The Russian operation to take the port city of Mariupol is drawing to a successful conclusion.  “Success”  has to be understood today in a qualified sense, since large parts of the city now lie in ruins and as many as 4,000 civilians may have been killed in the fighting, largely victims of trigger happy Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. The Azov battalion soldiers and other irregulars holding the city from fortified positions in residential communities of this city of 460,000 shot wantonly at those who tried to escape from the basements of apartment houses to fetch water or who dared attempt to join the humanitarian corridors and exit the city. The civilian population was held hostage and constituted a “human shield.” They protected the Ukrainian forces from the full fury of Russian artillery and precision air strikes, which otherwise would have been deployed.

All of the fighting over Mariupol has gotten very little coverage in the Western media. All that we heard about was the difficulty in establishing humanitarian corridors and interviews with the few terrorized civilians who managed to get out to the West.  To be fair, the situation on the ground in Mariupol has been reported only partially by the Russians because it has been very much a work in progress that they kept under rules of secrecy in line with their entire ‘special military operation.’

Now that the capture of Mariupol is in its final phase, some information of value has been published in alternative Russian media and I propose to present that here to give readers a sense of how this war is being prosecuted and why.  Main source:  https://www.9111.ru/questions/7777777771838727/

In effect, most of the city proper has been taken by the Russian army and Donetsk militias, with significant assistance from a battalion of Chechens headed by their leader Kadyrov.  As the routes out of the city heading east were freed and as the snipers and other Azov forces were pushed back to provide some level of safety in the streets, large numbers of civilians have left the city in the past week. It is estimated that the civilian population remaining in Mariupol at present is about one third what it was at the start of the conflict.

The Azov fighters, other irregulars and Ukrainian army forces numbered about 4,000 at the start and have been reduced due to casualties. They include among them “foreign mercenaries” as the Russians have said for some time.  Now from intercepted phone conversations of these belligerents, it appears that among the foreigners are NATO instructors. This means that the proxy war between Russia and the USA/NATO begins to approximate a direct confrontation, contradicting the public pronouncements coming from the Biden administration. Should the Russians succeed in taking these NATO instructors alive, which is one of their priority tasks, the next sessions of the UN Security Council could be very tense.

To be sure, the 4,000 enemy forces mentioned above were only those within the city. Ukrainian forces numbering six times more were positioned to the west of the city at the start of hostilities. Presumably they have been pushed back to the West.

As we have known for a week or so, the remaining Azov and other Ukrainian forces have retreated from the city proper to two locations on the outskirts of Mariupol:  the port and the Azovstal industrial territory. The Russians have now entirely encircled both.

The port runs for about 3 kilometers along the sea and reaches inland about 300 meters. It is from here that in the past week, the Azov group tried to send out by helicopter a dozen or more of its top officers. The helicopter was shot down by the Russians, killing all aboard.  A relief helicopter also was destroyed by the Russians, but here one Ukrainian survived and he was interrogated about the failed operation.

The port is now being cleared of enemy forces, with the Donbas militia taking the lead.  

The Azovstal industrial complex is a much tougher nut to crack. It consists of two steel works. Their specific feature is underground levels going down as much as six to eight stories, where the enemy has to be flushed out by siege methods not by artillery barrage or bombing.  As many as 3,000 nationalists and Ukrainian army soldiers may be there. The main task for the Russians is to watch all entrances and exits to the underground.

The Russians are not bombing for two reasons:

First, there is no sense in destroying the infrastructure above the ground level if the enemy is holed up below.  Moreover, there are some residential buildings in the vicinity.

Second, if you bomb and bury the nationalists underground, then there will be no witnesses to bring to court to talk about the atrocities which these people have committed in the Donbas. And there may well be in these underground bunkers still more biological laboratories which were till now very carefully kept out of view. The Russians want to get their hands on proof.

