Is Trump/JD Vance Going to Transform the US Foreign Policy?  Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on ‘Dialogue Works

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An hour long interview may be challenging for you, the viewer, but it is still more challenging for the interviewee. It moves across the waterfront from the more obvious salient issues of the day for which you have concise answers formulated in advance, whether or not a list of questions was provided in by the host, and moves into unforeseeable areas about which you respond extemporaneously.  So it was with this interview taken by Nima Alkhorshid.

https://youtu.be/m1UGx5Ay6J0

I was delighted that from the very start I was asked about the significance of Trump’s naming J.D. Vance to be his running mate. My own spontaneous look into Vance’s record ahead of this show turned up a speech he made in the U.S. Senate in the debate ahead of the vote on the bill providing $60 billion in further aid to Ukraine. This speech put flesh on the scarecrow Vance presented in major media, where attention is paid only to his ‘nyet,’ which puts him in the enemy camp, and no mention is made of the reasoning he applied to the issue, which, in my view demonstrates superior intelligence, independence of thinking and an appreciation of how history is used and mostly abused by his colleagues on Capitol Hill to serve their war-mongering.

He attacked the logic of the defenders of our Ukraine policy who oppose peace negotiations, saying this is just appeasement akin to Chamberlain in the lead-up to WWII.   But the film of WWII has been played and replayed endlessly in the Senate and this supposed lesson from history does not fit.  Putin is not Hitler, he does not have the power of Hitler.  No, there are far more apt likenesses in the past.   Look better at WWI in which the major powers stumbled into a horrific catastrophe because they overlooked diplomacy.   But then look also at the lessons of the Iraq war. Then as now those who were opposed to the attack on Iraq were subjected to abuse by the pro-war majority, just as today those who oppose the Ukraine war narrative are derided as stooges of Putin. There was no free discussion and this is what we need most to arrive at good policies.

Vance then points out the very same politicians who led us into the war in Iraq on false pretenses of defending democracy are doing that today in calling to arm Ukraine

And war, says Vance, has unintended consequences.  That is how America, the biggest Christain countryon earth, by its interventions in Syria wiped out one of the oldest Christian communities in the world dating from the time of the Apostles, 1.5 million strong at the start of hostilities and nil today.     This is how the same is playing out in Ukraine where the government is striking hard against the Christian community that it says is aligned with Moscow. The result is an assault on freedom of religion.

I highly recommend this speech to my readers:  Live: Republican VP Candidate JD Vance Called for Reevaluation of US Foreign Aid During House Debate (youtube.com)

In my interview, I explained at length something else I have been ruminating over these past several day, namely how the appointment of Vance and the speeches delivered in the Republican National Convention by several powerful representatives of civil society, most particularly the president of the Teamsters union, show that Donald Trump now appears to have the support he needs to do what he was unable to do in his first term: to attract a high quality team to his cabinet and to other high federal positions consisting of people who are dedicated to implementing  his policies.. It is likely that he will gain control of both houses of Congress so that the Senate approval of his nominees may be foreseen. Moreover, this time around, a divided Democratic party, such as we now see before us, will be unable to frustrate Trump’s plans, foreign as well as domestic.

I was less successful in this interview setting out my thinking on how the new catchword of the day in international relations, ‘sovereignty,’ relates to the bigger and very traditional dialectic between Realism and Idealism in international relations, with the former standing for the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) based vision of nation states that protect the interests of their citizens in general and most specifically against interference by foreign powers that so often causes civil unrest and wars. The latter, Idealism, as we know, focuses on values and finds its latest expression in globalism, which is promoted by supranational, unelected institutions that suck power away from nation states, and in non-state actors such as multinational corporations.  All of this I will come back to in writing another day, because it is of decisive importance to understand who is really who on the world stage today and why today’s catchy and novel jargon is often just a rebranding of distinctions that go back centuries.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcription below by a reader

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 00:04
Let’s start with Trump. He has chosen to have Senator Vance as his vice president. What does it mean when it comes to the foreign policy of the United States?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, I can tell you that my view of Trump’s candidacy has changed 180 degrees. I won’t say like Annalena 360 degrees. It’s changed 180 degrees since this weekend. Of course, it was a dramatic event, this near miss, which almost left him dead. But the– and it’s happily something that I had predicted long ago would be the main factor bringing this war in Europe to an end. I said it would be a result of divine intervention. I think we witnessed divine intervention this past Saturday. Friends, other analysts who say that they are not believers, I think they got religion over the weekend.

