Transcript of interview with Glenn Diesen, 28 June

Transcript submitted by a reader
Diesen
Hi everyone and welcome. Today we’re joined again by Gilbert Doctorow, an historian and international affairs analyst and also the author of War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War in which I’ll put a link in the description. And I’m actually reading this book myself at the moment, which is a big book and more or less an encyclopedia of the war itself. So yeah, definitely a book to recommend. Welcome to the program.
Doctorow
Thank you

Diesen.

 The reason I wanted to talk with you today was about the NATO Summit. And also what this means for the future of NATO because previous NATO summits have usually been about, well at least in the past years, have been almost all about Ukraine. Otherwise it’s been about common values or collective security But this year it seemed to be all about paying tribute to Trump. And after all this display of unconditional loyalty and obedience, Trump more or less left without any further commitments. So it was quite extraordinary.

And So I was wondering what you make of this summit and what does it tell you about the future of NATO? Is this, as some people argue, a dead man walking?

Doctorow

I think you have to concentrate on Mr. Trump and what he was hoping to achieve, and I believe he did achieve at this summit. Because the main activity of the member states, the leaders of the member states, was to prevent a catastrophe, some scandal, getting into a fight with Donald, leaving him unhappy, exposing him to people he didn’t want to see in front of cameras, meaning Zelensky.

So there was a damage control exercise by the member states of NATO with Mark Rutte, the secretary general in charge of that, and exposing himself to widespread condemnation for fawning over Trump. Trump lapped it all up. He was happy as can be. But I’d like to move away from the psychological portraits, which is unfortunately what nearly all of our peers pay attention to. And I’d like to look at the business part of it, which I think is intrinsic in your question.

On the business side, Trump got what he wanted. They signed on the dotted line, all countries except Spain, signed on the dotted line, committing themselves to this 5% of GDP available for financing the military, the defense budgets. It should be achieved within 10 years. The point of is, which so many pro-Atlanticist publications are saying, demonstrates the solidarity of NATO. Yes, there’s solidarity going down like a stone in the sea.

The answer to your brief question, is this the end of NATO? No, it isn’t. NATO will linger for some time. What does this signify then? It signifies the off-ramp for Donald Trump and the United States. By that I mean, by having these countries all commit to put up several trillion dollars or euros in defense spending in the coming decade, he has cleared the way for the United States to downsize, to downscale its contribution to NATO, which has been traditionally two-thirds of the overall budget of NATO.

And that is unsustainable politically in the United States when the mood is running in favor of Trump and there’s a slight isolationist mood in the United States. He’s not going to pull out. He cannot pull out of NATO. That would require the two-thirds majority vote in Congress, which he does not have and he knows very well that he doesn’t have it.

But he can reduce American contributions, freeing up the American military budget for other engagements, particularly in the Far East and for technology development in his unfortunately announced Golden Dome project.

So in that respect, this was political theater. Now this was the second run at political theater that we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the last 10 days. The first run was his staging the attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran, which has received enormous attention, even to the present. The last, yesterday’s news in major media were all about whether Donald Trump lied. Of course.

What does that mean? What does it say about America’s defense if the president is lying and his associates were all lying about an issue of great importance bearing on national defense?

 And then they get into the personal psychoanalysis of Mr. Trump, which they always use as a feeding fest for many of the commentators of major media. Regrettably, Glenn, also for many of the commentators in alternative media. I’m very disappointed to see my peers follow the big boys in the major media into this dead end.

Unfortunately, the dead end is not arbitrary. It is totally characteristic of the way we in the West look at international developments and personalize everything. Russia is run by one man whose name is Vladimir Putin. He grew up as kind of a slum kid, fighting, scrapping in the yards, and then he went on to a KGB career, and that’s all we have to know about him. And then, of course, they all engage in various psychological portraits of Donald Trump as a man who lies whenever he can, wherever he can.

