Transcript submitted by a reader
Diesen
Hi everyone and welcome. Today we’re joined again by Gilbert Doctorow, an historian and international affairs analyst and also the author of War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War in which I’ll put a link in the description. And I’m actually reading this book myself at the moment, which is a big book and more or less an encyclopedia of the war itself. So yeah, definitely a book to recommend. Welcome to the program.
Doctorow
Thank you

Diesen.

 The reason I wanted to talk with you today was about the NATO Summit. And also what this means for the future of NATO because previous NATO summits have usually been about, well at least in the past years, have been almost all about Ukraine. Otherwise it’s been about common values or collective security But this year it seemed to be all about paying tribute to Trump. And after all this display of unconditional loyalty and obedience, Trump more or less left without any further commitments. So it was quite extraordinary.

And So I was wondering what you make of this summit and what does it tell you about the future of NATO? Is this, as some people argue, a dead man walking?

Doctorow

I think you have to concentrate on Mr. Trump and what he was hoping to achieve, and I believe he did achieve at this summit. Because the main activity of the member states, the leaders of the member states, was to prevent a catastrophe, some scandal, getting into a fight with Donald, leaving him unhappy, exposing him to people he didn’t want to see in front of cameras, meaning Zelensky.

So there was a damage control exercise by the member states of NATO with Mark Rutte, the secretary general in charge of that, and exposing himself to widespread condemnation for fawning over Trump. Trump lapped it all up. He was happy as can be. But I’d like to move away from the psychological portraits, which is unfortunately what nearly all of our peers pay attention to. And I’d like to look at the business part of it, which I think is intrinsic in your question.

On the business side, Trump got what he wanted. They signed on the dotted line, all countries except Spain, signed on the dotted line, committing themselves to this 5% of GDP available for financing the military, the defense budgets. It should be achieved within 10 years. The point of is, which so many pro-Atlanticist publications are saying, demonstrates the solidarity of NATO. Yes, there’s solidarity going down like a stone in the sea.

The answer to your brief question, is this the end of NATO? No, it isn’t. NATO will linger for some time. What does this signify then? It signifies the off-ramp for Donald Trump and the United States. By that I mean, by having these countries all commit to put up several trillion dollars or euros in defense spending in the coming decade, he has cleared the way for the United States to downsize, to downscale its contribution to NATO, which has been traditionally two-thirds of the overall budget of NATO.

And that is unsustainable politically in the United States when the mood is running in favor of Trump and there’s a slight isolationist mood in the United States. He’s not going to pull out. He cannot pull out of NATO. That would require the two-thirds majority vote in Congress, which he does not have and he knows very well that he doesn’t have it.

But he can reduce American contributions, freeing up the American military budget for other engagements, particularly in the Far East and for technology development in his unfortunately announced Golden Dome project.

So in that respect, this was political theater. Now this was the second run at political theater that we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the last 10 days. The first run was his staging the attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran, which has received enormous attention, even to the present. The last, yesterday’s news in major media were all about whether Donald Trump lied. Of course.

What does that mean? What does it say about America’s defense if the president is lying and his associates were all lying about an issue of great importance bearing on national defense?

 And then they get into the personal psychoanalysis of Mr. Trump, which they always use as a feeding fest for many of the commentators of major media. Regrettably, Glenn, also for many of the commentators in alternative media. I’m very disappointed to see my peers follow the big boys in the major media into this dead end.

Unfortunately, the dead end is not arbitrary. It is totally characteristic of the way we in the West look at international developments and personalize everything. Russia is run by one man whose name is Vladimir Putin. He grew up as kind of a slum kid, fighting, scrapping in the yards, and then he went on to a KGB career, and that’s all we have to know about him. And then, of course, they all engage in various psychological portraits of Donald Trump as a man who lies whenever he can, wherever he can.

I was just picking up and re-reading J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. And there, my goodness, there was a portrait of Donald Trump, Holden Caulfield, who never, never misses the opportunity to lie when he could otherwise tell a straight story. However, this leads us nowhere. That is missing the point of statesmanship and what you accomplish as a country’s leader.

I said the West falls into this trap of layman’s psychoanalysis, which even professional psychoanalysts will tell you is a very risky thing to do remote when the patient isn’t sitting on a couch in front of you. But I described that as the West. Why did I say the West? Because in the East, particularly in the Soviet Union, when Marxist dialectic was predominant in shaping people’s minds in higher education. They always distinguish between the subjective and the objective.

We in the West are looking wholly at the subjective. What did Donald want? What does this one want? And we’re not looking at what was the consequence of their action. And so we get trapped in speculation, mad speculation, which is not productive.

In the instance, looking at what he did in Hague, everyone’s talking about the fawning on him, on how he was gratified and how he smiled to this one or shook hands with that one. I’m sorry, these are irrelevancies. The piece of business he had to do he did. And whether he was aware consciously that he was planning that this would be an exit ramp, we don’t know. To say it, it’s speculation.

But what he did is not speculation. He prepared the way for an exit. Just as what he did in Iran. I don’t know what he wanted, nobody does. They convey, the main discussion is carried out as it is mostly by the press who are deeply anti-Trump and are looking for anything to prove that the man is unworthy of office.

Well, that’s good for them. It’s not good for us, the American public, because they’re working against the national interests for the sake of partisanship. What counts is what did he do, what he did in Iran, which he saved Israel from self-destruction. And that is the point.

Well, and they always were speculating, oh, this is just a temporary truce, that Israel will again go back on the offensive. Well, they haven’t read Larry Johnson’s article in his Sonar yesterday in which he set out on a map exactly what was destroyed in Israel, which was half the country, half the strategic assets of Israel. A few more days and there would have been no strategic assets left. This is what Donald Trump must have known when he made that decision to make a phony bombing raid on phony assets in Iran. And whether there is enriched uranium left in the hands of the Iranian regime or not is frankly speaking irrelevant to the considerations of Washington right now.

They had to get Israel out of this, while there was still something to save of Israel. And if that meant giving up the whole argument about Iranian enrichment and the Iranian bomb, well, they just gave it up. Trump as much as said that he doesn’t give a damn what he does sign or doesn’t sign with the Iranians. That the issue is over.

Now, that’s how it is with the summit.  Let’s look at the consequences. The consequences will come up in the coming months as we see the United States almost certainly scaling back its contributions to NATO.

Diesen

Well, I agree with your approach because the key focus, I guess, in the media is that Trump is a narcissist. He likes to relish in this. And I also think that this is, well, it’s relevant to the extent that European leaders, they believe that this is a way they can control him or manipulate that is just, you know, feed his ego and then we can make him do what we want kind of thing.

But I agree this is pure psychological approach. It’s good for explaining perhaps what Europeans are doing, but doesn’t get the whole picture because while Trump indeed most likely is very much a narcissist, it’s also worth noting that the strategic thinking has been quite consistent. If you watch his participation on talk shows, Larry King Live,  since the 1980s, he was always expressing concern about the alliance system. That is, yes, the alliance system might elevate the United States to leadership position, but it had too great of a cost. That is, financing all of its allies would run the US into bankruptcy.

So he kept using the word, you know, they’re treating us like a sucker. And it’s a reasonable argument that the empire isn’t sustainable. Again, you want a proper return on investment of empire if it should be sustainable over time. So the idea that others should pay for US protection and it shouldn’t be an expense, this is something he’s been saying for 40 plus years now. So to just dismiss this as him being all about, you know, well, he just wants people to, you know, throw compliments at him, I think we might be deluding ourselves.

But what he kind of keeps saying is not that different from what a lot of other American leaders have said over the decades. That is that Europeans should pay more for security, but no one really pushed it that hard. But all of this is more relevant today, I guess, given that the strategic focus of the United States is going to other places of the world. Again beginning under Obama’s pivot to Asia in 2010.

