Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDsJcHxU_uM

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: 0:00
If you didn’t know any better, you would think from watching the headlines that the war between Russia and Ukraine has kind of devolved into a budget battle. Who’s going to spend the most money? Who’s bringing in the most contractors? Who’s got the most deals to make, et cetera. But as we’re going to see, there is that going on, but there is still a war going on and there is still progress on the ground. There are still people dying that are not impressed one way or the other with whose deal somebody’s making or what they’re trying to accomplish on the on the spreadsheet.

But as we know, of course, war does require finances. And if you don’t have that, then you don’t have a war. We’re going to see how that tails in as well. And to try and help us unpack some of this, we have for the first time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a historian and international affairs analyst and author of the book, “War Diaries, Part One, Russia-Ukraine War 2022 to 2023.”
First of all, Professor, welcome to the show.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, very kind of you to invite me.

Davis: 0:58
Listen, I wonder just because this is the first time you’ve been on our show. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with your work in a number of other different venues, but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this book that you’ve written here and especially because it’s called Part One. What did you learn during the publication of this book and where are you going next?

Doctorow:
Well, as I say in the Foreword to it, I thought this would be a thin volume. But then the war started. Russia had such a commanding presence and was threatening Kiev from day one of their invasion, but it looked like this could be over rather quickly. And I don’t think I was the only one who assumed that.

As it’s turned out, we were all mistaken. The war has progressed in surges, various stages of escalation that were not to be anticipated. The risk-taking of the Biden administration was in no way clear as a possibility or a likelihood when the war began. And the Russian way of war was by no means understood in the West, and even today is not clearly understood, since the expectation is the only way you can fight a war is the American way, which is shock and awe. And that didn’t happen.

2:11
The fact is, the American wars have been on territory without any personal presence, that is, without an American presence there before the troops moved in, without an interest in the people as such and in the value of human life in the territories we entered — in the Middle East, I’m speaking about now. In the Russian case with Ukraine, they are, these are two nations or peoples that have lived together and intermingled for 500 years or more. And the Russian interest was initially not to cause too much damage and too much loss of life in the anticipation that these are neighbors and we’ll have to live with them in the future. Moreover, they are, those neighbors are the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-father of many people living all over what was the Soviet Union and today is the Russian Federation. For these reasons, the Russians conducted the war in a rather, in a very different way from what people in the West expected. It was misinterpreted in the West as signs of Russian weakness.

Davis:
Let me ask you, on that topic, I’m just wondering what you may have discovered through the reading of your book, what the US actually anticipated ahead of time, because Biden famously said, you know, “Our intelligence says they’re getting ready to go, they’ve made a decision”, all this kind of stuff. We moved out a lot of our diplomatic personnel, left Kiev, and even offered a ride to Zelensky to get out, and he, of course, had a pretty famous quip to that. But what did the US expect to happen in that initial onslaught?

Doctorow: 3:53
I think it was just what I just said a moment ago: this would be over in a very short time. Then there was a misinterpretation which comes into the nature of propaganda, and say false information or disinformation as to what went wrong and why the Russians didn’t just move into Kiev as going down the rose garden. Here, the errors are not just in Western expectations, but also in Russian expectations.

The Russians had a conflict, a military conflict with the Ukrainians in 2014 in the spring following the installation of the radical nationalist government in Kiev with assistance from the United States, the Russians had a military conflict. In the Crimea, we know there was a standoff, a standoff that ended in complete Russian victory, because the Ukrainian forces in the Crimea, which were roughly the same number, 20,000, on the peninsula for each of the sides, just gave up. The Russians said, :You have a choice. You raise the white flag. You can go home in Ukraine, or you can come and join us.”

5:01
And indeed, some of the Ukrainian forces joined the Russians, and others just went home. There weren’t many gunshots. And the Russians were spoiled about that. They expected that indeed the Ukrainian army would– seeing the vast forces arrayed against them what, 50, 60 miles away from their capital on the Belarus side of the border– that they would again retreat and that the people, the local people would come out in the familiar Slavic fashion with salt and bread to greet the Russian liberators.

That didn’t happen at all. Eight years of work by the American and British intelligence agencies, by the Pentagon, had changed completely the psychology of the Ukrainian army. And it was now a formidable fighting force. Moreover, it was, and this was not foreseeable, it was largely under the control of those same radicals who were behind the Maidan storming and installation of a new government by force.

These people, the Azov Battalion and other radical nationalists had been integrated into the normal Ukrainian armed forces, with the result that the notion of raising a white flag didn’t exist any more. The Russians’ intelligence, it’s quite surprising, their intelligence was very faulty. They did not anticipate that they would have a stiff fight.

What happened when those tanks approached Kiev? Were they really, suffered enormous defeats as Western reports went because of the use of the shoulder-held anti-tank weapons supplied by the United States? We don’t know. I don’t know for certain. I’m not a military expert, as you mentioned correctly at the outset, but there are a lot of open questions that no one has answered satisfactorily about these first months of the war.

7:27
The Russian story is that they were preparing the way for negotiations. Indeed, the negotiations started very soon after the Russian invasion. The Russians invaded about 23rd of February, 24th of February. The negotiations started several weeks later. These were first in Belarus and then moved to Istanbul. And by the end of April, we know that there was a lengthy document agreed by negotiating parties on both sides, for–

Davis:
Actually, I want to ask you a specific question on this time frame. I’m really grateful that you’ve studied a lot of this because I remember very distinctly, I want to say it was the first or second week of March, I think it was the second week of March, that Zelensky was quoted as saying, “Well, I guess I can consider maybe going to an independent, unaligned situation, i.e. no more NATO.” And so he was openly thinking about that, because that’s one of the things that the Russians had said was one of their primary objectives, was to prevent NATO from coming into Ukraine. And then that was leading into the Istanbul arguments or discussions then something a lot happened. I wonder if you have any insight as to what happened with Zelenski that made him say that publicly and then radically changed on the backside

Doctorow: 8:43
Well, I wouldn’t take anything Zelenski said then or any time since as being … the God’s truth.