01:17
But that’s not really what changed my mind about whom I would back in this in the November elections and why. It was precisely what you just mentioned, his decision on who his vice president will be, that changed my mind at once. I had not been following the career of J.D. Vance, but I did a little bit of brushing up to see why my first instinct was to be elated that this man was chosen. My first instinct was as a result of reading what mainstream had to say, the New York Times or the Financial Times, who spoke about him and made mention of his stand on the Ukraine war. Of course, they did it in the most negative way possible.

I put aside the editorial opinion that they were applying, and I looked at the facts. And then just a few minutes before we come on air, I was listening to J.D. Vance’s speech. Well, first I listened to his speech at the convention last night, and that wouldn’t be much of a reason to change your views on anything, because it was very much baby-kissing type of American politics and my wife comes on and my kids and how I deal with my four-year-old and where I come from and what kind of a hillbilly I am and so forth.

02:52
All of that is very nice, traditional American politics, which they all engage in, whatever other views they have on the world, and whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans. However, when I dug a little bit further back and looked at his speech, and I was just been following his speech in the Senate, just prior to the vote on the aid to Ukraine, that 60-billion-dollar appropriation, I was utterly amazed. I was left speechless. Frankly, his speech was more cogent, was more patriotic in a way that will appeal to all American voters, but not cheap patriotism. You can see very deep patriotism, aware of the interests of the people who put him into office, and also with a moral, very distinct moral overlay, coming out of his Christian background.

03:51
This was unexpected. The kind of Christian overlay in American politics often can be difficult to take, because we have so many extremists, various sects, who would be quite happy to see the end of the world come because the Messiah will follow. These crackpots give religion a bad name. The religion that I saw in J.D. Vance was quite different. It was very traditional and very easy to appreciate in a positive way when he’s speaking about the loss of innocence in this war, about the unintended consequences of war. In his case, and I say religion came up, when he mentioned the loss of the Christian communities in Iraq, an unintended consequence of the war in Iraq, which sent 1.5 million Iraqi Christians from the, as he described correctly, from the community that goes back to the apostles. And they were sent fleeing for their lives because of what America did, the havoc that it created by overturning the existing regime and replacing it with chaos and ultimately with a move of the whole country into the arms of Iran.

05:22
This discussion was one example of what I did not expect in this man, but the whole speech from start to finish demonstrated, as I said, a very collected mind with a firm understanding of how history can be used and not abused, with a firm understanding and blending, what I would call academic intelligence with life experience intelligence, as a man who signed up for the Marines shortly after the start of the Iraq war, in the mistaken belief that this was a just war, and that America was coming in to do something useful for democracy. And what he saw on the ground was what we, the opposition, saw in the war, and have seen throughout American foreign policy in this millennium, and certainly going back to the 1990s, when America was given a free hand to do what it wanted with the world as it had become a single superpower.

06:36
The use of history and abuse of history was embedded in his speech. His insistence that all of the talk about Chamberlain appeasement is rerunning World War II, and it has been running on the theater of the American Senate nonstop for decades. And he said, it’s not the only historical analogy that we can bring up. It is a poor analogy, since Mr. Putin is not Hitler, and doesn’t have the capabilities of, the power over his people that Hitler had. And then he went on to inform us that this real analogy has to go back early in time. You have to take it back to World War I. and his understanding of World War I and how the powers stumbled into a disastrous conflict, which could have been avoided had they used diplomacy properly.

07:44
And this was his point, that history has many analogies, many lessons, and that very incredibly, his colleagues in the Senate seemed to have learned none of them. He reminded them how they had voted on that Iraq War when he was still a high school sophomore, and how they had silenced discussion and how everyone who disagreed was denounced in a kind of McCarthyite way, the very same denunciation that he sees around him today, where anyone questioning the Biden policy on Ukraine is denounced instantly as a stooge of Putin.

