Conversation with Professor Glenn Diesen: Restoring Russia’s Deterrent or Emboldening NATO?

My latest essays and video interviews with Americans, Indians and Iranians disseminated as podcasts on  internet channels in the USA, in India and in Iran set out my impressions from Vladimir Putin’s 4-hour speech and Q&A session on Thursday, 2 October in Sochi at the 22^nd annual Valdai Discussion Club gathering. They stirred considerable controversy as you can see in the Comments sections of the respective videos and in my substack.com entries presenting the links.

I insist that stirring controversy in this way is good and is necessary. Too many of the Alternative Media broadcasts resemble the Mainstream Media they supposedly are countering by borrowing from one another and standing shoulder to shoulder behind interpretations that are not challenged. When there is no debate, the results tend to be second rate whether in the camp of the ruling class or in the camp of the Opposition.

The chat that Professor Diesen recorded with me this morning is likely to stir even more debate, which hopefully will remain polite and constructive.  I am suggesting that the era of Vladimir Putin is coming to a close, that his performance at Sochi demonstrated that he no longer has the courage of his convictions, that his threats meant to deter Western enemies are empty verbiage, indeed that himself he has pulled up the red lines he clearly set out just one year ago with respect to long range missiles being supplied to Ukraine, and that he is drawing out the war in Ukraine by not using the Wunder Waffe that Russia has in the form of the Oreshnik and other hypersonic missiles to end the war now, without taking or inflicting further casualties on the young and not so young men at arms on either side of the demarcation line, without letting the war roll on for several years until the West succeeds in the remilitarization that is now underway and has a chance of defeating Russia in a conventional arms war.

This question of Putin’s succession will play out in Russia whatever we may think, but I am saying that this eventuality which we never openly discussed now is ripe for discussion here in the West even if it is verboten in Russia.

I particularly recommend this video to the Community because you will find in it the impressions of someone who watched the Valdai proceedings from afar on the internet (mine) compared with the impressions of someone who was present in the auditorium in Sochi when Putin delivered his address and who compared notes with ambassadors, political scientists and other participants of the event (Glenn Diesen).  Do check to see how our impressions did or did not match up.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aeigb0SeHrA

Doctorow: 0:00
He has been persuaded that controlling the whole world is too big a task and highly controversial and leads you into wars which you usually lose. Fighting in Afghanistan, fighting halfway around the world at great logistical disadvantage versus powers that are there on the spot, assisting Ukraine against Russia when you’re four or five thousand miles away and Russia’s right there. This is a fool’s game. And I think that advisers to Trump have persuaded him of that obvious point. However, bullying Venezuela, bullying Panama, that’s an American game that Mr. Reagan was very good at. The question of beating up little countries, well, there are plenty of little countries to beat up on in Latin America.

WTF – Fatseas: 1:01
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the “What the Finance” podcast. On this episode, I have the pleasure of welcoming on Gilbert Doctorow. So Gilbert is an author and geopolitical analyst with really interesting perspectives on what’s happening around the globe. So Gilbert, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Doctorow:
Well, it’s my pleasure.

Fatseas:
I’m looking forward to the conversation, because I was just talking before we sort of went on air. There seems like there’s been so much happening in the global sphere and sort of geopolitics overall. So interested to dig into it. What is your current outlook on what we’re really seeing in geopolitics overall?

Doctorow:
Well, I’d just like to emphasize, considering whom I consider, perhaps mistakenly, but whom I consider to be a prime audience, that the geopolitical conflicts that we see now are not isolated from the rest of politics. And they’re certainly not isolated from who is in power and what kind of finance policies, credit policies, and so forth these governments are pursuing. That is to say, the powers that be in Europe are all globalists, neoconservative in outlook, values-based foreign policy. And they also– and so you could call them, in American context, we would call them all progressives.

2:25
“Progressives” is a very nice word, but it hides the fact that they are war hawks. And that they, like politicians who don’t have such attractive labels attached to them, are ambitious people who have taken power by using various particular levers that we can discuss like the Green Movement, and are wholly dedicated to holding power. So these are preconditions for any discussion of geopolitics. And I raise this because of the recent analysis of who said what about Donald Trump’s speech last week in the General Assembly, where what he had to say about Russia was denounced because he was being provocative — by the very same people who are actually enemies of his anti-globalist, anti-renewables positions in other parts of domestic and foreign policy.

3:32
So these things are inseparable, whether we like it or not. And they have a lot of bearing on what the outlook for people interested in finance will be as these governments stand or fall in the wake of the ultimate collapse of Ukraine, which is a matter of months away.

WTF:
Okay, yeah. Thanks for laying that out. And I think it’s something that’s really interesting that you pointed out there. If we look at historically, or maybe it’s at least 25 years ago, the hawks seem to be the conservatives and then the liberals were sort of, I guess, maybe you could say the Peace Party, and now it seems to have been a complete switch. Is that something that we commonly see, a switch between, I guess, different leanings, or is this something that’s quite unique?

Doctorow:
Well, taking just the American case, the Democrats were always the party of the working man. Republicans, by definition, were the party of the bosses. And that has reversed itself completely. This is something that Donald Trump has worked on, but he’s not the first one.

Ronald Reagan was the first one to see the opportunity to take away the working class votes from the Democrats because they had actively undermined the interests of the working class by their globalist pursuits, including in particular, their multilateral free-trade agreements, their concessions in taxes to American corporations that had operations abroad and kept their profits abroad and declared them in very low taxing countries and districts.

So the Democrats, from being the working-class party, evolved into what Donald Trump openly denounced as the elitist party. And the Republicans, despite themselves, under Trump’s stewardship, have returned to principles of Reagan, where they are attempting to look after the interests of the working man. And that is what the whole tariff policy is about, the re-industrialization of the United States.

So the position of right and left has flipped. And that has to be understood. It’s true in the States where it’s so transparent and obvious. It’s true in England with Mr. Farage. He has completely gutted the conservatives and gutted the labor.

