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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
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The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
My own government.
Alright you guys, introducing Gilbert Doctorow from consortiumnews.com.
He's an independent political analyst based in Brussels.
And his latest book is Does the United States Have a Future?
The one before that was Does Russia Have a Future?
Welcome back to the show, Gilbert.
How are you, sir?
I'm very well.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And listen, you're the first guy from Consortium News I've interviewed since Bob Perry died.
You want to take a minute to talk about Bob for a minute here?
Yes, I have a feel for Bob.
This was not just a virtual relationship, which is where the way it went for maybe the first nine months that I was being published by Bob.
He stopped by here in Brussels.
This was in December 2016, when he was on his way to visit his son Matt in Denmark.
He has three children, rather four children, and they are mostly living around where he was based in Arlington, near Washington.
But one was in Europe.
And on his way to visit with his son, he stopped off here in Brussels and spent several hours over coffee.
And I really think that we had a pretty good feel for one another and what our concerns are.
And I understood that he was a man who knew everything going on in D.C.
He was very widely networked, and he was attentive to detail.
And he was, of course, as you know, most very well respected as a leader in alternative news.
So it was a great honor to be associated with him and with Consortium.
Cool.
Well, you know, he and I had had a falling out.
I interviewed him, I think, 18 times in the past.
And then we had had some differences, nothing worth bringing back up.
So I kind of quit interviewing him.
Our bridge was burned, as far as that goes.
But I always ran him and all of you guys on Antiwar.com virtually every day.
And especially, it really should be said, because he did groundbreaking work on Reagan's October surprise and Iran-Contra and all the cocaine smuggling in the Reagan years and all kinds of things.
I'm not exactly too sure about all his greatest hits of the 90s.
But, you know, I know he showed that Jimmy Carter told Saddam to go ahead and invade Iran, all kinds of stuff.
But in the last few years, really, since I had quit talking to him, he was the best, the best on America's role in the coup in Ukraine, on the entire American relationship with Russia and the rise of the new Cold War, and on the war in Syria and debunking the lies about the war in Syria.
And then, of course, post-2016 election, back again on Russia issues overall and their so-called interference, their pretended interference in the most recent presidential election here.
And he was absolutely the best on these issues.
And I think that's why you write for him or, you know, you're writing here still.
I guess Nat's running it now at ConsortiumNews.com.
That's what attracted you and some of these other writers is, here's a guy who gets it on Russia.
History didn't begin yesterday.
In fact, it began back in 1991, huh?
Right.
Well, as for Consortium and my own role in it, there are a number of people that were appearing in Consortium and continue today, including Ray McGovern, who are looking at these questions from the standpoint of domestic politics in the United States.
My contribution to his coverage of Russiagate and to other current problems that we have both within the States and between the States and the world at large was to take the Russian perspective, that is to say, how Russians were reacting to the very strange behavior that's going on in Washington, D.C.
Yeah.
Well, and it's to Bob's credit that, you know, he wasn't shy whatsoever about doing that, despite all the accusations from the propagandists about, you know, being an agent of a foreign power and all that stuff.
He never let that bother him any more than it bothers us at Antiwar.com or bothers you.
Obviously, you're not a pro-Russian partisan, but you clearly just think it's important the rest of us, you know, try at least to have the imagination or the curiosity to wonder what is the Russian point of view on all this, other than just, you know, Putin is Lex Luthor bent on taking over the world.
Well, if, as President Trump stated it a week ago when he was addressing the Congress, the United States has Russia and China as rivals.
And I think it is essential to understand who that rival is.
And simply huffing and puffing in front of the mirror and inventing characteristics for the rival's future purposes is not effective and could be disastrous.
So my role has never been to side with Vladimir Putin and his government and his society.
My role has been to explain it and to try to anticipate their moves to our moves.
Without that ability to anticipate, you can't play chess.
You can't even play checkers.
All right.
So which brings us to your most recent article here at ConsortiumNews.com.
A coming Russia-Ukraine war?
Well, we've had a Russia-Ukraine war, sort of.
We've had a war between the Ukrainian post-coup junta there in Kiev and its war against the at least wannabe breakaway regions in the east.
