Author: gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

Glenn Diesen: NATO’s Summit – Dead Man Walking?

This 45 minute discussion with Professor Glenn Diesen provided an excellent opportunity to expand on various conclusions about Trump and political theater that I have first put out in brief in the past couple of weeks.

There is my critique of the Western habit in both mainstream and alternative media to direct all attention to lay psychoanalysis of Trump based on his words instead of considering what have been the geopolitical consequences of his actions. My colleagues often do not differ from CNN presenters when they tell their audiences that Trump is a narcissist, that he is manipulated by X or Y and that his intentions are sinister, to enrich himself and little more. They feast on his lies which, in the case of the ‘obliteration’ of Iranian nuclear sites, have behind them raison d’etat, the salvation of the State of Israel from the latest results of the war of aggression against Iran unleashed by Benjamen Netanyahu, namely the utter destruction of much of Israel’s defense establishment as well as of its office and residential towers in Tel Aviv and elsewhere as demonstrated by Larry Johnson in his latest Sonar blog.

By harping on the fact that Iran may have moved centrifuges and enriched uranium away from the sites before the Trump attack, these analysts in mainstream and independent media are, objectively speaking, spreading sedition and arguing for renewed attacks on Iran and never ending war.

As for the NATO summit, I argue here that its main achievement, namely the agreement of the NATO Member States to raise their defense budgets to 5% by 2035, sets the stage for reduced American contributions to NATO. This may not be the same as a U.S. withdrawal from NATO but it can be a fairly good approximation, depending on Trump’s budgets for the years remaining in his term of office. This, in turn, puts NATO on a fast track to collapse, since European contributions will de facto not rise much if at all: the Member States simply cannot raise taxes or take loans sufficient to meet the new military obligations and they cannot find the funds by cutting other budgetary categories, meaning social benefits, because that spells political suicide.

I add here to previous mention of the problems Germany faces to realize the rearmament program that Chancellor Merz has set out. As yesterday’s ‘Financial Times’ discusses in an excellent front page article, there is growing resistance to rearmament within the German SPD (Socialist) party. Although a majority supports the plans of Merz and his Defense Minister Pistorius, a ‘substantial minority’ oppose these plans, including the prominent deputy Peter Brandt, the eldest son of Chancellor Willy Brandt, who set in motion the Ostpolitik (détente) in the 1970s.

Peter Brandt is probably the most visible signatory of a Manifesto against the rearmament that is now being circulated in Germany. The FT notes that the ruling coalition of CDU and SPD only has a slim 17 vote majority in the Bundestag, so that a revolt by some Socialists can bring down the government. Given Merz’s present unpopularity, any successor government will have a very different complexion.

One can say that we are witnessing now a new Turning Point in German political history when the Turning Point declared by Scholz a little more than a year ago, meaning the rejection of all accommodation with Russia and assignment to it of enemy status, is itself about to be thrown out.

To this, I add the observation that under present circumstances, the sinking of NATO also means the sinking of the European Union. Thanks to the work of Commission Chairwoman Ursula von der Leyen these past several years, the two have become virtually synonymous. Just as NATO has made fear and hatred of Russia the glue that keeps the Alliance alive, so von der Leyen and Team have made the very same fear and hatred the unifying theme of the European Union. Take that away, as will happen when the Russians conclude their erasing Ukraine as a military and political force, which we may well expect in the coming months, and the EU no longer has a reason to exist- at least no reason to exist under its present leadership in the Commission and in the Parliament. If it is to be saved, these people will have to go, either by voluntary resignation or by impeachment.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

 

Enjoy the show:


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yYPXP2aU_G8&t=4s

Transcript of ‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 26 June

Transcript submitted by a reader

Napolitano: 0:34
Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, June 26th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, thank you very much.

Let’s start with NATO since they’re not far from you and they were meeting this week; I guess many of them are still there. Can the NATO membership nations realistically spend five percent of their gross domestic product on defense, as they seem to have promised they will do as recently as yesterday.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:14
Some people, myself included, have described the meeting in The Hague yesterday as political theater. And I think there’s a lot to it. It’s not just watching the Secretary General fawn over Donald Trump that makes this political theater. It’s what they all signed up to. They signed up to commitments that almost none of them can realize. And I think that is known, but it is ignored in the same way that the bombing mission in Iran was known by many people to have failed in terms of destroying the nuclear capabilities of Iran, but that was kept to the side because it gets in the way of the whole purpose of the political theater.

The theater was there not for us to have a good laugh at the expense of the Secretary General. The theater there was to do business, and it did it. It got a commitment from these countries, all member states of NATO, to something that, as I say, most of them can not achieve, for reasons that we can go into if we have the time. But that is not the end result. The end result is that Mr. Trump has created an exit ramp for the United States from NATO.

2:38
If these countries all are committed and signed in writing that they’re going to raise their contributions by several trillion dollars in the coming decade, the United States correspondingly, can reduce its commitment and its spending on NATO over that period. I don’t see anybody looking at that fact. And I think it is the same way as people are missing the real outcome of the political theater in Iran. It was not to amuse us, it was to do business. And the business was to shut up Mr. Netanyahu, to prepare the ceasefire, which he had to gratefully accept, though not graciously, and to save Israel from itself, something which I hope and expect Mr. Trump will use when he goes back to his donors and tells them, I just saved Israel for you. Now let’s get rid of Mr. Netanyahu.

Napolitano: 3:40
I want to address the latter part about Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu in a minute, but just to circle back to NATO, if we could, your colleague on this show, Professor Glenn Diesen, has argued in agreeing with you that some of these NATO countries will use cooking the books to demonstrate to Trump that they’ve spent 5 percent. He gave the example of infrastructure, bridges and highways in Britain that will be suddenly put on the defense budget. I mean, this is really a joke if Trump and his people fall for it. Do you share Professor Diesen’s view that this kind of trickery will be engaged in by these countries?

Doctorow:
What you’re talking about was in today’s “Telegraph” in England. What I’m talking about took place six weeks earlier. Exactly that issue was raised in the pro-Atlanticist Belgian press. These are all rooting for NATO, but they are looking at the realities of political life in this country, in Belgium, and the reality is that their government has no wiggle room to sincerely follow through on any commitments it makes. This country already is the highest taxed in Europe, if not in the world. They cannot raise taxes and they cannot take loans, because the country is not in good standing with creditors; it has a very high indebtedness. So where are they going to get the money?

