Ongoing negotiations over Ukraine reveal the west’s division. Where Washington is eager to abandon the conflict, London and the European Union are fighting to continue.
Euro-Atlantic ties have never been more frayed. But it is also no great innovation to note that the United States elite is elite is itself torn apart by deep conflict.
Why is it that the American elite is torn in such disparate directions? Why does Trump push the American war machine south on Caracas, and the Democrats east and west, on Russia and China? What happened to the blissful bipartisan consensus in favor of mass murder in the middle east, where both sides of American politics could find their own justifications?
Still from a recent Trump admin strike on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean
And what does JFK, Chabad, Rudy Giulani, financialization, Palmer Luckey, and special operator death squads have to do with it all?
Some recent events
We’ll begin with some important individuals before we get to the grand historical abstractions.
Though popular to talk of deglobalization, national politics is as globalized as ever. And vice versa.
To liberal internationalist dismay, Trump’s recent defense doctrine emphasizes that the real goal of US diplomacy is to cut good deals for American businesses. And what is a business without businessmen? And what are businessmen without intermediaries?
It’s worth dwelling somewhat on the individuals Donald Trump chose for his negotiation team with Russia. They are his son-in-law Jared Kushner and old friend Steve Witkoff. Their Russian counterpart is Kirill Dmitriev, a financier himself known for real estate activities in his home town of Kiev.
Dmitriev and Witkoff before April talks with Putin in St Petersburg .
So, real estate. This is a first characteristic of the Trump elite. Fast deals for big money. State protocols and regulations are a hindrance. Long-term planning is less important than liquidity.
It’s also worth noting that both Kushner and Witkoff are Jewish. They also both entertain close relations with the Hasidic sect of Chabad, known for its excellent global connections.
Kushner with Trump and his wife Ivanka
Kitkoff celebrated Yom Kippur with Chabadniks in Miami a few months ago. Kushner pledged $1 million USD to Chabad in 2024 after one of their members was murdered.
Witkoff at said Chabad event
Chabad has also been in the news the past few days because of events in the antipodes, where two shooters killed more than a dozen Chabadniks at a Hannukah event in Sydney. Among those wounded was even the twitter personality Arsen Ostrovsky. In good Zionist fashion, Ostrovsky was himself born in Ukraine. No doubt Australian law enforcement will provide satisfying answers on how a known ISIS-admirer got hold of weapons in a country renowned for its strict gun-laws and surveillance of Muslims. After all, there was such a thorough investigation into the Australian mass shooter in Christchurch…
Anyway, why am I talking about Chabad? Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to look that way, I am not necessarily saying Washington is controlled by Israel.
In fact, Witkoff seemed to stand his ground in negotiations with the Israelis much more than Biden’s more WASPish, eastern establishment diplomats. Witkoff famously forced them to come to negotiations on the Sabbath at the start of 2025, despite their protestations. And he forced Israel to agree to a ceasefire (yes, a badly observed one, but still) that it had successfully resisted for almost two years under the Biden administration.
In fact, I think the common denominator of Chabad and real estate means something else. It is not a matter of a single center of decision making in Tel Aviv (any more than usual, that is). It is more of a common way of doing things.
The real state business style. And the transnational, informal business networks embodied by Chabad. This is how the Trump administration does diplomacy.
Chabad with one of his many meetings with Chabad rabbis
More Chabadniks
The Ukrainian elite has its own Chabadniks. They were also Trump’s great hope for a peace deal with Russia earlier in the Zelensky presidency.
Before we get to the politics, some humour. There are two popular jokes on Ukrainian nationalist telegrams recently:
Ukraine — we almost managed to build national socialism, but then the Jews stole everything
What happened to my favorite Ukrainian nationalist telegram? Oh, the owner fled to Israel.
These jokes became popular in the wake of the November 10 ‘Mindich-gate’. Pre-empting a raid on his house by Ukraine’s anti-corruption organs, Zelensky insider Timur Myndich fled. All the way to Israel.
And according to MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, Mindich fled to Poland through a Chabad synagogue.
This is hardly surprising, with a 2008 article on ‘Chabad Lubavitcher Headquarters’ describing Timur Mindich as the patron of a new Jewish international dating service:
Program supporter Timur Mindich, another Or Avner graduate now splitting time between Kiev and Israel, has underwritten the cost of entire weddings for needy couples who met through Mazeltov. Floridians who find a mate through Chabadmatches have access to a rabbi and cantor for their ceremony.
Mindich became who he is through his friendship with Igor Kolomoisky, who until his 2023 imprisonment was one of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs. It was Kolomoisky who was largely credited with bringing Zelensky to power in 2019. Kolomoisky did little to dispel the rumors, and returned to Ukraine from a two-year exile in Israel a few days after Zelensky’s victory.
Kolomoisky is himself also a good friend of the Chabad community. Elected President of United Jewish community of Ukraine in 2008, he was also a big funder of Chabad projects. In 2012, Kolomoisky opened the world’s largest Jewish community centre in his home city of Dnepropetrovsk — the city’s key Golden Rose synagogue is under charge of Chabadniks.
