Interview with Glenn Diesen: The Ukraine War Is Reshaping the World

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Listening to my chat yesterday evening with Professor Glenn Diesen of the Southern Norway University. I understood that his professional interest in geopolitics prompted him to pose questions that other interview hosts are not asking and which the audience should find refreshing because they look beyond the questions of this very moment to where Europe is headed when the Ukraine war comes to an end, whether Russia and Europe can re-knit commercial, cultural and other relations and the like. We are daily witnesses to a changing world order but how often do we lift our heads to consider these big picture questions?

I have no intention of spoiling the pleasure of discovering how we dealt with the big questions except to say that I am more predisposed to see the solutions not in what Europeans can do for themselves on their own but in how what the Americans do creates a scramble in Europe to catch up. For example, once Washington and Moscow agree on restoring direct flights between their countries, I expect there to be a stampede of European airlines to be liberated from the awful constraints of flying around instead of over the critical 12% of the world’s land mass, meaning Russia, which represents the only economically viable routing to East Asia. This obstacle is a major factor in explaining the great increase in passenger traffic on the airlines of the Gulf States these past few years. And so it will be with other commercial domains: the US rescinds sanctions and the Europeans fight among themselves to shed sanctions here.

Will the Russian foreign policy be overmilitarized when the war ends? Will Russia’s military industrial complex downsize or grow still further to support export sales of its world-beating arms?  Have a listen!

Of course, in the opening minutes we did spend a bit of time considering the adequacy or not of Russia’s response so far to the Ukrainian attack 10 days ago on the strategic bomber that form part of its deterrent nuclear triad at air bases across the Russian Federation.

I am appreciative of Professor Diesen’s flashing the front cover image of my new book War Diaries at the very start of our interview. Hopefully some viewers will get the hint.

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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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