5:26
Only one place, by cutting social benefits. And that is political suicide. No government will stand when it starts doing that. We had a general strike yesterday. They are like wildcat strikes every few days here, national strikes of transport protesting the rather minimal cuts in social benefits that this new government that came into power in January has instituted. To go from where we are now in Belgium from 1.3 percent of GDP assigned for military to three and a half percent, which is the rock, the hard part of the 5% that everyone’s talking about, is beyond, is a bridge too far for Belgium, and not just for Belgium, for many other countries in the EU.

6:13
So they have given Mr. Trump an empty promise, but which satisfies his needs. His need is to find a graceful way to take the United States out of NATO, and they just gave it to him.

Napolitano:
But it’s not going to be realistic. I mean, if the United States leaves NATO and there’s substantial support over here for that, and as I can take the pulse, that will result in a significant diminution in spending for NATO. Let’s backtrack a little. Doesn’t Russia produce more armaments and projectiles than all of NATO combined?

Doctorow: 6:55
Oh, it does. This came out, I think, was even the Secretary General made this statement of within the past week, that Russia alone produces four times the projectiles that are so important for ground warfare, for warfare of attrition that we’re seeing now in Ukraine, four times what the United States and Europe combined produce. But just one step back, I overstated this.

When I said pull back from NATO, I didn’t mean leave it, he can’t. Legally, he can’t. That requires the approval of Congress. But to reduce the spending on NATO, he can. And that is what he’s now been given.

Napollitano: 7:34
Right. I may have misspoken also. I meant reduce spending. He would love to leave NATO, but it’s a treaty and it would require rescission by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. I don’t think he would get that.

Doctorow:
No.

Napolitano:
Right. Now you, in your wonderful page-long missives that you sent have pointed out something I haven’t heard from anybody else. If NATO does increase its spending, what will the reaction in the Kremlin be?

Doctorow:
Well, what I was saying is that if they could do this, which they can’t, but for argument’s sake, if they could increase their contributions to defense budgets across the EU, across the NATO countries, and raised several trillion dollars in the next decade, then they would be digging their own graves.

Because we have to look at the last 40 years of history to understand that there has been on each side, Russia, Soviet Union as it was, on the east and western Europe and United States and NATO on the other side, they have looked this way and that way, as what kind of a military doctrine and strategy they have to have, given their appraisal of the other side. In the late 1970s and early 1980s– before Russia started to weaken and collapse, or Soviet Union under Gorbachev finally culminating in the December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, disintegration of it– before all that, when theSoviet Union was still relatively strong, the final period of Brezhnev, the beginning of the ’80s, the Russians looked at NATO with alarm. It had maybe a million men in arms, it had vast numbers of tanks, it had all kinds of military hardware in greater abundance and higher quality than they did. Well, in the 19th century, in the shootouts, you have the equalizer.

9:45
The fellow who is the weaker side could be the winner in a duel if he had a better gun. Well, the equalizer in our age was nuclear weapons. Russia understood that it could not withstand the full invasion by NATO. And so it built an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons that are unique in size and in variety to meet every eventuality. Now, In the 21st century, under Mr. Putin, the situation has reversed itself. Europe’s profiting from the end of the Soviet Union, and it cut back its military expenses or funding and its arms production drastically, to the point where Germany today has an army that’s not worth talking about. That’s not my appraisal; it’s what they’re saying among themselves publicly. They are one-third the number of men at arms that they were in the 1990s. And we know that their tanks hardly work. They have zero, no effective air defense.

11:00
So Europe is really exposed by its own choice, because until the hyperactive propaganda of the Russian threat came into effect after 2008, Europe rightly understood that there was no threat from the East, so why would they spend their money on all this hardware and keep so many men at arms? They didn’t. Now, in this present situation, this situation has flip-flopped from where it was in the 1980s. The Russians have the best European army, the best equipped, best trained, and the best war experienced.

Europe is weak militarily. Under these circumstances, okay, the Russians really have no intention of doing anything. We discussed this on your program in the past. The notion of a Russian threat is absolutely empty. They’ll be quite happy to solve the problem in Ukraine and then to go back to their knitting.

Napolitano: 12:01
Do the European leaders make the same domino nonsensical argument that Joe Biden made, Vladimir Putin wants to take all of Ukraine and then he’s going to go up into Warsaw and then aim for Paris. Do they actually make this argument with a straight face in order to induce taxpayers to cough up more money or justify borrowing?

Doctorow:
I think they can do it with a straight face, because they’re talking to one another. The broad public doesn’t listen to them at all. The broad public is concerned about the price of fuel, for how it’s eating.

12:42
But I just want to finish the argument that we were on. If Russia, if Europe should build its muscles and do what the Russians read from the documents coming out of Brussels and Berlin and whatever, and build up their armed forces to pose again a threat of a million men against Russia, Russia is going to change its nuclear doctrine yet again and put heavy reliance on nuclear weapons. And we saw this. This is not my guessing. We saw this when Macron and Starmer were planning to put 50,000 soldiers into Ukraine in the “coalition of the willing”, supposedly, to enforce a ceasefire.

The Russians said loudly, “Gentlemen, we are not going to fight you in the trenches. We are not going to lose our soldiers trying to remove 50,000 of yours. We will bomb you out of existence in a few minutes.” That is the new reality. And if people in Berlin and London and Brussels aren’t watching that, they are asleep at the job.

Napolitano: 13:51
Chancellor, German Chancellor Merz has suggested he could spend a trillion dollars in a year. I mean, that’s an astounding amount of money. That’s what the US will be spending if Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill passes. A: is that realistic? B: does anybody believe him? C: where would he get the money?

Doctorow:
I’ll come to those questions, but I’d like to say what’s a bigger issue. When we speak about Ukraine and providing them with additional military equipment, people raise their hand and say, “But they don’t have any men.” And that’s my answer to your issue. He can spend a trillion and he can build more tanks and they can manufacture various types of air defenses which are useless against against hypersonic missiles, as we now know and as he should know.

Anyway, they can build all this military hardware, but he can’t find the soldiers They opened– they did an advertising campaign in Germany. They made it attractive for young men– and women– to enlist. And I think in a month they got about 500 recruits.

Napolitano:
Oh, good Lord.

Doctorow:
They needed–

Napolitano:
A drop in the bucket.