Davis:
Fair enough.

Doctorow;
The man … is a politician This type of little white lies or even big lies are the small change of politics. Now, you asked what is new in the book or value to the book, and I want to state this is not a comprehensive history of the Ukraine War. The fact that it’s 772 pages does not mean that I was writing a history. I was writing diaries. By that I mean my journalism is a personal variety, that is what I see, very often what I see around me, what I take part in. And in this case, the contribution that is particularly interesting, I think, to readers are the visits I made to Russia during, from the start of the war, at a time when there were almost no Western journalists in Russia, first because they had left during the whole period of CoViD, and then because when it was possible to come back and visas were again being issued, the war started.

And many Western media withheld their journalists, so took their journalists out of Russia, like the “Financial Times”, took them to Riga where they stay to this day because they were threatened by, or they felt threatened by Russia’s legislation against spreading false information about their armed forces, for which you could face a criminal penalty. And reporting with a Western slant could run the risk of that. So there were very few, almost no journalists there. There were very few people who were receiving visas of any kind. I happened to have what is called a humanitarian visa, since my wife is Russian.

10:38
And that was one of the few exceptions which enabled you to get a visa and stay, and come to Russia. And I used that, and I recorded in this book what I saw around me. The book is not about the front. The book is about the rear. It’s about how Russians fared during the war.

And that is, what they suffered or didn’t suffer in terms of the “sanctions from hell” that the United States imposed, and Europe followed up with several months delay. And my reports are that initially, yes, there was a little bit of shock, but very quickly Russia adapted. The financial crisis was averted because they had been taken out of script in the banking system, and things got very normal. In fact, with the change of suppliers, I’m speaking now about food products, tropical fruits and so forth, the Russian supermarkets were very well stocked. And these are the things I report, not just the supermarkets, but the change over commodities in stores and so forth, and life in general, and the feeling of people, people on the ground, not just elites, but people on the ground: how are they reacting? And I record here the surge in patriotism when it took place.

12:01
I just, I’d like to say, coming back to the question you posed, what happened at the start and the change and what was going on during the negotiations in March, April between the Russians and the Ukrainians, between Putin’s team and Zelensky’s team. One thing that came out and surprised me when I went through my material, is that I had almost no notes on those negotiations.

Now, particularly after Mr. Putin, I think it was November, December, stood up in front of journalists and waved this 100-, 200-page document that had been initialed by the heads of both negotiating teams and just needed to have one final signature by the two presidents. After he waved that, and after we know the whole story about Starmer, sorry, about Johnson’s, about Boris Johnson’s visit, which is said to have been the clincher to take Mr. Zelenski out of any thoughts of accommodating Russians on their war demands and to proceed with the war in the belief that he would get full support, military and financial, from the West.

13:18
Well, that is something that doesn’t ring true any more when I look at my notes. And I hope readers will find this and appreciate what it means. The reason why it comes up, and I’ll try to explain it now, is that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were very happy about that almost-signed peace treaty. They neither.

So they were– Russian patriots think that Putin was giving away much too much because the territorial side of it was negligible for the Russians. And for the Ukrainians, their patriots would find it objectionable because of the new Trump conditions.

Davis:
Well yeah, and then now then that’s– not a whole lot has changed over that. And the fact, I think that the two camps have almost widened their views where we are now, which is going to have an impact on where this war is going to go here. And I want to get into, you know, kind of the current situation here. And with NATO, there’s an interesting statement made by Tammy Bruce yesterday at the State Department, which I’d like your view on.

Bruce: 14:30
What we do know is what apparently bothers Russia is the fact that NATO is going to be strongly returning to its original roots of being a deterrent. And that is what NATO’s job has been the … advancement of their commitment to defense is remarkable and not only it’s– we of course support NATO completely and their role is imperative for a safe and stable Europe, and that’s the point: being a deterrent. This kind of defense spending helps them achieve that, and of course it is something that would not have happened without President Trump’s encouragement and demand. And so we’re excited about that.

Davis: 15:07
So, you know, for the longest time, going all the way back to 2023, Trump had been talking about how he was going to end the war in a day. And then after he got elected, he said he was going to have it done even before he took office, etc.

And then, well, that crashed into reality. And then he said something about 100 days and then it was, all right, we’re days away from walking. Of course, none of that ever happened. And now that it’s like he’s not even hardly talking about the end of the war at all. Now we’re going into, “Well, let’s just kind of expand NATO here.”

But one of the things she said in there that really got my attention was she said, “We want to return to NATO’s role of being a defensive alliance and setting up for deterrence.” And I’m like, okay, if you’re returning to that, what was it? Because that’s the only thing it’s ever supposed to have been. How do you interpret that?

Doctorow: 15:54
Well, her statement indicates that there are various flowers blooming in this garden. And I’m not sure who the gardener is any more. Let’s assume that it’s Donald Trump. I think she’s not clued in. My own reading of what happened at the Hague summit is that Donald Trump got what he wanted. He got this written, signed commitment by all of the NATO countries, so we’ll put Spain on the side as an exception, but all of the other 26 NATO, sorry, it’s more than 26, [about] 30 NATO countries, that they are raising their budgeting for military purposes to on the hard side, three percent.

