06/14/16 – Gilbert Doctorow – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Gilbert Doctorow.
He is the European coordinator of the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And his most recent book is Does Russia Have a Future?
That's an interesting question.
Reminds me of Richard Mayberry.
We'll get back to that.
But if you're familiar, it's because you've been reading him on antiwar.com.
We've been linking to his articles over at consortiumnews.com.
This one is called The U.S.-Russia Info War.
What's Real?
And I would also direct your attention to this one at TickinDaily.
That's tickin.org.
The nuclear clock is at two minutes to midnight.
Welcome to the show, Gilbert.
How are you, sir?
Oh, it's a pleasure to be invited.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us.
If you don't mind my asking real quick, who were you before you were the coordinator for the American Committee for East-West Accord?
Clearly you're an author here, but people might wonder, what's your angle?
I've had several careers.
I should have had an academic career.
I got a doctorate in Russian history at Columbia University back in 1975.
Those days were not very good for prospective academics.
They were not too bad for people who had a specialty in Russia and knew the language well.
And so I used my language skills and related area knowledge to lever myself into a business career, which lasted 25 years, largely as a manager responsible for business in Eastern Europe and for the Soviet Union, later for Russia.
That culminated in about an eight-year stretch when I was based in Moscow and was the country manager of some major multinational corporations who had operations, either import or distribution operations, and production operations in Russia.
This was in the 1990s.
My corporate career came to an end in 2002, and it took me a while to find my next big thing.
It came really in 2006 when I started a blog and decided to stop writing letters to the editor and to start writing commentaries, primarily on Russia and Eastern Europe, but not only.
And that found an audience, found resonance.
I learned, as it went along, how to say things that could be useful for people to understand what's going on.
And that took me along to invitations to conferences, to be a speaker, to be a workshop organizer, and that sort of activity.
So as you go along a path, you develop contacts, develop experience that becomes all the more relevant for the next thing you're about to do.
And the next thing that I was about to do, I found a common soul in Steve Cohen, who was a very well-known figure in the Russian studies area, made one of the best intellects in history, which is not often attracting to universities, the best minds.
He is the best of the best, and it was a great pleasure to make his acquaintance.
And he had been on the board of the American Committee for East-West Accord when it existed from 1964 to 1992.
He came on as a protege of George Kennan, who was perhaps the best-known academic and State Department career servant who was on the board of that American committee.
I had been, for several years, his junior, and I was a rank-and-file member and a contributing writer to some publications of the American Committee back then.
Both of us understood in 2013 that things were getting extremely bad, and that the dissolution of the American Committee in 1992 on the assumption that we would have normal relations with Russia was a serious error.
And the letter has taken me that our finding one another and our shared understanding of the perils that have been developing since the start of the 2007 information wars with Russia led us to be co-founders of this American Committee, which now has some very eminent public personalities and great names on its founding board.
Yeah, you guys even added Chuck Hagel earlier this year, correct?
The former Secretary of Defense?
We have Chuck Hagel.
We have our own Roosevelt.
We have Jack Matlock, who is a very eminent authority on the end of the Cold War, having been at the right hand of Ronald Reagan as his ambassador in Moscow when all negotiations took place in 1989 to 1991 that ended the Cold War.
Jack is on our board.
We have a major industrialist, that is John Pepper, who for many years was the chief executive officer of Procter & Gamble.
And in that capacity, he oversaw investments of several hundred billion dollars in manufacturing capacity in Russia.
And of course, not a great many people there on the way.
We also have a grassroots representative.
I'm embarrassed to say only one, but I hope that others will come to us.
This is a California-based organizer of people-to-people exchanges who was very active in the 1990s and who has a network today.
And at age, I hope she won't be offended if I say that she's over 80, she has restarted taking American groups, small groups, to visit their peers around Russia.
In fact, in a week, she's going to be going from Moscow to around the country with 20 people, including one whom I think your audience knows.
That is Ray McGovern.
He will be in a group of 20 people whom she's taking around.
Yeah, good friend of the show, Ray.
So these are the names that I'd like to call out.
Of course, Bill Bradley is another of our eminent board members.
And we have very different political views on separate questions, but we share one common priority.
And that is to ensure that civilized dialogue is reestablished with Russia.
And I should say also it would be nice if we had civilized dialogue with China as well.
And if the United States would step back from a very aggressive and provocative foreign policy.
