For Pacifica Radio, September 28th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Again, time to welcome Gilbert Doctorow back to the show.
He's the author of the book, Does Russia Have a Future?
And we regularly run his stuff at antiwar.com as well.
His blog, it's gilbertdoctorow.com.
And his latest is Provocative U.S. Air and Sea Maneuvers at Russia's Borders.
Welcome back to the show, Gilbert.
How are you, sir?
I'm very well, thanks.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show.
Happy to hear that.
And this is the biggest deal in the whole world, I guess, outside of the war in Yemen.
And that is, of course, America's relationship with Russia.
And then particularly this week, what your story is about American air exercises all around Russia's borders.
And do I have this right?
The Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and then the seas I've never heard of before there in the north and the Far East, too?
Yes, the Far East.
It's the Bering Sea.
These are east of the maritime provinces, east of Vladivostok, northeast.
And what are Americans doing exactly?
Well, what they're doing has changed.
And this is what prompted the Russian television stations.
There were two of them that I watched.
And I've given the links on my, my article.
One is the Armed Forces, Russian Armed Forces Station, Zvezda with a star.
And the other is the Vesti program, which is the main news channel, 24 hour news channel of Russia.
Now they were calling attention, particularly to the change in the nature of the American probing of Russian borders.
Until recently, these were primarily intelligence gathering operations, with various surveillance planes equipped to do monitoring, coming close to as close as 15 kilometers from the Russians, Russia's borders, primarily in the Black Sea, but also on the other, the other sea borders, as we've mentioned.
However, what's happened recently is that the Americans have been sending a B-52 bombers.
These are from North Dakota, they're based in the UK.
And they have been coming in through various front sea frontiers, approaching and then turning on their cruise missile systems.
What they've been doing is a kind of mock cruise missile attack on Russian military installations.
That's a different kind of a probe.
And it's one that's gotten the Russians obviously quite riled up.
I've mentioned two different channels, the Armed Forces channel, Zvezda, they were factual, stating what is, they were repeating information that, that all the Russian news services have carried from a Friday event when the highest ranking officer in the Russian command was briefing the press on what they have detected.
So those facts were covered by the Armed Forces radio.
What Vesti did, in the person of Dmitry Kisilev, who is the Director General of all Russian news services, and who can be viewed as a kind of spokesman, informal spokesman for Vladimir Putin, he says occasionally on his news programs, what the Kremlin would find it inconvenient to say in an official way.
And what Kisilev said is that we've been very nice guys, and we put up with this.
And you're sending 30 or 40 of your flight approaches to our borders, which our jets scramble and meet and accompany out of our airspace or away from our airspace.
But you know, we may not remain such nice guys very long, because our pilots are getting nervous and are getting tired of this game.
We haven't turned on our electronic warfare equipment for the airplanes.
I can tell you that the Russians have in the past year turned on their electronic warfare equipment to dissuade American cutters, American smaller Navy vessels, carrying cruise missiles and other high precision weapons.
They have blinded them.
Well, when you're blinding a ship, nothing catastrophic happens.
When you blind airplanes, things rather unpleasant can happen.
And Mr. Kisilev was saying, hey, we're gonna do this.
So that was a very clear warning for the Americans to desist.
Moreover, what the Russians were reporting this past, this is last Sunday, what they were reporting is that the B-52s aren't just flying in solo.
They are being accompanied by NATO jet fighters as they pass over various countries.
They've been accompanied by Swedes, by the Germans, even by the Italians.
And the most threatening probes have been in the Black Sea, and the approaches to Crimea.
These B-52s have been accompanied by Ukrainian MiGs.
The Russians don't like that one little bit.
The Ukrainians turn back before they approach the Russian borders.
The B-52s continue their way over Ukrainian territory into the Black Sea littoral.
And this is seen by the Russians, by the Minister of Defense Shoigu, as having several dimensions to it.
One is, as we said before, intelligence gathering to see how the Russians respond, how they scramble and so forth.
And the other is political, political aimed at Russia, to remind them or to insist that they understand that there's only one big guy in the world, and that big guy is United States.
And they shouldn't even think about challenging its strategic superiority as viewed from the States.
And the other aim of the political message is Western Europe.
And that is why the planes from Sweden and Germany and so forth are brought into play.
So if these pilots and the air traffic controllers who are watching them can understand exactly the military prowess of the United States, and will be more subordinate and more quiet in or more attentive to American demands, for example, that they host missiles directed at Russia.
So this is the political message that the American flights carry as seen from Moscow.
Okay, hold on just a quick sec.
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It's anti war radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Gilbert Doctorow about America's Russia policy.
Go ahead.
The one other detail, which is quite important to add, is that the American forces are telling their European counterparts that not to worry, you can you can host our missiles and so forth.
The Russians aren't likely to retaliate.
Or if there's any such threat, remember that we United States have a monopoly on actionable military intelligence.
What the Russians said in the broadcast last week is forget it.
We've been very, very low key.
We have not allowed the American pilots from heading our way to understand that we are following their every move from the minute they take off in the UK.