Doctorow:
They need a few hundred. They need 100,000, not 500. And Pistorius, in the last two or three days– Pistorius is a defense minister who was formerly a defense minister under the socialist government of Scholz– he came out saying that if we cannot get volunteers, we will be obliged to introduce a draft. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that will be the end of this coalition government. Mr. Pistorius may be a socialist, but he doesn’t speak for his party. His party said they will leave the coalition and the government will fall. If the government falls, well that is the end of this military build-up. As I said, without personnel, the hardware is useless.

Napolitano: 15:47
Got it, got it. What is the status of things in Ukraine? While the world’s eyes and the media’s attention has been focused on Israel, Iran and Trump’s bombing, what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, from your–

Doctorow:
Well something is happening. We’ve commented in the last few weeks that the conflict in the Middle East had certain benefits for Russia, in that the United States withdrew various air defense systems, took them to the Middle East to safeguard its own military bases in the Gulf states, and that the United States stopped, essentially stopped supplying materiel to Ukraine because it was saving, hoarding it for Israel and any other eventuality in that region. But there’s something else we haven’t talked about.

16:41
The Russians have become much more aggressive and hard-punching in their ongoing battle in Ukraine. The strikes on Kiev were much more severe than anything in the last three years, strikes in the last two weeks, I mean. The reasons are clear. Not only do they not have anything resembling an air defense. But the Russians are not getting bad publicity.

Russia and its “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine, its “barbarism”, to take the words out of Mr. Starmer. Hey, that’s gone to page 20 in the newspaper. On the front page, all we read about is the devastation that each of the parties, Iran and Israel, are visiting on one another. And Russia is getting a free ride to do what has to be done in Ukraine.

Napolitano: 17:35
How much longer can Zelensky last?

Doctorow:
As long as they let him. He’s not going anywhere until and unless the United States throws him under the bus, which may well happen. But at present, the people around him– let’s make this clear: he’s not the only, he’s not a singular madman. The people who were there in power before him are saying virtually the same thing.

Whether it’s Poroshenko, who was immediately before Zelensky came to power. Sorry, not immediately before, but he was in the camp, the camp Zelensky before. Then Timoshenko, these are big names. They’re in the Rada, they’re in the parliament and they would be, you can look at them as well. Do we have an alternative to Mr. Zelensky if he’s pushed out? Among the politicians, we don’t. The only place where you could possibly find reason would be in the military.

Napolitano: 18:49
What is your view as to who prevailed in the Israeli-Iran-US 12-day kerfuffle that ended with Trump’s bombs?

Doctorow:
I think we’re all seeing that when we tune on YouTube. Let’s face it. Israel had a very strict military censorship which prevented the Western journalists, whether they were Reuters or the BBC or CNN, they were in Israel, but they could not report on Israel. They could not show images of the destruction around them. You had some small piddling videos of this apartment having been hit or the glass shattered — rubbish.

19:30
As we now are seeing, just go to YouTube and you will see not fake news but real images of major residential and business towers in Tel Aviv that are shattered, that will have to be torn down because they’re no longer structurally sound. You see, you’re beginning to see the same images coming from Haifa. We had, my own inputs, I don’t have, like Colonel McGregor, I don’t have military counterparts who exchange information with me. But I am on Indian radio, television. I watch closely a couple of these international broadcasters who are respectable. There are a lot of fake news outlets in India, but there are several very respectable ones.

20:19
And they’ve been, from their own sources, providing information. And then there are the Russians. And I don’t mean Russians who are sitting in Russia; I mean the Russians who are given the microphone living in Jerusalem, and they are emigres from Russia who are interviewed by Russian journalists.

Napolitano:
And what do they say?

Doctorow:
Well, their apartment has just been knocked out. In fact, the 25-year-long lead journalist of Russian state television was showing his apartment where all the glass was knocked out. You can imagine that the destruction is pretty widespread if even he was hit by it. And that’s not to talk about the real infrastructure, what electricity generating plants were doomed, what port facilities in Haifa were utterly destroyed.

21:08
And even without destruction, you’ve got the war risks that made Haifa useless. No merchant vessel would go near Haifa, given the risks of destruction. So the damage to the Israeli economy was very severe. It’s only now beginning to come out.

Napolitano:
The Israelis have one major international airport, Ben Gurion; it’s still closed.

Doctorow:
Yeah, they have suffered enormously. And you’ve mentioned this in your latest programs. The result of all this is in effect Israel lost the war. Now Donald Trump and the people around him saw and knew that. And that’s why I say that the theater that we saw, that we were exposed to, of empty shell sites in Iran having been hit, that was not just amusement and it was not an empty act. It was an act with a consequence that surely was planned.

22:12
And that is, namely, to take away from Mr. Netanyahu any reason to continue the war or to deny that Israel has lost it.

Napolitano:
What did the United States gain by that bombing?

Doctorow:
Well, here I agree with Colonel MacGregor. It’s keeping the United States out of deeper involvement. It was a– they bombed bases which were certainly known to have been emptied out. They did not intend to cause loss of life or casualties. I believe there was some advance notification that this was coming for the Iranians. And it’s the same thing that Iran did in its attack or counterattack on the American base in Qatar.

23:09
This was a 19th century duel. When your honor is compromised, as a gentleman you are obliged to pick up the glove that was thrown at your feet and to arrange with your seconds for a duel with pistols. But you were not obliged to kill your opponent. It was perfectly acceptable to fire in the air. That way you acquitted your humiliation and nobody was hurt. That’s what’s just happened now.

Napolitano:
Professor, a terrific analysis. Thank you very much for it. I just have images in my head of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton must have expected that Burr would shoot in the air and of course he didn’t, and Hamilton died on the spot.

24:01
Oh well, we’ll see where this goes. But thank you very much for your analysis. Thank you for the notes that you keep sending. Very, very insightful. And we’ll look forward to seeing you again next week, my dear friend.

Doctorrow:
Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Napolitano:
Thank you. And coming up later today, two more of our heavyweights. By heavyweights, I mean a lot of you like to watch. At 11 o’clock this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sachs; and at 1 o’clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer.