Well, I got to tell you, the part about the CEO on your board there, to me, is really more exciting even than having a former Republican senator and secretary of defense like Chuck Hagel.
Although that's great PR, but having a CEO on there, that's real progress.
You've got to get businessmen with dollars at stake.
I mentioned George Kennan, but probably the biggest name at the time, biggest name on the board of the original American Committee for East-West Accord, was Donald Kendall, who was the president of PepsiCo for maybe 25, 30 years, and who was a Nixon Republican and who led the founding of the committee.
And the dates of the committee may not say very much to you.
Let me just explain something to the audience.
They were founded after the Jackson-Bannock Amendment passed the Senate, which was intended to sink Nixon's policy of detente.
And that was understood by people like Kendall and people like George Kennan, and so they gathered to form the first American Committee.
Yeah, and that's really important.
People, those in the audience not too familiar with the history, Kennan was Mr. X, the State Department employee who wrote the Foreign Affairs article inaugurating the Cold War, the containment policy, against the Soviet Union.
And I guess I knew that he was very much against NATO expansion in the 1990s, heroically even, the degree to which he opposed it.
But I didn't realize that he had worked hard to back Nixon and Kissinger in the detente policy and fight off the right during that period.
There was an authorized biography of Kennan that came out two years ago, which makes it appear that Kennan was zigged and zagged and didn't really know what he wanted.
Unfortunately, that has received a lot of currency among professionals who were students, university students, which would definitely see this as a description of George Kennan.
That is, in my way of thinking, a real misrepresentation of the man.
There were certain things in Kennan's life that were constant from start to finish.
One of them was a great love for Russia.
That has to be said.
He did not like communism.
He did not like the Soviet Union.
But he certainly appreciated Russians as people and as a culture that had a great deal to offer the world.
And you have to understand that his containment policy was intended to be the alternative to bombing them.
When he put that policy in place in 1948-49, there were ongoing studies of a kind of plan B for the United States, which was simply to go out and nuclear bomb the major Russian cities.
His point was to sound tough, but at the same time to move the confrontation with Russia from a military to a geopolitical sphere that did not entail direct military conflict.
The present containment policy, which MacFowell called for as if we did not have enough of it, MacFowell, the recent U.S. ambassador to Moscow, that containment policy does not have such a wisdom behind it or such an intent to steer us far from the course of war.
And what is being implemented now, as we speak in the Anaconda 16 military exercises going on in Poland with 17,000 U.S. troops taking part and another 14,000 allied and associated country troops taking part, that is bringing us much closer to actual armed conflict with Russia.
It's terribly sad that most people are not aware of that.
They hardly know from the daily press or from feature news on cable television what we are doing right now and how it is viewed by the Russians.
And I think very few of your listeners would know that about 10 days ago, at the start of these exercises, Vladimir Putin said directly that any attack on Russian territory, and the exercises are a rehearsal for conquering the Kaliningrad Enclave, which is Russian territory in what was formerly East Prussia, sandwiched between Poland and the Baltic states, that any encroachment on Russian territory would be met with a nuclear response, and it would not be limited to the European theater.
It would be ICBMs directed against mainland United States.
I defy your readers to confirm that they were aware of this.
And it is typical, I raise the issue because it is typical of the news blackout that our major media have been practicing, and which has been keeping the American public in the dark about the risks that we are courting.
And your article here at TIKKEN is about how a couple years back you were at a big anti-war event, and even there they didn't really even know.
It wasn't that they had been buffaloed into thinking that, oh, terrible Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Empire and dominate Eastern Europe again, and all this fake consensus like we have in Washington D.C. and New York, I guess.
But they just didn't even really understand that there was a problem at all.
If there's a problem, it's the Middle East, as we've been focusing on for all these years.
So those are basically our choices, total ignorance or this false consensus about Putin's aggression that must be defended from.
Well, in that article I make mention of Noam Chomsky, and I think that anyone who consults the article should be aware that Chomsky already in late spring of 2014 understood that the situation around Crimea and the growing confrontation with Russia was much more dangerous than he had ever assumed.
And he was quite alarmed by the very aggressive and very provocative American behavior throughout.
So he changed sides.
He decided in the spring, the event that I'm referring to is in October 2013, when Chomsky, who was obviously providing a lot of inputs to program agenda to the concepts of that peace event that I went to, he didn't see it, didn't see the situation.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I think I've gotten ahead of myself.