5:58
And so who is right and who is left? And everyone will say, who is the Labor Party, that Mr. Farage is on the right. Well, that’s a very subjective statement which we can examine. In Europe, the right and the left is almost meaningless. The left has largely been vanquished. And so what we really have is the right and the center. And in Europe, that is even complicated further because most countries have coalition governments and they don’t have a first-pass-the-line kind of electoral system that is true in the first-past-the-post in the United States and in Europe. And the coalition governments, what each party stands for more or less becomes meaningless because of all of the swapping and concessions and compromises over policy to get in the number of the parties and the parliamentarians, the number of deputies necessary to have a majority in parliament to rule. Therefore, it’s very much fudged and unclear where right and left stand.

7:11
But where we are headed in Europe, I believe, is going to follow the pattern in the States because Mr. Trump and the United States are very, very important in determining policies in Europe and politics in Europe. It will take some time, but I think things will head that way.

WTF:
Yeah, and I think it’s a great point. If we look at it, it’s more like a political class with traditional parties versus, I guess, not revolutionary, but the new parties that are trying to push into this, you know, one system, one, you know, political class that are sort of driving basically the same agenda. At least that’s what I’ve seen in the UK and I think it’s probably quite similar sort of throughout the rest of Europe.

Doctorow: 8:01
And again, issues, it’s very easy to use the category right and left when you take an issue like sustainability and carbon footprints as a political issue and a way of gaining votes and winning elections. The point is that this is totally unrelated to where the given spokesman for Green stand on other things, like war and peace. Going back 15 years, the most warlike, the most viciously anti-Russian, the most sanctioning party against Russia in the European Parliament were the German Greens.

Is that a necessary association? I cannot say for sure, but it is true that this is the association. The Greens paid for it because of who their leaders were initially and who their leaders became, what kind of people they were, how they were shaped by American sponsorship, turned these Greens, who were appealing to young people in particular, who would like to break with the stasis of the centrist parties and with their indifference to global warming and so on. These parties, the Greens, combined a concern for the environment with readiness to destroy the world in a nuclear war. So it becomes very, very difficult to speak in traditional right and left terms wherever you look.

WTF: 9:49
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And how has Trump shifted what we’re seeing globally? Because it does seem like he’s had a large impact on the geopolitics and what we’ve been seeing. Would you agree with that?

Doctorow:
Yes, I believe he is having. To say that he’s had is a bit premature. But assuming that he stays alive and that he is not taken out to the woodshed by what remains of the deep state in the United States and told, “If you don’t change your ways, you’re going to have a short life.” Assuming that he continues the bold implementation of policies that he has ruminated over for several decades and the formulation of which he has been assisted in by some very capable advisors who have been with him through thick and thin, he will have a big impact on global geopolitics, as well as on domestic politics in large parts of the world. What he spoke about at the General Assembly, particularly the question of open borders and the question of the Green Movement. These are going to be reversed in front of our eyes as Mr. Trump’s tenure in office proceeds.

11:21
It is often … not understood how certain individual principles– well I mentioned before the question of greens and how that is deceptive for their actual policies other than environmentalism when they come to power. But there are other issues which seem to be progressive, attractive, which unfortunately are promoted by people who are not progressive and attractive. On the contrary, are just the opposite of that. They are authoritarians, and they wouldn’t know democracy if they tripped on it. And I have in mind, for example, here in Europe, the Federalists, the people who are talking about harmonizing Europe, consolidating Europe, giving it a consistency that was lacking up to the 1990s.

12:17
That sounds great, but regrettably, the very same people who are talking in those very respectable, very progressive-sounding and attractive terms are also warmongers, are also spoiling for a fight, with Russia in particular, and use militarization to justify and consolidate their grip on power. And I can name names. If we go back to the 2010s, you had a group called Aldi that was a substantial minority group within the European Parliament, headed by the former prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt. Verhofstadt fell from grace after he was one of the several leaders in Europe, the Germans, the French, who openly resisted Bush’s intention of using the United Nations Security Council, to allow for his invasion of Iraq.

13:23
And so Mr. Verhofstad, who would otherwise have become the head of the European Commission, was sidetracked and he formed a group within the European Parliament called Audi, which after Mr. Sarkozy– Sarkozy, sorry– after Mr. Macron was elected, his parliamentarians joined, merged with Verhofstadt and formed a rather substantial bloc that is present and rather influential in the European Parliament today. Those people are pursuing policies on the Europe-wide level in foreign policy, which will lead us straight to World War III if they’re not checked. And they are federalists, and they’re looking to increase the powers of Brussels at the expense of the sovereignty of the member nation states.

14:17
So as I said, single issues like federalism, like sustainability and the green and renewables, which are sound fine and give certain people and certain parties a claim on the electorate, are unfortunately linked to broader intentions that are quite odious.

WTF”
Yeah, and is this sort of why they, if you look at it, they’ve been very, yeah, definitely hawkish against sort of Russia. Is it sort of trying to find a common enemy to to find an excuse to unite and to federalize and to gain more power is that what you’re seeing as a mechanism for this?

Doctorow:
Well yes, Russia is a very convenient bogeyman, and it gives the leadership at present in Europe the possibility of saying to their electorate, stay with us, bear with us, our countries are under threat, we are the stewards, We are the ones who are most interested in national defense, and we will protect you.

This is precisely what Mr. Starmer was saying at the Labour Party convention in Liverpool yesterday, when interviewed, and was explaining how Mr. Farage would cozy up to Putin and threaten the security of Britain. That’s in a nutshell what these people are saying to hold their grip on power and to deprive the electorate of a reasonable debate on all policies, including the remilitarization of Europe and the merger, essential merger, of what is NATO and what is the EU. These are serious issues today. And unfortunately, in the mainstream media, no one is looking at these constellations as I have just set them out.