But he seems to have achieved some of this by asking for 5% expenditures on weapons by the Europeans and ideally by American weapons. It’s two things achieved. One, the Europeans are now paying America given that they have to buy American weapons. But the second would be that the Europeans acquire more, well, they take more responsibility for their own security, which enables the United States to reduce its commitment. But this is where I want to ask you about the contradiction, if you will, because in Europe, the idea is, you know, if we pay more for security, we do what Trump’s tells us, then he will be happy with us.

And, you know, we feed his ego and then he will stay in Europe. Or as Mark Rutte has written, you know, he wants to keep the family together. But we seem to neglect that we might achieve the opposite. If we keep increasing our military expenditure to increase our own stock value for the Americans, the Americans are able to say that Europe is now able to defend itself and then reduce the commitments. Do you see the same contradiction in the thinking between the Americans and the Europeans?

Doctorow
Well, you’re touching on the other side of the issue, which I didn’t get to. What Trump was achieving, he was getting them to commit to something which everyone knows they cannot fulfill. That doesn’t mean they say it. The only people who said it publicly were the Spanish. And they came out and refused to sign this on the dotted line because they said it’s not workable for them.

The fact is it’s not workable for anybody. The signal about the falseness of all of this commitment is a 10-year timeline. Ten years in politics is eternity. Most everyone who is in that room will not be in office. Some of them won’t be alive altogether within ten years.

And so when you put a timeline like that without having in place measured markers for achievement, then you’re saying it will not happen. Everyone kicks the can down the road. That’s how politics works. So that’s generally, without even looking at the particulars of this case, the specifics of the situation in one country after another, this was an empty promise. But let’s look at the case by case, because it’s very relevant to where we are today and what’s going to happen in the immediate future, not 10 years from now.

I live in Belgium. In Belgium, we had a demonstration the day before the opening of the Hague Summit. 35,000 people came out in the streets of Brussels. 35,000. That’s a lot for Belgian demonstrations that aren’t about this or that piddling change in pension laws.

And they were against rearmament, against an introduction of a draft. That’s a sign, just a straw in the wind. The bigger issue is that even Bart De Wever, the prime minister, admitted after the summit that it’s improbable that Belgium can reach these new targets. He was saying that because otherwise his government’s going to fall. If he proceeds beyond the present chicanery with the 2025 budget where they’re doing exactly what that extra 1.5% in the 5% is all about –  labeling infrastructure investments in roads and bridges as defense and putting that into their budget to reach 2% since Belgium is only at 1.3% today as a percent of GDP for its military budget.

To go beyond the 1.3% to say 3.5% which is for hard military spending is not possible. There’s no wiggle room in Belgium for finances. Neither to raise taxes nor to raise credits because the country is over-indebted. So it can only come at the expense of social benefits, and everybody knows what that means. That is political suicide for any Belgian government. For that reason, here in Belgium, the commitment was absolutely hollow.

Now let’s look at the big neighbor because Germany is really the driving force of the rearmament program, even more than loud mouted Macron since Merz actually has money to put there whereas Macron just has words. In the case of Germany, yes, they can put up a trillion dollars, as their chancellor has said. And Merz knows where he gets the money. So that isn’t the issue.

He can’t get the men. That is the issue. To have the equipment, to have more tanks rolling out and more drones produced is fine, but if there’s nobody to operate the new equipment, then you’re back where you started. You have no army to speak of. And we know that German volunteer recruitment was advertised for more than a month by the Defense Minister Pistorius producing almost negligible results. Something like 500 men, women signed up to join.

Pistorius himself said that if an all-out effort at recruiting volunteers does not pay off, the country will be obliged to introduce a military draft. That touched off a left-right divide in German politics.

There was an excellent article in yesterday’s Financial Times describing the signing of a manifesto against rearmament by a certain Mr.Peter Brandt, the elder son of the chancellor best known for introducing the Ostpolitik, Willy Brant. So Peter Brant was a signatory.

The article went on to explain the Brandt’s comments in general about how and why Russia should be, once again, taken up as a partner for Germany and not as the enemy, reintroducing the elements of his father’s Ostpolitik or new eastern policy. They went on to explain the rest of his logic, which unfortunately was very badly informed. He was saying that Russia really isn’t so strong, it’s taking three years to do anything in Ukraine, so therefore they’re not a threat. Well, of course, that’s complete rubbish. They are a threat. And they’re taking three years because that’s the way Mr. Putin wants to play the game, not because he can’t do otherwise.

Looking at solid reputable sources that are on the internet, WION, the largest international broadcaster of India with 9 million subscribers, they had a video on the internet yesterday explaining how the Russians have been using their upgraded missile Iskander-M to destroy American Patriot air defenses in and around Kiev, and how another rapid-fire rocket launcher, a kind of updated Katyusha, is now devastating the Ukrainian lines along the Donbas. There’s no question but that the Russians have the upper hand, they’re winning, and this comes out in articles of even the Russophobic Financial Times.

So the arguments that Mr. Brandt adduced are not correct and not well informed, but the fact that he has taken the lead, that his signature is on a new manifesto against rearmament is a new tipping point. Mr. Scholz introduced a tipping point in the last year of his chancellorship, that is that Germany no longer could cultivate relations with Russia, but that Russia was an enemy and that Germany must rearm and prepare for confrontations with Russia in the future. That was one turning point. Now we’re seeing another one, a turning point against that last turning point.

This manifesto was against rearmament, as I said. And although the SPD, the Social Democrats of Germany, have a majority which supports Pistorius in rearmament and in a draft, there is a very strong minority against. This is not my characterization. This was the remark of the pro-NATO Financial Time. And that the government can fall because it only has a majority of 17 votes in the parliament; so if a minority of the SPD vote against their own party, the government will fall. And that will be the end of Mr. Merz because he’s very unpopular. Should they go to the elections again, there’ll be somebody else who replaces him within the Christian Democrats. So Germany is at a tipping point, and that is of decisive importance for this commitment that was made in their name at the NATO summit by the most important military and industrial country in Europe.

For all of these reasons, the summit may be the last of its kind. The fact that only Spain came out against this doesn’t tell you anything. I think that Mr. Orban and Mr. Fico are also against it, but caution tells them not to oppose Brussels on everything. If all you need is one member to stand up and say what you want to say, it’s good enough. And Spain was that member this time.

Diesen

Yeah. Well, I guess it does make sense for everyone to stand up, given that Trump also threatened to punish Spain for not falling in line. But it is extraordinary though, the lack of pursuit of national interest, because Germany can change their government, but no government can survive unless they’re going to start to address basic national interests.

And for Germany, the great irony of making Russia their main enemy is if you want a competitive German economy, you do need to link up with the Russian economy. If Germany wants security, it really needs to also address Russian security, that is, overcome this effort to create a Europe without the Russians. And also, if you want a politically relevant Germany, you can’t have a Europe re-divided, remilitarized, because it will go from being a subject to an object of international security. So I don’t see how another election in Germany is going to fix this problem unless they begin to look a bit more honestly at what their actual national interest is versus policy.

So we’re at this position now where the Europeans are pretending to arm themselves to prevent the Americans from leaving, which is actually enabling the US from leaving.

They don’t have the economic power to do this. As you said, they don’t have the public support for this. They’re not able to mobilize the men to manage the equipment, which they can’t build, at least not in time. But even if they were able to do all these things, you know, the basic foundations of the security competition, which dictates international security, suggests that Russia’s not simply going to capitulate. We’re not going to restore a new hegemonic peace.

Russia will respond in some way. So how do you see Russia reacting to the Europeans seeking to arm themselves to the teeth?

Doctorow

I’ll respond to that in one second, but I’d like to take one step back to the question of NATO’s future existence and what that means more broadly. Because of the work of von der Leyen and her associates, NATO and the EU have become synonymous. They are so intertwined.