I've missed half a year here.
The event was in 2014.
And he should have known better when he arranged it.
In 2000, the spring of 2014, he already spoke about a red lines that the United States was going through, and he was unnerved by the coming confrontation, but it apparently did not influence his behavior in arranging the program of that peace day.
And now, so this consensus in DC, I am sorry to the audience, because I keep repeating myself to every different guest to get their different take on this.
But I talked to Mark Perry, the great Pentagon reporter, and he had written this thing for Politico about the competing military doctrines of the different army generals and all based on the theory of fighting a tank war with the Russians in Eastern Europe, basically.
And I asked him, you know, hey, do these guys really believe all their own nonsense about the re-rise of Russia and Putin is Hitler or Putin is Stalin and Putin wants to conquer Eastern Europe?
Or, you know, they know they're lying, but they're just buying and selling tanks because that's their job.
They collect ribbons for their shirts and they go golfing.
And that's part of being the military, right?
And Mark Perry said, oh, yeah, no, they really believe it.
Other than those who have a severe vested interest in arguing against that point of view because of their military doctrine.
Everyone else is in on the consensus that history began, I don't know, the day that the little green men seized Crimea.
And, oh, my God, what are we going to do to stop them?
And these are the adults.
I mean, these are the actual guys in charge.
I mean, rather than even kind of privately admit to themselves that, you know, America overthrew the government in Ukraine again.
And that's what started this fight.
And we've been threatening to integrate Ukraine into NATO.
And that's what's got the Russians on edge and all these things.
They don't even really admit it to themselves.
They believe their own propaganda line according to their answers to Mark Perry when he asked them himself.
And I just wonder what you really think of that, because that's the part that really bothers me when nobody's out in Austin, Texas like me can see right through this.
I mean, come on.
All you got to do is remember the winter of 2013-14, right?
But apparently all the professionals in D.C. know that they're right.
Gilbert, what do you think?
Well, there are two elements here.
One of them is the consequence of the monopoly control of the airwaves, of the newspapers, of the electronic media by the group who are behind what's called the Washington narrative.
That is, the neoconservatives, they are card-carrying Republicans, and the liberal interventionists, who are exactly the same thing, only they're card-carrying Democrats.
They've controlled, they've taken control, or really throttled the American agora, the public area for discussion.
And so it is why I mentioned one consequence, that people who are earnest and are activists and are very well-meaning in the peace movement have been largely in the dark, and have been fed the same propaganda as everybody else, and have been unable to find orientation points.
The same is true of the other side.
Because they do not engage in debate, because they are constantly in hiding from open discussion and from conflict of ideas, their argumentation is weak.
It is sadly weak.
I stopped commenting on articles in Foreign Affairs about a year and a half, two years ago, because it became a pointless exercise, but the commonality of my critiques was that the level of argumentation, this is of our opponents, the people who are backing up 150%, the Washington policies, their level of argumentation is full of holes.
They don't see it, because they never have to stand up and argue their points against a real competent adversary.
And the losers are everybody.
They are those military men you were describing, because they are making asinine statements, which are unsupportable, but nobody gets a chance to question them.
I don't mean a reporter on the side, I mean on national television.
And of course the peace movement, or anyone who is skeptical of power, doesn't have a basis for exercising that skepticism.
You hear about Putin, and this was swallowed by everybody.
Noam Chomsky couldn't stand Putin.
But what they are missing in all this, is that we are speaking of 145 million people, and a great many of them, maybe 90%, share the ideas that are in the public space in Russia.
And that have been authored by Putin and the people around him.
Not because they are brainwashed, I assure you, there is a big difference there.
I am one of the very few Americans, who in the last two months, was twice on Russian national television, domestic television.
I don't mean RT for foreign consumption, I mean domestic Russian television, where they have a great many talk shows.
These are panels of politicians and experts, who debate the kind of issues that we are talking about with you right now.
And this is on major televisions, on the key channels, which have, I don't know, 10, 20, 30 million viewers.
And they invite into this, these discussions, of the national security issues.
A poll from Poland, an Israeli who is speaking the Netanyahu line, Ukrainians who are speaking the Maidan line, and they are going at it, in a very lively, sometimes too lively, debate, that the public watches in real time.