Whatever the level of destruction may be, the pending Russian victory over Ukrainian forces in Mariupol is anything but Pyrrhic.  It is a full-blooded victory with great strategic importance insofar as it gives the Russians full control of the Azov Sea littoral. It seals the land bridge connecting the Russian Federation mainland with Crimea. It also is a key piece in ensuring water supplies to Crimea, which had been cut off by Ukraine in order to inflict maximum pain on Russian Crimea. With water now flowing once again from the Dnieper, there is a solid basis for resuming farming on Crimea in its traditional levels and also to support tourist inflows, a key source of income for the region. Add to that the likelihood that with some time and investment, Mariupol will reassume its important economic role as seaport and industrial town.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Postscript, 21 May 2022 In the past week approximately 500 civilians, mostly women, children and pensioners were released from the Azovstal complex via a humanitarian corridor supervised by international organizations and were permitted to move on east or west as they wished. In the past three days nearly 2,500 Azov fighters in the steelworks raised the white flag and surrendered to Russian authorities. Among them were 100 seriously wounded or ill soldiers who were taken to medical facilities for care while remaining in Russian custody. In short, there has been a total capitulation by the most determined and ‘heroic’ fighters on the Ukrainian side, including foreign mercenaries. Kiev has put a brave face on this defeat, calling it an “evacuation” and insisting that the fighters had successfully completed the mission assigned to them, which was to pin down large numbers of Russian troops for three weeks. The Russians do not mince words: they speak of their victory setting the stage for much larger surrender of Ukrainian troops in the Donbas as they close several ‘cauldrons’ and crush the resistance of the enemy in foritifed concrete bunkers by application of heavy artillery. During the coming weeks, the Russians will be conducting interrogations of all the POWs to separate out the neo-Nazi ringleaders whom they intend to bring to trial for war crimes against the civilian population of Donbas over the past eight years. Those tried in Russian courts will face sentences of up to 25 years imprisonment. Those tried in Donbas courts will face the death penalty. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has already appealed to Moscow “to show mercy” to British warriors who are among the captives. Such requests may soon turn to demands as Western governments and media raise the alarm over the trials in due course.

“Short and to the point.”  With those words I would characterize the 12 minute news bulletin on Iran’s Press TV yesterday in which I was given the microphone to place the Bucha scandal in the broader context of the ongoing vicious Information War. The United States and the United Kingdom are conducting precisely such a hands-off operation due to  their animal fear of confronting Russia in a kinetic war.  Moreover, it is the only kind of war they have any chance of winning, for all that is worth. The hasty, indecent withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan last August capped a series of disastrous military adventures by the US and NATO forces in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the course of the past two decades that left millions of civilians dead and these given unfortunate countries in ruins economically and politically.

The result of the present Washington policies is a vast discrepancy between the “virtual world” being disseminated by the U.S. led Collective West and a “boots on the ground” reality from the Russians. 

As I note, for reasons of military secrecy, the Russians are divulging very little about their troop concentrations and immediate plans.  Consequently, we will have to wait some time to see the outcome. I anticipate it will be the utter destruction of the bulk of the Ukrainian military parked to the West of the Donbas demarcation line. Such an outcome will obviate the need for a negotiated peace treaty. Facts speak louder than words.

With regard to Press TV:  I draw your attention to the moderate and rather fair handed news management.  This drives home the fact that even in present day massive censorship in the USA and Western Europe and propagandistic manipulation of the media facilitated by a blackout on Russian news sources of all kinds (not just Sputnik and RT), the curious and open-minded public can find the “other side” or sides of issues making the headlines by tapping into the English language broadcasts of major global players like Turkey, Iran, India.

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107681

By good fortune, I turned on our satellite receiver of Russian state television today just in time to catch key moments from the Prime Minister’s annual report to the State Duma on the work of the Government in the year gone by. Mishustin described in substantial detail the Government’s funding for domestic social and economic needs in 2021, but went on to say how the appropriations are being greatly increased in the current year to counter the negative effects of the “sanctions from hell” which the USA and the EU unleashed after the start of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February.

Mikhail Mishustin is a heavy-set man but radiates energy, mastery of the subject matter of the day and enormous confidence in the ability of his team to manage effectively all of the challenges, challenges which would have already sunk most every other nation on earth save China. Instead, Russia recovered from a brief collapse of the ruble exchange rate, attaining once again in the past few days the level from before the sanctions. Of course, the exchange rate is not the only measure of success in coping with the sanctions, but it is a good initial barometer of business and public confidence in the government’s financial management.

At his appointment by Putin a couple of years ago, Mikhail Mishustin had going for him a reputation as what the Russians call a хозяйственник, meaning a technocratic manager who can keep tight reins on government spending and get things done.  Following the trials of seeing Russia through the Covid crisis, Mishustin has filled out his inventory of skills to be a very impressive manager of men as well as means. He is a good public speaker.  What he is not is a politician: he does not pose a threat to the occupant of the Kremlin; instead he is deferential and mentioned at every turn how this or that initiative of the Government or the legislature is made in response to directives from the Head of State.