And that is deadly for the EU. If NATO goes down, the EU goes down with it. The whole glue of NATO is the Russian enemy and thanks to von der Leyen, the glue of the EU is the Russian enemy. So the consequences of this, what we just described, of a changing political balance in Germany, we went from Germany’s vote in the summit to what’s happening internally in Germany as a result of this position. And it’s not just a consequence for Germany, it’s for the whole EU.

But now the answer to your question, the big question, how does Russia react?

And here’s where it is amazing that the thinking is so poor within the EU and within NATO. The thinking is poor because there’s no debate, because there’s censorship, because all of this works against producing well thought out solutions or proposals. If there is no contest, intellectual contest pro and con for any of these major policies like the present rearmament policy, it can only be a very poor policy. And that’s what we see. The Europeans have not debated what rearmament will mean.

You spoke about buying American weapons. That’s a large part of it. But weapons for what? It’s already been demonstrated in the last two weeks to anybody, for anybody with eyes to see that the notion of air defense against the latest generation of missiles is utter nonsense, it is throwing money down the drain. You cannot resist them.

The logic is if you cannot resist the enemy, then come and talk to them and find some solutions, some that everyone can live with. Now the other thing: even if we were turned away from the money that is supposed to be spent on air defense, the general building of muscle, of conventional muscle so that Europe had an advantage like in its relations with the Soviet Union. To do that today is possible. The money can be found, as Germany is demonstrating, but what will be the net result? The net result will not be the defeat or a negotiating advantage over Russia.

Russia has nuclear weapons that are entirely capable of deterring any possible European invasion of the Russian Federation. The idea of dealing Russia a strategic defeat is utterly stupid. And why is it stupid? Not because people advocating this are individually stupid, but because there is no debate in which the flaws of their reasoning could be brought to their attention and everyone else’s attention.

Diesen

 I noticed also that Medvedev went out and argued that no longer would Russia accept Ukraine in the European Union.

I think it was repeated by Sergey Lavrov as well, which has been many people seen as a possible compromise that is Ukraine has to remain neutral, but it can join the European Union. But this is one of the problems of making the EU indistinguishable from NATO or this geopolitical EU, which von der Leyen is trying to build, that the Russians now see the Europeans as being more hostile than the Americans, which has kind of switched the script a bit.

But do you think this will be significant or, well, that Ukraine is never going to join the EU to begin with, I guess, given that even some of their closest partners, such as Poland, would oppose this, much like the Hungarians or the Slovaks.

Doctorow

I think raising this question of Russia is not happy any more to envisage Ukraine within the EU takes us back to 2014 when the Kiev government was overthrown because Yanukovich waffled, was undecided whether to take the $15 billion, I think, that Putin offered him for economic assistance if he stayed out of the arms of the EU and the EU’s insistence that he sign the strategic cooperation with the EU and enter onto a path of eventually joining.

The reason why the Russians were so upset is exactly the same as what you just said of Medvedev now. That within the agreements for close cooperation with the EU there were secret annexes, and not so secret annexes. The one that’s not so secret was the requirement that the new country align its foreign policy with the EU. The secret part was they aligned their military policy with the EU. And that was, of course, totally unacceptable to the Russians.

And it remains so today. So although we may have heard some remarks in the past year or two that suggested that Russia didn’t really care about it, I don’t think they reflected the reality within Russia itself, within the strategic thinkers of Russia ove, what EU membership for Ukraine could entail. It’s not joining a military alliance as such, but actually it is de facto because of all the security cooperation that would come with EU membership.

Diesen

Yeah, I remember in 2014, this was sold in Europe as a trade agreement with Ukraine and almost focusing on student exchanges, something where it is kind of harmless things.

But it did have, I think was 14 or 17 articles where it, which addressed foreign policy in which Ukraine’s foreign policy would have to be brought into line with the European Union. And for EU that’s becoming increasingly anti-Russian in nature, it’s yeah, this becomes problematic and also could be used obviously as a stepping stone to NATO or make it a de facto NATO state. But if the Europeans would be successful in this development of weapons, how do you see this affecting the nuclear weapons policies of Russia? Because the Russians have already now begun to lower the threshold for nuclear weapons. And often this is, well, historically, this is often seen as loosening up the use of nuclear weapons for a skewed balance of power.

That is, during the Cold War when the Soviets had the superior conventional forces, NATO opened up for the first use of nuclear weapons. That is, if a conventional attack would threaten their existence, then they could use weapons, nuclear weapons first. After the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Soviets or then the Russians were severely weakened, suddenly NATO had overwhelming superiority in conventional capabilities. We saw it flipped and suddenly the Russians put it into the nuclear doctrine that they could use nuclear weapons first if their existence was threatened. So what exactly would be achieved by arming Europe to the teeth?

Is this supposed to be a deterrent or do they imagine these weapons being used in an actual fight with Russia? So, because it was only deterrent, the nuclear weapon seems to be sufficient. So, what is the thought here? Is it going to impact any war fighting in the future?

Doctorow
Well, the policy or doctrine relating to the insubordination of nuclear weapons is variable and changes over time in accordance with perceived threats.

And as you say, the, we can call them great equalizers– nuclear weapons are the great equalizer. The side that has less power in conventional war-making will opt for the great equalizer to defend itself or to create a deterrent against the side which has superiority in numbers and quality of its conventional forces. The Russians already tipped their hand. You don’t have to guess about this. When there was talk, when Mr. Starmer of Britain and Emmanuel Macron of France were speaking and putting together a coalition of the willing, numbering some 50,000 troops they would send nominally as peacekeepers to Ukraine, the Russians reacted and said that they saw this as hostile, they saw this as leading to an attack on their positions– and that they had no intention of going into trench warfare with the French and the British. They would instead use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy a whole lot of them at one blow. So that’s the answer to the question. Yes, of course, if Russia is threatened by a million or more well-armed Europeans, it will respond with tactical nuclear weapons.

Diesen
My last question, which is, what do you think will happen to NATO if it loses the proxy war in Ukraine, or to reframe it, when NATO loses this proxy war? What is going to happen to NATO itself? Beause it appears that, yeah, a lot of the political credibility has been gambled on this that we went all in. So, again, I always make the point, no academics like to stare into their crystal ball as there’s too many, you know, uncertain variables. But what do you expect at least?

Doctorow
Well, in its present form it will cease to exist. I think the Americans will leave NATO eventually. Of course, that will take some time, some changing in American opinion, in the political leadership in Congress, how they view America’s participation and how they view the whole global empire, whether it was a net plus or a net negative for American interests and for the American economy, I think that will change over time. But in the immediate future, NATO will not disappear, but it will fragment and elements of it will probably be incorporated into the defense that the European Union puts together for itself. They’re not going to just cast aside what they have, they will just redesignate it as what is already evident in the concept of the EU that von der Lryen has put in place as being a major geopolitical force in the world and not just an economic force.

So the pieces will be picked up and reintegrated into the EU. But I am hopeful that the political cataclysm that the final defeat of Ukraine will bring about in Europe will change the balance of power within the European Parliament and will lead to the removal or resignation of the von der Leyen team, the majority coming from the European People’s Party that has been so destructive in the last decade of the whole notion of the EU as a peace project. For that reason, I say there will be identifiable pieces of today’s NATO that will continue forever, but under new overall management that will be EU management and not the present NATO structure.

Diesen

Yeah, I do hope that the people who sacrificed Ukraine over the past decade to fight Russia would be held accountable so there’s some possibility for policy change. But as I suggested before, first there needs to be some opening for some, you said, intellectual competition to shape a more rational foreign policy.

But maybe the defeat in Ukraine would create the conditions for this. So yeah, thank you so much for letting me pick your brain and yeah, hope you’ll come back on soon.

Well, Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

 

Enjoy the show:

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

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctorow:
No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Napolitano:
Oh, good Lord.

Doctorow:
They needed–

Napolitano:
A drop in the bucket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Napolitano:
And what do they say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24:29
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:09
[commercial message]

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

Doctorow:
The elites, not the public.

