‘Dialogue Works’ edition of 7 November 2024: Trump Wins! But Huge Challenges Await in Ukraine & Israel!

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In fact the greater part of this interview was devoted to news about the candidates Donald Trump is said to be considering for the key positions of Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. These include Mike Pompeo, Richard Grenell and several other ugly personalities who, during Trump’s first term, not only tried to implement the worst of Neocon policies, in defiance of the stated objectives of their boss; but who swaggered on the world stage and treated all their counterparties with contempt.

If this is indeed a signal on how Trump intends to lead the country in the coming four years, then he is in for a rude shock just after his inauguration, because the world has changed significantly in the four years since he left office. American global hegemony is on the way out. Apart from Europe; where the collective leadership seems to be suffering from incurable subservience to the States and a sort of masochism that notches well into Trump’s customary aggressiveness and disdain for ‘losers,’ the Rest of the World is in revolt against American domination and hubris. Moreover, the objective factors of respective military might and geopolitical heft of the Russian-Chinese alliance today vis-à-vis the United States make it virtually impossible for Trump to end the war in Ukraine by fiat without due regard for Russian interests or to enable Netanyahu to destroy Iran and subjugate its neighborhood in West Asia. The seeming restraint of Joe Biden with respect to Russia and to Iran was due not to his being soft in the head or lacking force of will, as Trump seems to believe. No, it was because folks at the Pentagon told him firmly that ‘you cannot do that boss’ without risking America’s assets abroad if not nuclear attack on the Continental USA. This is the advice these career officers will likely administer on Trump as well, if they do not simply subvert or overrule his orders, as General Mark Milley once did in Trump’s first term. We go into a detailed discussion of these matters in the interview, and I trust that viewers will find this to be of value.

Global politics are now moving along very quickly. It appears that the German federal government has just collapsed as ministers are abandoning ship without waiting for some long delayed vote of confidence in the Bundestag. And, notwithstanding my remark in this interview that Vladimir Putin is in no rush to congratulate Trump on his victory since the countries are de facto if not de jure in a state of war, at his talks during the session of the annual Valdai Club gathering in Sochi last night Putin did just that and made a fairly conciliatory outreach to Trump. As the Russians are now fond of saying, the ball is now in Trump’s court.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgZt-uJS-Mg

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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3 thoughts on “‘Dialogue Works’ edition of 7 November 2024: Trump Wins! But Huge Challenges Await in Ukraine & Israel!”

  1. A supremely useful and excellent post.

    Given that the election results were an appalling and stupefying own goal by the Democratic party elite, as demonstrated in this article from The New York Times, what likelihood do you assign to the probability that the United States will launch a nuclear attack on Russia before the inauguration?

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