We have them in there in our sights.
And we could do what's necessary to neutralize them.
We have until now only let the Americans understand our observing their operations when they approach our frontier.
And then we scramble our jets, we send them up as fast as they can go.
And they approach as close as they can to the American pilots unnerving them.
And this has resulted in numerous protests to the to the Russians from Brussels.
Well, there's a story I've just summarized what was said last week.
What I would like to do with your permission, Scott is to just give an overlay here.
Sure, go right.
All of this cannot be taken in isolation.
And you have to put it in the context of a few other types of pressure that the United States and European allies have been applying to Russia, again, in the in the expectation or the hope that the Russians will submit and listen more closely to the directions coming from from Washington or from Brussels.
Precisely, the other events, what are they, they are the ongoing attempts at an orange revolution in Belarus.
Belarus is happens to be very important strategic buffer, as viewed from the Kremlin, to the Western Europe.
And the idea of a notion that the Russians would allow a change of regime, such as, as now being promoted by Lithuania and by Poland, and with a little bit less vigor by other European countries, no doubt, with quiet encouragement coming from Washington, the kind of regime change that they're trying to carry out, using this opposition leader, Tikhonovskaya, who's now living in Poland, is directed against Russia.
Mr. Lukashenko is, is a minor figure in this as far as the big game between Russia and the West.
Then there's the whole Navalny poisoning case.
And the the formation of a of an anti Nord Stream two, so called coalition that Mr. Pompeo has been crowing about in the last week.
Well, if you look at it, you've got an all out propaganda offensive, economic offensive, if you consider the suspension or cancellation of Nord Stream two and what it's worth to the Russians.
And now a military confrontation.
This is what heck of a concerted effort to beat back the Russians, and to have them adopt a more conciliatory position into the United States on the still not developing arms limitation talks.
It may be all for that sake.
Because Mr. Trump is very keen to have to to show progress and agreement on arms limitations before election day.
And the Russians have not been the least bit respectful of his wishes.
Because of the terms that Washington has put down.
So you've got a lot of pressure.
That is Washington encouraged or Washington designed a directed against Russia, of which the most risky is, of course, the military that I wrote about.
Right.
There's a huge assumption underlying all of this with the planes.
And that is that cooler heads and cooler computer programs will always prevail on the Russian side.
No colonel is going to overreact.
No general is going to misinterpret some readout.
And, and they couldn't possibly presume that these exercises are just cover for a real first strike.
Because of course, they're not.
And so it'll be fine.
And we'll just continue on like this.
I don't know, for some indefinite period of time, or just until their point is made.
Well, so far, the Russians have over decades, and not just over the last few weeks, have proven themselves to be consummate pilots, and to be very skilled in the game of chicken.
But mistakes happen.
Things go wrong.
And I think it was important to get this piece of information out in public space, because Western media have given it no attention whatsoever.
And I know we've heard in the past of the complaints from Sweden about Russian flights over the Baltic Sea.
But you never hear a word about the highly provocative things that have been going on now for several months, under American direction.
Not a word.
You won't find it in any of our media, major, even the alternative media.
It was only when the Russians came out and said it directly, last week, it was time to pick it up.
And nobody has.
Well, you picked it up, anti-war camp picked it up.
So if something goes wrong, and there's always possibility of having an accident, or misjudgment, even the highest professionals can make mistakes.
It'll hit the papers, like something out of the clear blue sky.
How did this possibly happen?
Those Russkies have done it again.
And they've given fair warning.
They've given fair warning that they're ready to turn on their electronic warfare equipment with the consequences that are predictable, that American planes will crash.
Yeah.
You know, let me ask you this.
Well, first of all, before I get to that, I just wanted to ask the audience to just think for one second about the shoe on the other foot.
And I don't know exactly what it was like in the 80s.
I remember the Cold War, but I don't remember exactly the extent of how far Russian bombers flew around North America.
But I know that right now, if the Russians were flying bombers all up and down our east coast and west coast and into the Gulf of Mexico, and all these things, we'd be at DEFCON two or worse.
And it will not be treated like well, of course, they can do that if they feel like it the way our attitude is about them.
Scott, you're right on subject.
Because I didn't say in my in my article, one other little warning that Mr. Kislyov made, he said, Ma, my goodness, you guys in the States, how are you going to react if we start flying in the Gulf of Mexico up to your borders?
He said that.
So that precisely that warning also was in the air last Sunday.
And as I said, this isn't just some little stringer out there.
This is the highest ranking Russian news director.
You know, even think back at all of the folly of Trump's hawkish statements and belittling and threatening North Korea in 2017.
As bad as all of that was, it was clear that he was open to a breakthrough and making a deal doing something about it to go from that to some kind of progress.
In fact, they did have some meetings that could have been productive anyway.
Certainly things are less worse than they were before Trump was sworn in even.
So it was really bad.
I'm not justifying he shouldn't have done the way he did it.
But at least we could see that there was something going on there.
We're here, this is just ratcheting up and ratcheting up.
