Transcript of conversation with Glenn Diesen, 6 September

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kWxalQjkhM

Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, historian, international affairs analyst and author of _War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War_. So it’s good to have you back. There’s a lot that’s currently happening in the world, both in China, but also of course in Ukraine. But I thought a good place to start would be the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in China, as the dust appears to have been settling at the moment. And yeah, have we learned anything new from how I guess the world has changed as a result of this?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, yes, it’s changed. I think that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was hidden to a side, which was not really attracting the attention of the broad public in the West, and even of specialists, has moved to the fore ahead of BRICS. And the reason I say that is that BRICS has been held up, has progressed slowly because of the diverse interests of the founding members, in particular Brazil and South Africa, which have been in the past when it came time to vote on additional members, had been looking one eye to the United States and how their alignment with Russia, China, could affect their ongoing relationships with the United States. Now that, of course, has become the less serious question, since the United States has gone after all of them anyway and is engaged in this tariff war, which has been very cruel to both Brazil and to South Africa, both with 50 percent or more tariffs.

1:53
Nonetheless, in other matters also, the security interests, the financial well-being of Eurasia was not the key issue, a key issue of BRICS. Whereas these countries are important; together, they take in more than 40% of the world’s population, and I think something like 36 percent of global GDP. And they’re not being looked after properly by BRICS. So in this case, what we see, what we saw this past weekend during the gathering in Tianjin and then continuing at the military parade gathering in Beijing, was a big step in the evolution of the SCO. The SCO has been evolving gradually since its founding.

2:51
I don’t mean to say that this totally, what happened this past weekend totally changes the mission statement or the interests of the SCO, but it significantly moves it to a higher plane and one which requires the greater attention of the world community. And what I have in mind is the apparent primary emphasis now placed on financial and material well-being of the populations of Eurasia. That seems to be moved ahead of the original security considerations, which were in the founding documents of the SCO. And in that context, the single most important fact has been what I believe is the rise of India. That came out, and it’s not formally declared, but I’m saying is a guess. It’s not something that I can say with reference to this or that document. There aren’t any documents.

4:00
But from the body language and the treatment of Modi at the SCO, it seemed to me that he was being invited to join a troika, which is the word that was used by various Western media also, the Troika being Xi, Putin and Modi, as the deciders, the most decisive voices in the SCO. Now India had been a member of the SCO for a long time, but it was not on a governing board of two. And so this changes the situation, the prospects for what can be achieved with the SCO considerably.

4:44
It gives some additional comfort– as you mentioned in our last discussion– it gives additional comfort to Russia, because it’s not alone as a junior partner to China. And I think that all of this development, this interpretation of what’s happening has received further backing by Modi’s decision yesterday not to go to the United Nations General Assembly in September in New York, as a kind of protest against the American administration. Definitely India has moved farther away from the States than the Trump administration reckoned it would, and has drawn closer to Russia, and somewhat reluctantly, even closer to China. So these are the big developments.

Diesen: 5:42
Yeah, well, you heard a lot of comments from the Chinese side where they also focused on the need for China and India to learn to overcome their differences and work together. Now that’s very different from being in an alliance where all the interests are harmonized. But I guess the general idea if you can have these three Eurasian giants, Russia, India, and China, working out differences and working together, having economic connectivity, then the smaller pieces would be easier to fall in line and avoid some fragmentation. But I do think it’s interesting that because these three countries, they make up three of the four largest economies in the world in terms of purchasing power parity.

6:30
The one missing though would be the United States. It would have been, I don’t know, I would personally have liked to see the United States there with those three others. Instead we saw Trump tweeting from home about these three Eurasian giants conspiring against America. It then had a very strange tweet, seemed a bit bitter that America had lost India and Russia to the deepest, darkest China. I was wondering what you read into the American reaction to this. It looks like they could have played this very differently, though.

Doctorow:
In 2015, I was a panel leader at a peace conference in Massachusetts at MIT. And the most important or best known participant in that was Noam Chomsky. And they were talking about relations with Russia — remember this was 2015. And someone had said that yes, and this administration has lost Russia. And Chomsky objected, he said, you can’t lose something that you never owned.