And if you want to throw in the soft side, the one and a half percent on top of that, that is allowed to be allocated for infrastructure development of roads and bridges, supposedly, which are said to have a military value. In any case, if they would rate go from, let’s take Belgium, it’s 1.3 percent. That’s all that Belgium has as a military budget today in terms of GDP. To take that to two percent, they will do it this year by the kind of financial fraud that represents the one and a half percent I just mentioned a minute ago.

17:14
And they can’t go further in 2026. There’s no wiggle room. There is no possibility of raising taxes, which are also already the highest in the Europe, if not in the world, and there is no possibility of taking out loans because the country is over-indebted. So they signed to something which they cannot deliver. They signed to it because they expect Mr.– I didn’t see any landmarks in that commitment to achieve this or that at a given date before 2035.

That’s to say, the target is well after Mr. Trump leaves office, and the expectation that his successor will … be more lenient and stand step back from that. There is no intention in Europe to fulfill those commitments, which they cannot do.

18:09
On Mr. Trump’s side, that’s fine. He has no problem with that. They don’t fulfill it, and his Article 5 commitment doesn’t exist any more. Moreover, it gives him the possibility of cutting back on America’s contributions to NATO without anybody [having] a right to complain.

Davis:
Right.

Doctorow:
They don’t they don’t fulfill their end of the bargain, and we can’t–

Davis:
I agree. Yeah, we’ll see how that ends up playing out. You know, one … of the other I guess participants if you want to look at it that way, in this whole issue of NATO saying we’re going to go up to 5% GDP on our defense spending, et cetera, was the Russian side, because they had a lot of things to say in the aftermath of that about how we’re going to bankrupt ourselves and all this kind of stuff. And you have said that you actually find that to be a mistake on the part of Sergey Lavrov and other Russian speakers. Why is that?

Doctorow: 19:11
Well, there’s a general tendency among the backers– most of the American political establishment, to think that people who disagree with the American policies that Biden was following are all stooges of the Kremlin. And that is not just a malign characterization of everyone, but it misses the point that those of us who try hard to be honest, and I put myself in that category, have no hesitation to say when the Russians are doing something stupid. And I characterized the remarks that Sergey Lavrov made as very poorly advised. I’ll give a very good reason. During our elections, particularly the last presidential election, Putin was very careful not to tip his hand as to which side he supported for the obvious reason that that person would be denounced as a friend of Putin.

20:17
Somehow that lesson has been forgotten when Lavrov opened his mouth and started giving advice to Europe about what they should do about their military budgets. That is downright stupid, because we don’t need that help. There are even in the “New York Times”, in its front page, at least in the European edition, which I read two days ago, they had an opinion article, invited a guest author, which said plainly that it is risky, or they said the word he used was delusory, for Europe to think that it can re-industrialize and free itself from dependence on the United States by heavy investment in European weapons industry. That is in the “New York Times” on the front page. So nobody needed a helping hand from Mr. Lavrov or from Mr. Putin, because Lavrov, again, this is another fallacy that many of my peers make from my perspective, to think that Lavrov is an independent personality, political factor. He isn’t. Mr. Lavrov is a very skillful implementer of whatever his boss tells him to do.

He was a strong nationalist when Putin was his boss. He became a very weak, flabby spokesman for Russia when the namby-pamby Medvedev was the president, and now he’s pretty much back in form under Putin, and it was actually– a lead for this information war offensive of this past weekend came from Putin himself. So I don’t blame Lavrov solely, but he should have been more cautious. To say that this would be a catastrophic loss for Europe, for NATO, was not very wise.

Davis: 22:22
Well and then let’s see you brought up Vladimir Putin because one of the things that he did say, which might fall into a different category, maybe something that was pretty straightforward and honest, is that he still says, despite what the West claims constantly that he’s not willing to have a negotiated settlement, he has been saying he’s very much willing to have a negotiated settlement, but he said in this recent comment here in June, there’s an other alternative side.

Putin: 22:50 [English voice over]
It all started with the fact that we were lied to, that we were deceived, that we were swindled about the NATO enlargement to the east, because the entire world is aware that Russia received promises that “not an inch eastward. NATO is not going to enlarge to the east.”

Then one wave of enlargement, the second wave of enlargement. And we keep saying that security of one country or of a group of countries cannot be insured at the expense of any other states. And there are documents signed to this tune. And then they kept expanding and we were told, “Well, you should not be concerned, you should not be afraid, it’s not a threat to you.”

23:33
And when we said that we do believe it’s a threat to us, then they did not say anything in response. They just told us to go far away with our opinions. No one wanted to listen to our opinions, but we know better what is a threat to us. It’s our right to define what’s a threat to us, and how big the threat is from one side or from the other side. But no one was listening to us and they kept on acting like that.

Isn’t that an aggressive behavior? Because that’s exactly what aggressive behavior means. And the West doesn’t want to notice this.

Davis: 24:11
See, now that’s in a lot of, you know, Tammy Bruce, which we just showed you, talking about what all of NATO agreed to is this increase in defense spending, this increase in military capacity. And Russia seems to be saying– and you tell me if you agree with this or not– that look, this whole NATO coming into Ukraine is one of the reasons we attacked in February 2022 in the first place. And so if you’re talking going up now, there’s gonna be a commensurate reaction to it. How do you see that?

Doctorow: 24:39
Well, yeah, of course. The expectation of Russia is an eventual Ukrainian capitulation, which will be enshrined in a document signed by whoever is a successor, a head of state in Ukraine after Mr. Zelensky is pushed aside or suffers some … misfortune.

But that is not the issue. That is something in passing. This war is not about Ukraine. This war is about the relationship with NATO, as was perfectly clear when the Russians presented NATO and the United States with their demands that it withdraw its presence, its establishment from all of the new member states after 1997. The new, those countries as came in the successive waves of NATO expansion.