WTF:
Okay, really interesting. So maybe we can come back to that point, but if we go directly to sort of the Russia-Ukraine war, how are you currently judging that? You know, a lot of people, it’s very hard to see what the actual, what’s actually happening. Some people say Ukraine are almost going to beat Russia. Others are saying Russia is going to walk over them soon. What is your current outlook?

Doctorrow: 16:40
Well, at this stage of events, for anyone to be saying that as the “Financial Times” yesterday and today as a lead page, so to speak, in their online edition, I forget it was Rashman or one of their regular contributors is explaining, or trying to explain, why Ukraine is really winning the war.

And I think similar to what is being said in the States, even in the circle of President Trump, that, “Wow, the Russians should have solved this problem and defeated Ukraine long ago, and we see they’ve only had such limited territorial gains in the last three years, that proves that Russia’s losing.”

Of course, this is utter nonsense. The latest figures even coming out of Ukraine from military sources, is that Ukraine has lost 1.7 million dead and severely injured soldiers. Out of respect to Russia, someone with as much experience and good sources as Colonel Macgregor has been saying that Russia has lost 120,000 soldiers dead. Discrepancy is more than 10 times, 12 times. That is reasonable to expect when you consider from the very beginning of this war of attrition, Russia had 10 to 12 times the amount of artillery shells and tubes, artillery tubes, compared to Ukraine and NATO. So the figures correspond. The actual mortality versus the actual, is in line with the actual relative armaments and wherewithal of the respective sides.

18:33
To say that Russia is losing and to ignore this vast discrepancy in fatalities is to be irrelevant and is, simply speaking, a propagandist. The situation at present is: the Russians have accelerated their move in all fronts, in part in the Donbass, which is the principal area of interest to the Russians. They have found weak spots, undermanned positions on the Ukrainian side here and there. And they are taking advantage of this, but not in the most obvious way.

They don’t storm in and push the Ukrainians back 50 kilometers. No. They take some land and hold it, inviting the Ukrainians to come and counterattack, which they do, and they get slaughtered. So this is repeated in various places. The Russian game is to demilitarize Ukraine by destroying its manpower in the army. They’re doing a good job of it.

19:39
Now you can send to Ukraine everything you want by way of new artillery and new Bradleys and new xxx-powered tanks, but if they have no one to man it, or if when they come out in the open field those tanks are destroyed in minutes by Russian drones and artillery, then how can you speak about the Ukrainian counteroffensive ever taken back what they’ve lost? So for people who are following the facts on the ground, as are being quite objectively reported by many different sources, it should be clear that Ukraine is on the ropes. The problem is that politically, the group around Mr. Zelensky have a stranglehold on the Ukrainian nation. They have since they came into power.

They have since the coup d’etat of February 2014. And the Ukrainian nation has been deprived of all possible alternative news to the state-run media or to the supposedly free press that has in fact from the beginning been financed by the United States USAID, essentially the CIA, and NGOs acting in the name of the US government. So the Ukrainian people only see the large increase, regular increase in cemeteries, but they don’t have a sense of the balance of power between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

What is happening now is, as I said, in advance, the Russians are moving on on Donetsk, which was the most important of the two oblasts in Donbas, which have been largely, majority, held by Ukrainian forces when this special operation began, and which even today are at least 30-35% held by Ukrainian forces and 65-70% held by Russian forces.

21:56
The Russians want to sweep to the Dniepr River. That’s probably a matter of weeks, if not a very few months away, since they are knocking out these substantial fortified towns that the Ukrainians fortified over the course of eight to ten years precisely to prevent such a Russian sweep. The Russians are very cautious. They want to keep this ratio, kill ratio that I mentioned before stable. They do not stage large-scale, widespread assaults on these towns because in any situation like that, the attacking force always has bigger casualties than the defending force. So they are softening these towns up, and I have in mind Pakrovsk in particular, and several others in the Donetsk province.

We see the, as I said, the partial takeover of Pakrovsk, which is a major logistical hub and fortified point, barring the way to the two lesser fortified cities in the very center of Donetsk, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. And then as a free plane, free rolling to the Dnieper River. The Russians have been moving on this Pakrovsk, which they call Krasnoyarsk. And they have had significant success in the last week in a similar town, taking a similar town on the outskirts of Kharkiv, that is northeast Ukraine, on the border with Russia. And it’s the city that is the second- largest in Ukraine with predominantly Russian-staking population but has been used by the Ukrainian government as a staging ground for attacks on the Russian border provinces.

23:53
This goes back more than a year, a year and a half, to a raid, the first raid within Russian Federation territory that was staged by a group that the Ukrainians helped form, called the Russian Volunteer Unit or Corps. These are the people who have been defending the fortified town near Kharkiv that the Russians now have surrounded. And these renegade Russians who were turning on their own people and staging terrorist raids across the border are among those whom the Russians are very busy slaughtering right now to remove the most obnoxious forces in the Ukrainian military.

25:04
Well, so that’s what’s going on in Northeast around Kharkov. That’s what’s going on around the center and the Donetsk, Lugansk, the two core oblasts of what they call the Donbas. And now the Russians are turning their attention to Odessa. Odessa is not so far away. When you consider where the Russians are in the neighboring province, Ukrainian province of Kherson, it’s a rather short distance to by land to Odessa.

But Odessa so far has been attacked by the Russians by air, using missiles, using drones. Odessa is the most important port facility of Ukraine. It’s what they have used for all their grain exports, and it’s also a very important military base. It would be a still more important military base if the war is frozen, if there’s a settlement that is a provisional settlement and not a profound settlement like the Russians want, and the borders are fixed where they are now. In that case, the French and the British would certainly move into Odessa, set up shop and prepare Odessa to serve their purposes in attacking Crimea, which is rather close by sea, if you just look at the map, close by sea from Odessa.

26:35
For that very reason, the Russians are now saying among themselves, “We cannot be free of the threats to us, to our security, coming from Ukraine if we don’t take Odessa, which was always a Russian city anyway.” So that is probably the next area of military attack by the Russians as they roll on and take the whole of the Donbass in a month or two to come. If they take Odessa, then the rump Ukraine will lose almost all of its interest to France and to Britain, and the war will be ready to be wound up.

