By NieShuyi
Marshall Billingslea, US Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, issued a statement at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on the evening of October 13, local time, stating that if Russia agrees to restrict and freeze its nuclear weapons arsenal, the US is willing to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and said that Russia and the US had reached an agreement in principle on this point. However, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that Billingslea's remarks were pure "nonsense and out of context", Russian media reported on October14. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the statements from US that US had almost reached an agreement with Moscow on strategic weapons, and that Russia showed the desire for China to join the arms control negotiations are very despicable.
This is not the first time the US has engaged in "small tricks" in the US-Russia arms control negotiations. During the negotiations between the US and Russia to extend the validity of New START in Vienna on June 22, the US, to create the illusion that China was also participating in the negotiations, placed the Chinese flag at the venue without consent. Billingslea even posted relevant photos on personal social media accounts. China's attitude is obvious: it has no intention to participate in the so-called "China-US-Russia trilateral arms control negotiations". The US, knowing it very well, still "faked" this scenario out of thin air, which set a new record for American "diplomacy of lies."
In fact, in the past three years or so, the US government which vowed to carry out unilateralism to the end has long become a “scam master” in the international community with a series of political manipulations by American politicians represented by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It is not only in the field of international arms control, and the attitude of the US government is also the same in other fields.
On October 13, the US State Department issued a statement requesting US think tanks and other organizations that it worked with to publish the acceptance of foreign government funds. Pompeo specifically named China, Russia and other foreign governments and slandered them trying to exert influence on US foreign policy through think tanks. However, AFP exposed Pompeo's lie on October 14, reporting that most of the funds of US think tanks come from its friendly partners. German media noticed that Norway provided $27.7 million to the top 50 think tanks in Washington from 2014 to 2018 and is the largest funder of think tanks in the US. Is Norway, rather than the White House, the "big shot" in determining US foreign policy according to Pompeo's logic?
In the past few years, the US government has repeatedly "faked dramas" and "shift blames" on the international stage to conceal its true purpose of refusing to fulfill its international obligations and undermining international multilateral cooperation. The US government accused the WHO and China of "cover-up", and threaten the WHO with a withdrawal. However, it was the White House who continued to downplay the threat of the pandemic that finally lost control. The US withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement first but it slandered the countermeasures taken by Iran as a violation of the Iran nuclear agreement. The US claimed that climate change is a false proposition and accused the Paris Agreement of harming US economic interests, and used this as an excuse to withdraw from the Paris Agreement unilaterally. This is nothing but a political play by US politicians for their gain. The US accused the United Nations Human Rights Council of "political bias" and withdrew from the organization again in 2018. However, the poor performance of the US government in the fight against the pandemic and the George Floyd incident this year have allowed the world to see who is the trampler of human rights.
The US is becoming a victim of its poor performance. Obviously, the US wants to indulge itself, but it frequently blames other countries and shifts blame. The “humiliating” failure in the UN Security Council vote, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases approaching 8 million, or becoming a "loner" on the international stage, all plummeted the international image of the US. How much credibility can the US still be overdrawn after all lies and scams are exposed?
Disclaimer: This article is originally published on haiwainet.cn and translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
