Analysis of some aspects of the 68th Bilderberg Group meeting

Institute for International Political and Economic Strategies

68th Bilderberg Group meeting (Washington, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 1330 Maryland Ave SW, 02-05. 06. 2022)

Official topics of discussion

1. Geopolitical realignments

2. NATO’s challenges

3. China

4. The Indo-Pacific realignment

5. Sino-US tech competition

6. Russia

7. Continuity of government and the economy

8. Disruption of the global financial system

9. Disinformation

10. Energy security and sustainability

11. Post-pandemic health

12. Fragmentation of democratic societies

13. Trade and deglobalisation

14. Ukraine

I. Features of the official theme

Specific priorities

1. For the first time, the terms “deglobalisation” and “disruption of the global financial system” are used in the wording of the group’s meeting topics.

2. For the first time, as many as three topics are directly devoted to China (3,4,5), in addition to those affecting China (1,8,13).

3. The topic of continuity of public administration and economics is formulated for the first time.

4. Official topics are emphatically neutral (there are no evaluative definitions like “post-truth” or “precariat” that were used earlier).

5. Security and sustainability in the energy sector are combined into one topic, without identifying problems in this area (energy shortage, rising prices).

Passed over specifics

1. The official topics do not reflect the issues of race relations and compensation claims of racial minorities.

2. There is no migration issue.

3. There is no climate issue (in the context of security, the term sustainability changes its meaning).

4. There are no topics related to political processes in the United States (in fact, neither America nor Europe are included in the country topics, unlike the 2014-19 meetings).

5. There is no topic of relations between the West and the Islamic world that is relevant to the White House (in particular, Afghanistan, relations with the Gulf countries and the fate of the Iranian nuclear deal).

II. Symbols for organisational details

1. The initial location in Sierra City, California, is preferred to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in southern Washington. https://broadstreetbeacon.com/bilderberg-group-to-meet-in-sierra-city-in-2022/ The transfer has a threefold content: a) organisational: ensuring confidentiality (abandoning open spaces available for shooting from a height, in favour of a monolith building occupying a separate block); b) geopolitical: holding a meeting after a two-year break in the US capital (“city on the mountain”); c) clan-political: neglect the California establishment.

2. Localisation specifics: the proximity of the Smithsonian Institution federal archive and museum complex, which includes the Wilson Center – a traditionally bipartisan think tank, where three departmental heads of the Trump administration received sinecures – former USAID administrator Mark Green (president of the centre since March 2021), former head of the Department of Education Betsy DeVos (sister of Eric Prince) and former head of the Department of Education Alex Azar, the head of the Department of Health, is on the Board of Directors, and they are joined by Secretary of State Tony Blinken and former John Kerry campaign adviser Louis Susman.

3. The presence of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands marks the succession of the club’s founder, his grandfather Prince Consort Bernhard.

III. Special features of the representative office

A. Features of estate representation

1. Narrow circle of media management. The list of participants of the 68th meeting does not include senior managers of international agencies and electronic media. The invited media representatives are actually experts and belong either to the category of industry analysts-humanities (scholars), such as The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, columnists of the same publication Gideon Rachman and Shashank Joshi, or to the category of country experts from the states covered by topic 2 (former Hurriyet Daily News editor-in-chief Murat Yetkin, foreign editor-in-chief of Habertürk News Afsin Yurdakul, editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomaat Kaius Niemi) and topic 6 (columnist for The Atlantic Anne Applebaum).

Three titans of the publishing business – Axel Springer President Mathias Doepfner, Mediahuis President Thomas Leysen, and PRISA Media CEO Carlos Nunez Murias – actually represent clan-forming family holdings with affiliated clubs and institutions (see below).

2. Narrowness of the “third sector” circle. The representation of public institutions is limited to the presence of the Global President of the Service Employees International Union Mary Kay Henry and Connie Hedegaard, head of the Danish climate foundation KR Foundation (the only ideological lobbyist for renewable energy in the assembly).

3. Limited participation of private banks. Among the participants of Bilderberg 2022, the absence of top managers of British banks HSBC and Barclays Bank, who previously regularly appeared at meetings, is striking.

The “pushing aside” of these banks is offset by the large-scale representation of Goldman Sachs: in addition to the president of Goldman Sachs International; ex-NATO Secretary General Jose Manuel Barroso, the international banking group is represented by Jörg Kukies, Secretary of State of the Bundeschancellery and ex-Head of Derivatives at Goldman Sachs International; Also from Goldman Sachs are the former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and the former head of Deutsche Bank, a member of the Steering Committee, Paul Achleitner.

Skandinaviska Enskilda Bank Group is regularly represented (and is considered one of the three strategic ones) by Marcus Wallenberg, Grace Reksten-Skaugen and Eivind Eriksen. Equally traditionally present are UBS President Ralph Hamers and head of Turkey’s Koc Holding Omer Koc. A new face at the 68th meeting is Tomasz Kostrzewa, President of the Polish Business Round Table, CEO of mBank, a subsidiary of Germany’s Commerzbank, and former President of the German-Polish Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The insurance mega-business is represented by Thomas Buberl (who replaced Henri de Castries as CEO of AXA Group), Mark Sedwill (Lloyds), Sergio Ermotti (Swiss Re).

