The arrest of the 29-year-old Russian on charges that she functioned as an undeclared “foreign agent” risks ruining the tradition of Track II diplomacy.
Countries all across the world rely on informal networks of communication to channel messages to their counterparts and gauge their real reactions to foreign developments, which is completely natural and in line with international norms. Known as Track II diplomacy, it oftentimes relies on the expert communities in each country, and think tanks and discussion club events represent the highest profile interaction between them. On other occasions, however, individual experts independently probe their partners to find out what they’re thinking about certain issues, and they sometimes use these channels to unofficially make various proposals.
The art of statecraft has been operating like this for decades even if the abovementioned dynamic isn’t openly recognized by the media, let alone most people. That doesn’t make it “conspiratorial”, but actually works to the benefit of these “undocumented diplomats” so that they can continue carrying out their informal functions and contributing to the stabilization of International Relations. Sometimes, however, a country might want to make an example out of one of these people during times of tension, selectively enforcing open-ended legislation to accuse the individual of being a “spy”, which is exactly what just happened to Maria Butina.
This 29-year-old Russian was working in the American capital and had cultivated impressive political and lobbying contacts since she first moved there. What she was doing is no different than what countless others are doing except that she’s a Russian national during a time of heightened distrust between her homeland and the US. Instead of being seen as the valuable point of contact that this Track II diplomat could otherwise have been in bringing together influential people in both countries, she’s being tarred and feathered as a “spy” by the American “deep state” in order to undermine the successful outcome of the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki last month.
The prevailing Mainstream Media narrative is that she was trying to nefariously burrow as deep as she could into the American political system for as-yet unknown reasons that are hinted as having been motivated by a desire to later influence the country’s democratic policymaking processes. It’s also alleged that she was in contact with Russian intelligence officers and civilians who are supposedly “close to Putin”. The very basis of the case against her is full of innuendo and character-killing smears that make it difficult to separate fact from fiction in today’s Russiagate drama, but some determinations can be casually made about the veracity of the claims against her.
It’s indeed possible that Butina was on friendly terms with someone connected to the Russian leader through a couple degrees of separation, which isn’t anything remarkable at all when one considers that wealthy Russians such as the people who she was allegedly in contact with usually know someone who knows someone else that’s in touch with a politician that was probably in the same room as President Putin sometime in the past 18 years. On a more serious note, given her background history of gun rights activism, it wouldn’t be surprising if Butina was an intermediary between the US and Russian lobbies on this issue, which isn’t a crime.
Professional networking between people in different countries dealing with the same political subjects is commonplace in today’s interconnected world, but the anti-Russian witch hunt in America is dangerously creating a precedent where Track II diplomacy of this sort risks being suppressed or snuffed out completely. Butina’s only “transgression” is that she’s a Russian national who was allegedly in touch with both Russian and American officials, which is no different in principle than an American political expert who has friends in both governments. That, however, might soon be “suspicious” under the current McCarthyite conditions unless people in this role inform the FBI of all of their contacts and the content of their conversations.
That would destroy the tradition of Track II diplomacy by rendering it impossible to practice because of the violation of trust that this action would entail. To be clear, sometimes the whole purpose of this art is to discretely convey messages from one government to another, but other times this isn’t part of the tacit understanding involved. According to one interpretation of the US’ “foreign agents” legislation, though, this wouldn’t just be unethical but illegal, which is the line of attack that the state is taking against Butina by accusing her of being a “spy” because she supposedly spoke to a foreign national about her interactions with some influential Americans.
If expert communities need to fear prosecution if they don’t voluntarily submit to preemptive interrogations about all of their foreign state and non-state contacts, and if their counterparts suspect that these individuals are being compelled under legal pressure to inform their government of every interaction that they have with someone abroad, then Track II diplomacy loses all of its meaning. That, however, seems to be the whole point, because the American “deep state” wants to sabotage US-Russian relations once and for all by reasserting its monopoly over the policymaking and diplomatic processes so that it’s impossible for any rapprochement between the two to ever happen.
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