25:36
This is the primary issue, and it is the one which Putin had in mind when he spoke about the causes of war, we have to resolve the initial causes of war.

Davis:
And so what does that tell you that, you know, this is heading? If we’re, if Russia is saying, you know, that NATO is not something we’re going to be passive to. NATO is saying, and we’re going to keep going anyway, where’s this war going to end up going?

Doctorow: 26:08
Well, I think the Russians can play a waiting game very nicely. I’m fairly confident or certain that Mr. Putin, despite the rhetoric you’ve heard, and certainly despite the rhetoric of Mr. Lavrov, is confident that NATO will not be able to achieve this. They also achieve the increased military spending. And not just that, They are following very closely political developments in Germany.

In Germany Mr. Merz is the lead personality. He’s grabbed the microphone away from Emmanuel Macron who otherwise wants to run out in front of whatever the marching band is and take control.

Mr. Merz, or Chancellor Metz, has that role now. And it is improbable, I think, from Russian analysis, that he will stay in power for long if he proceeds with not just the trillion euros in investment in German military production and increasing the armed forces, but if he looks for the manning, which is critical. We know from the remarks of his defense minister, Pistorius, that the attempts, recent attempts to induce young Germans to enroll in the armed forces have been another failure. They’re going to give this a bit more time, and if it doesn’t produce results then they will seek to introduce a draft.

And there you have the end of the German government, because the German government, coalition government, has a very narrow majority in their parliament, the Bundestag, 17 votes. It’s dependent on support from its junior partner, the Socialists, the SPD. And the SPD is split down– is split, not down the middle, no, it’s true. There are more socialists who back their fellow socialist Pistorius in proposing a draft, but there is a substantial minority, as I’m repeating the words of the “Financial Times”. They call it a substantial minority within the SPD who oppose this, oppose rearmament and particularly oppose the imposition of a draft. They vote against it and Mr Merz is history. I don’t believe he will be a candidate for a further election, because he’s widely hated in Germany.

Davis: 28:52
Well, you talked about Macron, and now trying to take the mic and, or is it Merz coming in here. The other guy who’s vying for that microphone is Keir Starmer and he seems to be focused a lot on continuing to give more British money.

Starmer: 29:08
I told President Zelenskyy at Downing Street on Monday that we will harden our resolve. We struck an agreement together to share battlefield technology, accelerating our support for Ukraine’s defence, while boosting British security and British jobs. We committed to providing hundreds more air defence missiles, paid for not by the British taxpayer but with money from Russia’s frozen assets. And together with Europe, Canada and our Indo-Pacific partners, we announced that we will deliver 40 billion euros of military aid to Ukraine this year, matching last year’s pledge in full. There is a path to a just and lasting peace, but it will only come through flipping the pressure onto Putin.

29:58
His position is weaker than he claims, So I urged all our partners, including the US, to step up the pressure now with more sanctions and more military support to bring Russia to the table to agree an unconditional ceasefire leading to serious negotiations.

Davis:
Now how long do you suppose that the UK can keep going down this path? I mean he talked about how much they gave last year, they’re going to give a same amount of this year. You talked about the difficulties politically with the Merz inside the German government. Do you see any commensurate issues with the British government?

Doctorow: 30:36
I don’t have to see them. They’re on the BBC and British newspapers today. After his finance minister, Reeves, failed in her attempt to introduce a substantial reform in the budget to their assistance to the less well-off part of the population. This was a disastrous failure in parliament. She broke out into tears.

That’s probably the first time any of these alligator lady British politicians has actually broken into tears in parliament. There was speculation first that she wouldn’t last, that she would resign. Now the speculation is that Starmer isn’t going to last. Because he belatedly came out to the press that he supports her fully. And I think he just condemned himself to loss of power by saying that.

31:38
Again, the Russians every evening have, or starting at like five o’clock their time to seven o’clock their time. They have this program, 60 Minutes, which is a commentary and discussion program, which has a very big section, like a third of it, is long video clips and long excerpts from major press, United States, UK, Germany, France, and they show all this. So Mr. Putin is perfectly apprised, as is the Russian establishment, foreign policy establishment, of these deep fissures. They’re also aware of the development today that, with respect to Ukraine and NATO, that the Poles have joined Fico of Slovakia and Orban of Hungary in taking a position against Ukraine joining NATO.

32:45
And of course, they’re against Ukraine joining the EU because it is a big threat to their agricultural economy, since Ukraine has vastly cheaper production costs in things like poultry and in oils, vegetable oils and in grains, than Poland or France or any other European member state has. So the fractures are there, and they’re not the whim of one personality or another. They’re based on real contradictions between the interests of the Ukrainians and the interests of member states of the European Union. So the Russians can afford to take their time. I don’t see that– this is my answer to your your overriding question of how the Russians will respond to this … NATO resolution to raise their finances and become an effective deterrent, as this government, US government spokeswoman said. And I don’t think they expect any of this to happen.

Davis: 33:56
Well, where … does that, where does that tell you that this is going to end up going then, because you have the NATO leaders across the board talking, in my view, just almost fiction that the things that can never come to pass, “just and lasting peace”, as Starmer says almost routinely, you know, “we’re going to help Ukraine for as long as it takes” some of these others and all the things that several these other leaders say, like Emmanuel Macron, etc. But they can’t happen on the battlefield, and so Russia seems to be very patient.

And I wonder if you could in the last bit of time we have here kind of talk about the different approach that the Western world has as opposed to the approach that the Russian world has. You mentioned at the outset that we think that war has to be shock and awe. Russians have a different viewpoint. Where do you see after now three and a half years of war, where’s this going next?