24:29
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Transcript of ‘Coffee and a Mike’ full video

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gcl4ULCIcPU

Farris: 0:06
Gilbert, thanks for coming back so quickly. I, you know, we are … in a bizarre world. I feel like, you know, look at the events over the weekend. And I think to myself, is this country, is the geopolitical, are we in a pro wrestling era now? Because everything is just like, things are happening, but yet nothing happens. I keep saying that but that’s the first feeling I get. What do you think?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Yeah, well, Donald Trump is the Haystack Calhoun of our day. He was quite a performer, Haystack Calhoun. So I take up your reference. Look, it’s only over when it’s over, and then we’ll all be gone.

0:50
The– things are changing, and I have made some statements. I’ve claimed victory in my forecast of what Trump was up to. It ended in a ceasefire, which is now in force. But I say, “ended in”, we don’t know when it can emerge from that into new fighting. I think it’s very doubtful.

Though I do look around me and I see people who are quite reputable and quite serious who are saying, “Ah, the United States is now arming Israel to the teeth, and they’ll go back into–“. I don’t believe that, but that’s my belief against their belief, and we all can be, each of us can be wrong in his own way. Nonetheless, as I have said in several essays in the last day or two. My difference with peers amounts to two elements.

One is that I believe I’m more open-minded than they are. Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a buffoon, that Donald Trump is a narcissist. Everyone thinks they know a lot, but they really don’t. And their unwillingness to look at anything that he does without prejudice works against them. So that’s one thing I have going for me, I had going for me, in my prediction about his seemingly bizarre and seemingly unconstitutional and very vicious attack on Iran this past weekend was going to end badly. I said it would end all right. And I think so far my prediction has held.

2:36
But there’s a second reason, which I’ve mentioned today in my writings, and that’s methodology. And I think– I want to say this to the audience, because it’s something that I don’t think anybody much thinks about. They all have these experts and they all, and they mostly they agree, and then there are a few people who don’t agree, as if this is arbitrary and just personal whim. It isn’t.

Regrettably, most of the people who are on the airwaves are not following the principle of objectivity. By objectivity, I mean something very specific that comes from Marxist thinking, something I was introduced to when I was a college student, and it’s called the difference between objective analysis and subjective analysis. And almost everything that we read in commentary on political leaders is based on subjective analysis. Now, what does that mean? It means that you’re trying to express what the motive, intention of the actors can be or was.

3:54
And it assumes you can get into their head. It assumes– when I get questions from some interviewers, “Oh, what does the Kremlin think about this?” If I answer the question, because I don’t answer it, I won’t be invited back. But I’ll tell you right now, I don’t have any respect for the question. The question assumes that I have a microphone under the pillow of Mr. Putin, which is nonsense. We don’t know what he thinks, and I’m telling you, I don’t care what he thinks. I care what he does. And that’s the same thing with respect to Donald Trump. But even with Donald Trump, it’s multiplied many times, because if you listen to him consecutively day after day, he’s saying everything contradictory.

4:36
On day two, he’s contradicting most of what he’s done on day one. Therefore, you’re left in total confusion, and you think the man is a muddle. He isn’t. But I say that to try to follow any politician’s spoken words or to try to imagine judging by their biography, their past, what their personality is like — is a big mistake.

All the famous well-known biographies of Mr. Putin, KGB, and power. I’m sorry, this is all rubbish. This is precisely subjective analysis, looking at the man’s past, trying to get into his mind, trying to pretend as a layman that you’re a psychoanalyst who can make sense out of a man and then explain what his next moves will be on the political chessboard. Wrong.

5:33
Even professional psychologists tell you that analysis by remote, without having the person sitting on a couch in front of them, is virtually worthless. And it is still less valuable when it’s done by laymen who really don’t know what analysis is all about. Therefore, for this reason, so many of my colleagues are making either hysterical statements about the present in the future. They’re hyperventilating. And they are not making predictions that can help the public understand where we are and where we’re going.

So as I say, when I differ from my colleagues on evaluation of given events, like what happened this past weekend, I don’t take credit for being smarter than anybody else, but I do take credit for using a methodology which I think is more valuable than what they are using. I use objective analytical frame. Now, what does that mean? It means I look at what they have done, not what they have said, and what is the consequence of their actions.

6:48
In the case of Mr. Trump this past weekend, it was clear to me that what he just did– in his bombing and making this bragging statement that the United States had obliterated the nuclear program of Iran, which was contradicted by many experts minutes after he made it– he was doing something very specific. He was shutting up Mr. Netanyahu. Netanyahu could not come back and say, “Oh no, they still have–“. He couldn’t, because then he would be humiliating Trump and their relationship would be finished, meaning that Israel would be cut off from its major supplier of all armaments.

Therefore, Mr. Netanyahu had to bite his tongue. He had lost the reason for waging the war on Iran, and the consequence was that they stopped fighting, that they agreed to a ceasefire, which was not in the nature of Mr. Netanyahu. Now that’s why I say that this analysis, without prejudice, looking at concretely what would flow from what just happened, I think is a more valuable approach to current events.

8:15
[commercial message]

Farris: 8:46
When that was occurring on Saturday, how long did it take you to come to the conclusion of what you just shared with me?

Doctorow:
Five minutes. It was obvious as day. Either the man is completely mad, in which case go look for the nearest shelter, or there was some spark of intelligence in what he was doing. Not because Mr. Trump is necessarily brilliant, but people in power are surrounded by brilliant people. So they’re surrounded by some scoundrels and surrounded by a lot of people, just as he was when he was a real estate developer.

When you’re wealthy, you have people lined up outside your door to make proposals to you. Your value in the whole situation is to have enough common sense to sort out what is trash and what is potentially great value. And since he’s been in business for a very long time, and he didn’t go bankrupt although admittedly there were some close shaves, I assumed that he has enough judgment to sort out the advice from would-be advisors that is good, from advice that is dangerous or trash. And that is what I give him credit for. Just as he doesn’t write his own speeches, and when he goes extemporaneous, It’s pretty awful.

There’s no reason to expect him to write his own speeches. There’s no reason for us to expect our president to be a universal genius. And the people who don’t understand that, as President Obama did not understand that, and who are flattered and who are vain and who answer every idiotic question that the public puts to them, they are fools. None of us is a universal genius. But it’s so easy to be flattered and to consider yourself as obliged to answer questions that you know nothing about.

So let’s leave it with Mr. Trump. I understood very quickly there had to be some sense in what he was doing. And as soon as he, he said, when did I realize this? After he made his speech, not during the event.