7:40
And so it is with the current events. The United States did not own India, and there’s no finger pointing as to who lost it, although it’s pretty obvious that Trump has put a wrinkle in the relationship that’ll take some time to iron out. It will iron itself out. If you watch or listen to what the Indian media are saying, they’re generally pro-American, the major broadcasters in English.

And what they’re saying is that there’s no way that China can replace the United States in the global trade of India and provide it with export earnings of similar nature, because when you look at the two countries, they don’t have an economic fit. Their own country, India, doesn’t produce anything that China needs. Whereas China produces a lot of things for India to buy. That lopsided relationship is not a good foundation for cooperation. So they give this argument why the United States will always be an important factor in Indian economic relations and from economic relations you get political relations.

8:56
So I think this is a temporary problem. Moreover the whole logic of Trump’s attack, the terror of attack on India, was its continuing purchase of Russian hydrocarbons. And that issue will disappear when the Ukrainian war disappears, which is probably a matter of months and not a matter of years. Therefore, the punishment of India is not likely to go on for very long. And after that, they can start to mend fences.

Diesen: 9:31
Well, I guess it’s a bit of a learning process, too. Indeed, that’s what the meeting in SCO was about as well, that is learning to live in a multipolar world. You have to clearly define the relations between the different players. Well, it’s not unfair to argue that the Americans also have a learning process there. I mean, you can’t sit at the center of the world and have a whole world organized around the United States for decades and then I guess suddenly expect them to learn to treat others as, I guess, sovereign equals.

And so I think the best thing the Indians could do is what they did, just push back and draw the line. You’re not going to line us up on a chair in front of the desk of Trump like the Europeans. We will be addressed like an equal and that gives the United States some time to walk back something. I don’t think this is beyond fixing.

It’s a very big bump in the road, obviously, but I think it’s reasonable and part of a larger process. And when I hear Trump’s make statements such as, without America, the world would die, you see that there’s still some way left to, I guess, readjust this multipolarity.

Doctorow: 10:50
Definitely. There’s one other event of course; that is the parade. I was watching BBC coverage of the parade, which is the coverage [where] the journalists were saying absolutely ridiculous things about China.

But actually, I take it back. They were rather differential to China, which surprised me a bit. At the same time, they were insulting towards North Korea and, of course, to Russia. There was a distinction in the way this was nuanced. They didn’t want to offend China, but because you all have a good time offending the Russians. That was clear. Their comments were– also clearly, they respected what China was showing on the parade.

11:34
Now, going back to what we discussed a week ago, this question of the balance between Russia and China and how India helps Russia feel comfortable in the new situation where economics will be as important or more important than security. I want to bring up what I heard on Russian television, this is on the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” show, speaking about the military parade in Beijing. It surprised me, but it should be said, it should be a topic for discussion for among viewers.

They said, [“By the way, the Chinese parade doesn’t mean very much because nobody has used those weapons on the battlefield. And the Chinese don’t have a clue as to whether any of it really works.”] Therefore, to draw out conclusions, about the strength of the Chinese army, which is not war tested for, I don’t know, 20, 30 years, excluding this little tiny skirmish. Well, no, the last skirmish was pretty good, the turn of the century with Vietnam. But since then there has been almost no real exercise on the battlefield by Chinese troops.

12:53
And therefore, they were kicking the tires. And that surprised me. Although I have a right, and there was a reason for it, it was clear. What they were, the subtext was, “Beijing, take your military gear and bring it to the battlefield in our war with Ukraine and see if it works in practice.” So I imagine the people in Beijing were listening to that, because that was the clear message.

Diesen: 13:21
Yeah, no, that’s trying out the… But it also, besides encouraging China to get a bit involved in the Ukraine war, it’s also, you know, no one is comfortable with any balance, lack of symmetry. And people often focus on the balance of power between adversaries. But within any institution, you also need the balance of power. This is why I say within the political West, the European Union needs a format for collective bargaining power to have some symmetry with the United States, even within the EU.

It works better if you have Germany as the economic, France as the military power. It was better when the British were in, because again, there was some balance. Once too much power began to focus in Germany, you saw already how from Greece to Poland, people were starting to express some discomfort. So I think it’s the same within the SCO. It’s always good for the Russians if you have some partners like the Arctic corridor where they have the territory.