Doctorow: 34:46
They had a different viewpoint. I wouldn’t say they personally are shock and awe, but they become much more destructive. Destructive of civil infrastructure and less careful about avoiding civilian casualties. The Russians in the last two, three weeks have staged ever more impressive, ever bigger aerial attacks on major Ukrainian cities, and they’ve moved into an area that they were very cautious not to touch, lest they raise severe criticism in the West. They have now attacked Ukraine west of Lvov, that’s to say between Lvov and the Polish border, which is a staging ground for all ground-delivered military material coming from the United States and Western Europe.

35:43
They’ve now attacked west of Lvov. So there are attacks on all major cities, daily attacks by precision missile strikes that are set off by their Black Sea fleet. Remember the Black Sea fleet, which the Brits and everyone else said has been has been taken out of the war by these by these wonderful naval drones which the Brits supplied? Well forget that. Those ships, wherever exactly they are in the Black Sea, they are a major launching site for these precision missile attacks on the Ukrainian cities. They are taking out refineries, they’re taking out all stockpiles of parts for drones that they can identify, they are very, very damaging daily.

35:40
And so the Russians have taken off the gloves. They’re being very tough. And the part of that is a result of the benefits they are enjoying from the distraction of all Western media and American attention of the Iran-Israeli war. From page one, “Russian aggression”, in quotation marks, in Ukraine, has moved to page 25, shall we say, figuratively speaking, in our newspapers. Nobody’s too excited about it.

They’re very excited– now, at the same time, the latest issues of the “New York Times”, the “Financial Times”, are admitting openly that the Russians are succeeding and are pushing back the Ukrainians. So they’re preparing the broad public for a Ukrainian collapse. And Mr. Trump’s cutoff of supplies of Patriots and other air defense missiles, his cutoff of 155-millimeter artillery shells and … the offensive missiles that … the United States have been supplying to Ukraine — all of this puts the Ukrainians in a very tough spot. I don’t see capitulation coming tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but by the end of the summer, it could well be.

Davis: 38:10
Yeah, and that is so ironic if just not anguishing, because if the end is going to come at the end of the summer, then it should come today instead of letting another some number of thousands more people pointlessly die just to drag it out. But that’s where we are. I don’t see anybody that’s going to change that anytime soon. But we’re going to continue to watch this and see what happens and we’ll just call balls and strikes as they happen.

So thank you for coming on today and just remind people of your book there, “War Diaries, Volume 1: The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022 – 2023”. You can find that on Amazon, see right there. Thank you very much and we appreciate you coming on.

Doctorow:
Well, my pleasure. I hope that there will be a final Volume 2. I don’t want to think about a Volume 3.

Davis: 38:54
Right. Yes, yes. Let’s let that be the final one. I agree completely. Thank you very much. And we will see you guys next time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnusdxbXzp0

Napolitano: 0:30
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here with us in just a moment on Russia’s information war against NATO and other relevant topics. But first this.

[commercial message]

1:58
Professor Doctorow, welcome here, my dear friend. What is your understanding of the current status of the special military operation in Ukraine or at least the Kremlin’s view of the current status of the special military operation in Ukraine?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, the Russians announced yesterday with great pride that they had completely liberated Lugansk oblast, which was one of the two regions formerly of Ukraine that we call the Donbas. There was, about three percent was left under Ukrainian occupation xxxxxxx as they were viewed from Russia. But that was cleaned up. And now the whole of Lugansk is theirs. They were also making substantial progress in Donetsk.

They are going after men more than going after territory. They want to deprive Ukraine of an effective military and do that at minimum cost to themselves. And so they’re proceeding not so much in a showy way by territory that they seize, although they are adding several square kilometers every day or two, but they are doing it in a way that the losses of personnel by Ukraine are again well over a thousand a day.

Napolitano:
Wow.

Doctorow:
In the Donbass, they continue to advance and to bomb and destroy the major logistical hubs that still are under Ukrainian control in Donetsk. And that is, first of all, Pakrovsk, as the Ukrainians know it, or Krasnoyarsk, as it’s called in Russian. So they show you every day this town, or that town, well, settlement would be a better title, that they are taking control of in the Donbas. The Russian flag goes up, or even a regional flag representing the military unit that was responsible for this particular action. For example, it could be the Baikal, troops from Baikal, and they would raise a Baikal flag over this or that hamlet.

4:21
But let’s be clear about it. The Ukrainians are moving back, but their lines are not collapsing. And I wouldn’t want to read into this, into the progress that the Russians are making, the suggestion that Ukraine is on the point of collapse. Nonetheless, everyone knows well that the Trump administration has curtailed, if not stopped, shipment of many valuable military assets to Ukraine. I think, first of all, those Patriots are not going to Ukraine. That’s clear as day. And other anti-aircraft.

Napolitano:
Let me just stop you for a second, because consistent with what you’ve said, Larry Johnson says, Ukraine will not be getting the Patriot missiles as you said. The thing they need the most, I know you’re not a military person, neither am I, but we can use our sense of reason. The 155 millimeter artillery shells, because the American supply of those is dangerously low. GMLRS rockets, I’m not sure what that is, and Stinger Hellfire missiles. All of a sudden, the Spigot has been partially closed. Please continue.

Doctorow: 5:37
Yes, well, the Spigot has been closed, and that sends a message to the Ukrainian military that they have to be particularly parsimonious with their forces and avoid direct confrontation with the Russians where possible, because they simply don’t have the supplies of weaponry, offensive and defensive, that they would like and that they need. So their situation is dire, but not desperate, not hopeless, and not urgent in the sense that tomorrow, or the week after, the capitulation. It won’t be.