Russia refused to absorb them, but the Donbass and Luhansk regions there, and I guess they're in the midst of a ceasefire now.
Oh, and I didn't mention, Russian special forces have been helping them.
They never did really invade the country like in the claims.
But anyway, they're observing a ceasefire more or less as of now, correct?
Well, when this article was written, the Russian television was saying quite insistently that they're not observing it.
That the level of violence in December 2017 had resumed at or above levels a year earlier before there was a calm.
And so the Russian news media were preparing the Russian public for the possibility of greater hostilities in which Russia would be directly involved.
Russia has not been directly involved.
When you say special forces, it's not true either.
What the Russians have done has been most likely to send in irregulars, to send in people who are on leave from their units, who are not wearing Russian uniforms.
And so that is a very common practice worldwide.
It's sad, but you can disown whatever happens because they're not officially your soldiers.
And that has been the kind of Russian presence in the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, which together are called the Donbass.
And then, so, okay, I guess I was under the impression, I'm trying to think of good sources now, but I guess I had thought that it was soldiers.
But you're saying more like CIA paramilitaries than the Delta Force, even then, completely deniable.
Precisely the case.
We do it.
They do it.
It has some benefits, some merits to it because it spares you the need for a direct eyeball to eyeball confrontation and finger on the button confrontation.
You can disown it.
They can disown it.
But the reason why I wrote the article and the reason why the Russian media had become quite intense in their coverage and were warning the public about the possibility of a kinetic conflict in the Ukraine was the passage of a new law in Ukraine through the parliament awaiting at that moment the signature of Poroshenko when I wrote the article, though in fact within a week he did sign it.
So it is Ukrainian law which essentially turns the back of Ukraine from the Minsk Accords and makes any attempt to link, attempt by Europe and by the United States to link the ongoing sanctions to Russia's failure to observe the Minsk Accords, it makes those accusations very tenuous, if not absurd.
The primary party to the Minsk Accords is Ukraine.
The secondary party is the provinces that are in rebellion against Kiev.
Russia is not a party to the Minsk Accords and therefore it was always a bit peculiar if the United States made sanctions a condition of Russian fulfillment.
However, now the situation changed dramatically with the passage of the law.
Ukraine officially revoked its participation by signing that law passing.
So the Russians were saying, well, essentially there's no Minsk, we can expect a flare-up.
Why would this be of interest?
It was of interest to Poroshenko and his government because their support levels among the population that had fallen to the low teens are still lower.
And they have an election, a new election in 2000, within a year.
So the chances of that government staying in power, unless there is some state of war that can justify postponing or canceling elections, seem to be very low.
It also, when that law was passed, there had not yet been the Davos forum.
Poroshenko had not yet met with the IMF, as he did in Davos, and yet in his new tranche.
And so the imminent bankruptcy of Ukraine seemed to be the case.
That has since passed over and so perhaps he's no longer so desperate to start a war with Russia.
Well, that's good anyway.
Now, this law being passed that made the Minsk II Accord moot, was this something that the Americans had okayed?
There's no way of knowing that, but it would be entirely possible.
The United States and Ukraine cooperate very nicely for their mutual interests to punish Russia.
And although the sanctions that were announced last week to meet the requirements of the August 2nd, 2017 law on US antagonists or adversaries, although that law, that announcement by the US Treasury does not present any immediate threats to Russian oligarchs or to the Russian government, the fact remains that at any moment it is in the power of the United States government to create circumstances that justify them acting on the sanctions lists.
A flare-up in Ukraine would suit that purpose perfectly.
A flare-up in the Baltics, a flare-up in Syria.
All of these possibilities remain on the table, as I like to say, in DC and leave it to the US government, essentially to the CIA, to decide the time and the venue where Russians are in violation and we are justified in imposing severe sanctions.
Well, and so, I guess, you know, we hear the term all the time, sanctions this, sanctions this, we have sanctions on these people and those people.
To what degree is the United States sanctioning the Russian government?
It's just picking out particular oligarch friends of Putin and government ministers, or they're really leveling sanctions, trading sanctions on the whole country at this point, or what?
Somewhere in between.