So, the man’s ability to navigate the arguments that you see in academic discussions, and to wed them with his own personal life experience, and with the behavior of the people around him, who he calls his colleagues and friends in the Senate — this is unusual. You know, I, we have a few very big names in the, in the academic community. There are very few. John Mearsheimer is the outstanding case. But I’ve never seen him produce the reasoning and the 360-degree view that came out in that speech by J.D. Vance. I’m really wondering who his advisors are, because I have little doubt that in many respects he’s his own advisor, because drawing on his life experience, well somebody else isn’t going to do that for you. And he’s done it himself when he did his memoirs, which were a bestseller. So I was enormously impressed.

09:37
But let me move on from that to what it means for where we’re going. Mr. Trump told us with the appointment of Vance where he’s headed, and it’s where I like to see him go. That is, I firmly believe that his remarks, that even before inauguration, he would, acting as a go-between and a broker, would find a way to end the war. I believe that. It sounded like a typical Trump exaggeration when he first said it. But seeing him in the company of Vance, I think he knows what he’s doing.

10:19
Now, I was, going back to 2016, a Trump supporter. And I made the rounds of Russian television, the talk shows, because I happened to either be in Moscow or St. Petersburg for large parts of 2016. And I was introduced by Yevgeny Popov on his then talk show, “Our Special Correspondent”. And once I was there, I made it to the other shows, all because I was viewed as somebody who could talk about, explain to a Russian audience what was going on in the States and what was the Trump phenomenon all about.

11:01
And I was a Trump supporter. I was– for only one reason. Not his domestic policy, but, where he stood on abortion or on lowering taxes and whatever. I don’t follow, as I don’t live in the United States, so his domestic policy would not concern me directly. But America’s foreign policy concerns the whole world. And therefore, I was very attentive to what he said about his foreign policy plans. These are all denounced then, they’re denounced today as isolationism, but that is rubbish. He’s not an isolationist. He simply wants to scale back the outrageous policeman’s role the United States has assumed at enormous cost and with only devastating results to show for it.

11:49
So, Trump seemed very attractive, and I was supportive in 2016. But regrettably, It very quickly became apparent that he didn’t have the– he was not a man of politics– and he didn’t have the contacts, and he didn’t have the savoir-faire, and he didn’t have the judge of people and he didn’t have the Senate. He didn’t have an ability to field a real team that could implement his policies in foreign policy and otherwise. I knew for a fact, because I knew something as an insider about the Trump organization, that yes, it’s a multi-billion dollar company, but he only had a dozen people who ran the whole show. And they were all around him. And he had them for 25 years or more, a very small circle. He never had– you think, oh yes, the company had billions. But it was not a corporation in a manufacturing sense. It was a closely held company. And yes, he managed a secretary, but he didn’t have broad experience managing tens of thousands of federal employees.

12:59
He was very ill prepared for that role, and he had nobody to help him, which is why he appointed so many of his relatives, his son-in-law was given assignments. All of this was criticized strongly at the time, but it was understandable, because he had no one else to rely on; he had family. And the result of that, all of that, is they appointed people, he got through the Senate, people who were disastrous, whether it was Tillerson as his first Secretary of State, who on paper should have been okay, coming as the head of a U.S. multinational. And then he had Pompeo. Then he had advisor Pompeo as a kind of anti-diplomat, setting us well on the course to the current administration, which is anti-diplomacy. And his other security advisors were all objectionable characters who were not sympathetic, who did not believe in his foreign policy ambitions and who undermined his policies.

14:07
So the result of the first administration of Donald Trump was in the area that interests me and I think interests the audience for this particular interview most, the policies on Russia were disaster. He was set up, of course, before he even came into the Oval Office by the actions, the outgoing actions of the Obama administration, taking away Russian consular properties and doing things which are a red flag in global diplomacy. So he had a bad start and it went downhill from there.

The whole of Trump’s time in office, relations with Russia, only went a downward spiral. The end result is even before the election of 2020, I was calling for him to be removed. I was calling for him to be impeached, not for the rubbish reasons that were given, but for the real crimes that he was committing in bombing this place and that place. And so I became an anti-Trump. In light of what I’ve seen so far in the Republican National Convention, I go back to my start position of enthusiasm for this man, for some very good reasons.

15:35
The Trump today is not the Trump of 2016, 2017. He has formed real contacts in Washington among people whom we have to respect. His choice of Vance is brilliant in this respect. All of his key appointments have to get through the Senate, and he has taken a senator to be his vice president. I understand that to mean that he will have considerable confidence that he can bring into government the people who support his policies, and not just bring into government people who can get through the Senate, which was what happened in the first Trump administration.