Redacted:
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6CBHDNv2ao

NewsX: 0:00
Our other story: ahead of the NATO summit in The Hague, Russian drone attacks have killed over three in an attack in Ukraine’s northern region of Sumy. As per reports, there was a child among the three killed. There are also reports of at least three people wounded in the attack too. The fresh attacks in Sumi come a day after Ukraine said Russia carried out dozens of drone and missile strikes on its territory, killing 10 people in the capital, Kiev. Meanwhile, Russia has said that a drone had targeted a residential building in Moscow overnight, wounding two people, a pregnant woman included.

As the war between Russia and Ukraine continues to escalate, the diplomatic efforts to end the three-year war have stalled, with the last direct meeting between Kiev and Moscow almost three weeks ago and no follow-up talks scheduled. The reports of the fresh attacks come amid Zelensky’s participation in the two-day NATO summit in The Hague which is scheduled to start later today.

1:18
Now we have Dr. Gilbert Doctorow joining us live for this news. He’s a Russian affairs expert joining us live from Brussels. Thank you, Dr. Doctorow for joining us today. And what do you suggest is coming next for these ongoing strikes between Ukraine and Russia, and also no talks or no scheduled talks ahead?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:50
In international affairs, everything is connected or interconnected. And what is happening now in the Ukraine-Russia War is impacted by what has been happening in the Middle East. We know that Russia has profited by the distraction for the United States of this higher-priority conflict in the Middle East, and it has withdrawn a large part of its anti-aircraft systems, and it has stopped the flow of military materiel to Kiev. That is what people talk about. What they don’t talk about is the new aggressiveness in the Russian attacks on Ukraine. The attacks in the past week on Kiev in particular were far more devastating and caused many more casualties than any prior Russian attacks.

So it is with Sumy. Sumy is a border town. It is the city very close to the Russian border from which Ukrainians staged their invasion of Kursk province, which is just across the border. The Russians have made it publicly known that they are creating a buffer zone, at least 15 kilometers in width, taking over or neutralizing Ukrainian territory that was being used as staging grounds for attack on Russian civilian settlements on the Russian side. The attack on Sumy that you have described is part of that operation.

3:36
And yes, the Russians make great emphasis on their concentrating firepower against military targets. Nonetheless, as we know, there always is civilian suffering, because how precise you can strike, particularly with artillery, does not rule out the possibility of damage to residences and so forth. So the deaths that you described were not the purpose of the Russian attack, but they were a result, a consequence of their strikes in Sumy for the purpose of weakening that center, degrading its military status, and preparing possibly for Russian takeover, if they so decide.

NewsX: 4:26
And Dr. Doctorow, as civilian casualties are increasing on both sides, Russia claims a drone targeted a building in Moscow. And now, does this signal a new phase where the war could become more mutually destructive on civilian fronts?

Doctorow:
But still, let’s put this in perspective. The relevant perspective is Israel’s conduct in this war on Gaza, which is genocidal and which has produced more than 55,000 civilian deaths. In the last eight days or so when the war in Gaza was scaled back by Israel, note that, “scaled back” because of their concentration on the conflict with Iran, there still were 500 civilian deaths recorded. Israel has daily killed more people who are waiting for food distribution in a land that is now in advanced hunger, advanced famine.

5:33
Israel is killing more civilians each day, many more, than the numbers that you’ve cited for Russian activities in their war in Ukraine. These are incomparable. And yet here we are, our mainstream media are reporting on Russian barbarity, how cruel it is, Mr. Starmer, with respect to the loss of life of civilians in Ukraine. And they are relatively quiet, if not absolutely silent, about the many times greater destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilian lives going on in Gaza, the West Bank, and in the recent strikes of Israel in Iran.

NewsX: 6:21
And now, building on the fact that NATO meeting is going to take place tonight, what message is Moscow sending by timing of this escalation, just hours before NATO leaders gather in The Hague, and are these strikes intended to coincide with the NATO summit to test or maybe dilute the alliance unity?

Doctorow:
I don’t think the Russians have to do anything to dilute the alliance. The alliance is collapsing in front of our eyes. The biggest event of the last couple of days has been the outright refusal of Spain to sign up to the increased contributions of NATO member states to armaments, to arms. That outright refusal is quite shocking.

7:08
It’s also backed up by other developments showing the loss of authority of NATO. Japanese are not coming to it. The idea of an Asian extension of NATO was just delivered a heavy blow by the Japanese refusal to attend. So NATO has its own problems, its inconsistencies, and I would say the utter nonsense of Mr. Rutte’s speech yesterday in preparation for this meeting, in which he was calling upon the countries of NATO to contribute to a vast improvement in their air defenses, making Europe safe from attack, particularly from that nasty neighbor to East, Russia, which is the greatest threat to security, according to Mr. Rutte.

That assumes that his audience is mindless, that they’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the Middle East, where the notion of an air defense against hypersonic missiles is utter nonsense. Europe, like Mr. Trump and his Golden Dome, is being asked to put up enormous amounts of money for a military strategy that is hopeless in providing any security. Therefore, NATO’s problems are NATO’s own problems. They are not in any way exaggerated or influenced by anything that Moscow is doing.

NewsX: 8:39
And now that there might be some chance, even though you show some pessimism towards NATO, could NATO countries use this summit to announce a change in policy, such as maybe providing longer-range weapons or air defense systems, more of them to Ukraine?

Doctorow: 8:59
If NATO continues on its present path, I predict that in five years it won’t exist. The internal conflicts within the European Union over foreign policy, which is a determinant, the determinant of military policy, are growing in front of our eyes. The famous 18th package of sanctions against Russia was just doomed by the veto of Slovakia and Hungary.

This is not a Russian intervention, It is common sense among European nations, who are seeking to defend their citizens from policies made in Brussels, which are destructive of the security and the economy of European member states.

NewsX: 9:49
Thank you very much, Gilbert Doctorow, for joining us today and sharing your expertise as Russian [affairs analyst].

Transcript submitted by a reader

NewsX: 8:37
We’re now joined by Gilbert Doctorow, who’s a Russian affairs expert, and he joins us from Brussels, Belgium. Gilbert, thank you very much for joining us on the programme. Gilbert, this G7 conference, formally G8, is coming to a close. What have been your thoughts on how everything has played out in regards to Zelensky’s presence and Russia’s absence?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Russia has been absent for 10 years, so that’s not a new development. But as regards to Mr. Zelensky, his trip was totally wasted. He was on his way into Alberta when he was apprised of the fact that Trump had already left hours before. I think Mr. Trump’s departure was motivated in part to avoid meeting Zelensky and to avoid participating in a discussion of the Ukraine war that was on the agenda for the day.

The fact is that Mr.– this is a meeting of seven, but Mr. Trump would find himself in the minority of one. He would have six fellow members, all grouped against him on the question of the Ukraine war. And that, of course, is not very agreeable or very constructive. As regards his mention of how sad it was that President Obama, together with Justin Trudeau of Canada, had decided to remove Russia as the eighth member of this group — he called this very sad and said that it was, had there been Russian participation in the G8, then there wouldn’t have been a war that we’re now fighting.

However, this is, these are pure rhetoric. The reality is that when Mr. Trump, sorry, when Mr. Putin was a member of the G8, he was in exactly the same disadvantageous and uninteresting position of Mr. Trump presently. He was a minority of one with seven allies in the West aligned against him who agreed, who met privately before he arrived at any conference, and agreed on a policy line which was all directed against him. So in that sense, the problems of today’s G7 are simply repeating the problems that existed in 2014, when you had seven members ganging up on the eighth. Now it was six members who were planned to gang up on the seventh, namely Mr. Trump.

11:18
Mr. Trump is not Mr. Putin. He is the most powerful man in the world. And so they could only lick their wounds and complain when he left, when he left early on the alleged reason that he had business to do in Washington that was more important.