WTF:
Yeah, thanks a lot for the in-depth analysis of it. Do you see, is there any way that this can be resolved through this settlement, or it would have to be quite large, sort of, I guess, you know, basically Ukraine giving Donetsk and other parts of the country. Is that the only way for that to be a settlement soon?

Doctorow: 27:38
Well, I don’t want to be dogmatic or to say that the scenarios as I just described are obligatory and the only way out of this conflict. Of course, there are always variations. What I will say is that what Mr. Trump was saying in New York last week when he was say taunting the Russians and saying that, “Gee, they thought they would do this in a week. It’s now the third year. They haven’t finished the job. Maybe Russia is a paper tiger.”

Well, of course that was a taunt. And a lot of people initially took what Trump was saying to be that, “Ah, he’s changed his position, he’s a pivot, he’s seen the light, he’s now on our side.”

Which was, after they reflected a little bit on this, they understood that they were being trolled. That is, the European leaders were being trolled, and Trump’s domestic opponents, like Lindsey Graham, were being trolled by Trump, when what he really meant was the opposite of what he was saying. He said, the essence to the Europeans was, “OK, you like the war, you want Ukrainians to win, good luck, and you’re on your own.”

28:56
The position of Mr. Trump with respect to Putin is a little bit different. Yes, there was a taunt. And yes, Mr. Trump wants to be the peacemaker, but not in the sense that the European leaders and his domestic opponents and the majority of the American political establishment believes. You see, the real message of Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin was, “Vladimir, get it over with. Crush Ukraine, finish them off, do it in a week, so that you and we can then move on and do real business. We can do business extending the about- to-expire New SALT treaty.”

That is to say, the only major remaining agreement on arms limitations, nuclear offensive weapons, missiles, submarines, and air-delivered weapons that we have today. It expires on the 2nd of February. And Mr. Trump, despite his seeming belligerence and unwillingness to accept arms limitations agreements in general, I believe he has been persuaded that it’s in America’s interests that there are not being new arms race.

30:32
So these, Mr. Trump’s desire– I believe, and this is, and I cannot prove this, it’s simply my take on the situation– his desire is for normalization in relation to Russia. First of all, for security reasons of the United States. Russia is now well ahead of the United States in updating its nuclear triad, and well ahead of the United States in not just development, but actual implementation, deployment in the field of advanced offensive weapons, hypersonic missiles of various kinds. And I think that Trump has been persuaded that it is in America’s interests to put a cap on these developments.

WTF: 31:24
Yeah, and I think this links quite well to the point you were making before about NATO and Europe. Do you see, so this is a mechanism for the US to almost withdraw from Europe, withdraw from NATO, and then to sort of push further to towards the East, towards China and Asia? Is that sort of how you’re seeing this trajectory?

Doctorow:
Yes and no. I don’t believe that Mr. Trump really wants to go after China. His secretary of state has, from long ago, made it clear that China is the biggest threat, la, la, la. And Mr. Trump is going along with that. And he is, again, Trump is assumed to be a dullard. He’s assumed to be a superficial man. He’s just a real estate developer. What does he know about global politics? I beg to differ. He’s had decades to mull over these questions, and he’s had some very smart, if not brilliant, advisors to help him along, starting with Henry Kissinger.

32:30
Everybody in the press has a memory that goes back about two weeks. And our political scientists in their journal articles have a memory that goes back maybe three, four, five years. Let’s look back a little further. During the 2016 presidential campaigns, Henry Kissinger was a key advisor on foreign policy, and I’d say a mentor to Donald Trump. And so strategic thinking was given to him in a kind of tutorial for at least six months, close to a year, by Henry Kissinger.

These principles, I don’t believe he’s forgotten them, and if he did, he has them in his new suite of advisors, some other very smart people who also understand geopolitics and can give him specific pointers as we go along. So as regards the world at large, Mr. Trump is interested in the American– in perpetuating, reinforcing, consolidating the American hegemony in the Western hemisphere and in Latin America. That is clear from the day he took office. That is clear in his whole Greenland acquisition move. That is clear from his gunboat diplomacy with Venezuela today.

34:06
Let’s remember what’s happened in the last 20 years. China has moved in to Latin America as a very big consumer of its raw materials, investor in minerals production, and investor in logistics, as we see in their involvement in the Panama Canal.

Mr. Trump would like to uproot all of that. I think that’s his primary concern. Going after the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan, I think is a negligible interest of Donald Trump, even if it is a concern of Republicans in Congress and of his own Secretary of State. So withdrawal from Europe, not completely, but he wants to end and he is succeeding in ending Europe’s free ride. They’re having less than 2% of GDP devoted to military purposes in their own defense. He has done what he could to motivate Europeans to raise their defense spending while preparing the way for a lesser role of the United States in Europe. That is not the same thing as isolationism and withdrawal of the United States from the world, which is what Mr. Trump’s enemies attribute to him.

As I just said, he wants to control half of the world. It’s called the Western Hemisphere. And he is less interested in America’s being the policeman of the world and of being widely overextended outside its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.

WTF: 36:07
Okay. So a return to the Monroe Doctrine.

Doctorow:
Oh, exactly. I think he was being persuaded that controlling the whole world is too big a task and highly controversial and leads you into wars which you usually lose. Fighting in Afghanistan, fighting halfway around the world at great logistical disadvantage versus powers that are there on the spot, assisting Ukraine against Russia when you’re four or five thousand miles away and Russia’s right there. This is a fool’s game. And I think that advisors to Trump have persuaded him of that obvious point.

However, bullying Venezuela, bullying Panama, that’s an American game that Mr. Reagan was very good at. The question of beating up little countries, well, there are plenty of little countries to beat up on in Latin America.

WTF: 37:12
Yeah, okay, really interesting. So you say it sounds like there’s gonna be spheres of, you know, as you said, the Western Hemisphere, you know, Europe, and then probably the Eastern, Eastern Hemisphere of China leading the way and I guess the BRICS countries, is that how you sort of see the world moving forward?