He spoke a good deal about support for the people in these trying times, in particular about subsidies for mortgage loans to ensure that housing construction remains at the highest levels of output ever seen in modern Russian history. This is good for employment and good for people’s well being. In farming communities, the mortgage will be held at 3%.

He spoke about the massive funding being realized for infrastructure build-out, in particular for roads having regional importance.  He talked about several industries having national importance which are being given special assistance – ship-building and civil aircraft production. The latter is being given every support to complete import substitution of all critical components, a task which began already several years ago following earlier waves of sanctions against Russia when Russia was denied supplies of the materials for composite wings on its newest passenger airliners.

But the greatest attention appeared to be to assist industry and commerce with subsidized credit for both investment and working capital. This takes on special importance under conditions of the very high prime rate (20%) which the Bank of Russia recently imposed to rein in inflation. The inflation was sparked by the sanctions and pull-out of foreign suppliers and manufacturers from the Russian market.  It also related to the collapse of the ruble in the early days of the ‘special military operation.’

Such high prime rates would normally put a halt to the currency exchange crisis which it did very nicely. However, it would normally also starve the economy of capital and so lead to sharp reduction of supply as well as of demand.  The measures that Mishustin set out, feeding capital at affordable rates directly to enterprises through subsidy arrangements with the banks, provides oxygen where it is needed at this critical moment.  The objective is to keep enterprises afloat, workers employed, and give a breathing space for the enormous challenges of import substitution to be resolved.  It all makes good sense.

In general, despite its statist overarching policies, which include, in present circumstances, naming champions in the target industrial sectors for import substitution, the government’s emphasis remains on encouraging private entrepreneurship at all levels, from small and medium sized enterprises, to the industrial giants, which are also under great stress from the sanctions.  That is to say, Russia remains predisposed to free markets as the best response to foreign pressure.

The statist, interventionist side of the present Government shows itself in the measures Mishustin listed with respect to facilitating closer cooperation between universities and other centers of research on the one side and industry on the other.  Going back to Soviet times, this was always a weak point in the Russian economy.  Now, listening to Mishustin, it appears that there are people in charge who know how to fix the problem just when the Russian economy will be in greatest need of innovation and new technological talents.

My take-away from Mishustin’s speech is that Russia has in place a world class management of the economy and finance.  Those in Washington who thought the country could be crushed misunderstood Russians and underestimated the capabilities, determination and sang froid of their Government.

But then there is nothing to be surprised at in this state of affairs.  Russian studies in the United States have been virtually useless to anyone for at least two decades.  Taking the well known and respected Harriman Institute of Columbia University as a marker, I can say that apart from LGBTQ issues in Russia or Ukrainian films, the monthly program of events for the student body has zero on offer. The lectures and round tables on the Ukraine war today are talk between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, with all panelists reading from State Department briefings, no different from what the journalists in mainstream media are doing.  Not an original perspective or thought to be found there. The field has been totally politicized into an anti-Putin street party and otherwise trivialized.  There is no way that this esteemed institution could help anyone in Washington planning economic warfare on Russia to understand the resilience of the Russian side and the futility of their mission.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

P.S. – On the issue of the failure of Russian Studies in the United States to produce anything of value, I refer the reader to my 2013 essay in The Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/11/18/defunding-russian-studies-may-be-a-blessing-a29668

I met Vladimir Zhirinovsky just once, in the autumn of 2016 when I was a ‘hot property’ on the Russian political talk shows and took part in Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, where Zhirinovsky was one of the ‘regulars.’  My making the rounds of the talk shows was due to the keen interest just then of the production teams, and presumably of their domestic Russian audiences, in views of the Trump candidacy from bona fide Americans. This is all well before Covid and the Zoom era:  panelists on these shows had to be based in Moscow, or no further away than St Petersburg, where I was at the time, and had to be on call for invitations on a moment’s notice. There were very few Russian-speaking Americans with tested on-air political analytical skills who met those criteria. I was one.

In any case, my shared time with Zhirinovsky on a segment of the Solovyov show did not leave a pleasant aftertaste. Zhirinovsky made one of his typically outrageous remarks, which I countered when my microphone was turned on. He then pounced, asking rhetorically: “What is this CIA agent doing on the show.”