Now, it's a sad, sad commentary, that Russia, which supposedly, if you listen to American media, is state controlled, has this type of rough and tumble, and often very substantive as well, debate, several times a week, on national television.
And we don't.
That's terribly sad.
Hey, we got Crossfire.
And actually, Pat's, I didn't even mean Crossfire, I meant the McLaughlin group, we still got Pat on the McLaughlin group, that's it though.
Okay.
He's the only one who's good on Russia, on all the TV, I think.
Well, I'm glad to hear this from one.
Being in Brussels, of course, I don't have a fingertip control, or a fine-tuned knowledge of all the things going on, but I have a sense.
And I know, for example, how major events are covered, or not covered, by our media.
And I'll give you two examples, if you'll bear with me.
One of them was in the 2nd of December of last year, 2015, when the Russian Ministry of Defense invited all military attachés of the embassies based in Moscow.
And Moscow is like Washington, D.C., the whole world has got embassies there.
They invited all the military attachés to a briefing, in which they showed, at great length, their aerial surveillance photographs and their satellite images of the supply lines taking illicit Islamic State oil to the Turkish border.
To fulfill contracts with Turkey.
And they were demonstrating in numbers what vast revenue was coming to the Islamic State, in complicity with Erdogan and his close relatives.
His son, to be specific.
And the Russian television had live coverage of this, which I watched.
And you could see these NATO and other military attachés taking out their cameras, photographing the slides, writing furiously at their desks.
And, of course, there were journalists there as well, Western journalists based in Moscow.
In the next two days, there was almost none, no coverage in major Western media.
None.
About a month ago, Valery Gergiev brought the Mariinsky Theater to Palmyra.
This was just three weeks after the Syrian regular army, with the help of Russian air force, cleaned out Palmyra from the Islamic State occupation.
And after a Russian expert team of minesweepers cleared the antique area where the concert was held, in the middle of their antiquities, in the middle of what was a Roman auditorium.
Well, they held this concert, and they invited, they brought down 100 journalists, Western journalists who are accredited in Moscow.
And one of them was Robert Kramer, who is the New York Times journalist.
The day after this event, there were reports in the New York Times, for example, had reports coming from wire agencies, which they assembled with their staff in New York.
And they linked two different things.
They linked an attack on refugees in an enclave in Eastern Syria, in which 28 people died, and the concert of Gergiev.
Making the headline point that the Russians are playing while migrants and refugees are being slaughtered in Syria.
These are totally unrelated reports.
No one knew at the time, and people don't even know today, who killed those people, those Syrian refugees in the East part of the country.
It was quite possibly, it was Islamic State, or terrorists, or people who had just come over across the Turkish border.
But that is not the point.
These were totally separate issues.
Three days later, the New York Times finally issued the report of its own correspondent who had been there in Palmyra, Kramer.
And Kramer wrote that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, that he will never forget the importance of this return of civilization to Palmyra.
Why did the New York Times take three days, when everybody already forgot about Palmyra, to publish Kramer's report?
There you've got the nub of the issue.
I hope I'm making the point that major Western media, and it's not just the United States, it's Western Europe, which follows the American lead, have kept you all in the dark.
Well, they follow the lead of the State Department.
In fact, there's a great clip of the State Department spokesman, Toner, almost snapping his spine, bending over backwards to avoid saying that, yes, the U.S. prefers that Damascus rule Palmyra, and not the Islamic State.
And Matt Lee at the Associated Press basically nails him to the wall and forces him to admit that, no, the Islamic State is worse.
These are relations that you expect before an outbreak of all-out war.
These are not normal relations.
And that is the issue of the day.
All the name-calling that Putin is Hitler and the rest of it, this is what you say before you drop the bomb.
So you better be ready to drop the bomb, because the Russians are preparing for it.
Well, now, so here's the thing.
Back to Americans, one, have no idea, or two, are completely wrong and believe this whole narrative about the Russian aggressor here.
It sounds very alarmist, Gilbert.
It's almost counterproductive to warn about the dangers of missteps in American-Russian relations, because after all, we survived the entire Cold War and brinksmanship and tens and tens and tens of thousands of nukes pointed at each other without a nuclear war.
And so now you're saying there could be a nuclear war over this tiny little strip of land between the Baltics and Poland that nobody's ever heard of, and, you know, aren't we friends with them now?
