Transcript of Press TV, Iran interview dated 19 February

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PressTV: 0:00
Joining us now out of Brussels is Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst, joining us for more on the story. Hello Mr. Gilbert Doctorow, hope you’re safe and doing well. Now there’s actually a crazy shift in alliances going on here. This is something quite unprecedented when you see the US president circumventing the Europeans going straight to Moscow to the Europeans, especially the Ukrainians chagrin, to try to etch out a peace deal.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:30
I think it’s quite impressive how Donald Trump is conducting this restoration of normal relations with Russia and his approach to the war. There are a great many people in the United States, still more people in Europe, who do not appreciate Donald Trump’s ability to be tactful and to think strategically and to have very detailed and spontaneous approaches to resolving a complex issue like the Ukraine war.

1:04
What we have seen in the last seven days is a remarkable testament to the team that Donald Trump has put together, who are very intelligent, who are very experienced in human relations and dealing with people, which is essential to any diplomatic effort. I’m speaking now of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State; of Steve Witkoff, who is President Trump’s personal emissary and longtime confidant and colleague in international business; and Mr. Walz, who is the national security advisor to the president.

1:47
They displayed acumen, they displayed tact and diplomacy, and they made a very positive impression on their Russian counterparts, which is this trust building that your coverage, that your reportage has just mentioned. This is essential for something as complex as the restoring relations between countries at the top, that have been at the top of the world in general as superpowers, restoring their confidence in one another. And I think that very wisely the delegations yesterday divided the tasks ahead of them into three separate baskets, we may call them. The first one is to restore normal diplomatic functioning, since the embassies of both Russia in Washington and the United States in Moscow are operating at a skeletal level, a minimal level.

2:43
The ambassadors have not been appointed. The staff has been drastically reduced. The Russians in the United States are handicapped by the cutoff of their access to normal banking relations, so they can’t even pay the staff properly. These abnormal conditions have to be reviewed and reversed. So if you have an operating diplomatic corps in the other country, you’re able to support very complex and difficult tasks that the parties have now to deal with, bigger issues of not just the Ukraine war, but as Mr. Trump’s team said, the geopolitical issues that they face.

PressTV: 3:27
Mr. Doctorow, over the last couple of decades, if any US President truly cared about peace in Eastern Europe, they would have respected the long-standing notion that after Gorbachev’s fall, that the US is not going to push eastward close to Russia’s borders. If any US president came along throughout this time and decided that look– And Ironically, when you do push close to Russia’s borders, that’s only going to create more conflict and lead to something like we’re witnessing today in Ukraine, because this could all been have been averted if anyone cared not to continue demonizing Russia to the point where they feel they need to pull up to its doorsteps.

4:04
They would have probably got along better with Russia and that respect could have been reciprocated, we wouldn’t be where we are today, and Ukraine would have never happened.

Doctorow:
This all goes back to the final days of Gorbachov, and what I’m about to say has a lot of relevance to the situation that Iran faces in restoring its relations with the United States and its position with the West in general.

The issue here is the lack– you cannot have trust in people who are untrustworthy. And the United States officials, going back to the George Bush senior administration, were untrustworthy. It’s easy. We have generally said that Mr. Gorbachev was politically very sophisticated in having his way within the Soviet power elite. And he feinted to the right, and he feinted to the left, keeping his opponents on both ends of the spectrum off balance, so that he could push through reforms which his opponents on both sides opposed or rejected.

5:07
Mr. Trump is also showing that kind of political balancing act and skill. But on the negative side, it was said about Gorbachov that a man who was so skillful in handling his colleagues in the Soviet Union was naive, even foolish in his dealings with the United States administration and with Germany and the Europeans in general, because he didn’t require a written agreement on what was being discussed, that is, not to move NATO lines to the east. That was just done on a handshake and without solemn documents.

5:44
Of course, that is admitting the fact, overlooking the fact, that a gentleman’s honor was worth something going back, say, to the days of John Kennedy, when his agreement with Krushchev that Russia would remove its nuclear arms in Cuba and the United States would remove its missiles, nuclear-capable missiles in Turkey and in Italy. That was done on a handshake, a verbal agreement. No more, no less than what Mr. Gorbachev sought. But John Kennedy was a man of honor.

6:17
The people around George Bush Sr., the people around the Clintons, they were dishonorable people. They weren’t fair; they were card cheats. And the United States administration under Joe Biden was constituted by card cheats. By definition, you cannot agree anything with these people, whether it’s oral or in writing.

6:40
Happy to say that the people whom Trump has appointed appear to be honorable people. They appear to be intellectually … competent and experienced. They have done deals, deals that have worked and lasted. So for you in Iran, I think it is very important to watch what’s going on.

PressTV:
Always a pleasure, Mr Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst there joining us out of Brussels.

7:12
And viewers, this brings us the conclusion of this Press TV world news bulletin here. Thank you for tuning in, and bye-bye for now.

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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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One thought on “Transcript of Press TV, Iran interview dated 19 February”

  1. Na minha visão de homem comum, os americanos já nascem trapaceiros e quando a situação complica, não hesitam em mudar diametralmente suas convicções, creio que o fato gerador atual chama-se BRICS.

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