11:01
During the event, during the bombing, it wasn’t clear what’s going on. But when he made his speech to the nation, and there are a couple of things that were in there. There were markers. And I’m amazed that my peers, my colleagues haven’t paid attention to those markers.

Marker number one, his whole litany of grievances against Iran, justifying America taking action now. Israel wasn’t in that pool at all. That told me he was going back to 1980 and the shock and horror in the States over the taking of hostages from the US embassy. That is the start of America’s hatred for Iran, and for the leadership of Iran, for the Ayatollahs. And he went on to the present, “Oh, they’ve killed a lot of our soldiers.” Yeah, well, of course. Of course they’ve killed them, because you’ve killed them. There’s been this whole litany of grievances, but strictly American grievances. There was no Israel in that equation. That should have been a signal to everybody that America is waving the Israeli tail.

And as opposed to Mr. Mearsheimer’s well-known proposal, proposition accepted by, which almost cost him his academic position in 2007 when he set it out in the book, but today is universally accepted that the Israel lobby dictates American foreign policy. Well, there it was, shredded, shredded by Mr. Trump himself. And what I took this to mean is that he was in control of the relationship with Netanyahu, not the other way around.

12:55
And he was saving Israel from Netanyahu, because Israel’s losing the war. So there you have it. That’s where I realized that it’s not what it looks like.

Farris::
And then Iran’s response by military base in Qatar?

Doctorow: 13:17
This was more political theater. And it has a tradition. It didn’t just come from nowhere. But what we’re speaking about in the relationship here is a duel. Trump dishonored Iran by moving this very sophisticated, heavy bombers, the B-2, with their 15-ton bunker busters, and attacked Iran. That was a humiliation for the country, not just an act of war.

And Iran, being a proud nation of 5,000 years of civilization, had to respond. But duels are not what we think about. Duels don’t always end in death. In the 19th century, They very often did not end in one side trying to murder the other. On the contrary, you as a gentleman were obliged to pick up the glove that had been cast at your feet.

14:19
That is the humiliation that your opponent was delivering to you. You had to respond by choosing your seconds, by discussing with them, having them discuss which weapons were used, pistols or swords, or Lord knows what, and you would have to have a duel. But you were not obliged to kill him. You were obliged to react, to take part in the duel. And it was perfectly respectable and admirable if instead of taking aim at his heart, you shot your pistol in the air.

And that is what Iran did. They avenged their insult by attacking the most important American base in the Gulf region, the coordinating center in Qatar. But they sent older, less advanced six missiles against Qatar, missiles which they knew could be shot down. And they gave advance warning to the Americans that this was coming. And they chose Qatar, because Qatar, aside from being so important, they knew it was an empty shell, the same as their own Fordow and other two nuclear sites were empty shells when the Americans attacked.

The American soldiers had largely been withdrawn from Qatar. So in these circumstances, I say this was political theater. They knew that this could end the conflict with the States. And Donald Trump knew that. And he virtually, minutes after it happened, said that.

16:10
He even publicly thanked the Iranians for having given America advance warning. There you have it, political theater. So this is the way I read it. No, I don’t pretend that this is the way it’s all going to end. And I don’t pretend that Scott Ritter is wrong when he says that the Americans are arming Israel to the teeth and they go back into the fighting. Anything is possible, though I’m very skeptical.

Farris:
That was going to be my next question to you. Not that you’re forecasting, but will this hold? I mean, it’s holding for now.

Doctorow:
I think so. The question is, what is the meaning of this for Israel’s war on Gaza continuing? I believe that Mr. Trump now has leverage over Netanyahu to end that as well. If I were Trump, which I’m not, I would speak to my Zionist donors, who my peers believe are dictating his policy. I don’t agree with that, but that’s what they think, and they have a reason to say that.

17:24
And I would say, “Gentlemen and ladies,” because the biggest donor was a woman, “I have just saved the neck of Israel, because Mr. Netanyahu was taking it down. If the war continued, Israel would be destroyed. The state would cease to be viable economically.” It already has lost more than 250,000 Israelis who fled from the start of this 12-day war.

At the start of the war, they took pleasure boats and they went out into the sea off of Gaza to watch the fireworks as their Iron Dome brought down the Iranian missiles. Well, six, seven days into the war, they were using the same pleasure boats to flee to Cyprus. So those who had the money to get out, got out, 250,000 of them, that’s about, probably a low estimate. The country is going to rack and ruin. Haifa port has been largely incapacitated either by destruction of port facilities or by the unwillingness of any merchant vessel to go near it for fear of being bombed by the Iranians.

18:46
The country cannot go on like that. And I would tell them, “Gentlemen, Ladies, let’s get it over with Gaza as well. And let’s get rid of Mr. Netanyahu.”

That’s, I can’t say that the scenario that I just painted now is actually happening. Nobody can say that. But I don’t exclude that as a possibility to explain when Israel stops its genocide in Gaza.

Farris:
So for now it appears that that chapter is closed but by no means did the book finish on this.

Doctorow:
No it isn’t, and you have vile personalities like Macron who was one of the first to come out, rushed to the press and said “Oh, we didn’t, the … Americans didn’t really finish off the nuclear capabilities of Iran. Oh, we have to go back to war.”

19:43
Yes, I know, these vile personalities. And there are a few of them in the States as well. But generally speaking, Trump has succeeded in shutting everybody up and having them be silenced by what we all know. That Iran still has its enriched uranium. Iran still has a lot of centrifuges. And Iran, if it wants to, can go back to where it was before the attack.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of really wild speculation that’s being presented as solid facts in whatever you will touch when you open up YouTube and tap on the international subjects at the top of the screen. And this is really, “Oh, and Trump is shipping, sorry, Putin is shipping nuclear warheads to Tehran for use on their missiles.” This is totally irresponsible. Unfortunately, the fake news, particularly this is true of some of these Indian outfits, Times of India who were reporting a week ago that Netanyahu’s son had been killed and his wife was hospitalized.

All of this rubbish fills what any one of the viewers will find when they click on YouTube. And so if you don’t look at responsible presenters like yourself and a few others, you will be left with your hair standing on end. I think that the value of this program is precisely to let people smooth their hair down without [xxxxx] and relax a little bit. Things are not that horrible.

