All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Gilbert Doctorow, he's got a new book out, Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume One.
That sure sounds interesting, opening link in new tab here.
And we publish his stuff at antiwar.com all the time.
This one is called Will Antony Blinken's Past Catch Up With Him?
And that is the new designated Secretary of State of the, apparently, obviously, President-elect Biden here, and sure to be confirmed by the Senate.
And it turns out Gilbert knows a little something about this guy and his biography that could be very meaningful here.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gilbert?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me.
Congratulations on the new book.
I can't wait to read it, although it may be a long time after I order it that I finally get to it in the pile here.
But I definitely will get to it at some point, I hope.
I hope so.
But always love talking to you, and I guess I should explain for the people I should have already in the introduction.
You live in Brussels and pay very close attention to all things Russia in the news there, and including watching all of the most important Russian news shows and kind of, you know, keeping your thumb on the pulse of what they think about us and what our government is doing all the time, which is really important stuff.
But now, so Anthony Blinken here, the new Secretary of State, you write here about his time as a boy living in France and his stepfather and his stepfather's importance in American and Soviet relations back during the days of the Cold War.
Please tell us about that.
Well, the interesting thing is that, well, it comes up quite often when new, when candidates are going to go before the Senate for confirmation.
And the journalists in our mainstream like to put a human interest article about the man they refer to his childhood, and they refer in the case of Anthony Blinken, he does have a very unusual status.
He is called sometimes the most European of our diplomats.
He grew up in France, grew up in Paris.
And although it's very, it's customary to speak about leading American statesmen as being fluent in Russian, and they know a few words, in the case of Blinken, I think it is reasonable to assume that the man actually knows French, and just as Carrie knew French.
What you would expect from this is sophistication and a broad mind, which are very desirable qualities, of course, in a statesman, particularly someone who's going to be heading a diplomacy.
So far, so good.
The issue is that when they speak about his stepfather and who, into whose home he moved with his divorced mother in 1971, they speak about Sam Pizer, for facts about his past, which are salient, which are really important.
The man was a Holocaust survivor, the man, Sam Pizer, the stepfather of our Anthony Blinken, he was, had a doctorate in law from Harvard, a doctorate in law from Sorbonne.
He was an important expert, called before Congress, taking part in various committees under the John F. Kennedy administration.
So this is the 1960s, Sam Pizer, still a relatively young man, had a larger-than-life reputation as a transatlantic personality, a person who has had feet in both Paris and in New York, and someone who was hired by Fortune 500 companies to assist them in various ways.
The articles that I've seen about Blinken in the mainstream never say quite what he was doing to help these major corporations.
One could assume that he was helping them establish themselves in Europe.
However, the real specialty of Mr. Pizer was not the European countries in the West, it was the European countries in the East.
In 1971, the year before Anthony Blinken came into this household, he published a volume called Coexistence and Commerce.
This was, at the time, in the 1970s, the single most credible and well-researched guide to how to do business in the USSR, and a book that was widely consulted by law, by the law departments, the legal departments of major corporations.
This aside of Sam Pizer, the fact that he made his money as an expert in trade with the Soviet Union, the fact that it has been airbrushed out of his personal biography.
If you look the man up in Wikipedia, you'll find about how he worked with Leonard Bernstein and assisted him in the production of the symphony that is known as Kaddish.
You'll find that, you'll find references to Sam Pizer's literary works, I think he wrote some of it, some poetry, but you won't find any reference to his single most important professional work, which I just mentioned, Coexistence and Commerce.
On the second page of that book, which I happen to have in my library, and I do hope it would be very nice if Anthony Blinken got a copy in his library, because it would expose him to the real nature of the household and past that he had as a child in the midst of a very sophisticated family that was working for detente and for coexistence.
Now, as I was about to say, in the second or third page of that volume, Pizer quotes Alexander Hamilton, when Hamilton was speaking about commerce as being a very important instrument for peaceful exchanges and as putting aside the kind of conflicts that lead to war.