There are sanctions that are of an economic sector variety.
You are aware that all high-technology energy projects are sanctioned by the United States.
Projects for Arctic drilling, for fracking technologies, for drilling in areas that are contested, like the Black Sea off of Crimea.
These projects all were stalled by United States sanctioned efforts.
The United States also has taken a stand on trading in Russian armaments or providing components to the Russian military-industrial complex.
That is real and ongoing, though it hasn't hurt the Russians so far in any serious way.
So there are financial sanctions that the United States has imposed, not of a life-threatening variety, but they cost the Russian government dearly when they were first imposed two years ago, and Russian companies which had large US dollar debts were obliged to repay rather than to roll over those debts.
That caused severe economic stress and banking stress in Russia going back two years.
But the sanctions that were the new sanctions that were being talked about were both against individuals, as you say, friends of Vladimir Putin, those who were supporting the Putin regime in quotation marks, and also potentially further very nasty sanctions, for example, on sovereign debt of Russia.
These sanctions remain jaw-boning.
They have not been imposed, but they are something that is held against Russia like a sword of Damocles to be opposed at our choosing.
And that is what got the Russians quite upset as they were waiting for the Treasury to make its announcement last week.
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All right, now Obama and Biden certainly were willing to push the issue when it came to overthrowing the government in Kiev in 2014.
And yet once the war broke out, and I guess I can say they huffed and puffed a little bit about Crimea, but not too much.
But once the war broke out in the east, they, well, Obama anyway, I don't know what Biden would have done, but Obama decided that, you know, we'll give them some trucks and some money, but no guns, no missiles.
We're going to draw the line here because we can see where this is heading and we don't want it to get that bad.
It was almost like a wink nudge between him and Putin.
You use your deniable guys and I'll refrain from giving them Lockheed's latest anti-tank missiles or something, you know.
But then, so now we got Donald Trump and his people in there.
And, of course, McMaster, his kind of entire shtick is war with Russia in Eastern Europe.
This is, you know, the McMaster plan and all of this is sort of his, he's built his career on this.
So I hope that doesn't mean that he really wants to have that war.
I don't think it necessarily means that.
But it's certainly, you know, his mindset is all about Russia as a rival at best.
And so now they've gone ahead and approved Mr. Let's get along with Russia.
Wouldn't it be nice if we got along with Russia?
Trump has now approved what Obama would never approve.
And that is the shipment of those Lockheed Javelin missiles, those anti-tank missiles, and I don't know what else, to the government in Kiev.
How dangerous is that?
Well, the Russians huffed and puffed about this for some time before it took effect.
They talk about it now.
I don't think that it has any serious value in weighing the equation of Russia-Ukrainian strength.
Russia could take out Ukraine in a couple of days.
That isn't an issue.
The question is then, what do you do with it?
And the question is, what price would you pay in terms of U.S. economic warfare and European economic warfare?
The whole issue of war with Russia is dealt with with such a carefree attitude coming out of Washington that it's quite remarkable.
It is in a way positive that both Trump and other spokesmen within the administration have come to call Russia a global rival and to remark on the possible superiority of Russian arms, particularly nuclear arms, because of the investments they've made in the last 10 years, compared to U.S. nuclear arms.
This is all hard to say where the reality is, because it serves the purposes of those who are now deciding that Russia has progressed in three years from being trash to being a very serious security threat to the United States.
But where we really are is rather hard to say, and the general American public, I think, is still back where Obama was, thinking about Russia as a rusted and hopeless case country, a gas station masquerading as a country, as John McCain put it so picturesquely.
And that isn't the case.
They are, as a rival, a potent threat to the United States if we step on them.
And that is the issue that does not get attention in all U.S. coverage, that the Russian stance is very much that of the state of Vermont originally in its motto, don't tread on me.
And we only look at the effects, that is, the rattlesnake striking, and we don't look at the cause, which is we're stepping on them.
The notion that economic warfare is a viable alternative to hot war is valid only up to a certain point.
And this very question is widely discussed in Russian political circles today.
At what point does economic sanctions and economic warfare justify pressing the button?
We are reminded that Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor did not just come out of nowhere.