Back in 2019-21, Kolomoisky positioned himself as Ukraine’s Trump man. Kolomoisky pushed for detente with Russia in a 2019 NYT interview, and Kolomoisky’s politicians released the anti-Biden Burisma leaks of 2020. Democratic Party-sponsored NGOs and journalists in Ukraine despised Kolomoisky, claiming he was going to push Ukraine out of its ‘euro-atlantic integration’.
Kolomoisky had at his disposal powerful Chabad links with the US. Here’s the New York Post in 2021, writing of the formal reasons why the Biden administration sanctioned Kolomoisky that year (the real reasons were geopolitical):
Kolomoisky and a partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov, are accused of taking out billions in fraudulent loans and lines of credit from PrivatBank, which they co-owned, funneling the cash through a “web of entities” created by Korf and Laber.
Korf and Laber — who met Kolomoisky decades ago while working and volunteering in the Ukrainian province of Dnipropetrovsk he governed [from 2014-16 - EIU]— gave a total of more than $1.4 million to Brooklyn’s Jewish Educational Media, and nearly $1 million to the Manhattan-based Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States, nine countries which banded together after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union].
Miami businessman Mordechai “Motti” Korf
Laber is listed as a board member of Jewish Educational Media, a nonprofit which promotes the work of the late Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the Ukraine-born spiritual leader of the Chabad Lubavitcher movement.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Colel Chabad, a Brooklyn charity for orphans and widows, received $466,647 between 2006 and 2013 from Laber Foundation Inc., while the Korf Family Foundation Inc. gave $476,000 between 2006 and 2013 to the charity.
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken banned Kolomoisky and his immediate family from America, citing Kolomoisky’s “significant corruption.” The billionaire has long been accused of repeatedly raiding PrivatBank, a Ukrainian bank he once co-owned, legal filings show.
Colel Chabad at 806 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, which received laundered cash.
Miami and Chabad — in other words, Trump-world!
In fact, Rudy Giulani’s famous May 2019 trip to Ukraine, cancelled after it emerged he was planning to press Zelensky to release dirt on the Biden administration in Ukraine, was also through Chabad. As the Times of Israel wrote, Giulani’s trip to Ukraine was, formally, to deliver a ‘a paid speech to a Jewish group on Middle East policy’.
In fact, this was the ‘American Friends of Anatevka’. Anatevka is a bizarre 2015 initiative to create a Jewish village (gated compound) on the outskirts of Kyiv. It had the stated aim of a displaced persons camp for Jewish refugees from the war. It also got plenty of publicity by using a name taken from the fictional shtetl in the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
The main apartment building of the Ukrainian-Jewish hamlet of Anatevka - Times of Israel
But Giulani wasn’t interested in the troubled history of Jewish shtetls in Ukraine. Anatevka was merely a mediator between Giulani and the Ukrainian elite:
In lieu of the Anatevka visit, Giuliani traveled to Paris, where he met with Rabbi Azman, received an oversized key to the hamlet, and was named its honorary mayor. Giuliani also reportedly met in Paris that month with Dmitry Torner, an executive at a company owned by Ukrainian gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash. Torner had formerly been a politician with the pro-Russian Opposition Platform–For Life party.
‘Kyiv Chabad rabbi Moshe Azman (left) meets with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in Paris on May 21 after Giuliani canceled his scheduled trip to Ukraine. On May 13, Azman announced on Facebook that he would ask Giuliani to be the honorary mayor of the hamlet of Anatevka (Facebook)’ - Times of Israel
The exiled Firtash is one of the heavyweights of Ukrainian politics. The US has been trying to extradite him from Austria for years, to no avail. He has also been much criticized by patriots as a ‘pro-Russian traitor’. Like Kolomoisky and the rest of the oligarchy, he would rather see his factories not destroyed by artillery fire.
The Anatevka affair came to global attention in October 2019, when Belorussian-born US citizen Igor Fruman and a Ukrainian-born US citizen Lev Parnas were arrested at a Washington airport. They were indicted on charges of funneling foreign money to Republican political candidates. Journalists soon found that one of their registered charities was American Friends of Anatevka, set up in October 2017 by Fruman, with Parnas a board member.
In December of that year, the Times of Israel wrote more about the Fruman and Parnas’s adventures:
Two men with close ties to Rudy Giuliani leveraged their political connections to pursue a deal to export natural gas from the US to Ukraine intended to benefit Republican donors and friends of US President Donald Trump’s family.
The plan centered on replacing the head of Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz with its No. 2, Andrew Favorov, in hopes that the dual US Ukraine citizen would be more amenable than his boss to the proposal. To make that happen, they also pushed to eliminate the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was known for fighting corruption.
Favorov, in a series of interviews with The Associated Press in Kyiv, described his dealings with Giuliani’s associates, Soviet-born Florida businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. His tale, corroborated with interviews with key witnesses, shows how Parnas and Fruman were able to use their contacts in Republican circles to suggest they had access to the people and money that could make a complex business and geopolitical deal happen.
