Transcript of ‘Redacted’ interview, 25 June

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x_ye1K3HP4

Redacted: 0:00
Well, NATO leaders are trying to play President Trump at the NATO summit with two narratives. Number one, Russia is coming any minute now. We are at eminent threat of a full ground war with Russia is what they want us to believe. Also, they will pay, they say, to match US contributions. They’re no longer just going to rest on the lure of American tax dollars. Wink, wink.

Only they are trying to fool the president with bookkeeping, shady bookkeeping entries. But they are going to pretend. Here is NATO leader Mark Rutte today lecturing NATO members about paying more in front of President Trump, who nods approvingly. Watch.

Rutte: 0:44
For too long, one ally, the United States, carried too much of the burden of that commitment. And that changes today.

President Trump, dear Donald, you made this change possible. Your leadership on this has already produced one trillion dollars in extra spending from European allies since 2016. And the decisions today will produce trillions more for our common defense, to make us stronger and fairer by equalizing spending between America and America’s allies.

Redacted: 1:20
Okay, they sure got a telling to, didn’t they? Our next guest, Gilbert Doctorow, is an academic and Russia-US expert. He says this is pure theater, because even if member states pretend to hit this 5% of GDP contribution, most of them can’t afford it. And even if they could, it would make Europe less secure, not more. So thank you for joining us. Why don’t you explain to us how this is theater and what the president means by victory lapping it? Does he know that it’s theater?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:55
Well, I think he’s behind it. He is creating for himself an off-ramp. When he goes back to the States, he can claim that Europeans are picking up much more of the expense of defense of Europe, and America can pay less. So without leaving NATO, he has prepared a downsizing of American participation, thanks to the upsizing of all of the Europeans that they just signed on to today.

Redacted:
So does this mean the U.S. Is getting a discount then? Because won’t the budget remain the same?

Doctorow:
He as much as said that. If they are increasing their contribution, then the Americans obviously are reducing their contribution. So that is the end result, similar to the political theater that we saw in its solution to the Israeli-Iran conflict, where effectively Trump was providing Netanyahu with an exit ramp.

3:00
So this is the second similar handling of allies and friends that we see within a week. I think it should be interpreted that way. But let’s start, take a step back. This is to be introduced over a 10-year period, which is to say by definition, it will never be introduced. Ten years in politics is an eternity.

Not a single person there in that room today will be in power in 10 years. In the meantime, they all can kick the can down the road. So that is a generalization. I’d like to introduce some specifics into this conversation, which come out of my more, my deeper knowledge of what goes on here in Belgium, the little country where I live, that just happens to be the home to the NATO headquarters. It’s a country which has one of the lowest contributions in Europe, when looking at its budget, military budget, as a percentage of GDP.

4:09
It’s only 1.3 percent here. There’s been a lot of discussion in the Belgian newspapers about how the prime minister, Mr. Bart de Weber, is promising to raise that to 2 percent before the end of the year. But it’s all by chicanery. It’s all by financial manipulations.

It’s by things like just relabeling various road improvements and bridge improvements that otherwise are part of the budget, and calling them defense spending, because they’re easing the way of Yankees who may arrive by plane or boat on these shores as they head off to fight the monster in the east whenever the war starts. This is nonsense. And it’s openly admitted, this is not my way, my judgment, it’s the judgment of serious pro-Atlanticist journalists in an Atlanticist publication, like most of the European media.

5:06
So the idea of going from this 2 percent up to 3 and a half percent, which is the real number that’s underneath the headline number of 5%– because the last 1.5% is indeed infrastructure spending, not real military spending– so to get from the 2%, which they can’t make now, to 3.5% is frankly politically impossible.

Again, not my judgment. This is a discussion of people who know a lot better than I do how things, the politics of budgeting works in Belgium. The simple statement is that there’s no room for raising taxes. The taxes on the employees, on working people, are the highest in the world here in Belgium. Low taxes on capital, real estate, so forth, but very high taxes on working people. You can’t raise them. There’ll be a rebellion. The government will fall.

6:09
Indeed, in anticipation of any formal move to raise the military budget, there is a serious threat that the liberals, who are part of the coalition, will leave the government and it will fall. It took nine months to put together the existing Belgian government after the June 2024 federal elections.

Nine months. If this government falls, it’ll take at least as much time to put together a replacement. And the caretaker government during that time cannot touch the budget, cannot introduce new legislation, meaning nothing will happen to meet this new higher spending requirements. Now, Belgium is not very dissimilar from the neighbors, even Germany, which has much better financing, much better credit access, easier to borrow, to pay for larger investments in its military industry and in paying for recruitments. Even there, they do not– they may find the money for the tanks, but they can’t find enough money to pay to buy off young men to go into the army.