As usual, private investment funds and companies managing private finances (KKR, Ariel Investment, Brookfield Asset Management) are well represented; the second largest pension fund in Canada, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ). In some cases, investment funds are represented by promising startups in which they have invested. The British private equity fund Actis is represented by the Greek company Upstream, a provider of mobile Internet services for fast-growing markets (in particular, India).

Similarly, the previously little-known Portuguese company Feedzai, which develops real-time machine learning tools for detecting fraudulent payment transactions, is represented by its co-founder Nuno Sebastiao under the patronage of its investor KKR.

4. A narrow but influential representation of the hydrocarbon sector: top executives from BP (Bernard Looney), Shell (Ben van Beurden), Total (Patrick Pouyanné), Enel (Francesco Starace) and Canada’s Suncor, a leading bitumen producer (Mark Little). American oil and gas giants and shale producers are not represented (except for their indirect lobbyist, Senator Kyrsten Sinema); at the same time, the CDPQ foundation is an investor in companies of this profile, including Ivanhoe, Pioneer and Ardinall.

The same Canadian fund is an international co-investor in diversified ports in partnership with the Emirati DP World (the consortium owns ports in Vancouver and Prince Rupert, as well as in Australia, Chile and the Dominican Republic). At the club’s 64th meeting (2016), CDPQ was represented by its then president Michael Sabia; this year, the foundation was represented by his successor Charles Emond, who came from Scotia Bank.

5. Significant involvement of exclusive electronics manufacturers. Dutch delegate Peter Wennink represents ASML Holding, a supplier of photolithography systems for the computer chip industry and integrated circuit machine tools (based in Eindhoven).

Thomas Leysen, president of the Belgian-Dutch holding Mediahuis and heir to the shipping business of the German Ahlers family, chairs the Board of Directors of Umicore NV, the successor company to the Upper Katanga Mining Union in the Belgian Congo, an exclusive processor of gold, uranium and rare earth metals from African raw materials, primarily columbite-tantalite for mobile telephony.

Replacing longtime Vice President of Umicore NV (and longtime Chairman of the Bilderberg Steering Group) Leysen joined the boards of directors of German partner companies Aurubis AG and Norddeutsche Affinerie AG, as well as Toyota Motors Corp.

The Leysen Group also includes Germany’s Metzler Bank; the Board of Directors of Umicore NV includes De Beers-Canada President Jonathan Oppenheimer (Umicore and De Beers are co-owners of Element Six Abrasives), former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene and former Japanese Ambassador to Belgium Shohei Naito.

The Wallenberg family companies and their partners that supply mining trucks (including Volvo CEO and President Martin Lundstedt) are also involved in the extraction of metals that are valuable for electronics in third world countries.

6. The IT sector is represented more widely than usual by both “silicon” monopolists and developers of cyber defence systems and artificial intelligence (AI). Former industry representatives (Andre Kudelski, Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp) are joined by former YCombinator CEO and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, co-founder of Upstream Markos Veremis, as well as British developers under the care of Reid Hoffman’s venture capital company Greylock Partners-DeepMind co-founders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman (now head of InflectionAI, a co-founded company). Linkedin (Hoffman) and DeepMind (acquired by Google). Meta Holding (ex. Facebook) is represented by the head of the AI department, a native of France, Yann LeCun, who together with Suleyman signed the AI Partnership memorandum on the ethical use of AI in 2016.

7. The pharmaceutical sector is nominally represented by only two top managers – Albert Bourla (Pfizer) and Emma Walmsley (GlaxoSmithKline), while Walmsley has no specialised education and until 2017 worked in the cosmetics and alcohol industry.

At the same time, a number of other participants from the IT sector are involved in medical technologies-in particular, Mustafa Suleyman established Deep Mind Health, which received exclusive access to the personal information of patients with cancer and nephrological diseases (which was the subject of an investigation).

Craig Mundie, President of Mundie & Associates and former Senior Research Director at Microsoft, serves on the Board of the Institute for Systems Biology, the Board of Directors of Raintree Oncology Corp, the Advisory Board of Aurasense Therapeutics, and the Board of Trustees of the Cleveland Clinic Case Western Reserve University.

B. Features of minority representation

1. The participants of Bilderberg 2022 include five representatives of the black race – Deputy Head of the US Treasury Adewale Adeyemo, Shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth of Great Britain David Lammy, President of the investment company Ariel Investments and head of the Board of Directors of Starbucks Mellody Hobson, chief strategist of Cryptocurrency AML Strategies, ex-CIA analyst Yaya Fanusie and co-founder of Palantir Alex Karp (African American on the mother’s side).

More visible than usual is the presence of Hindus: Tarun Chhabra, Senior Director of Technology and National Security at the National Security Council, Head of the Department of Strategic Relations at Carnegie Endowment Ashley Tellis and The Economist’s military editor Shashank Joshi. The “grey-skinned” racial group is also represented by Mustafa Suleyman, a Syrian on his father’s side. The Asian (yellow) race is not represented. The non-binary minority is represented by three white participants – Mary Kay Henry, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Thiel Capital LLC President Peter Thiel.