Doctorow:
Well, I think there is going to be a regionalization of power. And that is a good thing, where people in countries that are directly involved and directly knowledgeable about their neighbors are, with those neighbors, some of the neighbors, making common policy to resolve issues that concern them directly, without the intervention, without the big thumb on the balance, of a country that is very far away and has its own peculiar ideas about how the world should look, meaning the United States. So there will be– the Chinese hegemony in the Far East will be ultimately accepted by the United States. The Russian interests in its immediate neighborhood, not to control these countries, but to ensure that they’re not being used as weapons by the countries halfway across the world, to undermine Russian security.

38:40
So Russia is not going to control Poland, Estonia, and the rest of it. It’s all nonsense. But that these countries not be hostile to Russia. If they form some kind of written agreements on security, mutual security, I think that’s what we will see evolving around Russia. And the United States will remain regrettably, but let’s face it, this is a long story, the big bully in its own neighborhood.

39:12
Okay, really interesting. Gilbert, thank you so much for your time today. We’ve sort of covered basically going over the whole globe. But my last question is, what is one message you want people to take away from our conversation?

Doctorow:
Stay calm. Look, I am on a number of YouTube channels. I consult YouTube regularly to see who is saying what. There is a lot of sensational headlines attached to people who are otherwise quite respectable and balanced, which if you read them and see them daily, your hair stands on end. The end to the world is not coming. That is my single message.

And Mr. Trump is– whether is this shall I say despite himself, but I think in favor of what he really wants– acting against the war hawks, acting against the conspiracy here in Europe to maintain tension for the sake of keeping those in power in power. So overall, I do not see reason to be alarmed. And I take a phrase from Charles Dickens, in _Tale of Two Cities_, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” To my, as an, I’m an historian by training, and looking at the world in the past, the present, and I believe the future, that statement has always been true.

WTF: 40:51
Great message. Thanks so much for your time. If anyone wanted to find out more about your work and what you do, where would the best place for that be?

Doctorow:
Well I have a Substack account, the “Armageddon Newsletter”, which shouldn’t get people too worried by the title. It also was catchy, but it was not intended to alarm anybody.

I also, if you just look [for] me, Google me in Amazon, you’ll see what I have written. I have eight published books and a couple more in the works. My activity has been as a chronicler of our times. And that comes out in my two volume memoirs. It comes out in my latest book, _War Diaries_. So I invite the audience to investigate this aspect of my work and perhaps it will interest them.

WTF: 41:50
Perfect, I’ll pull that in the description below, but thanks again for your time.

Doctorow:
All right, my pleasure. Bye bye.

WTF:
Hey everyone, thank you for listening. I really appreciate the support. If you got value out of this, I’d really appreciate it if you could like, subscribe or comment, you know, good or bad feedback, I’m always open to that. But it really helps to the channel. As I said before, only about 14% of people actually subscribe to this channel. So if you were to do that, it would really help. It could mean we could continue to grow. If not, thanks for watching and see you on the next show.

42:20
You also might like this video right here. All right. Thanks again.

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

Diesen: 0:00
Welcome back to the program. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, an historian, international affairs analyst and author of _War Diaries – the Russian-Ukraine War_. So I remember the last time Trump was ramping up the pressure and rhetoric against the Russians. He gave them 12 days to accept an unconditional ceasefire. Otherwise the response would be crushing.

This of course, the prospect of America going, if not to war with Russia, but at least putting its might behind the attempt of crushing Russia created a lot of excitement. And then the 12 days expired, they met in Alaska and Trump took the unconditional ceasefire off the table. I was wondering now we’ve seen this display at United Nations. We see the same rhetoric, the Russians are losing, Ukraine is winning, will get back all its territory. And while you’re at it, why not take some Russian territory and shoot the Russian jets out of the sky.

1:11
And yet again, the Europeans are very excited. Finally, America is joining, becoming more directly involved at least, already quite involved. How are you assessing this development?

Doctorow:
Well, before I begin, I’d like to congratulate you for putting on air very divergent opinions coming from different experts or people who are being watched on alternative media. An hour ago, I caught the first part of your interview this morning with Jeffrey Sachs.

And what I’m about to say sharply diverges with his interpretation of it. The general position within alternative media of Sachs is very well known, and with good reason, and has a very wide following with good reason. I am much less known with good reason, and my views could be described as an outlier on what we’re about to discuss. I think it would be very informative for viewers to juxtapose, to watch these two different interpretations when each of us has been asked this question by yourself.

2:32
Jeffrey Sachs said that the performance of Mr. Trump at the United Nations was a colossal failure of leadership. I disagree entirely. But behind this is not just my opinion on that one issue and his opinion on that one issue, but where we both stand on everything about Mr. Trump, since it is not widely discussed that Mr. Sachs is a globalist by definition, given his position at Columbia University.

He is a Green movement supporter, since his whole career the last 30 years has been support of sustainability. And Mr. Trump in his speeches at the UN trashed both positions, both globalism, particularly the aspect of it relating to open borders, and very specifically trashed the Green movement. So we’re coming from very different positions on Mr. Trump in general.

3:21
But let’s look at what happened this week in his speech and in Trump’s answer to reporters regarding the shoot-down of Russian jets violating airspace; and the likelihood that Mr. Zelensky will succeed in recapturing his territory, thanks to, with the help he’ll be receiving from the European Union.

Now, Jeffrey Sachs was denouncing Trump for his lack of candor and for his not explaining to the American people the basis of his policy and for being duplicitous. My position is that if Mr. Trump did any of those things, he’d be impeached and removed from office within a few weeks.