I was just picking up and re-reading J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. And there, my goodness, there was a portrait of Donald Trump, Holden Caulfield, who never, never misses the opportunity to lie when he could otherwise tell a straight story. However, this leads us nowhere. That is missing the point of statesmanship and what you accomplish as a country’s leader.

I said the West falls into this trap of layman’s psychoanalysis, which even professional psychoanalysts will tell you is a very risky thing to do remote when the patient isn’t sitting on a couch in front of you. But I described that as the West. Why did I say the West? Because in the East, particularly in the Soviet Union, when Marxist dialectic was predominant in shaping people’s minds in higher education. They always distinguish between the subjective and the objective.

We in the West are looking wholly at the subjective. What did Donald want? What does this one want? And we’re not looking at what was the consequence of their action. And so we get trapped in speculation, mad speculation, which is not productive.

In the instance, looking at what he did in Hague, everyone’s talking about the fawning on him, on how he was gratified and how he smiled to this one or shook hands with that one. I’m sorry, these are irrelevancies. The piece of business he had to do he did. And whether he was aware consciously that he was planning that this would be an exit ramp, we don’t know. To say it, it’s speculation.

But what he did is not speculation. He prepared the way for an exit. Just as what he did in Iran. I don’t know what he wanted, nobody does. They convey, the main discussion is carried out as it is mostly by the press who are deeply anti-Trump and are looking for anything to prove that the man is unworthy of office.

Well, that’s good for them. It’s not good for us, the American public, because they’re working against the national interests for the sake of partisanship. What counts is what did he do, what he did in Iran, which he saved Israel from self-destruction. And that is the point.

Well, and they always were speculating, oh, this is just a temporary truce, that Israel will again go back on the offensive. Well, they haven’t read Larry Johnson’s article in his Sonar yesterday in which he set out on a map exactly what was destroyed in Israel, which was half the country, half the strategic assets of Israel. A few more days and there would have been no strategic assets left. This is what Donald Trump must have known when he made that decision to make a phony bombing raid on phony assets in Iran. And whether there is enriched uranium left in the hands of the Iranian regime or not is frankly speaking irrelevant to the considerations of Washington right now.

They had to get Israel out of this, while there was still something to save of Israel. And if that meant giving up the whole argument about Iranian enrichment and the Iranian bomb, well, they just gave it up. Trump as much as said that he doesn’t give a damn what he does sign or doesn’t sign with the Iranians. That the issue is over.

Now, that’s how it is with the summit.  Let’s look at the consequences. The consequences will come up in the coming months as we see the United States almost certainly scaling back its contributions to NATO.

Diesen

Well, I agree with your approach because the key focus, I guess, in the media is that Trump is a narcissist. He likes to relish in this. And I also think that this is, well, it’s relevant to the extent that European leaders, they believe that this is a way they can control him or manipulate that is just, you know, feed his ego and then we can make him do what we want kind of thing.

But I agree this is pure psychological approach. It’s good for explaining perhaps what Europeans are doing, but doesn’t get the whole picture because while Trump indeed most likely is very much a narcissist, it’s also worth noting that the strategic thinking has been quite consistent. If you watch his participation on talk shows, Larry King Live,  since the 1980s, he was always expressing concern about the alliance system. That is, yes, the alliance system might elevate the United States to leadership position, but it had too great of a cost. That is, financing all of its allies would run the US into bankruptcy.

So he kept using the word, you know, they’re treating us like a sucker. And it’s a reasonable argument that the empire isn’t sustainable. Again, you want a proper return on investment of empire if it should be sustainable over time. So the idea that others should pay for US protection and it shouldn’t be an expense, this is something he’s been saying for 40 plus years now. So to just dismiss this as him being all about, you know, well, he just wants people to, you know, throw compliments at him, I think we might be deluding ourselves.

But what he kind of keeps saying is not that different from what a lot of other American leaders have said over the decades. That is that Europeans should pay more for security, but no one really pushed it that hard. But all of this is more relevant today, I guess, given that the strategic focus of the United States is going to other places of the world. Again beginning under Obama’s pivot to Asia in 2010.