It just sounds on the face of it like it must not really be a concern, or else more would be concerned.
I think your skepticism is very healthy, and I'd like to address it.
Well, it's faux skepticism for the record.
I'm totally with you, but go ahead.
No, but I mean, so there are people.
Look, I had an exchange of emails with my sister two days ago, and she's asking virtually the same question you're asking, and she's no fool.
And she's trying hard to keep up with what's going on.
So I appreciate that very intelligent and very earnest and very serious people could be confused by the message of alarm that I'm issuing.
And I hope they are alarmed, but not that they turn off their radio, because the issue is we are in a different age.
Never in the Cold War did anyone dare to use the language or to, against the ruler, against the leader of the Soviet Union that we are constantly doing today.
Now, if you may argue, well, the sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never.
Wait a minute.
I tell you, the language is so violent, and you cannot negotiate with a Hitler.
We all know that.
That's been a broken record of American foreign policy for the last 20, 30 years.
We're always finding Hitlers whom we can't negotiate with.
The problem is that none of them, they were all tin-pot countries, half-assed countries.
And Russia is no longer a half-assed country.
They can blast us off the face of the earth.
They happen to be ruled by a government that is basically Western-friendly.
Mr. Putin and his closest associates had the misplaced hope that Boris Yeltsin had in 1994, that they would be admitted to NATO.
Now, whether your audience thinks that's a good thing or a bad thing, I don't want to get into that.
We all have our views on, the question is that NATO would no longer be NATO if the Russians were in it.
It would not be a U.S.-dominated body, which is what the whole resistance of the U.S. to Russia's inclusion was all about.
There was no desire to share power with anybody else.
So, the situation today has no comparable situation save 1962, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we came very close to the end of the world.
After that crisis, the United States took its missiles out of Turkey, which nobody talked about at the time.
And the Russians, of course, withdrew their missiles from Cuba, which everybody talked about.
And it looked like a painful step climbed down by Nikita Khrushchev, and it cost him his power because he was removed on the basis of his weakness.
In any case, aside from the little shifts in who was ruling in the Kremlin after 1962, what also happened was the setting up of a hotline, the setting up of rules of engagement between the Soviet Union and the West.
And that was a major factor in keeping the peace.
There also was, over time, a building of trust, and it was only that existence of a certain minimal level of trust in the intentions of the other side, which saved us, during the Cold War, from nuclear catastrophe.
There were several incidents, and these have been recounted many times, when the Russians, or we, misperceived launchings of missiles, or other events, and thought, briefly, that perhaps it was a nuclear attack.
The level of confidence in the intentions, in the sanity, and the humanity of the other side was sufficiently high for them to wait.
It's also true that the military technology at the time was such that you had maybe a 20 minute or half an hour time slot before it would all be over.
The violation, by both sides now, of the intent of the ban on intermediate range nuclear missiles, the stationing of Russian atomic submarines off the North Atlantic coast of the United States, the stationing of American battleships, frigates, and others, in the eastern part of the Baltic Sea, with nuclear-tipped, or potentially nuclear-tipped, cruise missiles, the plans now for putting, well, the already opening of the Romanian base for what is supposed to be an anti-missile installation, the construction and planned opening in 2017 of a similar base in Poland, which will have the capability of, at very quick notice, changing from anti-ballistic to offensive missiles headed at Russia.
These have brought down the time for making a don't-fire decision to minutes, if not seconds, in an atmosphere of no trust whatsoever.
So, this is my answer to your remarks that we survived the Cold War, but we may not survive this one.
We have created a demonized Russia, and it is not the Russia of the 1990s, led by a drunken Boris Yeltsin, and a completely dysfunctional army, and so forth.
It is a Russia that is now our equal in certain parts of conventional warfare, that has certain modern equipment, for which it's increasing the level of equipping of its various troops, which are on a par with ours.
It's no longer correct to say that Russia is just a kind of rusting nuclear power, which they can't use, and a conventional war will be the losers.
That isn't the least but true anymore.
So, the dangers are, we know that also the distances were different.
In the Cold War, Russia had a big buffer area around it.
It was all the Warsaw Pact countries.
Now, it doesn't.
Now, when we move our forces to the East, it means we're moving 50 miles from St. Petersburg.
You have to look at the map to appreciate what I'm talking about.
I was at a reception at the Russian Embassy here last Thursday.