His policy on Russia, unlike his policy on the Green movement or open borders, has little or no support within MAGA. It has still less support, in fact is vehemently opposed by the majority of congressmen and by the majority of the American political establishment. For that reason, there is no candor in his speech. There is duplicity, double talk, and he’s leading people on. This was my first conclusion regarding his remarks [in] respect of the likelihood of Mr. Zelensky winning the war against Russia. There was an initial reaction among European leaders of glee. It was not just Lindsey Graham in the States who was taken in by this. It was all of the European top leadership, whether it’s Merz or Starmer or Macron. Macron was sitting next to Trump, and looked very pleased to hear Trump say that he really thinks Zelensky can succeed.

5:42
Well, that was the initial reaction. After a bit of time and reflection and after people like the _Financial Times_ came out and said, Hey by the way, it could be that Mr. Trump’s word shouldn’t be taken at face value and that in fact he is setting the stage for an American off-ramp and for Europe to be blamed, because there will be a blame game for the eventual defeat, capitulation of Ukraine.

Well that has now become a consensus view within the spokespeople for the European Union, like Kaja Kallas, who came out and said precisely that. That– well, not precisely. What she said was that Ukraine cannot succeed with the help of the European Union alone.

6:32
That is a hint, hint, that the United States should be part of the party, of the group. But it suggests that they now understand that they have been taken for fools or as one reader of my recent essay said, that Mr. Trump was trolling them, which is indeed my view of the situation. If he said openly that he expects Mr. Zelensky to be defeated and so on, he would find enormous resistance within all of Congress. So that’s the game he’s playing.

Also the question of the “paper tiger” remark, an insult to the Russians. Indeed, some Russian readers of my interviews as they’re translated into Russian by one or another Russian internet platform have said that this was an insult to Putin.

Well, let me give my brief explanation. Mr. Trump wants to be a peacemaker. He wants the war to end. And he’s been told by all sides that he must pressure Mr. Putin. I believe he is pressuring Mr. Putin. And this taunt of Russia being a paper tiger was part of the pressure techniques of Donald Trump on Mr. Putin, but not in the sense that the European leaders and many in Congress would like it to be. The taunt is, “Vladimir, get it over with now. Crush Ukraine now.”

8:25
Now, I said in a recent interview that it could be done if Mr. Putin took out the Oreshniks and destroyed Bankovskaya Ulitsa, the street in downtown Kiev, where most of the government offices are. A Russian, one Russian reader and commentator said, you’re 100% right. At first, for a Russian to write that is rather brave. That’s to be taken to be a Putin critic or an Eno agent. But that is the message that Mr. Trump is delivering.

Diesen: 9:11
It is interesting though that the peacemaker is not always able to make peace because it’s a fear of being a sign of weakness. So for example, you saw toward the end of the Cold War when Reagan wanted to open up talks with the Soviets and discuss how to improve relations and have more peace. It would have been very difficult for a dove to get away with this, but he was the hardliner and no one could accuse him of being soft on the Russians.

So given that he had that reputation for being a bit of a hawk, he had the political capital to go and actually talk and try to make peace. I mean, you could say the same with the way the Russians gave territorial concessions to the Chinese. For Yeltsin, that would have been impossible because he was seen as weak, he would have been almost treasonous. No one saw Putin as weak. So he was able to make a lot of agreements which laid the foundation for more stable and stronger relations with the Chinese.

10:21
I guess my point is you might be onto something there because you do have to, it’s very difficult to make peace if you’re seen as peacemakers given that they’re seen as weak. It could be good as playing the hawk at times. I must say though, there is some dishonesty. It’s not [exclusive] to Trump either though. The whole idea that when he says yes, Ukraine can win, nobody really believes this.

And given that their reaction was wait, he’s just trying to blame us for the Ukraine failure. So obviously the Europeans don’t think that Ukraine is winning either. It’s just one of these things you have to say to pledge loyalty to the narrative that keeps the war going. So we’re all chanting, yes, the war was unprovoked, the Ukraine is winning, they’re having low casualties, Russia has these human waves, Zelensky is just super democratic. I mean, this is what you have to say to give support for prolonging the war.

11:20
But the thing is that there’s no honesty anywhere though. Everyone is just lying to support the narrative which makes it impossible to come up with a peace agreement and instead to keep the war going. How do you assess though Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen and Merz? What are their positions? Because I saw Mr. Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland, take to Twitter that he realized, wait, we might be getting played here. That is Trump is trying to hand over responsibility for the Ukraine war to us. I mean, I guess they wouldn’t panic in such a way if they actually thought that the war was going their way. I mean, why would you want to take responsibility if you actually think you’re winning?

12:15
Well, they are so heavily invested in all of this tripe, all of this nonsense, that it’s very difficult for them, particularly since they moved locked arms. And they are very critical of any member of the 27 countries that breaks ranks as Fico in Slovakia and Urbán in Hungary have done. So they will make a move, but they’re putting it off and putting it off, a move towards reality, to get out of the bubble.

Let me be very precise about duplicitousness and lying to the public or false words that Mr. Trump is spreading. That is in one area, maybe in a few other areas, but the area that is of note is his policy on Ukraine, the Ukraine-Russia war, and on what he expects American relations with Russia to be after the war.

13:20
He doesn’t dare set that out in a straightforward, honest, candid way. For the reason I just said, he would lose all of his political support and become a lame-duck president instantly, if not impeached, if that’s what he did. At the same time, his speech to the UN was perfectly candid and honest and showed leadership. Whether you like the direction of his leadership is another question; that’s a personal choice of anyone who’s listening. But he was perfectly candid in expressing his heartfelt thoughts about open borders, about the renewables as a substitute for traditional fossil fuels.

And he was perfectly honest and candid, if anyone bothered to listen to the end of his speech about a multipolar world. Why do I say that? He established that it is the obligation of heads of state and heads of government to look after the prosperity of their peoples and to give support to the traditions, the national traditions of each country, which established the uniqueness and the sovereignty of those countries. My goodness, that is a complete break with the underlying principles of the neocons and of globalism. And that was speaking from the heart. Oh, he does have a heart, and he just speak from it, but not on Ukraine and Russia.