2. Minority representation is thematically relevant in the case of Adewale Adeyemo, who is involved in diplomacy in the Middle East and Africa, including supply issues created by the paralysis of Ukraine’s booby-trapped ports and anti-Russian industry sanctions, as well as in the case of all the above-mentioned Hindus, whose analytical work focuses on deterring China.

At the same time, Tarun Chhabra, who majored in Slavic studies at Stanford, also has a competence in Russia, where he “studied at MGIMO under Professor Vladimir Pechatnov and studied how Russian academic and political views on US foreign policy changed after the end of the cold War.” https://dlcl.stanford.edu/people/tarun-chhabra

The Brookings Institution’s Global China initiative, co-founded by Chhabra, focuses on Sino-Russian relations. Prior to joining Brookings, Chhabra was a member of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s “High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change” (after his resignation, Annan was a member of the Board of Macro Advisory Partners, where Jake Sullivan worked with former MI6 Director John Sowers in 2017-20).

3. Minority representation is not determined by partisan-ideological (progressive) affinity: if Mellody Hobson, the head of the Economic Club of Chicago, is a member of Barack Obama’s entourage and is a sponsor of his personal foundation (like her white ex-husband, director George Lucas), then Ashley Tellis was a member of the transition team of Republican Mitt Romney, and under the leadership of Trump was shortlisted for the post of ambassador to India.

Peter Thiel was a member of the Mercer family’s Trumpist club (“Owl’s Nest”) along with Eric Prince and currently sponsors Republicans in congressional elections, unlike his Palantir project partner Alex Karp, who swore in Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Mary Kay Henry has been criticised by LGBT activists for being accommodating and contrasted with the more “consistent” Sal Rosselli, head of the United Health Workers SEIU.

At the same time, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who played a key role in the defeat of Trump and Republican senators in this state, was not among the invitees, although she was invited in 2019. There are no direct or indirect lobbyists for the Indian National Congress among the Hindus, which is consistent with ignoring Californians, including those around Kamala Harris.

C. Polar and team accents of the country office

1. USA. The Biden-Harris administration is represented by one cabinet member – Gina Raimondo, head of the Commerce Department; three National Security Council officials – Jake Sullivan, Head of the National Security Council; Kurt Campbell, Senior Coordinator for Asia (actually the second most influential person in the NSC); and Tarun Chhabra, Senior Director of Technology. The intelligence community is represented by CIA Director William J. Burns (not part of the cabinet) and the Director of the Agency for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, former NSA Deputy Director for Counterterrorism Jen Easterly.

None of these individuals belong to Joe Biden’s inner circle: Raimondo is the only representative of Mike Bloomberg’s team in the administration; Jake Sullivan represented Hillary Clinton’s circle at the 2015 JCPOA negotiations; Campbell is a co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) with Michele Flournoy, who ran in 2016 for the post of head of the Pentagon in the Hillary Clinton administration; Biden’s favourite for the post of head of the CIA was his long-time confidant Thomas Donilon, not Burns.

The same applies to current and retired representatives of the Pentagon – Celeste Wallander, former director of the National Security Service for Russia and Eurasia, now assistant to the head of the Pentagon for international security, and Michael Mullen, former head of the OGSH in 2007-11, a protege of Robert Gates, in 2016, the alleged partner of Michael Bloomberg in the failed presidential bulletin.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus, who became a regular member of the club after joining the Kravis, Kohlberg & Roberts (KKR) investment fund, represents his own team, from which Nina Shadlow, the developer of the National Security Doctrine during the leadership of the NSC by H. R. McMaster, was appointed to the Steering Committee.

Former Eurocom commander Ben Hodges represents the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a Texas-based think tank involving the Polish diaspora, and through it the Lockheed Martin lobby, which has promoted contracts for F-35 fighter jets with both Poland and Finland. CEPA gained influence under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson through the efforts of Brian Hook, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Political Planning and later Special Representative for Iran. Hodges was also selected in 2020 to join the Loisach Group, a think tank based at the George Marshall Center in Garmisch, along with Celeste Wallander.

2. Great Britain. The British Conservative Party was represented at the 68th Bilderberg meeting only by Michael Gove, who after Brexit entered into competition with Boris Johnson, which then led to the success of Theresa May; included in the Johnson government in 2019, Gove held prestigious but insignificant positions in it.

At the same time, Gove is a member of the US-British Henry Jackson Society, initiated by former CIA Director James Woolsey and based in Oxford, as well as the Conservative Friends of Israel parliamentary group. Mark Sedwill, the former special representative to Afghanistan who served with David Petraeus, combined the positions of head of the Home Civil Office and National Security Adviser under Theresa May; removed by Johnson from both positions in September 2020 as a “Europhile”, he retired honourably to the House of Lords and was elected vice-chairman of Lloyds, effectively representing the insurance business in Bilderberg.