NewsX: 11:39
Gilbert, the Kremlin has called G7 useless. Ukraine did want to make more gains than it did, but it did produce Canada’s massive support, some massive financial support from Canada. Do you think Russia is losing more ground diplomatically or gaining it?

Doctorow:
Well, whatever the G7 does, it really is not news in the sense that they are all aligned against Russia, not a day-to-day matter, not just when they convene together. So Mr. Zelensky left, as you said quite properly, he left this meeting with nothing in his hands other than what Canada could contribute. This may be of some small solace to him, but it in no way helps Ukraine to continue to fight effectively against Russia.

12:33
In point of fact, because of the Israel-Iran war, The United States has withdrawn a large part of its air defenses from Ukraine and moved them to the Middle East to provide some protection for America’s air bases and the 40,000 American soldiers who are stationed in the Middle East, should they come to blows with Iran. The United States also has reportedly stopped sending any further military materiel to Ukraine.

All of this is very bad news for Mr. Zelensky and bad news for his army. It is not a surprise that Russia is staging massive strikes on Kiev presently, as you have otherwise reported, because the air defences there are very weak.

NewsX: 13:25
Gilbert, prior to the G7, Putin and Trump had a direct phone call. They have so far agreed to commence talks again, once again, on the 22nd of this month. What are your hopes going into those talks, given Russia’s escalating strikes on civilian infrastructure across Ukraine? Do you think they’ll make any progress? And do you think peace is still on Putin’s mind when it comes to sending his delegation to Turkey?

Doctorow:
Oh, peace is definitely on Mr. Putin’s mind, but it’s a peace that he wants on his terms. In that sense, He is no different from Mr. Zelensky, who wants a peace on his terms. Both sides are looking for a capitulation of the other side, which of course is an impossible situation and does not indicate that they will reach any agreement until there is a definitive result on the battlefield. That’s, having said that, the meeting between the Russians and the Americans is really about technical matters. It is about restoring the functionality of their respective diplomatic establishments in the other country. Their embassies are operating on a very weak level because staff is missing.

14:48
Staff was thrown out in recriminatory exchanges going back several years. They are non-functional, and the intent is to restore functionality, because you cannot negotiate with the other side, over important matters of geopolitics, which is what Trump and Putin are trying to do, when you don’t have staff on the ground manning your embassy.

NewsX: 15:16
Gilbert Doctorow, thank you very much for joining us on the program and [for] your insight. We now move over to the Middle East–

Transcription submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnVZJl60l7c

NewsX: 0:00
–expertise and sharing your insight with us. We had Ali Abushbakh join us as Middle East researcher. Now we move on to our next story. Russia and Ukraine have declared that a fifth exchange of dead bodies has taken place. Kyiv has confirmed that the bodies of 1,245 Ukrainian servicemen have been returned from Russia as part of a continuing effort under the Istanbul agreements.

These exchanges come after months of negotiations between both sides. According to Ukraine’s coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war, the repatriated remains include soldiers who died in intense combat zones, including Bakhmut and Mariupol.

Meanwhile, Russian presidential aide and chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky told Russian media that Moscow is prepared to transfer an additional 2,239 bodies to Ukraine. He also confirmed that Ukraine has so far handed over 78 bodies of Russian servicemen to Moscow. Medinsky said that since the start of these agreements, Russia has returned a total of 6060 bodies of Ukrainian fallen soldiers.

1:24
Now we are joined by our guest, Gilbert Doctorow. He’s a Russian affairs expert, joining us live from Brussels. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to NewsX World. What does this fifth round of body, fallen body exchanges signal about the current state of dialogue between Moscow and Kiev despite active conflict?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, it indicates that at the technical level, the two sides remain in contact. And of course it is extremely good news that there can be a closure to the suffering of the families of these soldiers. They can properly bury their loved ones. And something resembling human behavior returns to that land. Nonetheless, none of this has any implication for the chances of a ceasefire, let alone for the chances of a definitive peace between Russia and Ukraine.

The parties remain very far separated by their ambitions in what they will get from the peace. That is to say, each side is expecting and demanding the capitulation effectively, the capitulation of the other side. And under those conditions, it is not foreseeable that negotiations can result in any agreements.

NewsX: 2:57
And now you will stay with us as we have breaking news. Moscow confirms that newly planned Russia-US consultations have been canceled at Washington’s initiative. Russia’s foreign ministry says it hopes the current diplomatic pause with the United States won’t last long.

Now we come back to our guest discussion, Gilbert Doctorow. He’s a Russian affairs expert joining us live from Brussels. What is your reaction about the breaking news that we just took, that the consultations have been canceled at Washington’s initiative?

Doctorow: 3:41
Well, I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference. Washington’s mind right now is fully focused on the Middle East and on the ongoing conflict, armed conflict, between Iran and Israel. The United States is deeply concerned that its bases in the Middle East will be attacked by the Iranians. And so I don’t think they have too much brain power to spare to consider the furtherance of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which in any case have not yet produced any positive results.

NewsX: 4:25
And building on that, how does the asymmetry in the number of bodies returned– being 6,060 Ukrainian versus 78 Russian soldiers only– reflect the intensity or geography of the frontline losses, and is this being used by Russia as soft power here?

Doctorow: 4:49
I don’t think that the discrepancy in numbers of these corpses fully reflects the discrepancy in the killed or seriously maimed ratio of those in the Ukrainian armed forces versus the Russians. There are other elements here as well. It’s been a safe assumption among most experts that the Russians have enjoyed a seven to ten advantage over the Ukrainians, meaning that seven Ukrainians or ten Ukrainians have been killed or seriously wounded in the combat in Donbass versus one Russian. Now, when you speak about 70 soldiers, Russian corpses being exchanged for so far 6,000 and maybe 7,000 Ukrainian corpses, that, of course, is unrepresentative of the numbers I just gave.

But I think it’s accounted for by something else. The Ukrainians have notoriously left their fallen and dead on the battlefield and have run for their lives when they were subjected to a Russian attack. And I think the Russians have been much more careful about recovering the bodies of their fallen in the military conflict. That is probably a bigger factor than anything else.

NewsX: 6:16
Thank you very much, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow. He’s a Rus–

Russia-Ukraine exchange of dead bodies:  78 Russians for 6060 Ukrainians   Why the vast difference?

I am pleased that News X put this question to me in a brief interview yesterday.  As I explained, many more Ukrainian soldiers and officers have died in the conflict than Russians, but the usual ratio we speak about is 7:1 not 78:1 as in the current exchange of corpses.

The answer likely is to be found in the low priority Ukrainian military give to retrieving the dead and wounded from battlefields, whereas the Russians do everything possible to retrieve their own.  But there is also the mention by the Ukrainian side which the NewsX presenter cites at the start of the interview that many of the Ukrainian dead lost their lives in the fierce battles for the cities Bakhmut and Mariupol in the first year of the war. Particularly in Mariupol, many of the ultranationalists of the Azov battalion continued fighting when they were totally surrounded and largely hiding in underground industrial buildings, so that retrieval of bodies was just not possible.

I call attention to the ‘breaking news’ which interrupted this interview:  the presenter asked me about the just announced cancellation of scheduled meetings between the USA and Russia, cancelled at the initiative of the U.S. side.  Since I had no additional information to go on, I gave a nonspecific answer which, now that the facts are better known, should be corrected.  The talks in question were about improving the working conditions of the respective embassies and consulates in each country. Upon reflection, it would appear that Washington cancelled not only because its full attention right now is on the Middle East, but as a sign of displeasure with Putin that Trump could use at the G7 meeting in Canada yesterday, to hold out the possibility to his enemies there that he might yet come around to their views on why the war should be continued until Russia is defeated.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kBZhtB0Kx4

Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome. I am joined today by Gilbert Doctorow, a historian and an international affairs analyst. Welcome back to the program.