Diesen: 15:11
But I hear what you’re saying. John Mersheimer, he’s also, he interpreted it in the same way that this was this statement, which was very belligerent on paper and rhetoric. What it effectively did was to wash Trump’s hands of the Ukraine war. And I thought this was convincing because when he said, well go shoot down Russian jets, but you know, America won’t participate and you can put crushing sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions, which will also crush Europe. But you know, you go first and then we’ll join later.

Yeah, we’ll send all the weapons, they can retake all the territory, but you know, You have to buy them from us. And they don’t really have the money. America don’t have the weapons and the Ukrainians don’t have the soldiers. So one, one, I guess I found your argument in your article quite convincing in this sense. But I do have to say though that words, they do matter though, and the rhetoric can be quite dangerous.

16:22
This whole argument of striking deeper inside Russia, they’re going to send more weapons. That’s one of the things that made Lindsey Graham just giddy like a little schoolgirl that now America wouldn’t put any limits on weapons. So you’re going to have this long- range missile striking deep inside Russia, which is effectively then an American attack on Russia, and with the Russian jets as well. I mean, once those words have been uttered, they have to be taken into account by Russia. And again, they made it very clear if anyone in Europe thinks about firing upon a Russian jet, then it’s war. There’s no other path. So it seems that the rhetoric nonetheless is intensifying, though.

Doctorow: 17:08
It would be troublesome if there were anything true, the claims and the demands and the … fists in the air from European leaders. What Trump was doing was calling their bluff, and it is a bluff because he knows and they know that they don’t have the wherewithal to do anything without the United States. And it also is calling the bluff of the Americans, the people under him who are saying to him and he then repeats, oh we will ship 3,000 missiles to Ukraine, so that they can strike deep.

Well, that issue has been taken up by Russian analysts on air, on state television, and they insist: these weapons haven’t been produced yet. We’re speaking about something two years, three years from now. When Trump said he’s going to ship them, he didn’t say when. Oh, he said when, but it wasn’t serious. It is not going to be in three weeks.

18:11
Therefore, this belligerency that seemed apparent and that could have made people like Lindsey Graham delighted is also a bluff, and empty talk. In the meantime, Mr. Putin, the lawyer– He is a trained lawyer after all, who doesn’t want to take an action that is no longer a military, special military operation, but in fact an act of war. He doesn’t want to do that without the authorization, specific authorization of his parliament.

That man, the lawyer, is working at odds with the man who is the supreme commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces, which also was named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. So we have this contradiction at the top of Russia, and it should be resolved. It has been lingering and lingering.

Diesen: 19:15
Yeah, well, Zelensky was making some comments that he might hit, I’m not sure if he was going to hit Moscow with Tomahawks, something along those lines. But I saw a report, I haven’t had it verified, but I read that the Tomahawks are not forthcoming.

So again, this would also be something that would cause a direct war between NATO and Russia. So I guess there is some, behind the wild rhetoric, there seems still to be some common sense.

But on the issue of common sense, what do you see actually happening now at the moment? I mean, you followed the war very carefully with your war diaries And there’s been, you know, gradual unraveling over time.

We tried to patch up the holes with new weapons, more aggressive recruitment strategies in Ukraine. But at the moment, there’s some, a lot of regions now which are being encircled, not just Pokrovsk or Konstantinivka, but Kupiansk, that might be the most critical one. There’s a lot of problems building up, Also the Zaporizhzhya front, which is now being closed off both from the West and the East. But once countries get desperate, and you did say the Europeans, they committed themselves fully to this. And if there is no diplomatic path, I’m always worried that desperation translates into stupidity, and there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that at this moment in Europe.

So what do you see happening? I ask because I see the Russians now shipping Oreshniks to Belarus. So I’m not sure if they will know something we don’t know yet.

Doctorow: 21:15
Well, to a couple of things. First, to ease the difficulty of listeners to this. Kopyansk is what has been described as a major fortified outpost of Ukraine. It is a logistical hub, yes, but it is also a city protecting Kharkov. It’s part of the Russian strategy of taking Kharkov without a ground assault on Kharkov that could be very costly in civilian deaths. And after all, Kharkov is not just the second-largest city in Ukraine, but it is essentially a Russian-speaking city. So they would be killing their own people if they came in and stormed the city.

So they are going to encircle Kharkov and taking Kupyansk is a big part of it. They do this very dramatically by using underground pipelines from the Soviet era, gas pipelines, to again bring in secretly their own troops. Some of them, these pipes are pretty big because I was told that some of the Russian forces were riding motorcycles or scooters through these pipes. Anyway, It was a very dramatic event. They already have their troops in the center of Kupyansk and they’re cleaning it out.

22:40
This is an important development for the Northeast because this area, Kharkov, was a staging ground for the attacks on the Russian frontier or border provinces, oblasts, Belgorad and Kursk. Moreover, very specifically, the 700 soldiers whom the Russians are said to have encircled inside Kopyansk, Ukrainian soldiers, a large number of them were what was called, or is called, the Russian Volunteer Army, or Corps, which were precisely the people, defectors from Russia, who were armed and sent in by the Ukrainians to commit acts of terror and murder civilians in the first Ukrainian incursion on border areas, which was approximately one year ago, and before the Kursk action, Belgorod. So the Russians are very keen to murder all of them. I think they’ve taken out 250 out of division, 750.


23:51
But that is not the main front. The main front, as you said, is in the Donetsk oblast, and that is where the Russians are advancing and are likely to do in the city of Pakrovsk, which is known in Russian as Krasnoyarmesk, are something similar to what they’re doing now in Kupyansk. And yet there are other things afoot. You’ve mentioned Zaporozhzhye, yes, but there’s something more, I think, more important for us to understand how this war will end, that’s now being discussed on Russian television. And that is the need to take Odessa, because Odessa is rather close. If you look at the map, in maritime terms, it is that close to Crimea.

