Transcript of interview with Glenn Diesen, 14 May

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bWR-jEgtWc

Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome. I’m joined today by Professor Gilbert Doctorow, an international affairs analyst, historian and also an author. Welcome back to the program.

Doctorow:
Thank you very much.

Diesen:
Well, the issue of negotiations to end the Ukraine war, I guess it confuses many people, because after three years of full diplomatic boycotts, not even wanting to talk to the Russians, the Europeans appear to be in a great haste.

They recently issued an ultimatum of a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which meant not discussing any political settlements before the ceasefire. Indeed, not discussing with the Russians at all. This was all communicated through ultimatums and threats of sanctions, as none of the Europeans are actually picking up the phone to speak with Moscow. How do you make sense of this recent, well this debacle? Within the, I’m not sure if we can even call it diplomacy. But how do you make sense of this?

Doctorow:: 1:02
Well, what the Europeans are doing is hard to understand. We’ll make an attempt at it. But it has to be put in a broader context. What Donald Trump is doing is hard to understand. His method of leading these negotiations is to create a total fog, total confusion so that all of the many opponents to his efforts don’t know what comes next and cannot offer serious opposition to what he may try to be doing. At the same time, it has inherent in it a formula for complete failure.

He is actively backing his two envoys, Steve Witkoff and General Kellogg, who are each embodying a different solution, a contradictory solution. Witkoff is close to the Russian position and Kellogg is very close to the European-Zelensky position. It is impossible to see how this can lead to a settlement. I also come back to the starting point of the basic illogic in one of the co-belligerents, namely the United States, who’s been supplying arms and finance to Ukraine for the last three years. And one of these co-belligerents just stepped forward as a mediator.

2:31
It doesn’t make sense. And that is why we are at this very peculiar situation where everyone’s waiting for news of whether or not Putin and Trump and Zelensky will all be in the same location in Istanbul tomorrow together with their teams and doing something to bring about a peace. I find this very hard to understand.

Diesen:
Well, the Kellogg proposal is interesting because again the main demands of the Russians is restoring Ukraine’s neutrality. Instead he came up with a proposal in which the Russians will pull back, well both sides pull back 15 kilometers each so they can send troops from NATO countries to observe, not considering themselves apparently participants in the conflict also under an unconditional ceasefire.

3:28
So it is a bit perplexing that is the, as you said, the United States plays the role of the mediator, even though it’s been, I guess, one of the leading participants. And Europeans are going to play the role of the objective or neutral peacekeeper. It doesn’t really make that much sense. So do they know that this is dead in the water, or is there any hope you think that the Russians can be pressured into accepting this framework?

Doctorow:
If we have to look for logic in the midst of this fog, the logic that I come to is the following. That Trump is setting up a situation where all parties will be witness to the impossible conditions that Zelensky is proposing, whereby the loser in a military contest is seeking a solution which makes him the victor, and makes the winner on the battlefield the one who is suing for the losers position of paying reparations, of submitting to a war tribunal, and all the rest of it that has appeared in the Ukrainian peace proposals of the last three years and in recent statements by the European leaders.

5:02
So it’s a basic fundamental nonsense coming out of Zelensky. And if Trump wants to be consistent and logical, which is a great effort to accept because he is so illogical in many of his activities, then he will do what comes next, which is to denounce Zelensky, to say that it’s impossible to reach a settlement based on the Ukrainian positions, and he would wash his hands on the whole thing.

If we want to be logical, and if Trump gives the lead to Witkoff and more or less muzzles Kellogg, when, if they all should be in the same room or the same building anyway, then it would be logical for Zelensky to withdraw and to abandon the presidency and to say, “I leave this to my successors to accept a defeat which I will not accept.”

6:09
That would be logical. But for people who are snorting cocaine, I think it’s too much to expect a logical behavior on the part of Mr. Zelensky. So, we’ll see.

Diesen:
What is the recent political stunt by Zelensky? Because he argued, I’ll be flying to Istanbul and I want to meet Putin here on Thursday, which is, usually you don’t give a foreign leader 48 hours to show up. It’s also unclear what kind of negotiations that would be or how basic issues like security could be arranged, but he will only meet with Putin. This comes after three years of saying there’s nothing to talk about, he refuses to even have any negotiations. How do you make sense of this? Is this either panic that the front lines are now collapsing quickly, or is it just knowing that these demands can never be met?