But he seems to have achieved some of this by asking for 5% expenditures on weapons by the Europeans and ideally by American weapons. It’s two things achieved. One, the Europeans are now paying America given that they have to buy American weapons. But the second would be that the Europeans acquire more, well, they take more responsibility for their own security, which enables the United States to reduce its commitment. But this is where I want to ask you about the contradiction, if you will, because in Europe, the idea is, you know, if we pay more for security, we do what Trump’s tells us, then he will be happy with us.

And, you know, we feed his ego and then he will stay in Europe. Or as Mark Rutte has written, you know, he wants to keep the family together. But we seem to neglect that we might achieve the opposite. If we keep increasing our military expenditure to increase our own stock value for the Americans, the Americans are able to say that Europe is now able to defend itself and then reduce the commitments. Do you see the same contradiction in the thinking between the Americans and the Europeans?

Doctorow
Well, you’re touching on the other side of the issue, which I didn’t get to. What Trump was achieving, he was getting them to commit to something which everyone knows they cannot fulfill. That doesn’t mean they say it. The only people who said it publicly were the Spanish. And they came out and refused to sign this on the dotted line because they said it’s not workable for them.

The fact is it’s not workable for anybody. The signal about the falseness of all of this commitment is a 10-year timeline. Ten years in politics is eternity. Most everyone who is in that room will not be in office. Some of them won’t be alive altogether within ten years.

And so when you put a timeline like that without having in place measured markers for achievement, then you’re saying it will not happen. Everyone kicks the can down the road. That’s how politics works. So that’s generally, without even looking at the particulars of this case, the specifics of the situation in one country after another, this was an empty promise. But let’s look at the case by case, because it’s very relevant to where we are today and what’s going to happen in the immediate future, not 10 years from now.

I live in Belgium. In Belgium, we had a demonstration the day before the opening of the Hague Summit. 35,000 people came out in the streets of Brussels. 35,000. That’s a lot for Belgian demonstrations that aren’t about this or that piddling change in pension laws.

And they were against rearmament, against an introduction of a draft. That’s a sign, just a straw in the wind. The bigger issue is that even Bart De Wever, the prime minister, admitted after the summit that it’s improbable that Belgium can reach these new targets. He was saying that because otherwise his government’s going to fall. If he proceeds beyond the present chicanery with the 2025 budget where they’re doing exactly what that extra 1.5% in the 5% is all about –  labeling infrastructure investments in roads and bridges as defense and putting that into their budget to reach 2% since Belgium is only at 1.3% today as a percent of GDP for its military budget.

To go beyond the 1.3% to say 3.5% which is for hard military spending is not possible. There’s no wiggle room in Belgium for finances. Neither to raise taxes nor to raise credits because the country is over-indebted. So it can only come at the expense of social benefits, and everybody knows what that means. That is political suicide for any Belgian government. For that reason, here in Belgium, the commitment was absolutely hollow.

Now let’s look at the big neighbor because Germany is really the driving force of the rearmament program, even more than loud mouted Macron since Merz actually has money to put there whereas Macron just has words. In the case of Germany, yes, they can put up a trillion dollars, as their chancellor has said. And Merz knows where he gets the money. So that isn’t the issue.

He can’t get the men. That is the issue. To have the equipment, to have more tanks rolling out and more drones produced is fine, but if there’s nobody to operate the new equipment, then you’re back where you started. You have no army to speak of. And we know that German volunteer recruitment was advertised for more than a month by the Defense Minister Pistorius producing almost negligible results. Something like 500 men, women signed up to join.

Pistorius himself said that if an all-out effort at recruiting volunteers does not pay off, the country will be obliged to introduce a military draft. That touched off a left-right divide in German politics.

There was an excellent article in yesterday’s Financial Times describing the signing of a manifesto against rearmament by a certain Mr.Peter Brandt, the elder son of the chancellor best known for introducing the Ostpolitik, Willy Brant. So Peter Brant was a signatory.

