Source: Asia Times:

By Pepe Escobar

The (geopolitical) hills are alive with the sound of … well, not music; rather that post-industrial noise, more Kraftwerk than Schubert, oozing from the recently completed 49th edition of the Munich Security Conference.

Who wouldn’t give a Goldman Sachs bonus to be briefed on what was whispered, very privately, by a selected cocktail of
politicians, ministers, generals and spies congregating in the gilded corridors of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich.

At least one knows what is on the record. And the stars of the show are definitely not musical. It’s more like Bayern against Barcelona in a Champions League match; call it the Biden vs Lavrov match.

What we say, goes
Let’s start with US Vice President Joe Biden: “The United States is a Pacific power. And the world’s greatest military alliance [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] helps make us an Atlantic power as well. As our new defense strategy makes clear, we will remain both a Pacific power and an Atlantic power.”

Another Goldman Sachs bonus to hear what our friends in the Zhongnanhai in Beijing make of all this.

Biden also stressed that in terms of the Obama 2.0 administration’s leading from behind strategy, the “comprehensive approach” implies the use of “a full range of tools at our disposal – including our militaries”.

He even doubled down, praising the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya quagmires/disasters as models and implying the global war on terror (GWOT) does, indeed, go on forever, (see Asia Times Online, January 23, 2013) as in the US “cognizant of an evolving threat posed by [al-Qaeda] affiliates like AQAP in Yemen, al-Shabaab in Somalia, AQI in Iraq and Syria and AQIM in North Africa”.

And then there was Iran. The light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel geopolitical crowd may have stressed Biden’s acknowledgement that the Obama 2.0 administration did not rule out a direct dialogue with Tehran, but still he was keen to stress, “Our policy is not containment.” No wonder Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said yes, let’s talk, but only if Washington is “serious”.

“Serious”, in the context, means that Washington must lift its Himalayan-scale preconditions – which include forbidding Tehran any uranium enrichment, to which it is entitled under the Non Proliferation Treaty, and keeping sanctions ad infinitum.

Finally, on Syria, Biden stuck to the same old script: Bashar al-Assad is “a tyrant, hell-bent on clinging to power”, who “is no longer fit to lead the Syrian people” and “must go”. But in true leading-from-behind form, that translates in practice into no US intervention, to the despair of the latest Washington-Doha-concocted Syrian “national coalition”.

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