Tom Tugendhat, a British and French citizen who replicated the “Russian dossier on Trump” in 2017, was close to the director of MI6 (2014-2020) Alex Younger, who bet on Jeremy Hunt against Johnson in the 2019 election, and in the autumn of 2021 was noted for personal attacks on Johnson for being soft on China.

David Lammy, a Labour shadow minister, was a member of the David Miliband group in his party; competed with Sadiq Khan and supported Keir Starmer against Jeremy Corbyn; is a member of the Labour Friends of Israel, like other Blairites.

Lammy’s presence naturally coincides with the absence of American and British dem-socialists, as well as their French partners in international left-wing (antitrust, environmentalist and pro-Palestinian) initiatives. Bilderberg’s disregard not only for Johnson’s team, but also for his competitors in the category of dreamers of a “Britain without chains”, was further accentuated by the complete absence of Australians, which was noted with resentment in the media mainstream of Australia.

International affairs conference without a single Aussie

3. The European Union. Among the EU government officials, the predominance of politicians from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) is striking: European Council President Charles Michel and European Commissioner Didier Reynders represent the Belgian Reformist Movement; Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte represents the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD); Beate Meinl-Reisinger represents the Austrian NEOS party.

The European People’s Party (EPP), which dominates the European Parliament, is represented by minor figures – the Vice-president of the European Commission for the European Way of Life, Margaritis Schinas (New Democracy), the ruling finance ministers of the Netherlands, Wopke Hoekstra (CDA) and Ireland, Paschal Donohoe (Fine Gael), and the former head of the Spanish People’s Party, who is in a hopeless minority (PP) Pablo Casado and former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of the Civic Platform.

Socialist ministers represent Spain and Portugal, in addition to Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin. The European “Green” bloc is represented only by Belgian Energy Minister Tinne Van Der Straeten, who initiated the extension of the service life of Belgian nuclear power plants against the background of the Ukrainian crisis. https://www.reuters.com/world/belgian-greens-make-u-turn-consider-nuclear-plants-extension-2022-03-07/

The political preponderance of ALDE and the presence of Spanish and Portuguese socialists who joined the alliance with Emmanuel Macron during the rotation of the EU leadership are combined with the impressive composition of the French delegation, which, as in 2019, also includes international delegate Audrey Azoulay, Macron’s creation in UNICEF, and Quebecois Charles Emond, taking into account the role of the director Bernard Emié’s DGSE in developing relations between Paris and the francosphere and the UAE elite.

Macron’s only political opponent on the Bilderberg Group’s Steering Committee, Henri de Castries (a campaigner for Francois Fillon), was absent from the meeting. In general, there is not a single politician loyal to Angela Merkel and the former leadership of the European Commission among the participants. Despite the political activity of new Europe politicians in connection with the Russian special operation in Ukraine and its economic and logistical costs, the countries of Visegrad (except Poland), the Balkans and the Baltic states are ignored.

IV. Club and institutional intersections

1. As at the 2019 meeting, the French delegation includes Patricia Barbizet, the current president of the club Le Ciecle (“Century”), the coordination centre for the political and business elite of France with the participation of members of the Rothschild family. Dr. Constance Stelzenmuller, head of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, is (like former MI6 chief John Sowers) a member of the management team of the British-American Ditchley Foundation, one of the backbone structures of the Bohemian Club.

Both Stelzenmuller and Axel Springer president Mathias Doepfner are members of the US-German club Atlantik-Bruecke, which until 2019 was led by Friedrich Merz, now chairman of the CDU (despite the calculations and efforts of Angela Merkel) and a representative of the BlackRock investment fund in Europe.

2. Supranational strategic institutions – the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission – are represented at the 68th meeting at a lower level than usual. In the absence of former CFR co-chair Robert Rubin, formerly a regular participant in the meetings, the CFR’s senior figure at the meeting was Elizabeth Economy, Senior Foreign Affairs Adviser at the Department of Commerce and Director of Asia Research at CFR, a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Asia Foundation Board of Trustees.

The senior figure from the Trilateral Commission was Thomas Leisen, whose Japanese connections are particularly valuable for the strategists of the QUAD and the expanded “quartet” from the NSC and the intellectual centres he mobilised.

3. Henry Kissinger’s personal involvement is combined with the presence of staff and advisors from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), including CSIS Digital Innovation Center Consultant Craig Mundie, President of Mundie & Associates LLC, currently also an advisor to the CFR Program on Digital and Cyberspace policy. During his senior management career at Microsoft, Mundy was “Microsoft’s principal technology-policy liaison to many governments worldwide, with a special emphasis on China since 1999.” https://isbscience.org/bio/craig-mundie/

Celeste Wallander, Assistant to the Head of the Pentagon for International Security Affairs and former co-director of the US-Russia Foundation (TUSRIF’s successor), previously served as the head of the Russia and Eurasia program at CSIS. Gregory Poling, Director of the CSIS Maritime Transparency Initiative, in March 2021 advocated the formation of a special vaccine assistance mechanism for QUAD countries, primarily for India, an alternative to the COVAX mechanism and supported through the Asian Development Bank.