The article went on to explain the Brandt’s comments in general about how and why Russia should be, once again, taken up as a partner for Germany and not as the enemy, reintroducing the elements of his father’s Ostpolitik or new eastern policy. They went on to explain the rest of his logic, which unfortunately was very badly informed. He was saying that Russia really isn’t so strong, it’s taking three years to do anything in Ukraine, so therefore they’re not a threat. Well, of course, that’s complete rubbish. They are a threat. And they’re taking three years because that’s the way Mr. Putin wants to play the game, not because he can’t do otherwise.

Looking at solid reputable sources that are on the internet, WION, the largest international broadcaster of India with 9 million subscribers, they had a video on the internet yesterday explaining how the Russians have been using their upgraded missile Iskander-M to destroy American Patriot air defenses in and around Kiev, and how another rapid-fire rocket launcher, a kind of updated Katyusha, is now devastating the Ukrainian lines along the Donbas. There’s no question but that the Russians have the upper hand, they’re winning, and this comes out in articles of even the Russophobic Financial Times.

So the arguments that Mr. Brandt adduced are not correct and not well informed, but the fact that he has taken the lead, that his signature is on a new manifesto against rearmament is a new tipping point. Mr. Scholz introduced a tipping point in the last year of his chancellorship, that is that Germany no longer could cultivate relations with Russia, but that Russia was an enemy and that Germany must rearm and prepare for confrontations with Russia in the future. That was one turning point. Now we’re seeing another one, a turning point against that last turning point.

This manifesto was against rearmament, as I said. And although the SPD, the Social Democrats of Germany, have a majority which supports Pistorius in rearmament and in a draft, there is a very strong minority against. This is not my characterization. This was the remark of the pro-NATO Financial Time. And that the government can fall because it only has a majority of 17 votes in the parliament; so if a minority of the SPD vote against their own party, the government will fall. And that will be the end of Mr. Merz because he’s very unpopular. Should they go to the elections again, there’ll be somebody else who replaces him within the Christian Democrats. So Germany is at a tipping point, and that is of decisive importance for this commitment that was made in their name at the NATO summit by the most important military and industrial country in Europe.

For all of these reasons, the summit may be the last of its kind. The fact that only Spain came out against this doesn’t tell you anything. I think that Mr. Orban and Mr. Fico are also against it, but caution tells them not to oppose Brussels on everything. If all you need is one member to stand up and say what you want to say, it’s good enough. And Spain was that member this time.

Diesen

Yeah. Well, I guess it does make sense for everyone to stand up, given that Trump also threatened to punish Spain for not falling in line. But it is extraordinary though, the lack of pursuit of national interest, because Germany can change their government, but no government can survive unless they’re going to start to address basic national interests.

And for Germany, the great irony of making Russia their main enemy is if you want a competitive German economy, you do need to link up with the Russian economy. If Germany wants security, it really needs to also address Russian security, that is, overcome this effort to create a Europe without the Russians. And also, if you want a politically relevant Germany, you can’t have a Europe re-divided, remilitarized, because it will go from being a subject to an object of international security. So I don’t see how another election in Germany is going to fix this problem unless they begin to look a bit more honestly at what their actual national interest is versus policy.

So we’re at this position now where the Europeans are pretending to arm themselves to prevent the Americans from leaving, which is actually enabling the US from leaving.

They don’t have the economic power to do this. As you said, they don’t have the public support for this. They’re not able to mobilize the men to manage the equipment, which they can’t build, at least not in time. But even if they were able to do all these things, you know, the basic foundations of the security competition, which dictates international security, suggests that Russia’s not simply going to capitulate. We’re not going to restore a new hegemonic peace.

Russia will respond in some way. So how do you see Russia reacting to the Europeans seeking to arm themselves to the teeth?

Doctorow

I’ll respond to that in one second, but I’d like to take one step back to the question of NATO’s future existence and what that means more broadly. Because of the work of von der Leyen and her associates, NATO and the EU have become synonymous. They are so intertwined.