Nonetheless, the Russians are feeling good about the way the war is going. And Mr. Putin has probably picked up a little bit more support among wavering Russian patriots who would like to see action faster.

Napolitano: 6:35
Is there pressure on President Putin from his right, to get more aggressive? I’ll just throw a name out there. I don’t know if he says these things for PR reasons or because he’s actually saying this to his colleague. A former president Medvedev, for example, has from time to time pounds the table. Is that pressure still on President Putin? Or if it is, does it go in one ear and out the other?

Doctorow:
Well, as regards Medvedev, he’s well under control by President Putin, and he is the attack dog that Mr. Putin has set up. He’s not attacking Putin. He’s taking the initiative to put the West on notice about Russia’s plans for continuing the war. So I wouldn’t look at Medvedev as a force against Putin, not at all. He’s an instrument of Putin.

But there are people, of course. There are, well, even this political scientist, Karaganov, who a year and a half ago was calling for a military strike in Germany using the Oreshnik, using even a tactical nuclear weapon to demonstrate that the Russians are serious, and to take their red lines with all due seriousness. So that pressure exists, but I don’t believe that Mr. Putin is responding to it or is forced to change his tactics, and not to mention strategy, as a result of this, since the armed forces have good news to put up on the television screen every day.

Napolitano: 8:22
Right. Right, right. What is the current attitude of Russia toward NATO? Taking into account, of course, the rather extraordinary telephone conversation that President Putin had with French President Macron yesterday for two hours, the first time they spoke in three years.

Doctorow:
Well, this is really two questions. And I don’t, I want to be sure that I get a handle on both of them.

Napolitano:
Sure, sure. Address it as you see fit, please.

Doctorow:
Both of them are very important. I think that the general public and the Western media are interpreting the call by Macron to Putin in the wrong way. We have very little information coming from anyone other than Mr. Putin as to what they talked about. He said they talked about, that he delivered to Mr. Macron Russia’s view of how this war will end. And we all know that; I won’t repeat the points, that they have to go back to the original source of the problem, resolve that, and not just have a ceasefire. So Mr. Putin used the opportunity to tell Macron directly what he otherwise would know indirectly from the Russian memorandum delivered to the Ukrainians at their last Istanbul meeting.

9:40
However, that is misleading. My understanding of the reason for the call is rather different. Macron reached out to Putin to involve the Russians in reinstating the old agreements with Iran over its enrichment program, the one that Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of. He– Russia was a party to that, and so it’s impossible for the European Union to proceed and try to reinsert itself into the peace process with Iran, since they’ve been totally sideline by the United States. If they reinsert themselves, they have to bring in Putin.

Let’s just remember that until relatively recently, when Viktor Orban went to speak with Putin, he was denounced by the EU for breaking ranks with the rest of the EU member states over the isolation of Russia. And here we have Mr. Macron, as if he’s doing this on his own, spontaneously, he’s a nice guy, he’s just changed his view. No, He did this as the emissary of the EU on behalf of Kallas and von der Leyen, who want to get Russia back, to help them get back into the Iran negotiate.

Napolitano: 11:01
Do you think he called up his buddies Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz and said, “I’m about to talk to Vladimir. What do you want me to say to him?” Or do you think he did it on his own, with just the EU leadership backing?

Doctorow:
I think it’s the latter. Well, that’s sufficient. That’s entirely sufficient. He is running for the microphone and to be at the head of the band at any opportunity he has. And so when, say, Kallas or von der Leyen tapped him and said, “Look, we need somebody to reach out to Putin”, he would have been overjoyed. And I don’t think he would look for the consent from Merz who is answering–

Napolitano:
It’s odd that they had their conversation yesterday, or maybe there’s a connection here. You can analyze it for us please. French missiles were used to kill Russian civilians just two days ago. Could that have been the impetus for the Macron phone call?

Doctorow: 12:05
I think it would have pushed things along, yes, because Macron would be aware that Russian animus towards France had just gone up a few levels in light of that. This missile was originally identified, I think, by Western sources as having been a Storm shadow. Technically speaking–

Napolitano:
If it were, that would make it British, right?

Doctorow:
No. Well, if you call it Storm Shadow, it was British. If you call it, I think, SCALP, I forget what the French call it, it’s the same missile.

Napolitano:
Okay, but I mean, the Western sources thought the missile that killed the Russian civilians came from Starmer. In fact, it came from Macron. Am I correct?

Doctorow:
You’re exactly correct. Now this is not my assumption, it’s not some contacts I had with Russian military, nothing of the sort. I’m repeating what was on Russian television yesterday. And whether that is true or not is almost irrelevant. If the Russians are saying there was a French missile, then for all practical purposes in diplomatic relations, it was a French missile.

Napolitano: 13:05
Wow. … What is going on between Russia and Azerbaijan as we speak? And how potentially inflammatory is this?

Doctorow:
It is inflammatory, but it has interest, I think, for the audience of this program for several reasons. I think the most prominent reason is that– I’ve said in the past, Russia is not a cuddly rabbit. Russia is what it is, which is a major power, and major powers sometimes behave badly. And in the case of the relations with Azerbaijan, Moscow behaved very badly. This problem, and it is a big problem right now, but it is more in symbolic ways. The Azerbaijanis are giving every day some new signal to Moscow, “Boy, we don’t like what you’re doing, and we don’t like you.”

And they say that openly. There are accusations against the Kremlin directly in Azerbaijani media. And where did this start? By a very shabby response from the Kremlin to the downing of a passenger airplane, Azerbaijani airplane, about six months ago, as it was flying in the south of Russia and in an area which was under attack by Ukrainian drones at the time. This is– I’m giving you the Russian side of the story– that it was mistakenly downed, although they didn’t even admit that, it was mistakenly shot down because Russia was responding to the drones that were in the air in that area coming in from Ukraine.