14:19
So there’s more balance in relation with the Chinese or the military where the Russians now have some battle experience. But also as you said, if you can bring in other large Eurasian giants like India, then the Russians can make their peace that the Indian, sorry, the Chinese, they’re the leading power, but they can’t dictate to us, they can’t dominate. And there’s a very big difference between leadership and dominance. And yes, I think that’s important for India, not for Russia to have India there. I did notice though that both Russia and India now opposes Azerbaijan’s membership in the Shanghai Cooperation organization. What do you read into this partnership to hold the Azerbaijanis out?

Doctorow: 15:08
These are certain parallels here. India vetoed the membership of Azerbaijan and Pakistan vetoed membership of Pashinyan’s little enclave in the Southern Caucasus, Armenia. They are linked. These are linked issues.

And one part of it, as far as India’s promotion of Armenia at the expense of Azerbaijan, has to do with the passage of the north-south corridor which goes through the southern Caucasus and is an important prospective avenue of new markets for India and new raw materials for India.

So they do not want Armenia to step on their tail in this issue. And when they vetoed Azerbaijan, Pakistan turned around and vetoed Armenia. They’re being vetoed as permanent members. It’s not really a big issue. It’s symbolic, but I don’t think it will do much harm to either country. If the North-South corridor proceeds, then Armenia will prosper and gain a great deal, even if it is not yet a full member of the SCO.

Diesen: 16:47
And how do you see the role of Mongolia having changed as a result of this meeting? I found the new Power of Siberia 2. They have been talking about this now for the past decade. So it’s interesting to see that this finally made it across the line. And this, of course, will put all this Arctic gas intended for Europe now sent to China.

But it is interesting that it’s– in the past, it was some proposals had it passing between Kazakhstan and Mongolia and the Altai region. Now we can argue environmental reasons why this was not ideal. But now, of course, it will go through Mongolia, which is a landlocked country sandwiched between Russia and China. So What is the significance of this?

Doctorow: 17:47
Oh, I think it is very xxxxx. Landlocked it may be between those two countries, but that has not prevented the United States from doing everything possible to turn heads in Mongolia, to show how wonderful it would be to … have had closer relations, economic, geopolitical, every kind of relationship with the United States. Now this puts paid to that. I think that as a participant in the Power of Siberia 2, the transit country, Mongolia will enjoy considerable transit fees.

More importantly, it won’t dare do anything against the interests of its two neighbors, because the project is so important, so big, important to both Russia and to China, that any hint that Mongolia was not supportive or of imposing unfair restrictions and price demands on the transit, could bring serious, including military, consequences for Mongolia. So the United States out of the picture. That’s a very big change.

Diesen:
This is a bit of a risk as well though, isn’t it? I mean, before 2004, when the West backed this Orange Revolution in Ukraine, before this, I think about or up to 80 percent of Russian gas to Europe went through Ukraine.

And whenever you’re a transit country, anyone wants to disrupt this relationship, it becomes, it’s an instrument there. I just thought one of the benefits of China and Russia is that they have this massive huge border where they don’t have to be reliant on a transit state which could be, well, where a big great power like United States could come and disrupt. And I think the United States tries to position itself as the third neighbor to Mongolia, symbolically, but nonetheless, to balance out the excessive dependence on the Chinese and the Russians. But is this anything the Russians and Chinese would be worried about?

Doctorow: 20:05
I don’t think so. Mongolia is not Ukraine. Mongolia is not Poland. There’s no need to skirt Mongolia’s borders because the population is negligible, and it doesn’t have supporters and allies on its Western frontier or on any frontier, as Ukraine did and does. Therefore, the possibility of dirty tricks by Mongolia against its large neighbors simply doesn’t exist. How could the United States, aside from sending in sappers to blow up the pipeline, how could the United States do anything? There would be, against the interests of the supplier and the purchasing country, transiting Mongolia.

So that is a different situation. And I think that these parties, there are many aspects to the routing of the Siberia 2 pipeline that don’t get covered in the press, but do get covered in the Russian press. And what I have in mind is, I don’t know the particulars here as they apply to the routing through Mongolia, but the geographic location is important for the Russians’ own gas supplies to its own population. For decades, Gazprom was under-supplying gas to the Russian domestic market, because it was burdened by sales prices fixed in law that were either giving them negligible profit or giving them losses on gas versus production costs and transmission costs.