That vitriolic statement was classic Zhirinovsky.  It was a sign of why he had so many enemies and…so many devoted supporters.

I had first become aware of Zhirinovsky’s existence back in the fall of 1995, when he was running for the State Duma elections in December and was making waves.  He was then the leading figure in the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) which he founded in the closing years of the Soviet Union and then re-registered as the first non-Communist party in the new, sovereign state of the Russian Federation. 

My favorite English-language newspaper, The Financial Times, called him a fascist in 1995. That designation stuck for a while, though even the FT understood it was a gross misrepresentation, and quickly changed to “far-right” the adjective that it regularly attached to his name.  At the time, it was widely recognized that the LDPR led by Zhirinovsky and the Communist Party led Gennady Zyuganov shared ultra-patriotic views and antipathy to the American-led West that was busily buying up Russia and installing its representatives in Russian ministries. Both parties rallied the general electorate behind an anti-West electoral revolt that claimed many Duma seats in December 1995.  Though it is largely ignored, that tidal wave of nationalism set off alarm bells in Washington, where it now became clear that the pro-Western government of Boris Yeltsin could be replaced by politicians who were not friendly at all.  Thus, the nationalist wave in Russia put wind in the sails of those in the United States who were pressing for NATO expansion to the East.  I discuss this in some detail in my diaries of the period that were published a year ago in Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume II:  Russia in the Roaring 1990s. (see amazon.com and all other online book sellers; available in ebook, hardbound and paperback formats).

When the Soviet Union was disbanded by the Belovezh Accords in December 1991, Zhirinovsky denounced the dissolution.  However, over time he revised his views substantially and in the last decade of his life spoke out repeatedly against any attempt to reconstitute the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. This is a point that most Western analysts overlook entirely when they speak of supposed Russian nostalgia for its Soviet past especially among the patriotic Right.  Zhirinovsky explained his position in the entirely rational arguments of economic nationalism:  the Soviet republics had been a net drain on its core political entity, Russia. Similarly, the East European countries in the Soviet bloc were also a net drain on Russia. Zhirinovsky spoke in favor of the American practice of extracting financial benefit from foreign policy instead of the Soviet pattern of throwing good money after bad by trying to buy friends abroad.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or “Volfovich” as he was familiarly called on the talk show that promoted him and his ideas the most, that of Vladimir Solovyov, was during the Putin years a regular contestant in the presidential elections, mostly polling less than 10% but nonetheless a force that was felt around the country, in particular, in the Far East, where LDPR had especially strong local presence. He was intentionally colorful, both in the loud sports jackets he wore on occasion, and in the unspeakable proposals he made regarding the exercise of Russian power abroad. 

It is commonplace in Western journalism to say there are no “opposition parties” in Russia but that is a gross oversimplification.  It is true that Zhirinovsky’s LDPR voted regularly with the Government on nearly all foreign policy issues.  However, in domestic policy the party had its own programs which it consistently defended in legislative initiatives, quite distinct from those of United Russia.

In the new millennium, Zhirinovsky played the fool in his television appearances, but it was all very well calculated to remain in the public eye while not arousing repression from the powers that be.  When his 75^th birthday was celebrated on television, he dropped the clown’s mask and spoke honestly about the challenge of remaining at the top of Russian politics in the face of a very strong and dominant United Russia party.

Otherwise, it bears mention that Zhirinovsky was well educated and a skillful linguist. His Ph.D. in the humanities focused on the Turkish language and culture. He is said to have been fluent in Turkish even to the end and he always was a knowledgeable commentator on political developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, where he was born.

As part of the feature programs on Russian television dedicated to his life that are being put on air now that his demise was announced in the morning, we are shown snippets from his predictions of political events to come year by year.  In the midst of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, we are all reminded that Zhirinovsky foresaw this proxy war between the United States and Russia.  He was a leader among the patriotic Russian elites in being ready to stand up to the United States militarily in the confident expectation that Russia will be victorious.

The leadership position in his LDPR party that Zhirinovsky held for most of three decades cannot be filled by anyone else. But the patriotic Right that he represented will in one form or another remain a major current in Russian politics.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Several weeks ago, US President Joe Biden warned gravely that Russia would soon be making a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, thereby violating international conventions and exposing itself to the severest punishment of the world community. Alternatively, the Russians would arrange a radiation leak by attacking one or another of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

Happily, neither dastardly act was carried out by the Russians to cover up their supposed losing position in the war being waged against the brave Ukrainians, who enjoy the unstinting support of the NATO alliance.

