The impetuous way the White House lambasted a widely acclaimed peace proposal Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made to end the Ukraine crisis demonstrates how adverse the United States is to the prospect of a cease-fire and peace being brokered in Europe.
Lula said during his visit to Beijing on Saturday that "the United States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace. The European Union needs to start talking about peace."
And during his following visit to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, the Brazilian leader called for creating "another kind of G20" to end the crisis and establish peace, which should consist of parties that are not involved in the conflict, disqualifying the US and the EU.
Predictably, that triggered a fierce reaction from Washington. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a regular news conference on Monday, on a day that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Brasilia, that: "In this case, Brazil is parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda without at all looking at the facts", calling Lula's message "deeply problematic".
It is no secret that Washington has been keeping a wary eye on Brazilian President Lula since he took the post for the third time in January. Although he visited the US less than one month after he took office — after his visit to Argentina and before his visit to China — the Joe Biden administration's cursory discussions on democracy, human rights and climate change show that it still regards Brazil as a banana republic, instead of a major country on an equal footing with the US.
Lula's back-to-back trips to China and the UAE, which both take a neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict, indicate that Lula is committed to playing an important role in coordinating the peace-loving countries' actions so as to set the negotiation table for Kyiv and Moscow.
That has really irked Washington.
Washington's strong opposition to the meaningful pro-peace mediation efforts of Lula is a telling sign of the hollow ring in its stated stance that it doesn't have "any objection to any country that wants to try to bring an end to the war", as Kirby stressed. But more importantly it also exposes its growing concern that more and more countries are unwilling to pretend to be blind to the ugly role the US is assuming in instigating, prolonging and speculating on the Ukraine crisis for its own narrow ends.
Washington no doubt realizes that a group of countries working to secure a cease-fire first and then a reconciliation betwe