21:58
Large parts of Russia were heated by logs and or by canisters of gas, which had a habit of blowing up in apartment buildings and causing every winter some kind of tragedies. What we have seen in the last two years, since the start of the special military operation and the underutilization of those gas fuels that had been developed to serve Western markets and now will in in five years’ time preserving Chinese markets. This situation has been directives from Putin to Gazprom, to gasify the country. Remember the old ,,electrify the country”? This was Lenin’s slogan.

Well, gasify the country, provide gas to residential buildings, both in the countryside and of course in towns and cities. That is a very big change. It was discussed openly in a, you know, Putin has a way of 50 different, they call them subjects of the Russian Federation. We would call them states or provinces or whatever, similar designations. This is a geographical area and a political entity.

And their governors, usually their governors, meet with Putin, given the number of entities and the number of weeks in the year, at least as one a week and sometimes more than one a week. And one that was shown a week ago was someone from the far eastern region, a governor, who was explaining how with the new Siberia 2 pipeline, they would finally get substantial allotments of pipeline gas from Gazprom and could finally build a large fertilizer factory because their agriculture– there’s a lot of agriculture, including soil in Eastern Siberia– they had been short on supplies of fertilizer from the Russian domestic market and they were resorting to imports. So that is one example. Of course, the petrochemicals of the plants will be built along this pipeline. So this may have played into the decision to run this through Mongolia. That is, that particular location where Russia would be supplying China from. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine it was one consideration.

24:39
Well, that has been a big issue in Russia, though, the idea that if, you know, now that they’re pivoting to Asia, they have to develop economically the eastern regions as well, because Russia is mostly a European state in terms of where the population lives and economies. But I remember, was it a bit over a decade ago, the concern by people like President Medvedev then was, they called it, I think, they needed dual integration because if you have the eastern parts of Russia integrating closely with China and the western parts of Russia integrating closely with Europe, that sovereignty could become an issue in the future. Again, when you’re the largest country in the world, you do worry about sovereignty.

25:30
So the main idea is, if we link ourselves to China, not only do you need the eastern parts of Russia to link yourself to China, you need also the rest of the country to link yourself closer to the eastern parts of Russia. So I guess these kind of gas projects that links the arctic with Eastern Russia and China that this also has an economic purpose; it also has a geopolitical purpose of cementing sovereign control, not worrying about any fragmentation. Again, it’s not that long ago since the Soviet Union collapsed and the West expressed some desire for the same to happen with the Russian Federation. So there is some insecurity there. Just as a last question though, I want to ask after the SCO summit, the Chinese were celebrating the 80th anniversary of defeating Japan in the Second World War.

What do you make of the special attention then given to Russia and North Korea? Because at the SCO it appeared to be Russia and India and then at the military parade it was Putin and Kim Jong-un. So again, the coverage in the media here in the West has been very superficial, just dictators, you know, because it’s not legitimate without us. But it is interesting how much North Korea was elevated though. This stood out a bit, it was strange to me.

Doctorow: 27:01
I’m sure that there is, we can identify some reasons. It doesn’t mean potential reasons. I don’t know if the decision-makers have in mind when they formulated it this way, as you just described, but potential explanations are first the refusal of all Western leaders in Europe to come to the parade. I’ve criticized Donald Trump for not coming to the parade, because the Americans made such a big contribution to not just the liberation of China, but of course to the liberation of so many islands and countries that were occupied by Japan prior to the American liberation at the cost of blood. And these people were not properly honored.

27:49
And for Trump to have put this into his social platform message to Xi, that we hope that you have looked after our people, was rather pitiful sounding. So I’ve criticized Trump for not going, but I can understand a number of reasons. Of course, the reasons multiplied as the date approached. He had presumably wanted to go. He had barred the Taiwan president from stopping in New York on a visit to the South, Latin America.

And this was two weeks ago, between two and three weeks ago. And this was interpreted, I believe correctly, by analysts in the West as showing that Trump did not want to displease the Chinese because of the coming celebrations in Beijing, meaning that he wanted to go. And then we see he didn’t go. Without any other leaders present from the West, of course he couldn’t go. He would be like Putin in the G8, the odd man out. And for somebody with an ego like Trump’s that is utterly unthinkable.