Instead, a very different kind of war crimes scandal has been promoted in the past two days to achieve the very same objective of universal outrage. The consequence is demands by French President Macron and Chancellor Scholz of Germany for still more draconian measures against the barbarians to the East, namely a full embargo on Russian hydrocarbons, even if it spells suicide for European industry and economies generally. These two birds sang before the microphones almost simultaneously yesterday afternoon denouncing the atrocities supposedly committed by Russian soldiers as they withdrew from their siege of Kiev.

Yes, my commentary introduces a note of sarcasm in speaking about a propaganda operation that is obvious as day to anyone with half a wit and half a memory.  It all takes us back to 2014 and the MH17 catastrophe which was laid at the door of Russia within minutes of its occurrence, without any need for an investigation.

As to the murder of civilians in the city of Bucha, a northern suburb of Kiev, and similar photographic accounts from several other settlements evacuated by Russian troops in the past few days, the vicious propaganda narrative coming from Kiev, but surely scripted in Washington and London, raises no alarm bells in the Western media.  But then again, there is no collective memory in Western media of what happened on the Maidan, when U.S. backed neo-Nazi units employed snipers to murder peaceful street demonstrators and police in support of a totally fabricated story of police violence by the Yanukovich government to justify its illegal ouster in a coup d’etat. Those same cynical murderers have been in control of Ukrainian politics up to the present day.

It has been reported extensively by Russian television crews traveling with the Donbas republic forces how departing Ukrainian troops fired wantonly on the towns they had been occupying for the past eight years but now were forced to give up.  It has been extensively reported by Russian press teams interviewing refugees leaving Mariupol via humanitarian corridors how the Azov battalion and other nationalist radical troops attached to the Ukrainian army were shooting anyone daring to come out of the basements to risk joining the escape routes out of the city.  None of this was picked up by Western media. But it surely was picked up by the Kiev propagandists, who decided to turn it inside out and sell it further.

In summation, there are reasons why wars are fought to the death, why many crucial disputes between nations are not amenable to diplomacy until one of the sides has been utterly destroyed.   We are living through such a moment in history.  And it is most sad, here in Europe, to see elected leaders like Macron, like Scholz play along with the villains to gain favor with the overlord in Washington, D.C.  May their cowardice and betrayal of the interests of their own peoples be recorded here and now for posterity.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

My colleague Paul Lookman has very kindly embedded in the latest posting on his website the link to a panel discussion on RT devoted to the Ukraine war. 

My fellow panelists on the program were two prominent speakers on the subject who are very much in demand in the States and internationally:  professor Nicolai Petro, a Ukraine expert at the University of Rhode Island, and Scott Ritter, a military intelligence and security expert with much relevant experience from his past government service.

The host, Peter Lavelle, has been the lead personality of Cross Talk since its inception 17 years ago. 

Since the onset of the Great Censorship that Western governments and major media companies put in place in February, all of Cross Talk programs are no longer carried by youtube.com  which is where most of their audience was concentrated.  Live reception of RT is, of course, impossible in Europe and North America due to the prohibition on this channel.  In the meantime, RT production people are preparing to place the shows on a new internationally accessible platform.

 Paul Lookman has done us all a great service by finding the key to the door, and posting the show.

https://geopolitiekincontext.wordpress.com/crosstalk/

Yesterday, after the Ukrainian and Russian delegations ended their several hours of negotiations in Istanbul under the watchful eye of Turkish president Erdogan, the parties released information on the proposals that Kiev made and which Moscow acknowledged were a possible working document for their eventual peace treaty. Meanwhile, the Russians announced that as a token of good faith to encourage the further rounds of negotiations, they would “drastically cut back” their attack on Kiev.

Immediately, global financial markets took heart and marked gains.  In Russia, the currency market strengthened significantly, reaching exchange rates against the dollar and euro that are within 10-15% of where they were before Russia’s “special military operation” got underway on 24 February.

What do we know about the points on the negotiating table and can they serve as the basis for a definitive peace?

The most important concession which Kiev is offering is to declare “neutral” status, to give up any plans to join military alliances or to allow foreign military to establish bases on its territory. The latest proposal fleshes out the list of guarantors of Ukraine’s security. These could include the UK, China, the USA, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel. In return, Russia will not object to Ukraine joining the European Union. 