Three other strategic institutes represented at the meeting are the Brookings Institution (K. Stelzenmuller, S. Joshi), the German Marshall Fund (E. Economy), and CNAS (Ya. Fanusi) were sources of specialised regional personnel for the National Security Service, and later also the State Department (ex-GFM president Karen Donfried – Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia from October 2021); CNAS is dominated by Madeleine Albright’s personnel, who competed with the personnel of Joe Biden and John Kerry both in 2008-2012 and during the formation of the Biden-Harris administration (where Michele Flournoy again unsuccessfully applied for the post of head of the Pentagon).

V. Possible “brainstorming” formats

Topics 1, 4, 8, 12. “Realignments” of the pole-forming powers and their alliances, which were included in the headlines of official topics 1 and 4, were actually formed in the period 2020-21, when the Bilderberg meetings were canceled due to a) the implications of the pandemic, b) China’s pressure from progressive funds, c) China’s response, including at the level of UN institutions.

China’s retaliatory self-estrangement from the West was combined with both breakthroughs in space exploration and AI technologies, as well as unprecedented activity in building intercontinental free trade agreements (RCEP) at the peak of the US’ unrealised Transatlantic and Trans-Pacific Partnership projects.

After the “Talibanisation” of Afghanistan, the strengthening of China’s relations with the countries of the Islamabad axis and the reinforcement of the expansion of influence in Africa with the supply of vaccines culminated in challenges at COP-26 (November 2021) and before the Joe Biden Democracy Summit, which Pakistan and South Africa pointedly ignored.

Both the obviously discriminatory scenario of the Democracy Summit, including the arbitrary selection of African countries, and the White House’s rejection of Russia’s proposals for mutual security guarantees only exacerbated the phenomenon of realignments, spurring China, Russia, and Turkey to actively defend their pole identity and sovereignise their financial and trade policies, including through rapprochement with advanced Arab countries, and India – to cultivate independent ties with Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Central Asian countries, and to compete with China for partnership with Russia.

The general theme of realignments, respectively, involves the widest range of figures of influence, strategists and experts: from the personnel of the intelligence community – William J. Burns (not only ex-ambassador to Russia, but also a participant in negotiations on India’s nuclear potential), from the business circles that provide electronics with raw materials in competition with China – Thomas Leysen and Peter Wennink.

Marco Veremis is a third-world communications extension technologist (including in Africa); Shashank Joshi is an expert on military strategies (not only The Economist’s military editor, but also a member of the Advisory Board of the Royal United Services Institute [RUSI, another David Petraeus sinecure]); and experts on third-world conflicts – Afsin Yurdakul.

In terms of “realignments” related to Franco-British competition in aerospace (in particular, the AUKUS initiative, which actually “hung” after the victory of the Labour Party in Australia), Shashank Joshi, the author of high-profile articles “Britain’s next warplane: Tempest” (2019), “Britain’s creaky nuclear programme” (2020), “Could Brazil get nuclear subs before Australia?” (2021), “The new Franco-Greek defence pact” (2021).

The derivative theme “Fragmentation of democratic societies”, which affects both post-socialist Europe and Turkey, involves not only academic critics of Trumpism and Turkish conservatism (Radislav Sikorski and Anne Applebaum, professor at Bilji University Eren Erdoğan), but also representatives of the banking community: the Austrian ERSTE Bank, represented by Andreas Treichl, is a co-founder of the European Stability Initiative together with the Open Society Foundation, exiled from Hungary (which, having self-identified from the Visegrad Group, became an observer in the Turkic Council, illustrating one of the actual realignments).

Topic 2. “NATO challenges”, in fact, an old topic that was raised (with the use of the term “stowaway” to address countries that lag behind in allocating funds to the alliance’s budget) even by Barack Obama in his last Message to Congress, and then repeatedly by Emmanuel Macron (“brain death”), it was updated by the summer of 2022 not only by the transatlantic reaction to the Russian special operation in Ukraine, but also by Turkey’s repeated setting of its own conditions related to integrity and security (like Russia’s appeal to the United States and NATO in December 2021).

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, for whom, as the Finnish press emphasises, participation in the meeting was only an episode of negotiations in Washington, is clearly not the central figure of this discussion. More relevant is the high status of the Greek delegation (including the nominal Brussels resident M. Schinas), as well as the participation of a number of people from the circle of Kofi Annan, who developed an unrealised plan for the unification of Cyprus, and Turkish diplomat Mithat Rende (former Ambassador to Qatar and the OECD), who in May held a discussion “The future of Turkish-Israeli relations” together with Professor Mustafa Çıraklı (Cyprus specialist), Israeli diplomat Nimrod Goren, and publisher of the Shalom newspaper Karel Valansi https://www.twuko.com/YDE_Official

The theme of “NATO challenges” also extends to South and Central Asia after the “Talibanisation” of Afghanistan, where France becomes the beneficiary of the departure of the German contingent, which took advantage of the defective change of power in Germany for polar self-assertion, with a natural competitive reaction from the romantics of “Britain without chains” involved in the revenge of the Sharif family in Pakistan.