So for this respect, Vance is a great asset and from the speech that he made, which I found remarkable, a speech in which he objected to the funding of Ukraine– for a number of very good reasons; I won’t repeat them– I think that he is the right man to help Trump put through the foreign policy that I would like to see implemented, returning the United States to a position of engagement with the world, but one among peers, and not as the global hegemon and global policeman.

Alkhorshid: 17:09
One of the most important thing that has happened during his first term was how they could manipulate him and concentrating his attention on internal affairs, marginal affairs, just Russiagate, everything coming. Do you think he has learned something from his first term, not getting involved with these little things and just focusing on what matters the most in terms of the foreign policy of the United States?

Doctorow:
Look, Donald Trump is not a genius. He’s not a fool either, but he’s not a genius. He’s a man with definite virtues for a politician, for a statesman. I should better to call him a statesman. And that he was involved in minutiae, as you said, as minor issues. I think he was forced into that situation. The Democrats did everything possible to discredit him and to remove him with their impeachment efforts. And he was fighting for his life the whole time, his political life. And his ability to put– first of all, to find serious candidates for high positions in his cabinet was restricted. He didn’t have enough people on the ground supporting him to help him get the right people through.

18:44
And once he got the wrong people in, then he was being marginalized by the people who report to him. So, as I say, it was not a lack of intelligence. It was working against the detractors of the Democratic Party, and in the media, who did everything possible to keep him away from the levers of power. Now, the situation today, if we anticipate that he will beat Biden, it is very reasonable to assume that the Republicans will take both houses of Congress. In which case, Mr. Trump will have his every possibility to recruit and to install people of quality who will implement the policies that he has defined.

The excellent beginning is JD Vance. I think that this will attract a lot of quality people to the Trump camp. I’m very interested to see whether or not Trump will succeed in getting an endorsement from Robert Kennedy Jr. That will, of course, be very helpful. It would also not be bad if part of that endorsement came at the expense of appointing Robert Kennedy to some influential and serious post in the new administration. As I think was clear from our first talk, I was supporting Robert Kennedy, because he was the only voice against the establishment that had credibility. I did not believe Trump to be credible until this weekend.

20:38
And I have to also say that I was listening not just to one or two speeches, but to several speeches at the convention, and I was most impressed by, for example, the president of the Teamsters, who delivered an outstanding speech, very pro-labor. Obviously, the Trump wing of the Republican Party is trying very hard to position itself as pro-labor and pro-common man against the elites that have run Washington. And when you get the president of the Teamsters to come forward and deliver this magnificent speech that I heard, then I’m satisfied that Mr. Trump will get high-quality people in his new administration that he could not get in his first administration.

Alkhorshid: 21:34
Do you think that his decision to have Senator Vance as his vice president has been made before that assassination attempt or he decided after that?

Doctorow:
I would assume it was before. I don’t think– I think that there’s talk that the new Trump is not the old Trump, that this was a life-changing event. I’m sure it was a life-changing event. When you’ve been that close to death, of course. But I don’t believe that he made an appointment as important as who will be his running mate on the strength of that one event. Besides, as we know, Elon Musk had strongly recommended that he choose Vance and had backed up his recommendation with a commitment to $45 million, which isn’t bad as electoral contributions go. So, I think there were a number of factors that pointed to the naming of this particular senator as his running mate.

Alkhorshid: 22:41
When you look at Trump at the convention, you see a picture of a man that is totally different from what we’ve seen before the assassination attempt.

Doctorow:
No, I wasn’t particularly impressed that he had changed his demeanor. There were still the little nods to this end of the room, to that end of the room, and his waving here and there. This was all very much Trump style. But I do believe that once he sits in the Oval Office, he is going to be more unifying and to let his vice president be the barking dog. I think Vance– we’ve had many barking dogs as vice president, going back to Agnew, people who were doing the dirty work of their president. In the case of Vance, I don’t see him as doing dirty work. The man is much too dignified, and so I believe he’ll be a very effective debater. And I want to– just thinking about what we’ve talked about in the past few minutes– I didn’t bring out this element of Vance’s speech, which complements, fits in perfectly, with what I’ve been saying about Trump all along, though I was speaking in the desert.