Farris: 21:40
Yeah, I was reading someone’s blog this morning and saying, you know, this is not 1939. There’s not going to be a draft. Not going to be a draft. There’s not going to be a nuclear holocaust. It’s not on the horizon. So everybody can just calm down.

Doctorow:
Well, I wouldn’t calm down excessively, because I’m sitting here in Brussels and just nearby, in The Hague they had a just concluding summit of all the NATO prime ministers and presidents. And if the policies that they have approved actually are implemented, which I don’t believe they can. But if they were to be implemented, then I would worry about the end of the world, but not next week. Let’s say five years from now.

Farris: 22:33
So you were writing about that, and I had a chance to look at it before we started. Talk about what they’re proposing in terms of increasing the budget for the NATO members.

Doctorow:
Well, I would like to address that in general terms and very specific terms, for the country I live in, because I read the Belgian newspapers, and there is relevant information about this country, which I think is relevant to countries even like Germany, to explain what the possibilities are to implement what was just approved unanimously, they say, at the summit in the Hague. The main achievement of that summit was the agreement, how it was finessed, Lord knows, because in fact Spain objected to it.

But reportedly the unanimous agreement that the NATO member states will raise their contributions, raise their military spending as a percent of GDP from the 2% that was mandated several years ago to 5% or practically speaking to 3.5% because the 5% includes 1.5% that could be called accounting, let’s call it subterfuge, accounting tricks. The one and a half percent, taking from three and a half percent to 5 percent, is permitted to be expenses for infrastructure, which is not really military spending.

24:20
Nonetheless, let’s say it goes to 3.5 percent. It can’t be done. My point is that they all agree to something that many of them know is utterly impossible politically. And why do I say that? Let’s look at Belgium.

Belgium now is, we know it’s the home of NATO. And at the same time, it is one of the countries that spend the least on military. With the percent of GDP, Belgium only spends 1.3 percent. The prime minister, Bart de Wever, conservative, an Atlanticist, of course, has pledged to meet the 2 percent before year’s end. But when you look at the details, the way of doing that is largely financial chicanery, budgetary manipulation, putting in the reconstruction of bridges and improvement of roads as having a military significance for NATO because it facilitates the movement of NATO troops that could be landed by plane or boat on Belgian shores.

25:38
It facilitates their movement eastward towards the beginning of Russia. Well, that’s a very nice trick. The problem is you can’t continue that trick into 2026. And where do you find the money? And here you have the frank admission that you can’t.

Belgium is highly indebted. Belgium has one of the highest tax rates on the working population. And I stress that, working population, not on capital, not on residences, but on working population, in the world. And so you can’t raise that rate of taxation. So what you can do to free up money to raise the military budget is to cut other elements of the federal budget.

And that, what does that mean? It means cutting social benefits. And that is political suicide. Belgium has a coalition government, which includes right and left, and center; and the left will walk out. It took nine months to form a government here, because there are a lot of little parties and everybody’s got their own favorite policy line, which has to be accommodated in the new coalition.

27:07
It took them nine months to form a government. If the prime minister pushes ahead with the obligation to raise the spending on military substantially, then the liberals will leave his government; his government falls. It’ll take at least nine months to replace it with a new government. In the meantime, we have a caretaker government, which cannot do anything.

It cannot touch the budget, it cannot introduce new legislation. Therefore, in no way would the planned rise in military be realized. And I don’t think Belgium’s a unique case. Looking at the neighbors, Germany, Mr. Merz is very, very, very enthusiastic about raising Germany’s military spending.

Maybe Germany has more room, more budgetary tricks it can play because it has a much bigger economy and much better credit, shall we say, on financial markets. But they don’t have people. And the latest remarks by Mr. Pistorius, the minister of defense, although he is a socialist, a member of former Chancellor Scholz’s cabinet, for introducing a draft will be the end of that coalition government, because the socialists reject it. Therefore, I think a number of countries, major countries and minor countries in the European Union, the idea of raising the military spending to meet what was just approved at the NATO summit is political theatrics.

29:07
It is not realizable. Now, I’d like to finish this remark on the summit by the second point. And if it were realizable, the only achievement would be to destroy European security, not to improve it. It amazes me that nobody is talking about this in their analysis of this meeting. Point is that for the last 30 or 40 years, there has been a shifting back and forth between Russia, well, Soviet Union, Russia, and Western Europe, NATO, between reliance on conventional forces and reliance on nuclear forces.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, before Mr. Gorbachev and the collapse, the slide into disaster of the Russian Soviet economy, the Russians looked at NATO. They saw massive armies. After all, the German army was three times what it is today. And they saw that army was well equipped.

30:21
And the other countries also in NATO had presentable armies and a lot of men. And the Russians added it all up. They came to whopping numbers of troops available to NATO, which outmanned them many times over. And they drew conclusions. The conclusion was, if we get into a fight with NATO, we will use nuclear weapons.

Now, what’s happened since? As we know, under Mr. Putin, the Russian armies have reconstituted themselves. They are now the strongest army in Europe, and maybe in the world, the best equipped with modern tanks, with modern drones, with everything you need on the battlefield, as we see daily in the results in Ukraine. They now produce four times the artillery shells that the United States and Europe together produce.

31:29
Russia is doing just fine in a conventional war against, essentially against NATO. The German army is in miserable shape, as everybody knows. Not because I’m saying that, because the Germans themselves are saying that. They don’t have equipment, they don’t have men, they don’t have anything, really. Europe as a whole has almost no air defense.

Almost none. Under these circumstances, the Russians are very happy to use their big advantage in conventional warfare and to keep it clean. They only are using conventional weapons, although they have the world’s biggest arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons of every size and variety for use in every possible eventuality.

But, but, big but, when Mr. Starmer and Mr. Macron started speaking about moving a 50,000-man force, armed force of coalition of the willing into Ukraine to protect them during a ceasefire and Lord knows what else. The Russians said very plainly, we will blow it up with nuclear weapons. We are not going to go into trench warfare with you guys. We won’t stand for it. We’re not going to lose our men because you are crazy. So get ready. We will blast you all away at once.

33:04
Well, there you have it. That’s what’s going to happen if Europe spends trillions of dollars, trillions of euros to rearm, as NATO is now suggesting. The war mode in Russia will go from conventional back to nuclear.


