Channel inner Musk and US-Russia duplication has to go into woodchipper

A merger and acquisition is often a common sense option for two companies in the same industry. It allows both to join forces to expand market reach, diversify products and services and do a whole lot of cost-cutting.

With Donald Trump having declared at his second presidential inauguration that he was bringing about the “common sense revolution”, it’s time to think the obvious: Why stop at aligning stated positions on major geopolitical issues? Why not go the whole way and share policy wallahs and spokespersons, thereby saving everyone a heap of money and time?

In real terms, an M&A of the US and Russia foreign service shops would mean no further action would be needed from either capital once the principals have spoken on an issue.

So if Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, says something about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a key moment, there wouldn’t be much need for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take time out of his day to do the same.

In an interview with the Krasnaya Zvezda outlet, which was published by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday, Mr Lavrov said: “Zelensky has turned 180 degrees from a man who came to power on slogans of peace, on slogans of ‘leave us alone from the Russian language, it is our common language, our common culture’ (all this is on the Internet) and in six months has turned into a pure Nazi and, as Russian President [Vladimir] Putin correctly said, into a traitor to the Jewish people.”

Mr Zelensky, of course, is of Jewish descent, but why let such matters get in the way of the narrative?

In any case, it seemed a bit pointless after Mr Lavrov’s takedown of Mr Zelensky for Mr Rubio to also bang the drum on Sunday, in an interview to CNN. Don’t get me wrong. Mr Rubio spoke tolerably well. He was decent in his role as the actor hired by Donald Trump to fly around the world in a parody of American secretary of state-ness and spout lines that might have been written by ChatGPT, except that AI would not repeat the words “President Trump” so often because it wants to pretend to real intelligence.

Anyway, Mr Rubio accused Mr Zelensky of hypocrisy and posturing on the vexed issue of peace. He seemed to suggest that peace was of greater interest to Mr Trump (he with the heart that bleeds for suffering people everywhere) than the president of a country that has been fighting and dying in an unprovoked hot war for three years. Mr Rubio mused to CNN, in disarming fashion: “And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t.”

He added: “That active, open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved in communications with them [the Ukrainians] leading up to today, and I think he [Zelensky] should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting [at the White House on February 28] that was going to end the way it did.”

I’m not sure if a time and motion study is in order to analyse the inefficiency in what’s going on at the moment between the US and Russian foreign service teams. But it’s clear there is quite a bit of overlap in effort and intention. It’s certainly a waste of time for both these men to separately slag off Mr Zelensky when just one could’ve been on duty and the other on backup. (The following weekend, they could’ve changed places on the rota.)

Pure waste of effort. Anyone who channels their inner Elon Musk can see that it’s time to feed such messaging duplication into the woodchipper.

T’was best said by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov when he told Russian state television: “The new [Trump] administration is fast changing all foreign policy configurations. This coincides with our vision in many ways.”

Any moment now, surely, DOGE will be announcing the M&A.

Twice the force at half the price.

Epic.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Medium and re-published in Europeans TODAY on 8 March 2025 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Dreamstime/Motttive.