29:05
But not just an ego like his; most any normal person would not want to be in such an unattractive situation. For Modi I think the same thing came up, that he did not want to be an odd man out, and particularly when it was known that the real guest of honor would be Kim. Therefore, there are explanations for what we saw on the screen and why the other possible, potential attendees did not come. It was not widely said on BBC or other Western reporting that the leaders weren’t there, the Western leaders, weren’t there, not because they weren’t invited, but they refused to accept the invitation.

29:55
That should have been brought out; it wasn’t. The reading public, or the television-watching public in the West doesn’t have a clue as to why the Western readers weren’t there, and can listen to this propaganda that you repeated, that it was intended to be a gathering of authoritarians. That was not the intent.

Diesen: 30:17
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. It’s such a wasted opportunity. Imagine if you would have a lot of Western leaders there as well, how different it would have been. It would have been a way of de-escalating some of the tensions which have been growing over the years. There was one exception though, that is the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico. He did show up and he actually scolded the European Union. He said they wanted to isolate China, and they isolated themselves.

And that sounds about right. You also had Vucic, of course, from Serbia, but they’re not part of the European Union. But it was interesting that Fico made it, though. I thought if anyone was going to break ranks it would be Orban as he tends to stick his head out, but it was Fico this time.

Doctorow: 31:06
Orban is very careful. He says a lot of things that we all like, _we_ all like in the alternative media, But when push comes to shove, he usually lines up with the majority, particularly when they’re voting on sanctions for Russia or other items. Fico was clearly not going to approve funding for Ukraine or military aid to Ukraine, whereas Urbán can fudge that. He can make some, try to use his leverage to claw back some of the punishment that’s been dealt to Hungary because of his otherwise unaligned or non-aligned approach to so many foreign policy issues of the EU.

The one last thing that comes to mind, I was very pleased to find this morning that the “Times of India”– which I don’t generally have a high regard for because they are very sensationalist on their YouTube podcasts– they picked up my RT interview of the 4th of September in which I denounced the Secretary General, Rutte, for the most outrageous statement that he made and was recorded and has played on television, saying that we don’t, in the West, we don’t have to pay any attention to Putin and what he thinks about boots on the ground in Ukraine, because after all, Putin has no more power than the governor of Texas.

32:49
The leaders like Rutte or like Kaja Kallas, they’re saying the most outrageous things. And nobody’s pushing back properly. I’m happy that I was given the chance to do that, but they should be getting it from all sides. They are showing themselves to be so clumsy. The level of language is what you would hear from a fellow of the next barstool who’s had a bit too much to drink. They’re completely wild statements.

Diesen: 33:30
It’s not that long ago, only 30 years ago, when we talked about security, people used terms like indivisible security, don’t enhance your security at the expense of others. This was always a core theme, but these days, this idea is that Russia shouldn’t have anything to say at all. I mean, they don’t have veto power and NATO represents Europe, where Russia is not a part of NATO, has nothing to say. I mean, this is efforts to deprive them of an institutional voice, it only left them with the military to prevent this.

I mean, if we had talked in the past, if the people lie Rutte had been replaced by people who actually recognized that you do have to take your opponent’s security concerns into play, there wouldn’t be a war in Ukraine. I mean, this is– and even now that we’re losing the war, they’re still sitting there going, “Well, why are we listening to him? He’s, you know, as a governor of Texas.” It’s quite extraordinary. But yeah, no, it’s a…


Doctorow: 34:27
I have one positive message to give to close my part in this. I was listening to, I had a lengthy discussion with a member of the European Parliament a day ago, and was listening with great pleasure to his estimation, and he knows a lot of people there, that von der Leyen won’t last six months, that she’s on the way out. And if she goes, then the whole crew, that whole motley crew of fools, will go with her.

Diesen: 35:00
Well, it’s not in these days, it’s not every day we get to finish on a positive note, and this is a very, very positive note. So we can leave it at that, the exit of von der Leyen. So yeah, I hope that this is true and Europe can return to reason and hopefully a better future awaits us. So yeah, thank you so much.

Doctorow:
My pleasure.