24:14
What I was saying about Trump is that all of us have freedom of speech in the States that was made possible precisely by Donald Trump, by his saying things during his campaign of 2016, which we all feared, if we had said them, would invite a knock on the door from the FBI. Now, I’m very pleased to see in the speech of J.D. Vance that he made in the Senate that he is– and this also came up briefly, very briefly, in a rather fluff-like speech that he made in the convention– how he stands for debate, and how it is essential that we have a thorough discussion of issues, if we are going to arrive at a good policy.

25:00
And that, how he denounced the Democrats, rightly so, for trying to snuff out discussion and debate. And by using– he didn’t say this, call it this– but ad hominem arguments, not answering their opponents with pointing out what was wrong in what they were saying, where they were factually wrong or whatever, but denouncing them for being stooges of this and that. And as he said, this had been going on for a long time. And he went back to his own personal experience in the Iraq War period, when those who disagreed with Bush Jr. were denounced in a kind of witch hunt, in a kind of McCarthyite way. So I’m delighted to see that freedom of speech is a conscious interest and concern of Mr. Vance. And I believe that his being chosen and what he said confirms my, what I can say: that Trump gave us all freedom of speech that we do not have here in Europe.

Alkhorshid: 26:12
How– if you were to mention the Trump’s position before the attempted the assassination, and right now– how would Trump benefit from this failed assassination in 2024?

Doctorow:
You are alluding to these conspiracy theories–

Alkhorshid:
No, no, no. I’m talking about politically, how this is going to change the mind of the people who saw this happening to Trump? Right now, they’re deciding that “Let’s vote for Trump.”

Doctorow: 26:46
Well, I don’t think it’s an intellectual change as such. I think it’s an emotional change. And of course, emotions are very important in deciding how people vote. I think what it highlighted to the broad public is something that those of us who were Trumpites or who were supporters of Trump going back to 2016 understood perfectly. The man is remarkably brave. One could say in the past, if you really were being disagreeable and unkindly, that he was not brave, but he was stupid. I never believed that he was stupid. I believed from the start that he would, by saying what he said, knowing full well how the intelligence agencies, the CIA and FBI have intimidated past candidates and past presidents to watch their words. And Mr. Trump certainly must have gotten intimations of this from the heads of these agencies, that they would walk him out to the woodshed and tell him what’s what, and what he can do and what he shouldn’t do.

28:04
And he obviously didn’t listen. And he didn’t listen, again, not because he was stupid, but because he was unbelievably brave. Now, what happened there in this political, in this address, at which the assassination attempt occurred, is that the whole of America and the world saw Mr. Trump get up and raise his fist and say, fight on, when by doing that very thing, he exposed himself to a possible second sniper. He resisted, and he showed unbelievable bravery, which I think penetrated the emotional appreciation of the broad public, whether they like his policies don’t like her policies.

29:05
The contrast with the feeble and senile Biden and with the hysterical and unsupportable Kamala, this is dramatic. And yes, people vote by their minds and they also vote by their emotions. And I think the emotional capital that he stored away — unintentionally, he was just being Donald Trump and it was instinctive. It was not something that was planned. It could not be planned. This is seconds after he’s nearly killed. I think that will draw a great number of voters to him and it will shame and send home a lot of the Democrats who have slandered him.

Alkhorshid: 29:53
And when it comes to Europe, and right now we know that Orban is totally isolated because of his policies toward Russia. How Trump can help Orban and these people, these people who are not happy with the policy in Ukraine?

Doctorow;
I’m not sure that he can actively help them, but the whole of Europe understands the sympathy between Orban and Trump. And as I’ve said on other issues, everyone wants to rally around a winner. And if Orban now will be the main conduit to the incoming administration in the United States, assuming Mr. Trump wins, then without raising a finger, he will have leaders of one or another country come to his side, to be on the winning side. Ursula– I don’t know what the result is of the election that should have taken place several hours ago in the European Parliament for her re-election as the head of the commission–but whether she wins or doesn’t win will not make a great deal of difference, because I think all power will be drained away from her and from the duopoly of the Social Democrats and the European People’s Party if Trump wins.

31:28
And there will be a big movement towards Orban and his movement within the European Parliament that will take power away from the losing side, which is the present majority. So, I’m not terribly concerned about whether or not Kallas gets the final approval as the Foreign and Defence Minister, Commissioner of the European Union. I think that these people will be stripped of power, effective power. Mr. Orban will be effectively empowered and become much more attractive to his peers, to some of his peers, those who are open to realism, if there is a Trump victory.