The effort ran parallel to their work in Kyiv with Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, to push Yovanovitch aside and convince Ukraine’s leaders to investigate Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter’s business ties to another Ukrainian energy company called Burisma.
Lev Parnas arrives to court in December 2019
These intrigues took place at ‘a smoky Houston bar’ and ‘the Pennsylvania Avenue steakhouse The Capital Grille’. In short, Miami real estate mogul tactics.
The Democrats are outraged at Trump’s wheeling and dealing. But this is something that defines the class he represents. Approaches aren’t the only difference between the institutions-obsessed liberals and Trump’s lone wolf diplomat-hustlers.
Yankees and Cowboys
There is no such thing as American isolationism. There are different vectors of American expansionism, representing different economic interests and strategies. To understand these different foreign policies, it is necessary to understand the split in the governing class. We’ll begin with the conflict of the 60s, move onto the truce began in the late 70s, and end with the return to open struggle in the 21st century.
In the 60s and 70s, the US elite was in a state of more-or-less open civil war. JFK whacked in 63, RFK iced in 68, Nixon pushed out of the White House in 74.
Carl Oglesby, head of the Students for a Democratic Society, famously described the struggle as one between Cowboys and Yankees.
The Yankees were the genteel Anglophiles of the eastern establishment. Ivy Leaguers, internationalists, old money, the Rockefellers.
Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, was a classic Yankee.
The Cowboys represented the frontier that has always animated American capitalism. The west, an endless frontier of plunder. First they killed the natives, taking the land to become fiercely individualistic farmers. Then they found oil. And after the second world war, it was Texas, California, and other southwestern states like Georgia that received the bulk of military industrial investments.
Nixon was a Cowboy, but beholden to Yankee interests and with too many of his own ambitions. Hence his fall.
Cowboy capital doesn’t need free trade but loves war. Yankee capital prefer a smoothly-integrated global economy, one that can involve police operations against local uprisings, but not so much war as an end in itself. Naturally, the inter-penetration of both camps of US politics by the military industrial complex makes any ‘pacifist/militarist’ distinction largely irrelevant, but that’s the general picture.
The Civil War was one great struggle between the two forces. And the Cowboys were never defeated — only turned into insurgents (a view of themselves they particularly enjoy presenting).
There were many issues dividing Cowboys and Yankees in the 60s, with foreign policy a particularly violent arena for combat. The Yankee JFK spoiled the Cowboy plan for an all-out invasion of Cuba in 1960, resulting in the Bay of Pigs debacle (and a bumpy car ride through Dallas in 63).
In Vietnam, like in Cuba, Kennedy wanted to stick to covert operations instead of aerial bombardment. And in 1961, he founded USAID. The typically Yankee, liberal internationalist aim was to build a friendly global environment for American capital through getting the locals to like the gringos. The Cowboys, then and now, never understood the point. Why not just do a deal with the local chief and bomb anyone who disagrees? Of course, Yankees often resort to that option, but USAID is meant to allow them to minimize that.
By now, USAID and the vast associated ecosystem of NGOs has even become a powerful asset for Yankees in their domestic struggles against the Cowboys, as I wrote on the Ukrainian role in Russiagate here. It is also a vast space for the socialization of new Yankee elites, besides providing a number of morally satisfying and financially enviable sinecures.
Back to the civil war of the cold war era. Without getting into the weeds of Watergate, Oglesby and others have argued it represented a revanche by the Yankees against the Nixon Cowboy. A CIA operation to embroil Nixon in an impeachable scandal.
More broadly, this was the conflict at stake. The Atlanticist Yankees favored relations with Europe, damaged by what they saw as an unwinnable war in Vietnam. This had an economic basis, given the banking and civilian industrial interests the Yankees represent, both of which depended on trade with Europe.
The Cowboys, in contrast, favored endless expansion in the Pacific. As today, they didn’t care a whit for the opinions of the limp-wristed Europeans.
Endless expansion of the western frontier was non-negotiable. The fall of China to the communists was the first hard barrier the Cowboys had ever experienced, and they were furious. The China lobby, allied with fascist drug dealers based in Taiwan and south-east Asia, would be a powerful animating force for the Cowboys. As Jim Glassmann describes in his magisterial Drums of War, Drums of Development, the endless holocausts visited upon Asia in the Cold War provided numerous business opportunities for entrepreneurial Yankee generals.
Uneasy truce
By Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in the late 70s, Cowboys and Yankees managed to settle into a ceasefire. Ford was particularly fitting — highly sympathetic to Yankee gung-ho militarism, but also a member of the liberal internationalist Bilderberg Group.
Some say that it was under Gerald Ford (1974-1977) that the consolidated Yankee-Cowboy conglomerate really took the reigns — in other words, the deep state shut out all challenges.
The international conjuncture also changed, leaving few issues in the way of the Cowboy-Yankee alliance.
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Events in Ukraine.