7:24
The volunteers, I think in the last couple of months they got, 500 young Germans decided to enter, to sign contracts to serve. But Mr. Pistorius is dismayed, and he is talking about, Pistorius is the defense minister. He comes from Scholz’s party of socialists. But he more or less stands alone when he’s the one he says in his capacity as the defense minister that if the volunteers aren’t there, then he will will introduce the law for a draft to … forcibly raise the number of soldiers in the German army.

8:09
[commercial message]

Redacter: 9:32
If I just may interrupt, it’s predicated on a war with Russia, which they are hysterical about. And when we lived in Europe and this conflict broke out, the people of Europe bought it. They were like, “Oh yes, Russia, they must be stopped before they get here.” I don’t think they buy that any more. Do they?

Doctorow:
The elites, not the public.

Redacted:
Okay.

Doctorow:
The– I am in a prestigious social club called Royal because there are monarchists in it here in Belgium.

And they’re all successful professionals. And at table talk, I can draw conclusions. They even have some nice people at the table saying, “All our sons and daughters should go into military service. It’s good for their discipline and to their general education.”

Such nonsense appears at the table when they refuse to understand that entering the military service in a situation where you’re preparing for a war with Russia, it’s condemning your sons and daughters to an early death.

10:40
Now, you are right, very correct, in identifying the Russian bogeyman as something that is held up by the governments here for the reason of their own self-preservation. The only uniting feature in the EU– and the EU has almost entirely become synonymous with NATO– the only unifying feature is fear and hatred of Russia. You take that factor out, Europe falls to pieces. And so they are in this game for their own ambition to stay in power, not because they’re improving the security.

I’d like to get to that second point, that is that they’ll be weakening security of Europe, not strengthening it, if they were to succeed in raising the expenses, the expenditures on military purposes. Over the last 30, 40 years, there has been a shifting balance between Russia, or the Soviet Union originally, on the east, and Western Europe and NATO on the other side, on the west, over an emphasis in your defense planning on conventional weapons, conventional warfare, or on nuclear weapons.

12:02
When you are the weaker side, you go for the equalizer. The equalizer is nuclear. When you’re on the stronger side, you are a fan of conventional warfare, attrition warfare. In the end of the 1970s, early 1980s, before Russia collapsed, Russia even then understood that Europe, which had indeed a much stronger military establishment than today, two, three times more in the case of Germany, men, equipment, everything, although it was downscaled and left in a dilapidated state after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Back in the 70s and early 80s, the Russians, or Soviets, looking at Western Europe and at NATO, saw a real monster. It had maybe a million men at arms. It had vast numbers of tanks and all the heavy equipment you would want for conventional warfare.

13:02
And at that point, the Russians invested heavily in tactical nuclear weapons, the equalizer. Coming into this new millennium, the 25 years Mr. Putin has been in power, the situation is the reverse. Western Europe’s military has been reduced to negligible. Even Germany has close to nothing that works.

The whole of Europe has no air defense. And Russia, in the meantime, as we see on the battlefield in Ukraine, has become the strongest military in Europe, if not in the world. Not because it has 4 million people under arms, as in Soviet times, but because it has very well-equipped, well-trained and highly motivated men at arms, with the latest equipment, both strategic and tactical. Under these circumstances, Europe is quite scared and has reason to be scared. But there are two ways you can go about it.

14:05
You can try to protect yourself by building up your muscles, which is what Rutte and the NATO leadership, and the EU leadership of von der Leyen are trying to do. Or you can go and talk to the Russians and revise the security architecture to bring them in from the cold and to remove the threat. But as I said, removing the threat also removes the hold on power of all those people who are meeting today in The Hague and who are otherwise participants in the EU. So they are caught in their own personal ambitions, working against the interests of the countries that have elected them.

Redacted: 14:49
Well, you nailed it there. And the only thing that I might push back on is who will still be there in 10 years because Ursula von der Leyen seems so slippery. She’s like petrified wood in there that who knows when we’ll ever be rid of her. But I want to let everybody know that they can read more of this brilliant analysis at Gilbert Doctorow’s substack. And we link to it regularly in the Redacted newsletter.

He joins us … not from Russia, from Belgium, where it is late. So thank you, sir, for staying up and offering us this analysis as always.

Doctorow: 15:22
Well, thanks for giving me this platform.