It came out of economic sanctions and economic warfare against Tokyo led by the United States.
And the red line that the Russians have in their own thinking is something that we blithely ignore.
I don't ignore it.
I try to follow them very closely because we can have a terrible miscalculation on the basis of these pet projects of the various security advisors to Trump.
Trump himself, I don't think he's changed one iota from the Trump who was on the campaign trail.
I think he genuinely would like to have something resembling normal relations with Russia, even if it is a rival.
There is no reason for rivals to go to war unless they miscalculate badly.
Who was calling the shots?
That was the basic point in one of my last couple of essays.
Who was calling the shots?
The Congress, which is totally irresponsible, particularly the Democrats, whether you're looking at Charles Schumer or Nancy Pelosi in the House or in the Senate.
The administration, which is populated by neanderthals who were named by Trump and approved by the Senate, or Trump himself.
They're all pulling in different directions.
At his best, he can only base what he knows and says on the information he's getting from his chief of staff, his national security advisor and his defense secretary.
Oh, and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a bunch of Marines, one army general and three Marines there to tell him exactly what's up.
People always leave Dunford out of this equation, but he's right up there with the rest.
They're all former leaders of CENTCOM, former leaders of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They're where he learns what he learns.
So that's a big part of the problem here.
He seems to be completely captured by them.
It's the box he put himself in quite deliberately, in fact, to borrow their credibility.
They're the only establishment faction that would give it to him.
So here's the thing.
With this whole Russia stole the election nonsense, there's this whole new cottage industry or worse.
Maybe it's a real industry now of McCarthyite, anti-Russia conspiracy kooks, mostly mainstream liberal Democrat types.
And one of the things that just goes without saying to them all the time is that Russia is preparing to invade and reconquer the Baltic states.
And that it's only a matter of time.
And can't you see how this, this and that play into the ultimate plan to reinvade the Baltics?
So I wonder, and I know that you write a lot about participating and watching as much Russian media as you can and that kind of thing, too.
What's the state of the conversation in Russia, you know, popularly or among power factions about maybe they really would like Estonia back?
What do you think?
No, I think that's nonsense.
Russia has moved well beyond the Soviet Union.
I think the general public doesn't want to hear about the Baltics.
The general Russian public, not to mention the Kremlin itself, people close to Putin, they're realists.
The last thing they want is to take on the burden of running out of the Baltics or any other territory west of the Baltics.
Because that was the lead ball that sapped the economy of the Soviet Union.
They had an enormous empire, but it was extremely expensive to maintain.
And that running expense made it very difficult for them to make reforms domestically, to improve their economy, or to get out of the arms race.
So Russia today has no interest whatsoever in running territories like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, whose populations loathe them.
That army of occupation would be enormously expensive.
They're not stupid.
They don't want this.
In fact, all of their military activities have been vastly smarter than what Uncle Sam is doing.
How is it that Russia today, on a military budget of less than ten times what the U.S. spends, is able to be a credible military opponent?
In fact, the only, the only credible military opponent to the United States in the world.
This is not an exaggeration by Mr. Dunford or any of the other military advisors to Trump.
It's a fact.
Rather than running their defense department as simply a giant racket.
No, I don't agree with you on just keeping their MiGs flying.
I'm sorry.
They have put out latest generation bombers and fighters, which are, they insist, and they have no reason to blow hot air on this, because they'd be facing them in a showdown.
They, which are comparable to the F-35 and other extremely expensive U.S. equipment.
Oh, well, I'm sure they're better.
I mean, the F-35 is made simply to be, to never be finished and to simply collect money.
Whether they're better or not, they are doing this on average at a cost of five times less per unit than you at the U.S. military spends.
So on a budget of $70 billion, they're getting hardware, because half of the budget, that's $35 billion of their military budget, goes into equipment.
The other half goes into maintenance.
Well, it's worth mentioning also that all of their foreign policies lately that the Americans object so badly to, such as their, as you put it, mild intervention in Ukraine on the ground.
And in Syria there, where it's not quite so mild, this is all in reaction to what Uncle Sam is doing.
There's no reason to think, really, is there that Russia had an interest in getting involved in Syria one way or the other, if America wasn't supporting the rebellion against the government in Damascus there?