And that is deadly for the EU. If NATO goes down, the EU goes down with it. The whole glue of NATO is the Russian enemy and thanks to von der Leyen, the glue of the EU is the Russian enemy. So the consequences of this, what we just described, of a changing political balance in Germany, we went from Germany’s vote in the summit to what’s happening internally in Germany as a result of this position. And it’s not just a consequence for Germany, it’s for the whole EU.

But now the answer to your question, the big question, how does Russia react?

And here’s where it is amazing that the thinking is so poor within the EU and within NATO. The thinking is poor because there’s no debate, because there’s censorship, because all of this works against producing well thought out solutions or proposals. If there is no contest, intellectual contest pro and con for any of these major policies like the present rearmament policy, it can only be a very poor policy. And that’s what we see. The Europeans have not debated what rearmament will mean.

You spoke about buying American weapons. That’s a large part of it. But weapons for what? It’s already been demonstrated in the last two weeks to anybody, for anybody with eyes to see that the notion of air defense against the latest generation of missiles is utter nonsense, it is throwing money down the drain. You cannot resist them.

The logic is if you cannot resist the enemy, then come and talk to them and find some solutions, some that everyone can live with. Now the other thing: even if we were turned away from the money that is supposed to be spent on air defense, the general building of muscle, of conventional muscle so that Europe had an advantage like in its relations with the Soviet Union. To do that today is possible. The money can be found, as Germany is demonstrating, but what will be the net result? The net result will not be the defeat or a negotiating advantage over Russia.

Russia has nuclear weapons that are entirely capable of deterring any possible European invasion of the Russian Federation. The idea of dealing Russia a strategic defeat is utterly stupid. And why is it stupid? Not because people advocating this are individually stupid, but because there is no debate in which the flaws of their reasoning could be brought to their attention and everyone else’s attention.

Diesen

 I noticed also that Medvedev went out and argued that no longer would Russia accept Ukraine in the European Union.

I think it was repeated by Sergey Lavrov as well, which has been many people seen as a possible compromise that is Ukraine has to remain neutral, but it can join the European Union. But this is one of the problems of making the EU indistinguishable from NATO or this geopolitical EU, which von der Leyen is trying to build, that the Russians now see the Europeans as being more hostile than the Americans, which has kind of switched the script a bit.

But do you think this will be significant or, well, that Ukraine is never going to join the EU to begin with, I guess, given that even some of their closest partners, such as Poland, would oppose this, much like the Hungarians or the Slovaks.

Doctorow

I think raising this question of Russia is not happy any more to envisage Ukraine within the EU takes us back to 2014 when the Kiev government was overthrown because Yanukovich waffled, was undecided whether to take the $15 billion, I think, that Putin offered him for economic assistance if he stayed out of the arms of the EU and the EU’s insistence that he sign the strategic cooperation with the EU and enter onto a path of eventually joining.

The reason why the Russians were so upset is exactly the same as what you just said of Medvedev now. That within the agreements for close cooperation with the EU there were secret annexes, and not so secret annexes. The one that’s not so secret was the requirement that the new country align its foreign policy with the EU. The secret part was they aligned their military policy with the EU. And that was, of course, totally unacceptable to the Russians.

And it remains so today. So although we may have heard some remarks in the past year or two that suggested that Russia didn’t really care about it, I don’t think they reflected the reality within Russia itself, within the strategic thinkers of Russia ove, what EU membership for Ukraine could entail. It’s not joining a military alliance as such, but actually it is de facto because of all the security cooperation that would come with EU membership.

Diesen

Yeah, I remember in 2014, this was sold in Europe as a trade agreement with Ukraine and almost focusing on student exchanges, something where it is kind of harmless things.