The talking points remain wide open as regards territory.  The future status of Crimea would be decided by 15 years of consultations.  The two presidents would discuss the future of the Donbas republics.

One thing that Western media have not noticed is the reaction of Russia’s leading talk show panelists and hosts to these draft points for a treaty.  As usual, I take for my point of reference Vyacheslav Nikonov’s Great Game and Vladimir Solovyov’s Evening show. I think the message was clear yesterday: patriotic panelists were disheartened by what they construed to be the too soft line being taken by the Kremlin’s negotiators. A peace treaty is being drafted when none of Russia’s war objectives has been met. No de-Nazification.  No regime change: the same Russophobe government would remain in power. No significant territorial gains consolidated in the terms of the proposed settlement.  However, the hosts were careful to remind the panelists that this was not end game, just a stopping place on the way. 

What do I foresee?

I believe that the Russians will continue to negotiate while using all available firepower to change the situation on the ground in Ukraine dramatically in their favor.  The Kremlin remarked several days ago, before the last round of negotiations, that it was about to concentrate its forces in the Donbas to liberate still occupied territories of the two republics and restore their boundaries from before 2014.

As regards, Lugansk, there is not much to do. Latest information suggests that 93% of the former Lugansk oblast is now in separatist hands.  However, in the Donetsk People’s Republic there is still a great deal to do. The separatists are holding only 50% of what had been the territory of their oblast in 2014. There are reasons for this.  First, the main concentration of the Ukrainian army, perhaps as many as 100,000 troops are still dug into hardened positions directly opposite Donetsk that  they created over the last eight years. They have been firing artillery shells and rockets into Donetsk city and its suburbs on a daily basis, causing multiple deaths and wanton destruction of residential buildings and civil infrastructure.  The Donetsk forces alone are no match for this concentration; moreover, some of the Donetsk troops have been diverted from attacking across the line of demarcation by the assignment given to them by Moscow from the start of the operations: to assist with the taking of Mariupol.  Donetsk units moved south to Mariupol to meet up with Russian troops moving north from Crimea. But the operation has been very difficult and time consuming.  Still now there are a couple of thousand die-hard Azov battalion soldiers holed up in the steel mill and in the port area. Their numbers are falling either to Russian assault teams or by melting into the civilian population and heading out via humanitarian corridors.  As soon as this operation is completed, the Donetsk forces and Russians can head north to attack the main mass of Ukrainians to the west of the Dniepr.

The Russians are running out of time and out of resources to smash the Ukrainian troops west of the Dniepr. It may be that to get the job done, they will finally resort to the “American way of war” and carpet bomb the Ukrainian positions. We will see shortly.

If the Russians succeed in liberating the 50% of Donetsk oblast still held by Kiev, then they will be ready for a cease fire and for definitive peace talks.  By smashing the greatest concentration of Ukrainian forces they will achieve two of their original objectives with one stroke:  de-Nazification and demilitarization.   The question will remain whether Zelenski can sign a peace based on the new realities. It may be in his interest to go to Istanbul for talks with Putin and then to keep on flying to freedom.  His associates in Kiev will surely be ready to lynch him for a bad peace.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

This edition of the Spotlight interviews Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst from Brussels, and Daniel Lazare, journalist and author from New York to discuss the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on global energy supply. 

 

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107036

Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations is the title of my first book of essays. Published in 2010, it has remarkable utility for understanding where we are in relations with Russia today, how and why a New World Order is now forming before our eyes, and where we are headed.

As an historian by education, I had long been unhappy with the way that American political scientists  were prospecting history for “lessons” to support their latest proposals for the country’s foreign policy. This practice was all the more in view during the 1990s in the period immediately following the collapse of Communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, reaching finally to the USSR. America’s best known, and also some aspiring less known academics produced works which were intended to inform a confused public, and also to guide policy makers in the highest offices of the land. They provided road maps for the new world which was now no longer split to the core by an ideological fissure and which was no longer bipolar, but instead appeared to be unipolar, with the USA as the sole remaining global superpower and hegemon.

I read some of their works, was scandalized by the shoddy workmanship and decided to take action as an historian calling fellow professionals in a related discipline to order.

