Interview with Glenn Diesen: Russia Calls U.S. Peace Plan Acceptable, Trump-Putin Meeting Is Confirmed

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Perhaps it is a misnomer to call today’s video with Professor Glenn Diesen an interview, because that suggests an imbalance in the discussion that is very clearly not present in what you will find here. In fact, both sides have questions, both sides point to contradictions in the information being fed to the public.

What is presented in this video is ‘brainstorming’ because neither questioner nor interviewee came to the show with a solid understanding of what is going on between the Trump and Putin teams that led them to agree to a face-to-face meeting within the coming week.  And we were both thinking on our feet, so to say. Some viewers may find this refreshing; others may well be disappointed that neither of us has certainty about what comes next.

The fact that a summit will take place indicates that a lot of work has been going on behind closed doors. That is the way diplomacy should function, even if it leaves us commentators in an awkward spot. Happily, public diplomacy which was briefly so popular at the start of this millennium has been brushed into the wastebin of history.

I take it as an operating assumption that Trump and Putin are not fools, that they are acting rationally, and that, somehow, they are approaching agreement on the acceptable outcome of the Ukraine war, as well as on much bigger issues like reinstating arms control agreements, revising the security architecture of Europe and generally reducing security concerns on all sides.  In a week we will likely know better to what extent these operating assumptions are valid.

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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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