So the book was about commerce as a means to peace, and the man was one of the most widely consulted experts in that domain.
My path crossed with him, and that's something that was mentioned briefly in this volume and in one of my memoirs, in 1979, and a good many American companies were competing to be designated as official suppliers to what was expected to be an important global sports event in Moscow, the 1980 Summer Olympics.
Sam Pizer was the legal advisor and probably drafted the proposals to the Russian-Soviet Olympics Committee on behalf of McDonald's.
McDonald's was hoping to be designated not just as a sponsor, but to agree on opening a McDonald's restaurant in the Olympic Stadium at Luzhniki and to open a whole series of McDonald's all across the Soviet Union.
They were unsuccessful, and when the door was closed on them in July of 1979, I walked in with their competitor.
I was the advisor to Burger King, who had the similar ambitions to open a whole range of fast food burger restaurants across the Soviet Union.
All of this took place 15 years later, after the end of communism, but my point is that Mr. Pizer was the preeminent figure in trade, in trade with the USSR and in detente.
This is a background which has been airbrushed out of Mr. Blinken's history.
It would be very nice if he were questioned about it.
There's so many things, but first of all, I have to go ahead and read that Hamilton quote because I know the libertarians are going to love this and want to take this down and Google it up and save it.
It goes right with Frederick Bastiat's famous quote that, where goods do not cross borders, armies will.
Hamilton, 1787, the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which so often have kindled into wars.
Which is so obviously true.
Anybody who's ever done business with anybody they don't like can tell you that, yeah, sometimes you go ahead and bite your lip and make your money and it's better that way.
This was one of the great ironies of the Donald Trump years.
He ran on, let's get along with Moscow, and then of course they framed him for treason, the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA framed him for treason with Russia.
He basically went right along with the hawks and one of his biggest issues with Russia in the last four years was condemning the Germans for daring to import Russian gas and to work with them on this pipeline when that ought to be considered the greatest invention in the history of the world.
The Russians and the Germans with billions of dollars at stake in keeping peaceful trade between each other.
What more important invention for peace could there ever be?
And then the Americans say no because there's a little bit of profit for some Texas gas company if we get the Germans to buy it from us instead and completely ignore the importance of the trade keeping the peace, which is priceless.
Well, what you're speaking about and the sanctions on German companies that probably will come up very early in the new Congress, the sanctions that have been imposed so far on the project of Nord Stream 2 have been inadequate.
They haven't satisfied the bloodlust of our Capitol Hill.
So we may well expect that there will be more severe and more punishing and more dangerous sanctions talked about and possibly legislated by the incoming Congress directed against German companies for having anything whatever to do with this Nord Stream project.
That's terribly sad and it's terribly short sighted for all the reasons that you were just speaking about a moment ago.
I mean, the two worst things that ever happened was when Germany fought Russia, right?
That's right.
And 25 million lives were lost on the Russian side.
And frankly, a very substantial number of lives were lost on the German side, military and otherwise, but primarily military on the German side, very heavily civilian on the Russian side.
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The other thing about Trump was he is constantly denouncing Germany for not arming up against Russia and spending enough money on American weapons.
But the Germans seem to ignore that, basically.
Are they not afraid of the Russian threat, Gilbert, in Germany?
No, it looks rather different.
Germany is quite self-confident.
If they were worried, they would have done a great deal to arm themselves and precisely to find those armaments which would have some value in dealing with the Russians.
They didn't, because they're quite confident that there was no threat posed to them by the Russians.
The Germans have tolerated, as Frau Merkel has tolerated, a great deal of punishment to be imposed on Russia as a way of controlling the relations which Germany has with its partners in the EU and to present itself as being a defender of European values.
Similarly, this pertains to Germany's relations with the Baltic states and with Poland.
The Germans humored their eastern neighbors in these exaggerated fears about a Russian threat, and they also presented themselves as defenders of Western values to forestall still more dangerous actions by the United States.