In other words, trying to play the role of the peacemaker to Trump, given that Trump is, well, obviously frustrated with Zelensky’s, Zelensky being opposed to negotiations and peace. How do you make sense of Zelensky’s? Because it’s very hard to take this very serious.

Doctorow: 7:35
I think the whole stage that we’re watching is being managed by Trump. I believe that he told Zelensky, I don’t have to imagine it, in his social site, social media, Trump said directly to Zelensky, “Show up immediately, accept the invitation from Putin to open negotiations, and accept immediately.”

I think that Putin would go to Istanbul only on the condition that Trump is there. And Trump’s latest statements suggest the opposite. He’s going to go to Istanbul because Putin is there. That’s nonsense. Putin would never show his face in Istanbul without Trump being there.

8:33
And the reason for that is that he is confident that Zelensky will make such utterly idiotic statements that the Americans have no choice but to denounce him and to abandon him. And for that reason, Putin will go. The Russian talk shows were saying last night that it is utterly foolish to speak about direct negotiations with Zelensky. That Zelensky is not an independent force, he is dependent on his curators, as Russians call his backers in Western Europe and the United States. And the only people that you can negotiate with are the Americans. So if Trump is there, then the Americans are there and Putin can negotiate with him, while Zelensky is probably in the next room fuming.

Diesen: 9:34
But are you, do you, are you sure or do you– why do you see Trump moving in this direction? Because initially, he was all for, during his campaign, ending the war in 24 hours, but then gradually it appears that he’s been taking more of the neocon position, that he’s been making the war more and more a Trump war, that is, by supplying weapons, continuing the intelligence, instead of just cutting the ties to Ukraine and walking away. But it looked for a while that this was what he was going to do, especially after that big debacle in the Oval office.

But do you see Trump looking for a way of still severing ties with Ukraine? Because there seems to be some optimism among the Europeans that they can pull America back into the war, but you see it differently?

Doctorow:
Well, that, I think, is being seeded. It’s being promoted by Trump to keep them out of his path. If I can give any justification for the confusion that he is spreading, it is, again, to disarm his enemies and to keep them from a direct attack on himself as long as possible until they are faced with a fait accompli and then have to back off and accept what has happened. I think what you were just suggesting is a subject of a lead story in today’s “Financial Times”, in which they’re saying that Trump– they make reference to JD Vance’s statements to the press yesterday that the Russians are overplaying their hand, they’re demanding too much.

11:24
And from that they’re reading that Trump has become much more sympathetic to the cause of the Ukrainians and much less sympathetic to the Russians. This is again, this is part of the confusion that he and his entourage are spreading for tactical reasons. The question is, at what point are you no longer confusing the other side and confusing yourself? I don’t know if Trump is genuinely the owner of a solution or if he is wandering about and changing his mind day to day by what the last person whispered in his ear, which is what Trump detractors say. The point in today’s “Financial Times” article was they interviewed people who would be the natural enemies of anything and everything that Trump has undertaken.

12:17
For example, former Ambassador McFaul. And you hear them say statements when you just cannot believe what you are reading. McFaul saying, “Well, finally, Trump is seeing that the Russians are not friends of America.” My goodness. After three years of war, which United States has repeatedly declared Russia to be an enemy and has done everything possible to break the country.

And McFaul is saying that Trump is just discovering that the Russians are not a friend. This is beyond comprehension. It is a kind of insanity that even the “Financial Times” think this is worth publishing because it looks too stupid for words.

13:04
So, as I said, Mr. Trump’s basic negotiating tactic is spreading confusion. What can come out of this confusion, we don’t know.

Diesen:
Well, If Trump’s tactic is spreading confusion, do you put his somewhat recent statements in that same category? He was given an interview and he argued that Russia doesn’t simply want a strip of Ukraine, it wants all of Ukraine. After all of this, it seems somewhat hard to believe that he actually believes this. Of course, he followed it up with the argument that because of his leadership, Russia is not doing it.