The Franco-Turkish rivalry from Africa to the Transcaucasus undoubtedly marks a more significant challenge for the alliance than the old Turkish-Greek tensions. The profile of the Greek delegation (in particular, the presence of the Minister of Digital Economy) points to Greece’s involvement in cybersecurity and AI efforts, in addition to the logistical competition of the US and China in Greece (and the UK and China in Cyprus). The participation of ex-heads of intelligence services in this discussion is appropriate and inevitable – moreover, the composition of participants predisposes to a Franco-British intelligence dialogue “on top” of the competition between London and Paris, which gave rise to AUKUS.

Topics 3, 5. In the subject areas “China” and “Chinese-American Technological Competition”, which are particularly relevant for the NSC’s Asia coordinator Kurt Campbell, the first expert violin belongs to the adviser to the Department of Commerce and author of the books “The River Runs Black” and “The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State” Elizabeth Economy, it tracks the dynamics of Chinese elites in the context of economic and energy policy.

For this expert, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Stockholm Environment Forum, former Deputy Chairwoman of the WEF Global Agenda Council on China’s Future and former Board member of the China-America Center for Sustainable Development, China’s dissociation from the COP-26 agenda and Beijing’s criticism of the European “environmental tax” is no less personal trauma than value and psychohistorical mutual understanding between China and Russia.

In addition to Eric Schmidt, the former chief director of the “Arab Spring” with the prospect of expanding to China in 2011, a member of the Defence Innovation Council since 2015, a “mentor” of the Pentagon’s Joint Center for Artificial Intelligence (as well as a sponsor of CSIS through the “Rebellion” company) and Craig Mundie, first-time invited experimenters of deep learning are involved in technological competition with China (R. Hoffman, M. Suleyman, D. Hassabis).

James H. Baker, director of the Pentagon’s Clean Assessment Office, a protégé of Ashton Carter (who introduced Schmidt to the Defence Innovation Council), is as much in demand in the discussion as officials (Jen Easterly) and cybersecurity experts and investors in specialised startups.

Topic 11. “Social consequences of the pandemic”, a discussion involving two top managers of pharmaceutical companies, in the general context of the discussion, India is most affected, where government mortality rates are 3-4 times lower than UN statistics. The implementation of the above-mentioned APVAX project is no less urgent task for strengthening the QUAD foundation than the confrontation over the Indian arms market (which Boris Johnson entered “over the head” of Washington.

Topics 10 and 13. The resolution of the energy shortage problem that has left the Biden-Harris administration facing the need for consensus with the obviously authoritarian absolute monarchies of the Gulf is directly related to the problem of restoring supply chains, following a pandemic exacerbated by anti-Russian sanctions and counter-sanctions.

Both the high proportion of the French (actually Macron) delegation and the selection of both European ministers and technology experts (including Peter Thiel and Alex Karp), along with the almost complete elimination of the “climate” asset, indicate the group’s consensus on nuclear energy, which is classified as renewable sources Paris insisted.

The discussion on restoring supply chains is undoubtedly a major one for port terminal investors, represented by Charles Emond and Mark Little, as well as electronics material suppliers Thomas Leysen and Peter Wennink.

Topic 6. Russia. The range of invited experts on Russia is non-partisan (Nadia Schadlow is employed at the Republican Hudson Institute) and wide in the range of positions: with traditionally “hawkish” Stanford graduates (Celeste Wallander, who proposed in 2016 to “attack Putin’s assets” in response to “Russian interference in the elections”) and the “anti-Trumpists-anti-Putinists” clan (Tom Tugendhat, Anne Applebaum) next to Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Kennan Wilson Institute and Director of the Russian Studies Program at the Centre for Naval Analysis, In November 2021, he participated in the international INF conference “International Uncertainty 2022″. Henry Kissinger’s personal position, shared by experts from the Centre for the National Interest and CFR President Richard Haass, obviously influenced the decision to separate the topics “Russia” and “Ukraine”.

Topic 14. Ukraine. The two Ukrainian officials invited to the 68th meeting are non-partisan managers with Western education and financial qualifications, not burdened with obligations to the oligarchs. Foreign Minister Oksana Markarowa is present not so much as a special guest of Jill Biden’s Address to Congress, but as a former Finance Minister (who lost this position after the release of an audio recording of her conversation with Prime Minister Aleksey Goncharuk, where President Vladimir Zelensky’s economic incompetence was discussed).

The “vacuum” of Johnson’s British team and its dreamy “Britain without chains” competitors, as well as direct or indirect representatives of the Polish ruling PiS party and their Baltic allies, demonstrates a deliberate disregard for the “British-Polish-Ukrainian alliance”.

The discussion on “Ukraine” should involve not only experts in containing Russia (such as Wallander), indirect arms lobbyists (such as Eric Schmidt) and voluntary technology partners (such as Alex Karp), but also financiers with experience in providing “unconventional” financial assistance in the event of geopolitical insolvency. significant countries. This applies to Jörg Kukies, member of the Supervisory Board of KfW IPEX-Bank and Deputy Governor of the European Stability Mechanism, and Wojciech Kostrzewa.