Now, why [ are they] not considering that? But why should they consider it? Because everything else they’re talking about is equal nonsense. How can Mr. Rutte make a speech as he did yesterday, which included a large segment on building a European air defense? How can they even begin to talk about that, when they see what’s just happened to Israel’s four-layer defense, the best in the world, American-equipped, American-designed. It failed completely.

33:57
When I said earlier that Israel’s being destroyed, it’s because the Iranians first depleted the interceptors and then, on the Israeli side, and then they moved in their most advanced missiles, particularly both cruise missiles and the hypersonic missiles, which cannot be stopped, and they’re destroying at will anything in Israel. If you look at that, I don’t see how Mr. Rutte or Mr. Trump with his famous Golden Dome for 150 billion dollars, I don’t see how they can open their mouths and talk about this … claptrap, this absolute nonsense of air defense. No.

Farris: 34:47
Yeah, that was going to be my next question to you, because you know Trump has been talking about this Golden Dome and you know, when we look back at what’s occurred between Israel and Iran over the last 12 days how effective is the Iron Dome?

Doctorow: 35:04
It isn’t, I don’t want to say that, against Hamas– it was developed, the Iron Dome was developed for nearby neighbors. The additional air defenses, which were largely engineered by the United States, were designed to stop the intercontinental ballistic missiles or just ballistic missiles. But none of them is capable of stopping hypersonic missiles. Nobody on Earth has such a capability now. And it is improbable that anyone will have, because these offensive weapons will be upgraded in sync with the upgrading of defensive systems.

And so the whole thing will be an impossible chase. And the losing side is the defense side, because as Israel has demonstrated, you have to send up four missiles to try to stop one incoming missile. And those missiles they’ve been sending up are $13 million a piece. The economics of this are unsustainable. The whole proposition is simply fantasy.

Farris: 36:25
I know I’m running out of time here with you, but what is your assessment of Donald Trump up to this point?

Doctorow:
Disappointment. Look, in his first administration, I was rather quickly ready to say, impeach the guy. I’m not ready to say that now, although he’s done and said some things which are quite strange to obnoxious. I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt with respect to the horrors of Gaza and his continuing support to Israel, which has enabled them to perform this genocide.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt in the argument, a cynical argument, but that’s what politics is very often, the cynical argument that he had to keep the Zionists on board and backing him if he was to have any chance of succeeding in his sought-after rapprochement with Russia and in his very contentious domestic policies, both on immigration and on the tariffs and on his tax relief or tax program. All these things are highly contentious. And he needed as much support in Congress as imaginable. And the pro-Zionist, the pro-Israeli members of Congress on both sides of the house, were essential for him to ride to victory in these policies that he holds dear. So I gave him the benefit of doubt in supporting Israel in its ghastly operations in Gaza.

38:26
But if I am wrong about the ceasefire in Iran and Israel, and this is, as some people like Scott Ritter are suggesting, yet another attempt to deceive us all, then of course I’ll revise my opinions. I’m not an apologist for the man, But neither am I ready to condemn him without looking closely at what he’s doing.

Farris: 38:58
What is, as we move forward here with the summit and then beyond that, what is your primary focus then in your work and your analysis?

Doctorow:
Well, my primary focus, of course, is Russia and its relations. But when Obama said Russia is just a regional power and Vladimir Putin responded, and which region? Because we’re all over the place. We are an Asian country and so forth. So Russia is involved in many things. I didn’t expect to say or write anything about the NATO summit today.

But of course, Russia is central to that summit. And so I was obliged to look closely at what they’re saying and doing, and to bring in, as I’ve just done, a material that is very close to me that would not be known to an outer world audience, and especially in the United States, what goes on in Little Belgium, which is actually just symptomatic of what’s going on in many separate European countries who have signed on to this NATO declaration, when they obviously have no intention or ability to realize it.

40:18
So my interests will be focused that way, with Russia at the center, but other countries necessarily coming in, because Russia has relations with them, either friendly or hostile.

Farris:
You know, Gilbert, I thank you for coming back on here. And you know, it’s– and I fall victim to fall victim to this as well, where I try to be better and then I find myself. I’m like, “Oh I got sucked into it again”, where you think you’re on the brink of the abyss, and then you realize like as we’ve moved beyond that, it’s, we’re not. We’re not going into the abyss this time. Maybe at some point, but not yet.

Doctorow: 41:01
Well, the advantage is, whatever you can think about Mr. … Trump, he is not Mr. Biden, in the sense that he is not mentally infirm. He still has his wits about him, and he is not being managed by his nominal assistants like Tony Blinken or Jake Sullivan.

He is responsible. He is running the show whether you like it or not. But don’t pay too much attention to his personality quirks, to his narcissism or his being a braggart or other personality defects. And just look at the significance, the consequences of what he is doing, whether negative or, as I think in many cases, positive.

Farris: 41:59
Where can people find you, Gilbert?

Doctorow:
I’m on Substack.com. That is, I have two web platforms. One is on WordPress. I used to publish essays there. Now I no longer publish essays there, though I do post there my interviews and transcripts of my interviews, but my essays which I invest a good deal of my thinking into– and of course, in written form, it’s easier to be more consistent and more logical than it is in any on-air discussion– they are published on gilbertdoctorow.substack.com.

Otherwise, I hope people will just look me up in Amazon in the search space and see what I published, which is eight books now. In some of these books, like my 2010 book on the great American post-Cold War thinkers on international affairs, they’re still selling. Because I think there is a long life to my books.

I’m still selling books. “Does Russia Have a Future?” “Does the United States Have a Future?” that date from 2015 to 2017. And my book is still, I think it was 2012, 2013, “Stepping Out of Line”, that is setting out the whole story of the pipeline wars between the United States and Russia for gas and oil.

That also has an audience, one copy just bought today in Germany. These are not, I don’t have big sales, but I think I have enthusiastic and serious readers, which heartens me. Sometimes I get comments back from them.

Farris: 44:14
Gilbert, as always, thank you so much. I look forward to continuing to follow your work and more conversations ahead.

Doctorow:
Well, thanks for having me.

‘Judging Freedom’: How Weak Is NATO?

‘Judging Freedom’: How Weak Is NATO?

Today’s discussion with Judge Andrew Napolitano went into the reasons why the commitment of all NATO member states yesterday to raise their military budgets to 5% of GDP from the present 2% was political theater as much as the fawning of Secretary General Rutte over Donald Trump was theater.

