions over the years.

The French called the bluff on Putin's phony peace initiative the very next morning, demanding that a) the resolution establish that Assad used chemical weapons (which is why they needed controlling, duh) and b) consequences if Assad didn't put the weapons under international control.

Russia immediately thwarted this very sensible French diplomatic maneuver to cancel out Moscow's bad faith and try to rescue the situation — remember the French were involved in trying to negotiate an end to the war with Georgia which Russia had provoked for many years, even if Georgia technically struck first.

Then Russia played business-as-usual with the Xenon's Paradox of a UN resolution that likely can never pass anyway, except in very watered down form given the votes right now. And it used its considerable diplomatic and media clout to put out two other conditions —  the world has to pay mass-murdering Assad $1 billion to do this expensive and difficult process of destroying chemical weapons, and Israel has to give up its chemical weapons. Oh, and no ICC for you, Assad.

I predict this will all end in tears, and of course Assad will keep killing civilians and the West will keep inadequately arming rebels who will increasingly radicalize.

Yet despite the very, very bad faith of Russia at the UN, Trenin calmly continues to tell us Putin really only has the international system in mind, merely only wants to "right-size" US foreign policy and "save it from itself," and admits that the US is stronger than Russia, but merely wants "a relationship  of equals" — hence his perversion of the US Constitutional value of all people being created equal by God into a contrived notion that all nations — man-made artifacts — are created equal under God.

Trenin even invokes Putin offering Kerry a "Dayton Accords" for Syria — as if Chernomyrdin, Moscow's agent, didn't obstruct the Dayton Accords at every turn.

Then, there's this outrageous concoction:

With his proposal, Putin has upped the ante and taken personal responsibility for the deal on Syria’s chemical weapons. He needs to be believed when he says that in Syria, Russia isn’t supporting Assad, but the norms of international law — as Putin sees them. The game the Russian leader is playing is big and long. Putin expects to be there for the duration, long after Obama has left the White House. With the Syrian crisis, he has stepped onto the global center stage and is no longer just a naysayer or spoiler, but a potential producer of global public goods.

But Russia is supporting Assad — whom it backed up with $1 billion in armaments and consistent vetoes at the UN — and it's not merely about a port or about a place in the Middle East but about a stick in the eye of the West at every turn to make sure Moscow always takes advantage of mayhem in the world.

The only "global public good" that can be produced under a Moscow the Third Rome Eurasianist condominium is more oppression and home and abroad, more terrorism and more revolution, of the sort the Soviet Union consistently produced all around the world. With the Kremlin propaganda machine working overtime to feed all the usual agents of influence around the West, you'd be forgiven for thinking that "the US has killed the most people in the world" or "all the victims of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were killed by American troops".

But they weren't. Somewhere in his twisted soul, Putin knows that, but he needs to keep hiding that truth. Hence "the multipolar world" and Trenin's claim that Putin is now the "global diplomat-in-chief" — despite his demonstrable capacity for continual bad faith and mayhem at the UN and at home in Russia.

I'm not ready to accord that role to Obama, either, but hey, bring in the French. Yes, that's where we're at.