At the initiative of the latter, mBank, a subsidiary of Commerzbank and a partner of AXA Group, provided loans at a reduced rate linked to the Swiss franc. Kostrzewa, a graduate of the University of Kiel, has been the head of the Polish-British fintech company Billon since 2018, which develops technology for storing and transferring regulated currencies and other data based on its own blockchain, and is the co-founder and co-owner of the Quedex bitcoin derivatives exchange licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC).

In addition to partnering with France’s AXA Group, Kostrzewa serves on the Board of the Canal Plus branch of the Vivendi Group, owned by the Bollore family, a key investor in French-speaking Africa. The development of a “formula” for helping Kiev, as in the case of Greece, is likely to be discussed at the level of representatives of the intelligence communities of the United States, Great Britain and France – over the interests and desires of Boris Johnson (or his competitors) and Andrzej Duda and their military and political adventures.

Conclusions.

1. The composition of the first Bilderberg meeting in three years sharply contrasts with the composition of the Davos Forum, despite the coincidence of certain geo-economic (deglobalisation, disruption of supply chains) and geopolitical topics (challenges to the West from China, the Russian special operation in Ukraine and its direct and indirect [boycott-sanctions] effects).

At the Bilderberg meeting, the representatives of the so-called progressive, in fact neo-Malthusian agenda, i.e. the lobby of the “green”, gender and anti-exhibitionist (narcolegalisation) revolutions, followers of the new monetary theory and equalising taxation, are unusually poorly represented. By contrast, the class representation of the real economy (from mining to mechanical engineering) is very broad, although the range of oil giants represented is limited and does not include US companies (unlike Canadian ones).

Shell’s choice, as well as the presence of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, expresses the club’s continuity to its founders, while BP’s choice reflects the relevance of its strategic role in projects that are opposed to the influence of China, in particular, the Trans-Caspian project.

The” pro-carbon”, as well as generally pro-industrial composition of the meeting is emphasised by the invitation of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a tough antagonist of the costly (and especially “climate”) legislative packages of the White House, equalising tax reform and constitutional innovations of the majority of the Democratic Party regarding the rules of qualified majority in the Senate (filibuster revision) and the size of the US Supreme Court.

2. Although the 68th Bilderberg meeting has a significant racial diversity and is even a record for the representation of the black race (as opposed to Latinos and yellows), racial revenge activists are not invited (Stacey Abrams is absent, despite being elected to the club’s steering committee).

The minority alignment is essentially functional, which is manifested by a significant proportion of ethnic Hindus, while the agenda is overloaded with Chinese topics (3 out of 14 topics), combined with the participation of Kurt Campbell, senior coordinator of the National Security Service for Asia, designer of anti-Chinese geopolitical alliances.

The cut-off of Indian Opposition (INC) lobbyists, as well as climate campaigners for an independent “greater Kashmir” is significant, which is also a contrast to Davos.

The focus on supporting the current leadership of India, rather than its opponents, is emphasised by the absence of any people from Kamala Harris’s entourage at the meeting, as well as the choice of pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines: in contrast to Davos, where Moderna president Stéphane Bancel was the central “vaccine” figure, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline executives who are less dependent are invited to Bilderberg from the Gates lobby.

This is in line with the strategy of Campbell, who designed the APVAX project for South Asia, independent of Gates’ COVAX, which is most relevant for India, in fact, the second victim of the pandemic in terms of mortality rates after the United States. Together with South Africa, it raised the issue of suspending the copyright on vaccines with an incentive for generic manufacturers, but failed due to the resistance of both the Gates lobby and the leadership Germany (significantly, Angela Merkel’s pro-Gates stance is now being blamed in the mainstream media).

3. Despite the fact that the official agenda of the meeting is loaded with strategic security issues, the share of active and retired military personnel in the participants is limited and is represented only by the US military, mainly related to the careers of former Pentagon Chief Ashton Carter and former Pentagon Deputy Head for Policy Michele Flournoy, who together with Tony Blinken established the strategic lobbying centre WestExec Advisors.

It is with these people, and not with the military from Biden’s entourage (Lloyd Austin, Biden’s strategy executor during the CENTCOM command, is absent), that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg “comes together” in a discussion about strategic threats.

The transatlantic expert team is dominated by the German Marshall Fund, mainly with a Stanford academic background, whose positions are fully satisfied by the Ukrainian lobby, supported by Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

At the same time, the participation of the Stanford hawks contrasts with the representative of the Wilson Center, Michael Kofman, who belongs to the “peace party” and is close to the positions of Henry Kissinger and the Centre for the National Interest.

4. Unlike a number of previous meetings, the intelligence community is represented only by the heads of intelligence agencies (as well as ex-heads and experts with intelligence backgrounds) of only three countries – the United States, Britain and France. This narrow composition is at odds with the institutionalised formats of the Five Eyes (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the Bonn Group (Europe+Israel).

Moreover, the head of the French DGSE, Bernard Emié, was invited again together with Patricia Barbizet, president of the French informal club Le Siecle, who was elected to the Bilderberg Steering Committee.

Numerous tech industry representatives invited in the context of the West’s rivalry with China also have long-standing and strong ties to the military and intelligence communities, where Ashton Carter and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also served as links.