Doctorow:
Good to see you again.

Diesen:
Likewise. So I guess the big issue still remains the aftermath of this attack on the Russian nuclear forces. I find it personally frustrating that many people, especially in the political media establishment, do not seem to appreciate how dangerous this is, not only about not avoiding a nuclear disaster, but also the retaliation which seems almost required on the Russian side. However, the Russian response so far has been limited. Of course, it doesn’t feel limited if you’re living in Kiev, but there’s many good reasons, I guess, for why Russia should have retaliated in a much more powerful way. And many people therefore expected that there would come a response effectively heard around the world. How do you explain for this reaction or the muted one? Or Do you think the worst is yet to come?

Doctorow: 1:18
We don’t know. And there are a lot of things we don’t know. In my new book, you’re aware that I’m saying in the introduction that we are living in the fog of war. And that certainly applies to the question you’ve given. I was personally very disappointed with the weak, _ne adekbat_, the inappropriate or unsuitable response that the Russians have given so far. That’s more of the same blowing up more arms caches and blowing up more drone manufacturing and hitting the Dubno tactical aviation air base in western Ukraine — that’s all child stuff. How many hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments the West shipped to Ukraine?

They can spend another five years blowing things up and not get through all of it. So this is not a change, a step change or an escalation that you would expect given the escalation from the Ukrainian side in attacking the nuclear triad, part of the nuclear triad of the Russian Federation. However, I’m beginning to turn this around in my mind and think maybe I’m being unfair and unreasonable because I’m uninformed, as everyone else is, about what exactly Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump were talking about in their hour or hour and a half long phone conversation.

2:59
People were, the general, if you look at the independent media, alternative media, everybody was speculating on whether or not Trump was being asked how much he knew or didn’t know in advance or in real time about this attack. I don’t believe that now for a minute, in particular because of a stunning article that appeared in “Financial Times” today, explaining further how this was carried out. I mean, the first impressions we all had was “My goodness, the Ukrainians have struck 4000 kilometers into the Russian Federation. Boy, this is drone warfare.” It took us a while to understand that those drones were probably 20 or 30 kilometers away from the air bases when they were only 50. Anyway, they were close to the air bases in these trailers, special trailers with roofs that would open up on signal and so forth.

3:58
So that already put in question how much outside assistance you would need for this. And then today’s “Financial Times” raised a dramatic issue that these drones are the Mercedes of their class. They are highly advanced, they’re using AI, artificial intelligence, as self-targeting. So after they were– their release was done long-distance by remote, of course.

And they were launched. And then the last part of their trip to target was done by themselves. They had onboard sensors and cameras, and they had AI to identify what they should be going after, what they should be striking. There was no, this means that there was no satellite intelligence, which is what everyone’s talking about, people who are really military specialists. They’re talking about this drone strike as if it were a missile strike. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t coming from 1000 or 2000 kilometers away. It was coming from 50 kilometers or 100 kilometers away. And it was guided by itself. So the British and the US involvement was nil.

5:25
And yes, all people will say, “Oh, Doctorow was quoting the “Financial Times”. That’s just an English rag. And so–” Hey, wait a minute. I’m quoting it because it coincides with what I see on Russian television every day. But the Russians are doing it.

The point of the matter is that the Russians and Ukrainians are peers. This is a battle between equals in terms of technical competence in certain domains. Certain domains, not all domains, obviously. And drone warfare is what the game is today. The artillery warfare exists, but it has been overtaken by drone warfare, where the Ukrainians are equal to the Russians.

6:10
And they are both way ahead of the Brits and the US. How are we speaking about this nonsense to talk about assistance coming from the United States or Britain? Moreover, well, I mean, let me just explain because it’s not obvious from my last remark about what the Russians are doing. They are guiding their battlefield attacks, not by satellite intelligence, but by what their drones, their reconnaissance drones tell them in real time. Now, you don’t have to be a genius or military expert to understand that information that’s coming from a drone that is 10 kilometers away is much faster.

than the information coming from a satellite that is 500 kilometers away. Therefore, real time is real time when it’s done by drones. That’s the game today. And if the Russians have it, the Ukrainians have it, and talking about British or American assistance for the execution of it, it’s not the planning of it, but the execution of it is nonsense.

Now, if that is nonsense, then surely Mr. Putin knows that, and surely he never would have wasted time in a precious phone call with Donald Trump to talk about what the Americans knew or didn’t know. They would have been talking about something else and hopefully they were talking about finding a resolution to this war and moving the talks to Moscow, which seems to be the case right now.

Diesen: 7:46
But the Ukrainians made the point that this attack had been planned 18 months in advance. And as we’ve also learned from this New York Times article, was it a month or two ago, that almost all the military planning had been done by the United States. It is hard to imagine though that, I’m not sure about the extent of involvement, but that the US and the British at least, they must have had some knowledge of this, given that the drones have been shipped in, stored and they’ve been coordinated and planned in this way.

If not, only if not to you know, bite the hand that feeds you, because if the Ukrainians would do this without the knowledge of the Americans and keeping them in the dark, wouldn’t this have created a lot of divisions?

Doctorow: 8:40
Let’s go back to the start of your question, because it’s very important. I didn’t say that the Brits and the Americans were not involved in this. Of course they were. And just exactly as you’re describing, in the planning and the preparation for it. But preparation, who knows when the preparation ended? Could have ended a year ago. Could have ended two years ago. No, two years ago, no.

A year ago for sure. Someone had to bring in those drones and these trucks crossing through Belarus, as I understand. But more importantly, somebody had to locate them near the bases. Now, American intelligence, CIA presence in Russia, is not so much. The British presence in Russia is big.

9:25
And they had been involved in every scandalous false flag operation that we’ve seen in the last three years. They were deeply involved in Bucha. They were even not directly involved in the war, but to disgrace the Russians and Mr. Putin’s group in particular, they certainly were the ones who killed Navalny. And how did they do that? How could you reach Navalny in this remote location where the Brits have got their fingers everywhere?

And so I believe that they were deeply involved in the preparation of this attack when the drones were brought in and they were stored near bases. So there is a reason why Mr. Lavrov was singling out among the Anglo-Saxons, the Brits. The Russians have got it in for the Brits, and with good reason, because they have been really the barking and the biting dogs, unlike the poodles and lap dogs that we knew from Tony Blair’s time.

Diesen: 10:35
Well, I was wondering though how, to what extent, the, I guess, the muted response of Russia, do see this, you know, because it does create a lot of tensions within Russia. You know, the usual discussion is between those who argue that, you know, they’re sick of this. Let’s get it just done with. I’m not sure if that’s possible, just to get it done with quickly, even if they would want this without again blowing up entire cities. While the others are making the point that they’re doing everything right, what they’re doing now that is gradually wearing down the opposing army so you can have objective indicators measuring the lack of manpower, reduced equipment, increased economic problems, lack of social cohesion, desertions, I mean casualty levels.

11:29
You know, we have all these different measurements. You can assess the extent to which they are reaching their goal. But do you think this impacts how they responded? Because many thought this would give an excuse, if you will, to Russia to just turn up the violence to 100 and just push through and get a faster end to this war.

Doctorow:
You’ve omitted one factor in that list of measurements and parameters: will. And that is of vital importance. People can be losing, the attrition can be taking effect, they can be losing men, they can be losing equipment. But that doesn’t answer the question of will, will they fight for the last Ukrainian? Maybe they will. I think it was relevant that Mr. Medinsky said in his first discussion with the Ukrainians in Istanbul that he made reference to Peter the Great’s Northern War in 21 years, and we’re ready to fight for 21 years. Is he ready to fight for 21 years? Is Mr. Putin going to be there in 21 years? This is totally illogical.