14:50
Well, whether, whatever truth there is in that, there was a mistake, la la, the most important thing was what the Russians didn’t do after this catastrophe which took many lives. They did not apologize to Azerbaijan. They did not offer to pay compensation for the plane, or more importantly, to the passengers on that plane. This was shocking. In international behavior, this was terrible.

And to this day, the Kremlin has not said, “We are sorry; we made a mistake.” And in Baku, they’re furious. They have to be– in February when this occurred. Shortly afterwards, they closed Russia’s cultural center in Baku, Russia House. This last few days, they’ve shut down all Russian language courses in their secondaries, in their school system.

These are clear messages. They’ve also arrested the editors of Sputnik, this Russian news agency in Baku, about which Moscow is now howling to the skies. The whole problem began with Moscow; and from the perspective of Azerbaijan, they were behaving like bullies and like imperialists. And I mention this to highlight this point. Let’s not get carried away and believe that every, that Russia is always an innocent, No, Russia is a state power, and state powers behave badly from time to time, and they have to be told that.

Now as to how serious it is, I believe that there is foreign intervention here to exacerbate the situation.

Napolitano: 16:36
When you say that, you mean MI6, CIA, or Mossad.

Doctorow:
None of the above: French. I believe the French are somehow involved. Look, the French are very active in the Caucasus region. They are the ones behind the rebellion, call it, of the prime minister of Armenia against relations with Moscow, this Nikol Pashinyan, who is making a bid to join the EU, who has been absent from major meetings of former Soviet–

Napolitano:
Gee, I wonder if this was discussed between presidents Macron and Putin yesterday.

Doctorow:
It could be, but of course none of this would come out to the public. But as I said, the French are mixed up in the Caucuses, and look at the map, Azerbaijan is right there. So it is not inconceivable that the French could have been active in exacerbating the issues.

Napolitano: 17:36
Let’s go to Iran if we could, before we conclude. What is your view, Professor Doctorow, about why Donald Trump dropped those 30,000 pound bombs? Was it a regime change? Was it just to get Netanyahu off his back? Was it a serious attempt to set back the nuclear program? Or was it a pinprick, a big pinprick, designed not to kill human beings but to bring them to the negotiating table?

Doctorow:
I think it was all of the above. The question really for any analyst is to weight those various factors, but they’re all present. I think that– well, there’s one that you didn’t mention, which I jumped on first when I was trying to make sense out of his action, and that is to prevent Netanyahu from using nuclear weapons against these Iranian positions. Because absent American assistance, that is the only thing that would be in the Israeli arsenal that could have a chance of doing the job. So I think to prevent the Israelis from doing something horrific and to take the ball away from Netanyahu and to eliminate either de facto really or in words the Iranian nuclear program and put an end to this whole crisis in the Middle East around the nuclear program that has been a 30 year and idee fixe of Netanyahu and his associates.

Napolitano: 19:17
How was it that Mossad, which claims to be the most effective intelligence service on the planet, so grossly underestimated the power and ferocity and destructive capability of Iran’s retaliation? Didn’t they warn Netanyahu accurately of what would happen?

Doctorow:
I think they didn’t. There are a number of mistakes made by Israeli intelligence, which were suffering a real case of hubris after their delight in decapitating the neighboring, I would say, cat’s paws of Iran in Lebanon with their gadgets that exploded in the hands of Hezbollah leaders.

They certainly were delighted with having set the plan, this goes back several years, was waiting to spring the plan on Iran to decapitate its top generals in their forces and the leading scientists in their nuclear program. They had their eyes perfectly focused on minutiae, and they were suffering from near-sightedness. They didn’t focus their eyes on the big picture. They should have known about the 40,000 missiles. They should have known about the hidden launchers underground, which the Israeli air force could not decimate. And my assumption is that they gave Netanyahu inadequate information, which is for an intelligence agency, the most damning thing you can say.

Napolitano:
Right, right. I suppose the only thing worse is what the American intelligence agency does, telling the president what they think he wants to hear, whether it’s connected to the facts or not.

Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. Thanks for your time as always. And again, Thank you for all those notes and insights that you periodically send. I read every word of them and appreciate all the thoughtfulness behind it.

I guess they don’t celebrate the 4th of July in Europe. They certainly don’t celebrate it in England. I know you’re not in England, but have a nice weekend. It’s a big holiday weekend here, and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
Well, we will celebrate. We’ll cool off. I mean, it’s been 95 degrees in Brussels. Tomorrow it drops to 70.

Napolitano:
Oh, nice to hear. All the best to you, Professor. Thank you.

Doctorow:
Thanks, bye-bye.

Napolitano: 22:03
Sure. And coming up later today at 2 o’clock this afternoon, Aaron Mate; at 3 o’clock, Phil Giraldi; at 4 o’clock, we’ll find him, Max Blumenthal.

Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Although the Information War that Moscow has advanced against the NATO decision to raise military budgets of Member States to 5% of GDP was indeed one of the topics in today’s chat with Judge Andrew Napolitano, we did not go into any depth because other subjects took precedence, including the fast deteriorating relations between Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation and what that tells us about the occasional brutishness of Moscow; Emanuel Macron’s two hour phone conversation with Vladimir Putin yesterday; the killing and wounding of civilians in Donetsk City yesterday caused by a French-built Storm Shadow medium range missile fired by Ukrainian forces; an appreciation of the situation on the front lines in Donbas, where the Ukrainians are losing ground but remain in control of the discipline of their troops and continue fighting despite the cut-off of American military supplies; and why Mossad may not be the world’s greatest intel agency but a very near sighted bunch that is no better than peers in Washington or London.