The representation of Silicon Valley’s top management further emphasises the “cut-off” of progressives-demonopolisers, who plentifully populate not only the House of Representatives, but also federal agencies under Biden-Harris. The vacuum of both Biden and Harris’ immediate entourage, despite the Washington meeting, reflects not only the “openness” of the issue of power in the democratic establishment, but also the specific ambitions of NSC Chief Jake Sullivan, coupled with the aspirations of ex-Clintons who did not get positions – especially Michele Flournoy.

5. The marked preponderance of Goldman Sachs among the banking class contrasts with the absence of top managers of HSBC and Barclays Bank, whose circle was the widest during the Prime Minister D. Cameron and the Chancellorship of G. Osborne, when the U.K.’s entry into the AIIB signalled its “21st Century Strategic Partnership” with China.

The shift, coinciding with the departure of Marcus Agius from the Steering Committee and the inclusion of Patricia Barbizet, highlights the ousting of the British Rothschilds and their partners in Rothschild Continuation Holdings, who catalysed the now-irrelevant “21st Century Strategic Partnership”.

The dominance of the French branch of the Rothschilds in the club, in turn, is in tune with Paris’ claims to the status of a pole-forming EU power with broad neo-imperial projections, which clearly manifested themselves during the French presidency of the EU, provoking London to a tough confrontation both in resource extraction regions with exclusive profit margins (Africa) and in aerospace competition (BAE Systems vs Dassault).

The last round of this competition, which was demonstrated by the AUKUS alliance “put together” by B. Johnson, was completely lost by Johnson’s political strategists in Australia, whose new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already initiated rapprochement with Paris and flirtation with Beijing, although he does not give up AUKUS in words and agrees to develop QUAD.

The refusal to invite Australians to Bilderberg, however, is motivated not only by a complete revision of foreign policy (especially since Albanese is a Republican, i.e. an anti-monarchist), but also by the exaggerated progressive ideological line of the Albanese government (the Rudd line).

6. The timing of the meeting (after the French presidential election and on the eve of the vote of confidence in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson) is reflected in the contrast of the French delegation, composed (for the first time) exclusively of loyalists of Emmanuel Macron and the British delegation, where not only the complete absence of loyalists of the “lame” Johnson, but also the presence of Thomas Tugendhat, who is close to plotter against Johnson and his former rival (2019) Jeremy Hunt.

An additional focus of Johnson’s “lameness” is the issue of Ulster, where the loss of the Unionists (DUP) and the triumph of Sinn Féin has exacerbated the key unresolved Brexit issue in which the Biden administration and especially its Irish-Catholic sector (including W.J. Burns and Susan Rice) occupy a pro-Brussels rather than a pro-British stance.

The presence of the shadow head of the Foreign Office, Thomas Lammy, who is loyal to Tony Blair, reflects the political activism of Blair himself (the “Future of Britain” conference scheduled for June 30 with the participation of Larry Summers and former British Labour ministers Rory Stewart and David Gauke), which was pointed out by the founder of the Politico website John F. Harris on the opening day of Bilderberg, having seen a “symbol of time” in a televised conversation between Blair and Bill Clinton a month earlier (May 2 – the anniversary of Blair’s confirmation as prime minister).

7. The very unusual composition of the Turkish delegation for Bilderberg, which lacks political opposition, is dominated by specialists on the Cyprus issue and is a direct lobbyist for the Turkish-Israeli oil and gas partnership, is consistent with both Blair’s initial strategy as an adviser to the quartet on Israel and Palestine (in favour of the Israeli-Turkish version of the gas pipeline) and the leading role of his closest Israeli partner, Isaac Herzog in restoring the Ankara-Jerusalem axis, both Brussels’ adaptation to the change of priorities initiated by the State Department (rejection of the EastMed Israel-Greece-Italy project) and the corresponding timing (on the eve of Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to Israel with a diversification pathos), and planning at the level of the US National Security Service, whose head, Jake Sullivan, has experience working directly with the late architect of the unification plan for Cyprus, Kofi Annan.

The specific weight and internal loyalty of the Turkish delegation also contrasts with the narrowness of the German delegation, where the Greek debt settlement strategist Jörg Kukies is next to Mathias Doepfner, who simultaneously represents the Warburg family (whose New York bank was founded by the head of the State Department’s own father, Donald Blinken) and the BlackRock investment group, as well as the narrow representation of Poland, the only not counting Ukraine.

The demonstrative refusal of the “first persons” of Bilderberg-68 (namely Kissinger, Sullivan and Campbell) from the invitation of the so-called countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), as well as the vacuum of the European Union of Conservatives and Reformers (including the Tories and the Polish PiS), is a consensus of rejection of British-Polish strategising both on the Black Sea and on the Baltic flanks of containing Russia, while at the same time identifying priority problems NATO – namely the problems created by Turkey, including current tensions with Greece and the Nordic countries.

In resolving the secondary problem of Ukraine, which is put in the last place in the list of topics, priority is given not to military, but to financial support mechanisms.

Source: https://russtrat.ru/en/reports_/28-june-2022-1338-10909