And how long can the Ukrainians hold on? That is a really, that is a number one question in everyone’s mind. And it’s good that you raise it, I don’t have an answer. But I do say that the Ukrainians are far more capable, are far more determined, are less deserting and running from the field than a lot of my peers are saying or suggesting. And that at the same time, the whole logic of the timing of this war, starting in February of 2022, was based on window-of-opportunity logic.

13:14
That Russia understood that it was that Mr. Putin and his associates understood that they were sanction proof after eight years of preparing their financial system and trading partners and so on. And that they had strategic advantage over the West with their new weapons systems that were not only tested but also deployed. Now, we have to apply the same measure today. Is Russia, does Russia have an unlimited window opportunity?

I say no. When the West is throwing hundreds of billions of euros at it, was beginning to assign hundreds of billions of euros to ramp up military production, it will take effect. Not tomorrow, just speaking about a five year time horizon. Well, if Russia doesn’t solve this way before the five years are up, then we’re going to have World War III. Yes, indeed, I agree with you.

But it’s not tomorrow, because the West isn’t ready for tomorrow. Russia is. Therefore, if Mr. Putin is to follow the logic he used when he launched this war, he will strike now in a dramatic way, unless I’m dead wrong, which is possible, and he has reached some accommodation with Donald Trump that we don’t know about. It’s possible. I leave that open.

Diesen: 14:41
Yeah. Well, this is it. It’s very difficult to know what they’re talking about behind closed doors. And well, I would just add this comment: that they fought for 21 years. This was the Great Northern War from 1700 to 1721. So it’s been over 300 years. So the way society is structured, the willingness to fight prolonged wars, the economy that supports it, the nature of international relations, a lot of this changed over time. So I’m not sure if that would, 21-year-long war would be pulled off today, simply because it was pulled off three centuries ago.

15:21
But I guess it’s important to signal the willingness to keep on fighting until the objectives have been met. Again, especially if you consider this to be a war for survival and to signal clearly to the opponent that there’s no intention of at least making compromises on these key issues. But this attack on Russia’s nuclear forces, well, with these new powerful strikes now being launched against Kiev and other cities, it doesn’t just impact the way the war is fought in terms of the amount of force which is being used, but surely it will also have an impact on the peace which the Russians will demand. Do you see them, I guess, preparing to set higher demands now or– because the rhetoric became quite, well, much harsher, it seems now. Again, they talked about destroying Ukraine before, but now it’s becoming, I guess, louder.

Doctorow: 16:28
It would be better if they didn’t talk about destroying Ukraine, but talked about destroying the decision-making centers, which is also going back to February 2022. Why? Are they walking away from that? The implications are clear. If they want to be consistent, they should send the Oreshniks against wherever Mr. Zelensky happens to be with his close associates, and against Mr. Budanov and all of his associates, and leave the rest of Kiev alone. Because the broad population, even those who are working in these military organizations, they’re not the problem. The problem is the decision makers. And they’re being left untouched.

17:13
I find that very hard to understand. Here’s where I– Then the other question is, what are you doing for the West? Mr. Karaganov is coming back and back again with his remarks of the need for a dramatic strike in Western Europe to sober up minds. And yet to be sure you would think that this is implicitly very critical of Mr. Putin, but he is invited back and back again by Vladimir Putin. So that’s also a little bit hard to understand. Are the Russians going to make military strike against Britain? I don’t know.

Diesen: 17:53
Well, he’s more of a, I guess, hawkish element, but Karagonov, he also attends this Valdai meeting every year. And I saw him over the past few years, every year at Valdai making the same comment that perhaps we should change our nuclear doctrine. And Putin pushed back against it every year when we met in Valdai saying, “No, this is, you know, we have to keep it the way it is with predictability and stability,” all of this.

But then, of course, at the end, he ended up taking his advice, given that, well, what he argued that the West was becoming more and more irresponsible in terms of American long-range strikes into Russia. So at the end he took the more hawkish advice, if you will, and I guess now Karagonov is suggesting the same thing, like let’s take it one step further. We have to strike inside Western Europe to send a strong signal after all the attacks they’ve done on us.

18:57
But then I guess it makes sense to have him around in case Putin decides that, when it’s time to take that extra step. I did want to ask about your comment on not striking the political leadership in Ukraine, because I noticed recently that the Russians began to use the word terrorism more and more. Obviously, there’s some real events, which is the reason behind this, which was the Ukraine’s deliberate targeting of trains which had no military function. So again, deliberately only going after civilians. Now, so this is why it could be framed as terrorism if terrorism is targeting civilians to, I guess, elevate fear for political purposes.

But It’s also true that if this special military operation is defined more as a war on terrorism, it could, I guess, create the legal space for beginning to target political leaders as well. Do you see it in a similar way or do you think I’m reading too much into this?

Doctorow: 20:06
No, no, I think your reading is correct. It’s entirely possible. Look, Mr. Putin is a lawyer. That is a blessing and it’s also a curse, because many of his decisions are made looking for legal niceties in international law. When the United States and many other countries, Israel is an outstanding example, pay no heed whatsoever to international law. And they don’t think twice about it. Russia does, and I’m not sure that it is so wise, but nonetheless, that being said, by calling Ukraine a terrorist state, he’s preparing a way to legitimize the assassination of Mr. Zelensky and his associates. Yes, that’s true.

Diesen: 20:44
Yeah, and in terms of this peace, not only do they see it now more difficult to live with the current Ukrainian state in the future, in other words, any peace negotiation now would have to include at least a regime change. But in terms of any future peace, to what extent do you see the way Russia imagines living next to the West in the future? Because after this strikes, do you think the Russians are giving up on this reconciliation with the West after the war?

Because you keep hearing that once this is over, everyone will benefit from pursuing some reconciliation, start to trade together, have normal relations, which would benefit both sides. But there seems to be a lot of anger now, not just from the politicians and the military, but I also sense it from society that this desire to not kiss and make up, but seek to normalize relations after this war is done with, it seems to be going away. This becomes more obvious that the US has been pursuing the destruction of Russia, you have these very aggressive attacks. Now the Germans are talking openly about attacking Russia with Taurus missiles. Kaya Kallas speaking of how Russia should be broken up to smaller countries, it will be easier to deal with.

22:26
I mean, this seems to be changing some of the collective consciousness in Russia, they don’t seem that interested any more to get along with the West in the future.

Doctorow:
Well, in the comments sections, the Russian language version of your show, of other major video interviews, which are also being put into Russian and which have audiences that are like 100,000 people. Your own audience for some of these programs in Russia is as big or bigger than the English language, original ones.

Diesen: 23:04
Yeah, I noticed.

Doctorow:
And so I look at the comments and a lot of xenophobia, a lot of real anger at the West. And would– but comments are in general, one percent of the viewers. The other 99 percent I would take as an indication of how many thumbs-up there are, which usually outweigh by considerable numbers, the comments. Therefore it’s very hard to reach a firm decision, a firm conclusion, whether or not Russian society is really turning its back on the West. The people I know in Petersburg and in Moscow, they are an intellectual class, and they all would like to go back to Paris. They would like to let bygones to be bygones.

23:56
But I think in answer to your question more broadly, what Europe does will depend entirely on what Donald Trump can [do] and does. If he restores direct flights between the United States and Moscow, the European airlines will die. They will sweep all the politicians aside to have their flights into and over Russia restored. And it will be the same way with other industries. If the United States takes the first step, the Europeans will be tripping on one another to also restore normal commercial ties.

They will not go back to where they were before the operation, before the sanctions, because so many foreign companies have been displaced. Their properties in Russia were sold off and taken over by Russian entrepreneurs. And there’s no way back as it was, but there’s still room for substantial restoration of trade ties and certainly restoration of energy supplies and other critical raw materials, which Russia was providing Western Europe at bargain basement prices in the past. So I think there will be a way back.