This was an early reception ahead of the 12th of June, National Day of Russia.
And there were several Russian ambassadors to various institutions in Brussels, that is the EU and NATO.
And we discussed these matters, and I can tell you one of them told me very directly that they were in shock at the need now to militarize the western province between Petersburg and their border with Estonia.
And they're bringing up massive numbers of their troops and equipment from the center of Russia to what is now just close to the NATO border.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, this is what Hillary Clinton says, is Russia now messing around right on NATO's doorstep.
Well, yes, you're saying this ironically, and I share you completely, your interpretation of this.
Of course, the whole thing is upside down.
It'll be hard for your listeners to understand.
It's a long story, and I think we'll probably not have enough time for that.
Right.
Well, and the thing is, you know, I think the average person probably...
I was asked, my car insurance guy asked me the other day, hey, what's up with Russia, you know?
And I said, well, of course it's all Uncle Sam's fault.
And he nodded.
It sounded plausible enough to him when I said, you know, Kennan warned us not to expand NATO, but Bill Clinton did it anyway, and et cetera, et cetera like this.
He knew I was right, but he certainly had never heard this before.
There's nobody saying what you're saying, other than maybe Pat Buchanan on Sunday mornings on a show nobody watches.
There's just nobody who takes this point of view on American TV.
They've never heard this point of view.
Hell, most of them probably forgot Russia even exists, but the ones who believe in it believe that, as Hillary Clinton says, it's run by Hitler and it's headed this way.
So, you know, we got...
Well, first of all, I'm very grateful for the work that you're doing, and especially putting together this committee of other like-minded experts to do this, and all the effort that you're taking to make this more of an issue.
Because, I mean, just on the face of it, it's obviously the most important issue on the face of the planet, America's relationship with Russia, simply because of the H-bomb count, right?
You're killing me with flattery.
I would like to just call out something.
If we had held this conversation six months ago, then I couldn't say a peep about your remark, that nobody else is saying this, and so on, where I look sort of freakish.
But I'd like to call attention to the need for right-left unity in not in everything, of course not.
We have very different priorities on domestic policy, and that is logical of the way the world should work.
But we should have a single common priority of survival.
Now, I know that your listenership will probably wince when I say it, but the views that I hold and my colleagues hold with respect to American foreign policy have become almost respectable, and certainly people can do the numbers and see that they're rather substantial.
And I have an additional fact I'll roll out if you give me a minute to do it.
Because of Donald Trump.
Now, Donald delivered an awful speech last night, and I'm sure a lot of people are very happy to hate him, but if he hadn't said what he has been saying about the folly of NATO expansion and about the plausibility of doing business with the Russians, then the entire political landscape would be the same, including good old Bernie.
I'm telling you that we have to get our priorities lined up and look what counts, and spend less time looking at the political coloration of who is saying what we want to hear.
Now, he has blasted a hole through the neocon ideology armor, and it is up to us to walk through that hole.
Now, just to get a sense of who we are, we are many more people than you think, or than your listenership thinks.
The Foreign Affairs magazine published, very peculiarly, they published John Mearsheimer's article in the September October issue, let me get this right, 14 years, in which he asked who is to blame for the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.
Well, that created a hullabaloo among all the loyalists at Foreign Affairs magazine and the Foreign Relations Council that oversees it.
Now, I'm not going to go into the details, but that created a hullabaloo among all the loyalists at Foreign Affairs magazine and the Foreign Relations Council that oversees it.
And they did a poll of their brain trust, which they published online in November 2014.
And they asked the question, do you agree or strongly agree, do you disagree or strongly disagree with what John Mearsheimer said, that the West is to blame?
Now, considering that almost nobody, other than Mearsheimer's one essay, ever appears in Foreign Affairs magazine with that line, and considering that their expert panel, I think was 30 people, their brain trust is packed with real loyalists, some of whom are not experts on Russia or Eastern Europe at all, but can be counted upon to slam Putin and the Kremlin.
People like Alexander Motil from Rutgers University, he's the spokesman, one man spokesman for Maidan.
Anyway, they've got these people who are quite anti-Kremlin.
Still, 35% of their expert panel said that they agreed or strongly agreed with what Mearsheimer said.
So it's not ones and twos of us.
It's just a whole lot of us have been shut up.
Well, you know, it's interesting too that Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, had actually gone on the Stephen Colbert show just one or two days after the coup, really celebrating and bragging about it.