So it’s, I guess, you know, building himself up as someone who can restrain Russia. But do you think he actually believes this? Or is this again to show that he can take a strong line against Russia in order to effectively win forward his political case?

Doctorow: 14:07
I would like to believe that he is canny as a fox, but there are times I admit when I’m uncertain about that. This remark that you’ve quoted is typical of the slightly unbelievable remarks that he makes from day to day, in what looks like flip-flops, again, to make sure that each side believes that he is, or is potentially, can be, on their side if just you get his ear at the right moment.

No, of course he cannot believe the Russians want to take all of Ukraine. As I have commented recently on this, it is, as you say, setting up the public, whoever is listening to these remarks, to believe that he has prevented the Russians from taking all of Ukraine. They’re only taking the four provinces that they now largely occupy, plus Crimea. And so he has saved the rest of Ukraine for Ukraine. Put in the context of all of the Biden administration remarks, and the progressive Democrats today still believe in saying that Putin wants to take the Baltic states, he wants to take Poland.

So against that context, if the Russians only walk away with four provinces in Ukraine, it would look like a great victory for the mediator, Mr. Trump. But that would look like a victory only to children. I don’t think any serious adults can take any of this talk seriously.

Diesen: 15:43
I guess the whole narrative that Russia wants to take all of Ukraine, it can serve two different objectives. I guess the one is the idea that we have to confront the Russians, because they’re after territory, so continue the war. However, that argument that Russia is after all Ukraine, as you said, it can also serve a different purpose, that is by claiming victory by only losing four regions. So again, I’ve been assuming at least for a long time that this is kind of the narrative which the Europeans will start to lean into as well when it becomes evident that a peace settlement is required, a painful one, even humiliating one, that they can at least lean on the idea that “Putin wanted to take all and he only got four. In other words, we won.” Again, if it’s a face-saving measure, I’m all for it, just as long as it leads to an actual peace.

16:40
But I’m nonetheless still confused with how the Europeans are reacting now. The whole concept of an ultimatum. Again, there’s some very big developments taking place on the front line now. They are cracking quite quickly and as this is happening the Russians are mounting more and more pressure across the whole front line. How do you post an ultimatum to the side that’s winning? It is turned on its head, isn’t it?

Doctorow:
You can do that if you have the wherewithall, which they don’t. There is the real delusional nature of their activity. They don’t have the force. They have engaged, they have cleaned out their armory, they’ve shipped everything that could be of any use to Ukraine.

And now they’re threatening with military action, for further economic sanctions, when Russia is already the most sanctioned country on earth. These, this is posturing and nothing more. There’s no, the Russians know there’s no reality behind these threats. They just want to look good to their voting public as if they’re tough guys. And that’s particularly the case with Mr. Merz, whose victory and installment as chancellor was quite hollow when he lost the first vote on his taking power. So I don’t– we are in a situation where Mr. Trump faces many severe challenges, domestically and foreign challenges. Some of these challenges he has created himself by very poor, poorly conceived and implemented actions like his tariff war over the top in respect to China. So he has set for himself many handicaps but didn’t have to be there.

18:34
But that being said, there were handicaps which preceded his arrival on the scene. And they are with him, that is the opposition in Europe of the major countries that we’ve named, and the opposition, both within the Republican Party and, of course, in the whole Democratic Party. He is apparently trying to keep his enemies at bay by making it seem as though one day he will lean this way, as they wish, and the next day he will lean the other way, as they don’t, and they don’t know how it’s all going to end up, but they’re hopeful that he’s still going to be brought around. That seems to be his tactic, but I’m skeptical that he will succeed.

Diesen: 19:20
He seems to be playing a similar game in the Middle East, by the way, in which it goes from being Israel’s biggest supporter to almost looking to embarrass Netanyahu.

But if a peace can’t be made now, how long do you think this war can actually go on? Because it does, as you said, there’s not much more to send. Macron even made that point in the news, I think it was yesterday, he was being interviewed on French television. He was saying, we sent effectively what we had to send, the rest we need for our own security. So if there is no more weapons to send, if we’re recognizing the huge shortage in manpower on the Ukrainian side and also as some Western newspapers have been reporting, the Russian military production is just spewing out more heavy weaponry, but they’re all being sent to the rear, building up a very powerful force.