But it did have, I think was 14 or 17 articles where it, which addressed foreign policy in which Ukraine’s foreign policy would have to be brought into line with the European Union. And for EU that’s becoming increasingly anti-Russian in nature, it’s yeah, this becomes problematic and also could be used obviously as a stepping stone to NATO or make it a de facto NATO state. But if the Europeans would be successful in this development of weapons, how do you see this affecting the nuclear weapons policies of Russia? Because the Russians have already now begun to lower the threshold for nuclear weapons. And often this is, well, historically, this is often seen as loosening up the use of nuclear weapons for a skewed balance of power.

That is, during the Cold War when the Soviets had the superior conventional forces, NATO opened up for the first use of nuclear weapons. That is, if a conventional attack would threaten their existence, then they could use weapons, nuclear weapons first. After the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Soviets or then the Russians were severely weakened, suddenly NATO had overwhelming superiority in conventional capabilities. We saw it flipped and suddenly the Russians put it into the nuclear doctrine that they could use nuclear weapons first if their existence was threatened. So what exactly would be achieved by arming Europe to the teeth?

Is this supposed to be a deterrent or do they imagine these weapons being used in an actual fight with Russia? So, because it was only deterrent, the nuclear weapon seems to be sufficient. So, what is the thought here? Is it going to impact any war fighting in the future?

Doctorow
Well, the policy or doctrine relating to the insubordination of nuclear weapons is variable and changes over time in accordance with perceived threats.

And as you say, the, we can call them great equalizers– nuclear weapons are the great equalizer. The side that has less power in conventional war-making will opt for the great equalizer to defend itself or to create a deterrent against the side which has superiority in numbers and quality of its conventional forces. The Russians already tipped their hand. You don’t have to guess about this. When there was talk, when Mr. Starmer of Britain and Emmanuel Macron of France were speaking and putting together a coalition of the willing, numbering some 50,000 troops they would send nominally as peacekeepers to Ukraine, the Russians reacted and said that they saw this as hostile, they saw this as leading to an attack on their positions– and that they had no intention of going into trench warfare with the French and the British. They would instead use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy a whole lot of them at one blow. So that’s the answer to the question. Yes, of course, if Russia is threatened by a million or more well-armed Europeans, it will respond with tactical nuclear weapons.

Diesen
My last question, which is, what do you think will happen to NATO if it loses the proxy war in Ukraine, or to reframe it, when NATO loses this proxy war? What is going to happen to NATO itself? Beause it appears that, yeah, a lot of the political credibility has been gambled on this that we went all in. So, again, I always make the point, no academics like to stare into their crystal ball as there’s too many, you know, uncertain variables. But what do you expect at least?

Doctorow
Well, in its present form it will cease to exist. I think the Americans will leave NATO eventually. Of course, that will take some time, some changing in American opinion, in the political leadership in Congress, how they view America’s participation and how they view the whole global empire, whether it was a net plus or a net negative for American interests and for the American economy, I think that will change over time. But in the immediate future, NATO will not disappear, but it will fragment and elements of it will probably be incorporated into the defense that the European Union puts together for itself. They’re not going to just cast aside what they have, they will just redesignate it as what is already evident in the concept of the EU that von der Lryen has put in place as being a major geopolitical force in the world and not just an economic force.

So the pieces will be picked up and reintegrated into the EU. But I am hopeful that the political cataclysm that the final defeat of Ukraine will bring about in Europe will change the balance of power within the European Parliament and will lead to the removal or resignation of the von der Leyen team, the majority coming from the European People’s Party that has been so destructive in the last decade of the whole notion of the EU as a peace project. For that reason, I say there will be identifiable pieces of today’s NATO that will continue forever, but under new overall management that will be EU management and not the present NATO structure.

Diesen

Yeah, I do hope that the people who sacrificed Ukraine over the past decade to fight Russia would be held accountable so there’s some possibility for policy change. But as I suggested before, first there needs to be some opening for some, you said, intellectual competition to shape a more rational foreign policy.

But maybe the defeat in Ukraine would create the conditions for this. So yeah, thank you so much for letting me pick your brain and yeah, hope you’ll come back on soon.

Well, Thank you.