I regret that there was not sufficient time to go into what I consider to be a serious mistake by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and President Putin in describing the rise in military budgets as leading to a ‘catastrophic collapse’ of NATO.

The mistake is that it is not for Moscow to say this to Western audiences. It is for Western journalists to say this on their own.  And they are doing that without any ‘help’ from the Kremlin. Today’s ‘New York Times’ has on the front page of its print edition in Europe an opinion piece by a guest writer who argues that it is a mistake for Europe to try to escape from ongoing deindustrialization by investing heavily in European military production. The author says that the hopes that such massive spending will free Europe from its dependence on the USA for its defense and will revitalize European economies are ‘delusory.’

On the other hand, when the Kremlin calls for the West to undo the plans for higher military budgets, saying this is self-destructive, it gives a bad name to all of those in the West who are saying precisely that on our own. We instantly become ‘stooges of Moscow.’

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdLwjoRuonU

NewsX: 0:02
For our top story, we start in Europe, where Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned that NATO’s push to increase defence spending could backfire. Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov says the move may lead to the catastrophic collapse of the alliance. He added that NATO should be guided by common sense rather than escalating spending. NATO leaders recently agreed to raise defence spending to five percent of GDP over the next decade, a target driven by US President Donald Trump’s demands for increased burden sharing. Meanwhile, Russia says it plans to cut military spending next year despite a current defense budget that makes up 6.3 percent of GDP, its highest since the Cold War.

Lavrov’s comments came in response to Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikowski, who warned an arms race could trigger Putin’s fall. Russia continues to dismiss claims that it would attack a NATO member, but the tensions reflected deep divisions over security and spending priorities across Europe.

1:07
We’re now joined by Gilbert Doctorow, who is a Russian affairs expert, and he joins us live from Brussels. Gilbert, thank you for joining us on the program. Putin has reiterated his ambition for peace over and over again. However, if Russia does really want peace, why does it spend over six percent on GDP on its military, the highest since the Cold War, while telling NATO to use common sense and spend less?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:35
Well I think during the Cold War, Russia, particularly at the end of the Cold War, Russia wasn’t at war with anyone. So it’s understandable that its military budget would have been lower than today. If a country is in the middle of a fierce war for its own existence, as Russia says it is today, it’s understandable they would spend a large amount of their GDP on a war. So that isn’t the issue.

The promise to bring it down, well, that assumes, I suppose, that Russia will win the war with Ukraine in this time period, and so can afford to scale back its military budget. So long as the war is going on, as fiercely as it is today, I think it is improbable that any cut in the Russian budget would be realistic.

NewsX: 2:25
It’s evident this hike in defence spending is because of fears of aggression. And how can Moscow dismiss these fears when much of the international community claims that Russia has invaded or intervened in countries like Georgia and also regions of Crimea and Ukraine all of which used to be in Moscow’s sphere. What are your thoughts on that, Gilbert?

Doctorow:
I think that the current Information War offensive by Russia– And I say that because Mr. Lavrov’s remarks are in sync with what President Putin was saying yesterday. And I can tell you that on major talk shows like Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show last night panelists were almost hysterical about the dangers being posed to Russia by the increased military spend projected for NATO. The Russians are engaging in an information war, you can call it propaganda, which is the old word we use for this sort of thing.

3:24
And that’s a mistake, because they are very poor at propaganda. They don’t do it very well, not nearly as well as the United States and the West does. So they’re talking themselves blue, but I don’t think they will have any real impact on what’s going on in Europe, which is faced with its own internal contradictions and really does not react to anything that Moscow says. The agreed-upon increase in spending in Europe, in NATO last week was an empty exercise as anybody who seriously looks at it knows. The European countries cannot raise their military budgets, and that includes Germany, where the government will fall if Mr. Merz proceeds with his ambitious plans to introduce a draft, which is what his defense minister was calling for a week ago. Therefore, the threat coming from Europe is by no means as real as the Russians are now pretending it is. And it would be better if they just shut up.

NewsX: 4:30
Okay. Lavrov calls NATO’s collapse possibly catastrophic. One of the reasons why this conflict started was, of Ukraine, the possibility that it would join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Is this a threat, or does Moscow actively hope for NATO to fall apart?

Doctorow:
Well, of course it hopes that it will fall apart. There was a peculiar choice of words by Lavrov, “catastrophic”. Catastrophic for whom? Certainly not for the Russians. And it is a hyperbolic statement. It’s an exaggerated statement. In the worst-case scenario, NATO will not collapse catastrophically. It will downsize, it will break up into pieces that become part of the European Union’s defence.

But the different forces and equipment that NATO now has will not disappear. They will be integrated or reintegrated in the European defense, in the worst-case scenario. So Mr. Lavrov’s choice of words was very peculiar.

NewsX: 5:41
Yes indeed. He also claimed that Russia will cut its military spending down from the 6.3 percent it’s currently at. Why should anyone believe Russia’s claim while, [on] spending the next year, while still fighting this costly war in Ukraine?

Doctorow:
Well, as I said a moment ago, the hidden assumption of that statement that was made by President Putin and is repeated by his foreign Minister, the hidden assumption, is that the war will end because Russia will win, because Ukraine will capitulate. Now, that is the assumption. Nobody, he isn’t saying that.

But if it is true, if that happens, then of course Russia will scale back its military expenditures. If it does not happen and the war goes on, then of course Russia will continue to spend it at its present level, if not even more.

NewsX: 6:40
Gilbert Doctorow, thank you very much for joining us on the programme and for your insights.

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.