20:22
All of these indications, wouldn’t it, we still don’t want to negotiate a peace, but where will this end? Do you think we’re reaching the final stages here?

Doctorow:
I think we are, but not for the reasons that most people would imagine. I don’t believe the Russians will win the war and get the capitulation of Ukraine on the battlefield, not in the near term. Over the long term, but over the long term, this can go on for a very long time.

The end of the war will come before the new year, and it will come not from a further victory on the battlefield, it will come from the political collapse of Ukraine when Mr. Trump says that he’s stopping all arms shipments to Ukraine and that he will not provide, sell arms to Europe for delivery to Ukraine. If he has the courage and the logical consistency to do that, then the war is finished in a matter of a few months. That is the end that I see. Not some vast Russian offensive that abolishes the Ukrainian army.

21:33
That is what many cheerleaders of Russia among our peers on YouTube are saying. I don’t believe it for a minute. I believe it will end by the political collapse of Ukraine.

Diesen:
How would that collapse, again, triggered, of course, by the lack of access to weapons, but would it be a struggle, would the military stand up against Zelensky? Would it be the nationalist? Is it an uprising in civil society? Because I guess the dividing lines within Ukraine, there’s quite a few of them. How do you see the regime change playing out if it’s not directly initiated by the Russians?

Doctorow: 22:15
I think that the military will push him out. I don’t think there’ll be a violent coup d’etat. I think he has enough sense of reality to take the plane out when he sees that he’s about to be overthrown and murdered. But I think that the military will come around. The main thing that I want to bring up as to why the war will not end quickly is that Mr. Putin continues his emphasis on the war of attrition. And that is a slow process.

And the Ukrainians are putting their emphasis on their drone warfare which is quite effective. Russians also have drone warfare, these are two countries that are using the latest state-of- development arms effectively, which change the battlefield conditions and put an emphasis on a very few intelligent game players, video game players, who have converted into into operators of drones, versus hundreds of thousands of men in the field.

The Russians no longer can place in the field large concentrations of troops to overrun the enemy. It is not feasible because of the risks inherent in attack by kamikaze drones. So the numbers game where the Russians vastly outnumber the Ukrainians, whose numbers are dwindling, whose best fighters are already being killed, that numbers game is no longer so significant as fielding effective use of drones.

23:56
So the war has changed, and that is why I’m saying precisely the war will not be decided on the battlefield, but in the halls of power in Ukraine. And as you have said, the logical force to precipitate this change is the military.

Diesen:
So if we have this regime change and the war comes to an end, what do you see will happen to the transatlantic partnership that is NATO and, well in general America’s role in Europe? Because it’s often argued these days that one of the key reasons why the Europeans are in panic is because if the war comes to an end now, the Americans will or to some extent act upon what they have said they would, which is to deprioritize Europe. Do you do you see fractions deepening once the war comes to an end?

Doctorow 24:54
No, I see something else. As I’ve just indicated, Donald Trump has it within his power to bring about peace in the Russian-Ukraine war. But not at a negotiating table as we’re seeing now. This is just the antechamber to the real settlement, which is when he when he withdraws all support to Ukraine.

The United States also has the power to end the problem of NATO and to force its Western allies to come to a negoting table with the Russians over revising the continent’s security arrangements, architecture. And that is very simple. If Mr. Trump does what he should do, which is to renounce the Biden agreement with Scholz over installing American nuclear-armed medium-range missiles in Germany. If that is done, then Europe’s defense is finished.

25:57
The logical thing to do would be for him to renounce that upon agreeing with the Russians that they will withdraw all of their nuclear-tipped missiles to the Urals. That is so they’re no longer pode a threat. Let us remember the war started because of Russia’s perception that Ukraine was being used by NATO and by the United States for the soon to be installed medium-range missiles there that can reach Moscow in five minutes. That was unacceptable to the Russians, and it gave them reason to start this war.

That issue has not been addressed. Mr. Trump can address it in the manner I just said, by removing all missiles and all nuclear weapons on this continent, Europe, including French and British. If that is done, the Russians will sign on the dotted line tomorrow, and the whole presence of NATO will be eviscerated. Mr. Trump doesn’t have to quit NATO. He has to remove the threatening elements of NATO that cause us all to lose sleep at night. And he has that within his power. So Mr. Trump is a central figure if he ever reasons logically, which is not guaranteed.