25:17
That comes up in little things. I follow culture very closely. We just had the Queen Elizabeth piano competition, once-in-four-year event here in Brussels. Our whole Belgian society was– high society, of course, but not all, but cultural society was there vying for tickets to the … competition proper and then to the performance of the … winners, of the [six top-placed] people. I, we went to one of these, the ones performed who received the awards of four, five and six. Number six was a Russian.

This, despite everything, despite all of the … hostility I’d say towards Russia, the, his, this man’s exceptional talent was acknowledged. When the concert came, he didn’t receive any encore requests. The two others, a Frenchman and a Japanese, they were, ah, everyone rose to their feet, and they demanded an encore.

They got it. So the cancel Russian culture is over. That wave is gone. Russian culture is slowly crawling back into everybody’s consciousness, but there is a certain coolness, okay? That’s what I see will happen in other domains where the West and Russia have exchanges.

26:56
There’ll be coolness, it won’t be the overwhelming joy of sometimes in 1990s on the part of Westerners visiting Russia, xxxxx xxx xxxxx, but things will somehow restore. I think airlines will be the first thing.

Diesen:
I remember the first year of the war, everything had to be canceled. There was, I think it was a tree competition for old trees, and they canceled the Russian tree as a nominee. I was hoping that would be peak hate and after this we would start to let the cool heads prevail and return to something of normal behavior.

But we might hopefully be going back, because a lot of this seems to be irrational. A lot of the things have been done. But I was wondering how do you see, because we’re not going back to the old world anyways after this is over. This seems to be gone. Indeed, I think the world even that existed before the attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces also probably won’t go back.

But how do you see then the extent to which Russia’s foreign policy could be militarized as a result of this? I mean, to some extent, it already has. That is, the military might of Russia, its expertise in drone warfare, you can argue military culture, something has been built up over the past three years. Do you see this impacting future foreign policy, I guess? Having incentives to find military solutions to political problems.

Maybe not so much as speculation about the nature of the Russians, but instead as a historian, do you see, maybe it’s too specific, but the capabilities influencing the intentions? So in other words, if you have all this military power, then if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Do you usually see this through history, or… ?

octorow: 29:03
I think Russia will not be on a war footing economically, but the military component of its general economy will remain at a very high level, not just for its own needs. But when the war ends, Russia will begin to conclude contracts for sale of its advanced … equipment.

All of that has been suspended. India did not receive equipment that it contracted for, because everything the Russian factories are producing is going to the front, their own front, and they couldn’t care less about selling the stuff abroad at this moment. But once peace is concluded, then I think the Russians will start to commercialize very successfully what they have demonstrated to be superior to American and West European military equipment. And they have the videos to show it. And they have the trophies to show it, because they’ve hauled back Leopards and American equipment as trophies to Moscow.

30:01
So they will be in a very good position to have massive sales of arms and to be a real competitor to both Western Europe and the United States. So in that sense, the Russian economy, even after the war ends, will have a much bigger military component than it ever did before the war. Otherwise, I think the, you say militarized foreign policy, I don’t see that happening, because Russia’s foreign policy now is within the constraints of its agreements to Shanghai Organization, its agreements with its Central Asian neighbors, and of course, BRICS, and all of that will not support Russia being visibly militaristic in its foreign policy. I don’t believe that.

Diesen: 31:04
Well, that makes me think if obviously the Russian military industrial complex will be much greater and more competitive, that obviously will have an impact on geopolitics as well.

It kind of takes me to my last question, which is perhaps a bit too big in nature, but what will be the, I guess, wider geopolitical consequences of this war coming to an end? I mean, It seems as if we’re going to, there’s going to be a lot of resentment for many years to come on both sides. So I’m guessing this won’t come to a complete end. Even if it would in Europe, we won’t end up quarreling over Georgia or Moldova or the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Arctic. We have a lot of possible areas of conflict.

31:52
We can have Belarus in there as well. But in other parts of the world, we’ve seen during the war the Russians pushing out the French. Well, they haven’t necessarily taken credit for it, but there’s other variables, but I’m sure the Russians had had their say in it. But how will the rest of the world reorient after this? Because this is, I think we’re moving towards a very humiliating defeat for NATO.

I mean, at least Europe, America’s been pulling back a bit, but Europeans, we really bet everything on this war. So what do you think will be the wider geopolitical ramifications of this war, assuming that it is being lost now by NATO.

Doctorow: 32:40
That’s a safe, I think that’s a safe assumption. But once again, I think we have to look at just what Donald Trump does, how, and– because he has the capability, the United States has the capability of really influencing what Europe does and how long the detritus in power today, by that I mean Kallas and der Leyen and our wonderful NATO boss, chief, how long they stay in their positions. The United States has the ability to influence their removal.

But for that, Donald Trump has to keep his political capital at home, has to score successes in his domestic policy. There are a lot of things that are unforeseeable or can’t be, which you cannot plan. I wouldn’t look for Europe to save itself and remove itself from the conflicts that we see today, the pro-war movement that it has become in the last several years under the guidance of von der Leyen. It will all depend on Mr. Trump, frankly, as I see it.

33:54
Like it or not, of course, many people don’t like him, but he has it within his power, or may have it within his power, to find a beneficial result, a change of political landscape in Europe that will facilitate the negotiation of a new security architecture. With the people in power today, it’s impossible. I don’t see any chance for Merz and Macron. They were so invested in their personality and political power in the war with Russia, which was for them, the unifying element for the new Europe, that I don’t see that they can stay in power. But the only one who has the strength to sweep them from power by one maneuver or another is sitting in the Oval Office in Washington.

Diesen: 34:50
Yeah, I think this is a key problem. The Europeans have gone down because they accepted, you know, not just throwing away all their weapons, but accepted this deindustrialization. The whole economic, I guess, utility or purpose of the European Union has been severely weakened. Indeed, the EU itself is now talking about itself as a geopolitical block. If you’re going to be a geopolitical block with internal cohesion, you really need that external threat. I mean, it’s a very different animal, the European Union, if you want it to be a geopolitical union instead of an economic block. So it remains to be seen what kind of problems they have, what kind of corner they have painted themselves in.

35:38
Anyways, as always, thank you for your time. I greatly appreciate it and hope to have you back very soon.

Doctorow:
All right. Thanks. Thanks for the invitation.

Diesen:
Thank you.

Doctorow: 35:51
Bye bye.

Listening to my chat yesterday evening with Professor Glenn Diesen of the Southern Norway University. I understood that his professional interest in geopolitics prompted him to pose questions that other interview hosts are not asking and which the audience should find refreshing because they look beyond the questions of this very moment to where Europe is headed when the Ukraine war comes to an end, whether Russia and Europe can re-knit commercial, cultural and other relations and the like. We are daily witnesses to a changing world order but how often do we lift our heads to consider these big picture questions?

I have no intention of spoiling the pleasure of discovering how we dealt with the big questions except to say that I am more predisposed to see the solutions not in what Europeans can do for themselves on their own but in how what the Americans do creates a scramble in Europe to catch up. For example, once Washington and Moscow agree on restoring direct flights between their countries, I expect there to be a stampede of European airlines to be liberated from the awful constraints of flying around instead of over the critical 12% of the world’s land mass, meaning Russia, which represents the only economically viable routing to East Asia. This obstacle is a major factor in explaining the great increase in passenger traffic on the airlines of the Gulf States these past few years. And so it will be with other commercial domains: the US rescinds sanctions and the Europeans fight among themselves to shed sanctions here.

Will the Russian foreign policy be overmilitarized when the war ends? Will Russia’s military industrial complex downsize or grow still further to support export sales of its world-beating arms?  Have a listen!

Of course, in the opening minutes we did spend a bit of time considering the adequacy or not of Russia’s response so far to the Ukrainian attack 10 days ago on the strategic bomber that form part of its deterrent nuclear triad at air bases across the Russian Federation.

I am appreciative of Professor Diesen’s flashing the front cover image of my new book War Diaries at the very start of our interview. Hopefully some viewers will get the hint.