However, this theater was not staged for our amusement. It had business to achieve, which was to prepare an exit ramp from NATO for Mr Trump and the USA.  Of course, the American president cannot take the country out of NATO in the legal sense, since that would require a two-thirds vote of Congress which he cannot expect to receive. But he can sharply curtail American contributions to the NATO budget and reduce US military forces on the continent now.

I compared this to the political theater that Trump directed just a few days later when he sent B2 bombers and cruise missiles to attack Iranian nuclear bases from which everything of value had already been removed and then declared that he had destroyed the Iranian nuclear program.  That too was a very serious piece of business.  He thereby deprived prime minister Netanyahu of all reason to continue his war on Iran and a cease fire followed almost immediately.

The overriding message I was making is that we should pay attention not to the words of Trump and his associates, which are largely double-talk intended to confuse the journalists, whom Trump despises. We should follow the direct consequences of his actions, which, for the moment, are making a very considerable positive contribution to international relations.

Transcript of ‘Redacted’ interview, 25 June

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:09
[commercial message]

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

Doctorow:
The elites, not the public.

Redacted:
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NATO Just Got EXPOSED — “It’s All a Lie” Says Russia Expert | Redacted w Natali & Clayton Morris

Last night’s interview on the widely watched interview program ‘Redacted’ provided a fine opportunity to explain why the NATO summit held earlier in the day in The Hague, Netherlands was a piece of political theater stage managed by Donald J. Trump. By forcing the acceptance of the NATO Member States of a new minimum contribution to defense of 5% of GDP, Trump was building an exit ramp for the USA to reduce its contribution while still remaining within NATO as US law requires

Coffee and a Mike: a foretaste

Earlier this evening I spent 45 minutes with Michael Farris talking about Trump’s use of political theater – in his recent bombing raid in Iran for the purpose of giving Netanyahu an exit ramp from his war on Iran and in today’s NATO summit, where adoption of the 5% of GDP spending guideline by all Member States provides Trump with an exit ramp from America’s massive financial support of the alliance

Here is a foretaste of that video just posted by Farris:

Transcript of RT interview, 24 June

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://rumble.com/embed/v6t2haz/#?secret=WA2RPa1vVp

RT: 0:00
Let’s cross live now to Professor Gilbert Doctorow, former visiting scholar at Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Many thanks for joining us on the programme, very good to see you today. So, needless to say, it’s been an extraordinary few hours. Last we heard from Trump, he was clearly seething and not happy at all with Israel or Iran, after what he said were breaches of the agreement that he helped to broker and was so happy to brag about. Talk us through your reaction to his words there, because usually it’s just Iran that he would be critical of but this time it’s Israel and Iran he’s very critical of.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:41
President Trump has many enemies. These enemies are the obvious ones, the Democratic Party. Part of the Republican Party does not like him. And I would say the vast majority of the alternative media, my confreres, my fellow colleagues who are informing the general public about the points in the news that mainstream doesn’t touch. They are mostly anti-Trump as well.

1:12
I have dealt with the last week’s developments, starting with the attack that Trump ordered on the three Iranian nuclear sites. I have taken a very different approach than almost all of my colleagues, because they are so anti-Trump that they can’t imagine that the man could do something good. I tried to imagine what motivated him to commit an act of aggression, an act that is in violation of the American Constitution and also of an American law requiring the president to consult with Congress before making a war act on a sovereign state. And what I found when I put aside all prejudice, or as much prejudice as it is humanly possible to do, is, [there] might just have been a logic to Mr. Trump’s actions, a logic which was proven in the last day by the announcement of a ceasefire.

2:13
The logic was that he, Trump, was preempting a nuclear strike by Israel on those very same sites. Let’s face it. Israel has been losing the war with Iran, losing it badly. We don’t know how badly because of strict military censorship in Israel, which means that the presence of the BBC and Reuters and the rest of it means nothing. They’re not allowed to do any real coverage of the war damage.

They only can show some pitiful destruction of apartments. So the general public has no idea that Israel is on the ropes. Israel’s infrastructure, essential to its economy, has been degraded. Its most important port, Haifa, has been largely destroyed or made inoperable because no merchant ship will go near Haifa for fear of being blown up by the Iranians. So the Israeli economy is badly wounded.

3:11
Now, we don’t know this when you pick up the “Financial Times” or the “New York Times”, but I’m telling you that from listening to Russian reports, listening to Indian reports, I deal regularly as a commentator, and to the most important Indian international broadcasters. And I listen to their programs, which are very, very sage and balanced. I have information which I’ve used to come to the conclusion that Mr. Trump was preventing Israel from doing what it could do on its own to destroy those nuclear sites, which could only be nuclear weapons. America had conventional weapons which would do the job, supposedly. Mr Trump declared victory and he left Mr Netanyahu with nothing to say except to do what we see now, enter into a ceasefire.

RT: 4:02
Well, this is what puzzles me, Doctor, is that Trump and now JD Vance as well have been bragging that those nuclear sites in Iran have been, quote, “completely obliterated”. Why then should Israel continue to keep hitting those sites?

Doctorow:
Because they’re looking– Mr. Netanyahu is desperate to continue the war because it’s the only thing that prevents his being arrested for various charges that have been in suspense due to his presidential, his prime ministerial powers. He is fighting for his personal political salvation at the expense of the welfare of his country. Israel is going down. Israel is being destroyed. And finally, Mr. Trump has stepped in.

4:49
What we have seen in the last week has enabled many of my peers to understand for the first time that the relationship between the United States and Israel is not what Mr. Meerscheimer has been saying for the last 18 years, that Israel dictates foreign policy to the United States. No. The relationship most recently has been the same as the American relationship with Ukraine, using Ukraine as a battering ram to impose a strategic defeat on Russia. The United States has been using Israel to wound Iran and to make revenge for the injuries that the United States has held close to its chest since 1980, and the hostage-taking of the American embassy in Tehran.

5:41
This was the explanation that Mr. Trump gave in his speech to the nation two days ago on why Iran was a dangerous enemy and terrorist state and had to be stopped. Fine. That was all theatrics. The reality is Mr Trump has stepped in and saved Israel from self-destruction. He’s been kinder to Israel than America has been to Kiev.

RT: 6:07
Really appreciate your time today. Many thanks for joining us on the program, Professor Gilbert Doctorow, former visiting scholar, Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Thank you very much.

Doctorow: 6:18
My pleasure.