So I always thought it was pretty big of him to go ahead and run Mearsheimer.
You know, it was a concession on his part, I thought.
Because as he explained to Colbert, this was supposed to work, right?
The Russians were supposed to say, oh, shucks, they got away with it.
Not it was supposed to break out in a horrible war.
I recall his flippant remarks, because he's pretty much a lightweight Gideon Rose.
He remarked, this was just after the Sochi Olympics closed, for us to remember.
And he made the asinine remark, well, the Russians, they got a lot of gold in Sochi.
But we've upped the country count.
We just took Ukraine.
This is Gideon Rose, the head of Foreign Affairs magazine, speaking like the last clown.
Of course, it was on Comedy Central, I understand.
But it wasn't funny.
Well, at least he did run Mearsheimer.
I kind of wouldn't have expected him to run that at all.
But yeah, you're right.
There is, among people who really know the facts, like the Foreign Affairs audience, or members of the Council on Foreign Relations, they may be familiar enough.
But certainly the narrative among the politicians is so far almost bullproof.
Although, after all, I mean, it's kind of, it's the elephant in the room in a way.
Donald Trump, not that anybody has any good reason to believe what he says, but Donald Trump has said in the past, I want to get along with Russia.
You can't be enemies with everybody.
And I thought, you know what, if there's one country for him to pick to not be enemies with, I think Russia's a great candidate for that spot.
So, you know, I'm not saying I'd support him or anything, but Hillary calls Putin Hitler.
So she's pretty much disqualified herself from the run and right there, it seems like.
What do you make of Trump's statements on Russia?
Look, he's been all over the map.
If your listeners look me up, they'll see that I've made a couple of endorsements for him.
So I don't, I did that looking strictly at one issue, and that was, will we survive?
And he had, he's the only person who had common sense on the question of dealings with Russia and with other world powers, not just Russia.
The, you'll ask, well, where is Bernie Sanders?
I'll tell you where, nowhere.
Bernie, the question is, can you teach an old dog new tricks?
And Bernie has shown himself to be totally incapable of learning new tricks in the area of foreign relations, a lot of which he is as blessedly ignorant as Obama was when he came to the Oval Office.
Now, we've been through this once.
We know what happens when blessedly ignorant people come into the Oval Office and are surrounded by advisors and handlers who assist them to perpetuate the cockeyed policies we've had before they came to office.
So Bernie may be great on domestic policy, I love him, but I really ask if he'll be any better than Obama has been, unless somebody gets to him and tells him, hey man, you better learn something fast.
And the one thing that I sense about Trump, the old, which justified up to now my saying a good word for him, is I am confident that he will throw the bums out, that he will drive into the street the Victoria Nuland's, her hubby Robert Kagan, the Crystals, and all the other neocon gang that have publicly joined Hillary and have been working in every way possible to destroy Trump.
He will not forgive that.
And the fact that he will chase the bums out, and they haven't been thrown out in 20 years, that is a great plus.
Yeah, well, I'm not so positive that that would happen, but yeah, you're right, that Bill Crystal and them have certainly made themselves his enemies, and I would sure like him to not ever forgive them.
The question is, are there enough guys at Cato for him to hire to take their places, you know?
If he could, if Doug Bandow was the National Security Advisor and Ted Galen Carpenter was running the State Department, You have to look at Trump from a different angle.
I don't think he has a tremendous respect for academics or for think tank personalities.
So I think his selection process would be a totally different end of the field.
Maybe he'd hire this guy Pepper, the CEO, who wants to get along with Putin.
Anyway, you know what, Gilbert, we should stop now.
We're at almost 50 minutes, and I want to make sure that people want to listen to this whole thing, and it ain't too long for them.
But thank you so much.
I'm so glad to have made contact with you, and we'll do it again soon.
All right, thanks a lot.
Okay, thanks again.
Thanks, bye-bye.
All right, so that is Gilbert Doctorow, European Coordinator of the American Committee for East-West Accord.
And his most recent book is Does Russia Have a Future?
Read him pretty much regularly, all the time, at ConsortiumNews.com.
Infowar, What's Real?
And this one here is at TIKKUN Daily.
That's T-I-K-K-U-N dot org.
The Nuclear Clock is at 2 minutes to midnight.
All right, y'all, thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton, ScottHorton.org.
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