Diesen: 27:22
My final question is just about how the domestic situation in Russia as you see it goes. Well, you just returned from St. Petersburg. How do you explain the economic growth in Russia, not just within the state, but the overall rise in the standard of living? How does this make sense there in the middle of an expensive war and the sanctions which the world has never seen has been launched against them by the collective West. So how do you make sense of, well, what did you observe and how do you make sense of this?

Docrorow:
Well, when you watch the Vladimir Solovyov program regularly, you see a certain Duma member. He’s a deputy chairman of the Duma, Mr. Babakov, who every weekend, every time he’s on the show, is talking about not viewing the horrible 21% interest rates at the Bank of Russia set, which destroy economic growth and so forth. Here we have the the nexus of the issue, how Russia’s economy is prospering, which it definitely is. Not just in the face of the sanctions, which they’ve had eight years to prepare for. From 2014 to present, they were very busy hardening their defenses against this type of sanctions, but because of their own action to protect their exchange rate, to protect, to keep down, tamp down the inflation, which would be natural when many sources of supply were dried up because of sanctions and the inability of producers, manufacturers who had long ties with Russia to deliver the goods. So how do they survive all this?

29:14
I’ve turned that around in my mind quite a bit, and I’m satisfied that the answer I’m about to give you is very relevant to the question that you posed. That is, Russia has both a free economy or market economy approach, which is what Nabuil is introducing, to keep down inflation, and you support your currency by higher interest rates, which are now at the unbelievable level of 21%. At the same time, you have a statist approach going on, where the Minister of Finance is providing subsidies to the banking system, note, to the banking system to dispense credit to specific industries and specific favorite son manufacturers that are producing goods and services that are deemed essential to the country’s growth. That is to say, you have state management of the economy through dispensing cheap credits to favored industries and favored manufacturers. That is what gave Russia its 4% growth rate in the face of interest rates which should have turned it into recession.

30:26
And that– so there’s a very complex management of the economy, which includes elements of trading in the national currencies as opposed to the dollar, which includes the various settlement provisions that have been put in place so that goods from the whole world are available. What I have commented in my writings about what I see in supermarkets, I haven’t gone into this side of it. How do they get the stuff there? Not just logistically, that’s the least of it. But financially, how is this paid for?

How are suppliers receiving due revenue for the exports to Russia? I see celery, green stalk celery, iceberg lettuce, watermelons of fantastic quality from Iran in the supermarkets and the corner stores. The corner greengrocer has these things. They have four varieties of strawberries in the corner store from the Russian Kuban, from Azerbaijan, from Turkey and from Greece. How do they do this?

31:40
It’s fantastic management of payments in the absence of SWIFT. They have mastered this in a most professional way. I’d like to call attention to again, a big issue. Mr. Putin has supervised since 20– well, since he came to power, but most especially after 2008, when the conflict of the United States really took off.

He has managed a reindustrialization of Russia, which is going full blast. Now, this, if Mr. Trump admires, respects, and I would say envies Vladimir Putin and Russia, it’s because they have succeeded in a reindustrialization which Mr. Trump would like to see in the States. Russia has done this thanks to sanctions, and Mr. Trump would like to do this through self-imposed tariffs. The idea is the same, to make it difficult or impossible for foreign suppliers to deprive domestic would-be manufacturers and agriculture participants from growing, from manufacturing what the country needs domestically and not importing these goods. It’s a similar end that is sought by both Trump and Putin.

33:12
Putin has already reached that point, thanks to American sanctions. And Mr. Trump would like to get to that point by way of self-imposed sanctions that are called tariffs.

Diesen:
Yeah, I remember recognizing that when I was working in Moscow, since 2014, how they were essentially sanction-proofing their economy, pursuing some import substitution, developing more technological sovereignty, safeguarding supply chains, having more conservative fiscal policy to be less vulnerable if these things would happen. So it appears to have paid off.

33:52
And always, Gilbert Doctorow, thank you so much for your time. Always appreciate it.

Doctorow:
Always a pleasure.