Alkhorshid: 32:23
Orbán’s position is so important right now because not only in Ukraine, when it comes to China as well, he’s just favoring having some sort of conversation between the United States and China. And we know that Trump recently in his interview, he said that he’s not willing to do anything militarily in Taiwan. But he wants to have a economic fight with China. But that doesn’t– that’s good, that’s good if– as long as you’re interested in any sort of negotiations, that’s positive. And Orban right now in the European Union is playing a very crucial and important role.

Doctorow: 33:08
Again, he is, there’s a reason why he and Trump are soul buddies. I’ve described now my feeling that Trump is remarkably brave, and the same has to be said about Orbán. It is not easy to go up against all of your peers in the European Union who are making a fetish out of unity in pursuit of utterly disastrous policies. He is a voice of reason. I think a day will come when everyone recognizes that saying, as the Financial Times does, that he’s the biggest fan of Putin in the European Union, this kind of slander will fade away and everyone will forget who said it. And Mr. Orbán will be recognized for the realist and defender of the interests of his own people, that he is.

34:02
So his standing will rise, and their standing will fall. As I said, I’m not particularly concerned about who will be in which slot in the incoming European Commission. I firmly believe that power will ebb away from those people and will move towards those who are on the winning side over the Ukraine war and over globalism. There’s a lot, there are a lot of fragments of thinking in public space today. And I try to consolidate them and make some reason out of them, and if you allow me, I’ll do that now in a very compact way.

We hear about the Russians particularly, Mr. Putin is using every opportunity, he speaks about sovereignty. “We have intellectual sovereignty, we have cultural sovereignty, we have economic sovereignty, and of course, we are militarily secure.” That’s fine. The word sovereignty has spread out from Russia. It’s become a kind of catch word now in what used to be called the third world, and otherwise is the global south now. And the former colonies of France, in Central Africa, are also speaking about sovereignty and taking back their mineral resources and the rest of it.

35:26
Sovereignty is very good. It Is a catchword, and it makes a lot of sense, but it isn’t in a void. It comes in– it’s part and parcel of a whole understanding of of global politics. And what we’re talking about in code language is Westphalia, 1648. We’re talking about restoring nation-states to sovereignty, to a position where they are seen as defending the interests of their residents, of their citizens, and they’re protecting them against the interference of foreign powers. The interference then was the religious wars. So, the interference in countries to overturn dictators, to install Democrats, all of this is a violation of the 1648 understanding of the world, that ended the 30 Years War of religious wars, where one prince would be fighting another prince over what religion we practiced in the given territories.

36:50
That’s where we are today. So these bits and pieces in the speeches that come out today, whether they’re identifying themselves as pro-sovereignty or anti-globalism, they’re talking about the realist understanding of the world, which stands in contrast to globalism, which otherwise can be called a utopian, Wilsonian democracy, something which never really existed on earth, but existed as a battering ram for one group of politicians to smash other groups of politicians.

37:38
There are very few– realism is part of American foreign policy, but is the hidden part. The– realism is part of Russian policy, it’s not hidden at all, but is not used extensively with the general public, because the general public doesn’t like realism. It isn’t– you’re not going to sacrifice your son for realism. You’re not going to be emotionally engaged when you hear arguments made on the basis of national interest. You will sacrifice your son when you’re speaking about defending our people, defending our culture, our language. These are emotive things that people relate to. And that’s why they have been used by President Putin to explain many actions that have taken place since 2014, which really had a basis in military considerations and national interest considerations, which are another way of describing realism.

38:45
They were described instead in these different types of idealism. In America, as I said, the hidden part of foreign policy is realism, there’s some understanding of national interests, but the big public side of foreign policy is ideological, voting democracy, even if most of the people advocating it wouldn’t know democracy if they tripped on it. They really are authoritarians, particularly the authoritarian left, which has no tolerance for other people’s views since they are the unique readers of the truth.