24:40
And the British and French have looked at Odessa as a key base for precisely that. So the Russians now are also turning their attention to Odessa to be captured. And if they capture it, then this tells you a lot about how the war will end, because once the rump Ukraine does not have Odessa, it loses much of its interest for Britain and France. So this is the way the war is going.

But all of this is going terribly slowly and the world doesn’t stand still. This is why I believe Mr. Trump is pushing Putin to get it over with by some stunning act, like an Oreshnik attack on Kiev that that decapitates the Kiev regime.

Diesen: 25:42
So you think the decapitation strike could be forthcoming; that is, as the frontlines are falling apart to add to the confusion, just go directly after Kiev. Because, well, so far the Russians, well, I wouldn’t say they haven’t touched Kiev because they have increased a lot, especially lately. But it wouldn’t be so popular even within Russia given the historical role of Kiev in Russian history as the origin from Kievan Rus. But do you think such a decapitation strike could come in the foreseeable future?

Doctorow: 26:26
Well, first of all, for one thing, having the Oreshnik takes away a big objection to attacking Kiev. They’re not going to wipe out the Lavada, the very famous and important Russian Orthodox Church-history monastery and repository of the holy relics and remains of Russian saints. They don’t have to do much damage to Kiev as a whole. They just have to wipe out and go deep to get to the safekeeping places of underground of Mr. Zelensky and his close circle on Bankovskaya Urizen and one or two other locations. So the material damage to Kiev would be minimal.

Is it capitation? I think that much depends on Mr. Trump. If he were, for example, to really step up sanctions, do something that severely interrupts the Russian economy, which is within his power, so he can do some nasty things. That might just push Putin to do what he otherwise should be doing, which is to go from this war of attrition, which can go on much too long, to finishing up the Zelensky regime. We’ll see.

Diesen: 27:55
I thought there was a big chance of something like this happening after the attack on Russia’s nuclear forces, that this was something that they couldn’t, yeah, something that would put an end to the attrition warfare. But yet, they seem to continue the same approach.

My last question, though, I just wanted to ask about this recent tensions between the Europeans and Russia. Because I had on also two days ago, I did an interview with Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who was previously an advisor to the US Secretary of Defense.

And he argued that in conversation with different people from US intelligence that they kind of dismissed this as being a European hoax. They were exaggerating. The Estonians especially were not credible. They argued that Poland, you know, they more or less, not more or less, they did very openly admit that there was no warheads on this.

Of course, the Russians, they go further. They say, of course, there’s no warheads, but also these weren’t ours. They were sent by Ukraine. Again, I don’t sit on any evidence here, so it’s not for me to say. But what do you make of these tensions though? Because even if it is Russia doing it to perhaps send a signal that we can also bring the war to you.

Even if this is the case, I’m a bit not perplexed, but I take note of the European excitement in this that they can almost show the smoking gun coming from Russia that now we have some legitimacy to step this up or pull the Americans in. I’m not really sure. Yeah, even in this country there, because I’m in Norway, and Oslo, they thought they saw drones. It’s like, oh, Russia, Russia.

29:52
And at the end of the day, they’re not sure if it was a drone. And the next day they arrested someone on a different drone, but you know, he’s a Norwegian. So it doesn’t make any sense. But this impulse always to run into this almost excitement that now finally the Russians have attacked us, now we can do something. It is very strange to me.

Doctorow:
Well, none of us knows for sure, and I doubt that the truth behind this will be known for decades, but we come at it from our own conceptualizations. And my conceptualization is that this fits in line with a typical false-flag operation designed and partly executed by the British, by MI6. I look at timing. Timing is important. In the case of Estonia, Kaja Kallas herself said a week ago, you know the Russians have made these incursions four times this year.

Okay. Why didn’t you say anything before? Why is it coming up now? Why suddenly out of nowhere is Norway coming? Why suddenly is Denmark and the Prime Minister, by the way, not the military, the military are much more cautious in Denmark. They say they have no idea where this is coming from, and it could come from a ship in the Baltic Sea. It could be anybody’s ship.

But it’s the real Russophobe prime minister of Denmark who said, oh, we can’t rule out Russia. OK. I believe MI6 is behind this, because it fits the pattern. If you go back over the last decade, every time there is some kind of big false-flag operation, whether it was in Syria or in Russia, relating to Russia, it coincides with something.

Well, the murder, death, of Alexei Navalny. It came what, a week before the Munich Security Conference, when his widow had already been prepared to come to speak. Well, that’s interesting. But it was a setup. Who had access to him in the far north?

Well, the Brits have a very extensive system of espionage and activities across Russia, particularly with the assistance of people who can pass for Russians, Russians speaking Ukrainians who worked with them, as well as Ukrainian intelligence. And I said at the time that Navani was killed by the Brits. I say at this time that what we’ve seen is a British plot; aided and supported by the Ukrainians, who are fully in on this, because it brought to the attention of Europeans how useful Ukraine can be in supplying them with its unique technology and hardware to intercept, to destroy cheaply, not at $50,000 a missile, a $20,000 drone coming from Russia. That was very convenient for Mr. Zelensky.

33:01
But more broadly, and then the whole idea of a drone wall, which was one of the results of this whole operation. A drone wall for all of Europe with the Ukrainians as part of this. That’s one result. But the timing, again, for me is a big indicator. This came, this whole story about the supposedly Russian drones attacking Poland and Romania, then the Russian military jets in incursion in over Estonian airspace, all of that comes at the tail end and just after Zapad 25.

This joint exercises of Belarus and Russia held every four years. That just was ending with 100,000 Russian soldiers with 25 foreign delegations, many of them quite important and obviously prospective customers for Russian military gear and for security arrangements with Russia, for money of course. And it is very convenient to start this new “Russia Russia Russia” chant to direct attention away from that big Russian success in Zapad 25.

Diesen: 34:18
It’s, yeah, behind the empty rhetoric slogans in the media, there is a more complex reality, I guess. So thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday to speak. I always very much appreciate your perspectives.

Doctorow:
Well, I very much appreciate your exposing the audience to divergent views, which they have a right and a need to get.