Considering the results of my dissection of the 1990s and early new millennium writings of the established names in the field, some readers of my book decided that I was insincere in designating them as “great.” However, my yardstick was not the intrinsic value of their writings but the degree of influence they bore across the profession and in the foreign policy community at large. There was little to quibble over my choices. Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were all well known to the public for several bookshelves of works that have enduring interest up to present.  The less well known names in my “big ten” were Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffmann, G. John Ikenberry and Robert Kagan.  They were fillers to give my volume enough bulk. I make no apologies for including them because they were still inescapable in 2010 though their residual value today is often negligible.  With one exception, of course, Kagan. I would be remiss not to mention that he is the husband of Victoria Nuland, with whom he shared a Neoconservative world view that he helped to define.

The stronger of the authors in my list were complex thinkers, and it took all of my efforts to get my mind around them to produce a critical analysis, including where they “borrowed” many of their ideas from, what was wrong with the sources and what remained wrong in their reworks.

The most original of the lot was Francis Fukuyama. His End of History (1992) was seminal in the sense that the other “greats” wrote in response to his challenge, even if they never acknowledged his work by name. Fukuyama’s book set down the principles that were embedded in the Neoconservative movement. He argued that with Communism vanquished, all of humanity was now headed in the same direction towards liberal democracy and free markets.  This was a single set of rails, along which were stretched out all the nations on earth, some ahead by the locomotive, some behind. With the direction of history clearly delineated by Fukuyama it was a small step for the Neocons to urge the U.S. government to accelerate the historical processes by direct intervention.  When this ended in the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Fukuyama jumped ship and quit the movement.  But he never went very far away, and he is called upon even today as an expert in international affairs to comment on the disaster awaiting Putin from his war on Ukraine. That was the main topic of his interview last week on the BBC’s Hard Talk show. Very clever people like Fukuyama walk away from train wrecks unscathed.

Zbigniew Brezinski is now long dead (2017) but his voice is still heard. In the past several weeks many of our news commentators cite the passage in Brzezinski’s best-selling book, Grand Chessboard (1997), in which he explains the decisive importance of Ukraine in Russia’s retaining or losing its standing as a European empire. Of course, there is a great deal more in that book than the two lines cited today. It encapsulated an entire world view that was deeply anti-Russian just as Brzezinski’s career had been when he moved from his university professorship to become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.

Brzezinski was the author of the plan to lure the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan in December1979 and then to provide U.S. support to the Islamic warriors fighting the USSR, which, in the long run wore down the Soviet state and contributed to its demise.  There are many in Washington who are hoping for similar results from American support to the Ukrainians in their war with Russia, another war which the USA largely engineered.

Brzezinski’s name was not mentioned in the many obituaries for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who died last week. However, he had been her mentor during her university studies and they remained in close contact when she rose to high office. Brzezinski accepted an assignment from Albright to assist plans to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Europe, skirting the territory of the Russian Federation, with intent to reduce Russian revenues from and control over global hydrocarbons.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Brzezinski’s anti-Russian views were imbibed with his mother’s milk. Though it is considered bad form in American political life to draw attention to birth, ethnicity, and the like, there were at the time of his appointment as National Security Adviser a number of serious professionals who questioned the wisdom of appointing a Polish patriot, son of a Polish diplomat, to participate in high level decision making involving policy towards Russia given the several centuries of bad blood between these countries and peoples.

Henry Kissinger’s writings were surely the most difficult to master.  He graduated from Harvard a summa cum laude and you feel it. When I was writing my analysis of his master work Diplomacy (1994)  I went to the amazon.com page for the book and looked over reader comments, seeking to capture the vox populi. One comment stood out:  “He writes very well for a war criminal.”

Indeed it was a widely held view in the past that Kissinger spent the second half of his life atoning for the sins of the first half. His role in prosecuting the ugly, criminal war in Viet Nam was the main sin of the past. From the 1990s on, it was assumed that Kissinger acted as one of the “sage men” giving perspective and insights to those making foreign policy, including presidents.  And when he is quoted today, it is common to point to his statements after 2008 advising against extending NATO membership to Ukraine.  However, this is to ignore what he did and said in the 1990s.  Kissinger and Brzezinski both testified on Capitol Hill in the 1994-1996 period when America reached a decision on NATO expansion and on relations with the Russian Federation going forward.  Back then Kissinger had been strongly opposed to including Russia in NATO, even opposed to including Russia in the very diluted Partnership for Peace program. NATO had to be sacrosanct. 