Yes and no.
They have their own very definite reasons for getting involved.
And these are, there are several kinds.
There are very real political reasons, and there are also nationalist reasons, which, nationalism in the romantic nationalism sense.
Russia has had an interest in Syria and Iraq going back to the 19th century, to the 18th century.
This is their culture.
This is their Orthodox Christian territory.
Russia was the defender of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire.
It's got into a lot of trouble with England and France.
Their involvement in that part of the world goes back centuries.
Their interest in it, in that part of the world, goes back centuries.
So this didn't just happen last week.
Nor did it happen in the late Soviet Union.
Well, I guess I just meant that Assad would have won the war back in 2012, if America, or maybe even 11, if America hadn't been backing their enemies all that time.
It wasn't until the fall of 2015, when al-Qaeda was marching on, or at least had divided the highway between Aleppo and Damascus, that they finally did intervene.
So, it just seems like the counterfactual, if Obama had just stayed out of there, there would have been no reason for them to start bombing the place and putting troops on the ground.
My point is, the Russian involvement didn't go there just because Uncle Sam was there.
Well, I mean, I know they had a base there already.
I'm talking about the war, not just being allied with Assad.
They still had a very strong interest in seeing that this fire in the Middle East, that was emanating from Syria in particular, didn't reach them.
You have to look at geography.
When you sit in the States, Syria is an abstraction, it's pretty far off.
When you're sitting in Moscow, it's not far off at all.
And the same people who were joining the Islamic State were running back and forth from the southern regions of the Russian Federation.
They were also connected with Dagestan, Ingushetia, and other troubled Muslim majority population parts of the Russian Federation.
So, this was a major state security issue for Russia, for Moscow.
Not just the fact that they had an important military base in Syria.
This is, again, it's a different perspective.
Well, I'm just talking about their reaction to the war is all, and it was America's war.
The CIA spent a billion dollars a year working with the Saudis, the Turks, the Qataris.
I'm just saying there was no war for them to fight if America hadn't started the war there.
When Obama tried to put down the Russians by saying that they were not a global power, but just a regional bully, and Vladimir Putin asked which region, he wasn't joking.
The region of Syria is a regional issue for Russia.
It is not a regional issue for the United States.
And these are two very different perspectives.
Well, and of course, there is reporting in The Intercept of all places, which has been pretty shaky on Ukraine and Syria.
But they had an article about Syrian jihadists going up and fighting in Ukraine, along with the Nazis, against the Russians.
Because as they put it, they just want to kill Russians, against the Russian-favored side there.
I don't doubt it.
But there were, as I said, multiple reasons why Russia got involved.
And you have to also put this in perspective financially.
Because coming back to the issue of how Russia, with a GDP that's more than 10 times smaller than U.S. GDP, and with a military budget that's more than 10 times less than the United States spends, how it can be a rival, a global rival of the United States, and how it can have a military that would cause the Pentagon to have concern.
These are not jokes.
They're quite serious.
Well, in fact, next up is Mark Perry about America's new nuclear war doctrine, which is based along this question.
He's actually the guy that did a lot of work on McMaster's Russia theories as well, his battle plans against Russia.
And I'm afraid I'm late, so I'm sorry to the audience for leaving you all wanting more.
And I'm sorry to cut you off, Gilbert, but I've got to go.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show.
I appreciate it.
Well, it was a pleasure talking to you.
All right, you guys, it's Gilbert Doctorow.
He's still writing for Consortium News.
Bob Perry is gone, but his sons are carrying on with the site there.
And Gilbert Doctorow is going to keep writing great stuff for him.
He has an independent political analyst base in Brussels.
His latest book is called Does the United States Have a Future?
Good question.
A Coming Russia-Ukraine War, and also Treasury's Kremlin Report, seen as targeting Russian economy.
Those are his two latest there, ConsortiumNews.com.
And y'all know me, Scott Horton.org, YouTube.com slash ScottHortonShow, FoolsAaron.us for the book, AntiWar.com, and the Libertarian Institute for more stuff I want you to read.
And follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks, you guys.