39:33
So, as I said, the many little elements that you see in the public domain as people describe their foreign policies, they all go back to 1648, and which ended the religious wars with the general acknowledgement that princes, kings, whatever, the rulers of territories forming nation-states were the best defenders of their people, and that one state should not interfere with another state. In this world, the biggest promoters of realism with a big R are Russia and China. And the biggest promoters of ideology, fighting for democracy, and other not fine-sounding principles which are impossible to implement without causing enormous numbers of deaths and damage, they are the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union, incredibly.

Alkhorshid: 40:50
Do you feel that the rhetoric in the West, specifically in the United Kingdom right now, they’re talking about that China is the biggest threat to the United Kingdom. And nobody knows why China, what does it have to do with China? And do you understand why they’re changing the rhetoric? They’re feeling that Donald Trump is winning. Let’s go that way. Let’s put pressure on Donald Trump to go aggressive on China, maybe militarily?

Doctorow:
Well, I think it’s good that we’re getting into this discussion of Trump on China. People have also commented on Vance on China. Vance is, “Well, we can go easy on Russia. because we really have to concentrate all of our resources against China.” My take on this is: don’t believe a word of it. If considering how many warmongers there are within the Republican Party [on] Capitol Hill, it would be suicidal for Trump or anyone else to advocate a foreign policy that doesn’t have war somewhere in it.

41:57
So, we have to concentrate our resources so we can really beat the hell out of China. Everyone– and therefore we’re going to cut, we’re going to throw Ukraine under the bus. Okay. That will be fine. Throw them under the bus and let’s move on and finish off China. I don’t believe he’s going to finish off China. I believe it is a tactical maneuver now to shut up the warmongers in his own party and to let them understand that we’re going to throw Ukraine under the bus.

Alkhorshid: 42:30
And the other thing that was, if you remember during the Obama administration, they were trying, the neocons or whoever is the bloc, was trying to force Obama to go after Syria, the government in Syria. We know that how Putin’s role in just bringing some sort of peace to this conflict in Syria was so important in those days. Right now, CNN was trying to put out that Iran is behind this failed assassination of Donald Trump. It seems to me that they’re trying to make a new Iraq war in the Middle East against Iran. But how do you find Trump’s policy when it comes to Iran?

Doctorow:
Well, he didn’t bomb them. There was a real dilemma in his presidency. Would he enable Israel to deliver a deathly blow against Iran? Would the United States itself intervene and attack Iran with conventional weapons, with nuclear weapons, whatever? And he was advised not to. I believe it was Elon Musk who had a role in that. I’m not sure who was the last to have the ear of Trump before he took a decision not to bomb Iran and not to back Israel in an attack on Iran. That was of great consequence. I don’t see Trump bombing or attacking anybody. That is counter to what he said. And if he really has had a life-changing experience from this near death, I would expect it to even further strengthen this moral side of his decision-making and sensible decision-making, not to cause havoc and chaos anywhere if it can be avoided.

44:48
So, I don’t see him attacking Iran. I don’t see him attacking China. I see him doing a lot of making efforts to distract his enemies from his mission by holding a flag for his toro to run past him, and not in his administration, by agreeing verbally. Look, he backed down on the vote for funding Ukraine and Israel, finally at the last minute he backed down. So he was able to conduct himself in a tactical way for the sake of remaining on course strategically. And I believe that will occur again in the future. But I see his position on China, or certainly the position of Vance, as being just that. It is a red flag for his enemies, while [Alejandro de Herrera] stands and the bull runs past.

Alikhorshid: 46:05
Just to wrap up this session, when it comes to Israel and the conflict in Gaza, Trump, in his latest interview with, it was an Israeli media, if I’m not mistaken, he said to them that what you’re doing right now is not helping you. Everybody is just turning against you around the world. How do you see the policy of Trump and his vice president when it comes to Israel? And how they can manage the situation in Gaza?

Doctorow: 46:43
Well, I can’t give an answer to that directly in specifics. But I come back to the primary point. Trump, and particularly J.D. Vance, because he’s far more intellectual. After all, he’s a Yale Law graduate. And I’ve listened to his speech. He has a very fine working mind. So I expect that the realism that gives structure to Vance’s foreign policy statements will prevail. And it’s not a question of being pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, but simply realism. What can be achieved by the sides? If that enters into the present chaotic and disgraceful situation in Israel and Gaza, that will work wonders.

47:40
And I think that both of them are clever enough to find a way to explain what they’re doing to the broader public without appearing to be compromising Israel’s interests.