In 2008, when the United States and Russia edged towards war over Russia’s incursion into Georgia in August, Kissinger was a leading player in the group of senior statesmen who put together a paper on how to restart relations with Moscow.  The paper was delivered to Barack Obama’s campaign team and was implemented in early 2009 as the “Re-set.”  However, that plan in fact did not question the givens of U.S. global hegemony and only called for improved rhetoric when dealing with the Kremlin.  This scarcely qualifies Kissinger for credits to offset his past sins.

Kissinger has been blessed with longevity.  Next month he will be a featured speaker at a big public event hosted by The Financial Times.  We may expect him to hold forth on the Ukraine crisis.  For readers of my Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers, it will be hard to hold back the jeers.

Finally, I wish to mention here Samuel Huntington, a political scientist who is less remembered today than the first three above, but whose vision of the present and the future set out in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) had a great influence on the thinking about the world in a whole generation of Americans and others around the globe.

Huntington’s book became a best seller after the September 11^th bombing of the World Trade Center. The author appeared to foresee the titanic struggle between the West and Islamic terror, and everyone was keen to read him.  But the book was not limited to the conflict with Islam. Huntington had a full set of “civilizations” that were supposedly jostling for position. Among them, we find Eastern Orthodoxy, of which Russia is the outstanding case. In this regard, the work remains relevant to today.

That said, Clash of Civilizations was a rather shoddy work which owed a great deal to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History for the overall concept and to Huntington’s young research assistants for the many scenarios that make up the bulk of the book.

I recalled the half-baked ideas of those young researchers who lacked any worldly experience when I exchanged emails this morning with my good friend Ray McGovern and he asked for my thoughts on a recent interview given by MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol. Postol was lambasting the young “punks” who seem to populate the ranks of advisers to Joe Biden.  What Postol missed is that exactly kids like these were always doing the grunt work in political science.  Lots of creativity, zero competence. They were surely the kind of folks who said in 2008 to let Lehman go under, because it would have a salutary effect on risk-taking by speculators. They were ignorant of the disasters that lay ahead then, just as those formulating the sanctions policy against Russia today are ignorant of the blowback to come.

Of course, no nation has a monopoly on stupidity and ignorance of economics. The European Union “leadership” is doing its best to hold up its end in this regard. If three days from now the EU member states follow the stern instructions of Gauleiter vonder Leyen and reject the Russian demand to pay for their gas in rubles purchased on the domestic Russian market, then economic mayhem will follow. That damned fool, a gynecologist by education, is telling the whole EU what to do in a vital area of commerce. Her position amounts to an unbelievable usurpation of powers by a warmonger.

The West is pointed straight down, like that Boeing 737 that crashed in China last week. Straight down and accelerating.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Dear Sir:

I assume that even in these very eventful days you had the time to remark the prisoner exchange newly agreed between the Ukrainian and Russian authorities.  If these mortal enemies were able to summon up the courage and humane feelings required to do the right thing on behalf of their own and the enemy’s soldiers, what I am about to propose to you will be both less onerous for you and far more rewarding for humanity in general than what is transpiring in the Ukrainian-Russian exchange.

My suggestion to you is to offer to exchange Julian Assange for Alexei Navalny. Such an exchange would support your political views, win you new supporters at home and abroad and add a dollop of humanity to our war crazed world. In Europe, in the Americas you alone have within your grasp a political prisoner of the international renown sufficient to entice the Kremlin to agree to part with Mr. Navalny.

You are by far the leading warrior in Europe against the “Putin regime.”  For years now you have fought by all means fair and foul to achieve regime change and remove Vladimir Putin from power.  I am appealing to your better side to act fairly in pursuit of your political objectives.

By achieving the release of Navalny, you will give hope to those who support his cause inside and outside of Russia.  The simultaneous release of Assange will remove from the U.K. a source of embarrassment and an unnecessary headache.  Let him enjoy his freedom on Red Square and share a cappuccino with Edward Snowde n.

Putting aside for a moment your self-interest in following my recommendation, your noble act will save two tortured souls from serving out years of imprisonment that are vastly disproportionate to their alleged misdeeds.  It is high time to relegate Iron Mask justice to its historic place in the distant past and to show humane mercy that corresponds to our occasionally enlightened age.

Respectfully,

Gilbert Doctorow

P.S. – I urge all readers who share my thinking on this issue to petition Mr. Johnson in their own name directly.