This is how I saw Merkel's role in enforcing sanctions in Europe as being to prevent the United States from doing something still more drastic.
It was not out of any inner conviction that the Russians really pose a threat.
So, Gilbert, I mean, do you think, it's got to be the case, right?
I see what you're getting at with, you know, your whole point here is that our new Secretary of State incoming here has reason to know better than a Mike Pompeo foreign policy, right?
So the question is, is there any reason to think that he can transcend the path that we're on right now?
Are they just going to accuse him of treason too if he tries it?
Well, one reason is he's got a brain.
The man is quite intelligent.
He seems to be bad on everything from what I can tell.
I mean, I don't know his history on Russia issues, but he supported all the terrible terror wars.
Exactly right.
I agree with you.
His past positions on Iraq and elsewhere, on Libya, have been awful.
But there is inside that head quite a sophisticated mind.
And I was very keen to denote his answers to an interview that took place last week on the BBC's prime program for these high personalities called Hard Talk.
And Blinken repeated his longstanding remarks on how the Russians would have to be punished for their malign actions in 2016.
However, when it came to other sides of the Russian policy, he put both feet on the ground that they would like to renew the arms control agreements and find other areas for cooperation.
That is hopeful.
It is certainly better than the ideological stance, the purely ideological stance that we could fear.
Right.
In fact, even at the height of Russiagate, you would have Democratic senators say things about, gee, we would kind of rather keep these treaties than ditch them, you know, where the rubber meets the road.
We're talking about H-bombs.
We like our restrictions on them, you know, which were hard won.
Well, going back to our over decades, the our Cold Warriors always had some little instinct for self-preservation.
And they may have talked a very tough talk about Russia, but they pursued arms control.
And that really goes back to the nightmare situation of 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis that instilled a little bit of common sense and will for self-preservation in political leaders who otherwise are quite rabid in their ideological pronouncements.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you about this, Gilbert.
What do things look like on Russian TV as far as what they think of what's going on in America right now?
And I don't just mean like presidential politics, but the relationship between our nation and theirs and whatever you think is important there.
Well, there is, of course, a constant attention to the United States in Russian news, outsized coverage of what is going on in the States.
I'd say slightly bemused, slightly schadenfreude.
They are taking, I'd say, wicked pleasure in watching the calamitous development of COVID infections in the States.
At the same time, that is restrained a little bit because they are under some pressure as well with their own infections.
But that the United States might be hurting is something that appears on the Russian news in their coverage, just as there is a schadenfreude in the Financial Times and the New York Times when they speak about how the COVID might be posing a social problem for President Putin.
So both sides, I'd say, are using the misery of COVID to find satisfaction that the other side is suffering.
I'd say that the COVID crisis has trumped other issues.
Ukraine has fallen by the wayside, whereas a year ago the situation in Donbass, the problems dealing with Mr. Zelensky, were all over the news.
You could just hardly find anything else going on in Russian news other than Ukraine, with the predictions that the country would collapse any minute.
This was going on for some time.
So issues that take the top of the news have changed in the last year.
And frankly, watching Russian news becomes quite painful because they have been using the news to scare the devil out of the population over COVID.
They give very graphic reporting of what's going on in the hospitals and how patients are being treated, and it would really scare the devil out of most people watching this.
So I've been a bit cautious about how much Russian news I take in these days.
All right, Gilbert, well listen, it's great to talk to you again, and I hope everyone will go and look at this great article at antiwar.com.
It's called, Will Anthony Blinken's Past Catch Up With Him?
And then, that's actually hopeful, is what's good about it there.
It would be nice to hear your questions about that in his hearings, that would be very nice.
Right.
Well, I guess we'll see if anybody asks him.
And then the new book is called Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume 1.
So that promises to be very interesting.
Thank you again for your time, Gilbert.
Great to talk to you.
Well, thanks for having me, Scott.
Bye-bye.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