But it doesn't seem like they're leaving a way out for Putin to say, okay, fine.
I'll give into whatever our demands are, and then have a way to move forward and save face or anything.
It's like they're just trying to piss him off.
Well, I don't know which is the worst way to look at what's going on now.
That Donald Trump has a master plan, and this type of massive pressure on Russia, as I expressed, expressed it a minute ago, in three different operations against Russia that are going on simultaneously, that this is a master plan to achieve something like arms control negotiation, or I don't know what else.
Or is it the other?
This is totally out of control, and he doesn't know what's going on.
Right.
It's just the different departments of the military and the different agencies just setting the agenda themselves.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that sure is what it seems like.
Because you know, even in the case of Iran, the maximum pressure, you can tell that, well, they want to either get rid of the sunsets and add missiles, which they know they're probably not going to get, you know, to add to the deal.
Or maybe they can push for a coup and destabilize the country and get a regime change without necessarily firing a shot, but provoke some kind of revolution or something.
There's some kind of end.
It's nonsensical.
It's crazy, but at least it means something.
In this case, you would think that they're trying to insist that Putin, I don't know what, withdraw his forces from lands he's not occupying or something.
What is it?
They don't even have any demands.
When I spoke about the Navalny case, it was put in terms of a device to apply maximum pressure to the Kremlin not to intervene in the Belarus situation.
One could conceivably think of this pressure of the B-52s approaching the Russian borders with their cruise missiles armed as being another kind of approach to solving the same problem of keeping the Russians out of Belarus.
But I will say one thing, if that is what people in Pentagon and the State Department are thinking, then they have, they're suffering from amnesia.
And they're also suffering from critical failing to interpret intelligence.
People who tell you that the Russians are concerned about their buddy dictator falling in Belarus, because it would send bad signals to Russian politics.
That is the wishful thinking of deluded people who know nothing about Russia.
The people who say that Russia invaded, invaded, which is kind of funny thing because the troops were already there under a treaty, that the Russians invaded Crimea and took it over, you know, for arbitrary reasons to punish Ukraine.
These people know nothing about strategy.
They know nothing about Russian military thinking.
The case of Crimea was one issue only.
It was not that Russians like to think back about how their Tsars were swimming off of Yalta.
All of these romantic ideas are for people who gave us Hunt for Red October, people who know nothing about Russian military and strategic concerns.
The loss of the naval base on the Crimea would have been an extremely great blow to Russian national security.
And the possibility of that happening under the anti-Russian regime that was installed by the Americans with French help and Polish help.
That was the red flag that this bull charged after and charged after with enormous skill and professionalism and got what he wanted, which was to take the peninsula and to ensure that that whole area of the Black Sea Littoral is Russian and has the most important naval base of the country.
Now, for Russia, Belarus is similarly strategically vital.
And to think that in any way, the Kremlin would allow a regime change that installs an anti-Russian government.
It means that you've been taking you've been you've been taking acid.
Yeah.
Well, you know, a couple of things on this.
First of all, have you seen the new Woodward book at all?
Have you taken a look at it?
No, no, no.
It's 90 percent gossip, right?
But there's always a few important anecdotes in there because he has such high level sources, you know.
So one thing is he says, well, America, you know, has there's been this big border war in Ukraine over Crimea because he doesn't know that the border wars in the Donbass in the far east of the country and all that broke out after the crisis over the Crimean Peninsula where he didn't know anything about it at all.
That was the way he reported it was just jumbled facts.
But then the more important part is the introduction to the character of Rex Tillerson, who was the CEO of Exxon, which was formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey, the core of the Rockefeller World Empire and most powerful corporation on the planet.
I think in in dollar terms, the biggest corporation on the planet and a very serious guy in his interview for secretary of state, the way that he introduced himself to Trump was, let me tell you about Vladimir Putin.
All right.
He's a serious guy, but he's a reasonable guy.
And I know him well.
And he's my friend.
And, you know, that reminds me of the time that it was Christmas and I was on his yacht in the Black Sea and he was saying to me, Rex, all I want is a little bit of respect.
OK, I've got a lot of hydrogen bombs.
My country's still equal to yours in that sense.
And I just want a president who will look me in the eye and not lie to me and treat me like a dog.
Does that seem reasonable to you?
And Tillerson is explaining to Trump that that's all they really don't want anything.
They're not.
He didn't even bring up the ridiculous idea that they were going to somehow invade Eastern Europe or some kind of thing that America had to help defend against.
He was just saying, look, man, the guy just wants a little bit of respect and that should be good enough for you, Mr. President.
And the way Woodward reports it, Trump says, yeah, that sounds reasonable to me.
That's what I already thought anyway.
So here's your high trees and, you know, and compromised Russian secret agents.
It's, you know, a man who you could characterize as the most powerful capitalist on the planet, telling Trump that we can do business with this guy.
Yeah, it's sad, really sad that with all the good intentions that Trump had at the beginning, there has been only a ratcheting up of the pressure and of the abuse of Russia in American foreign policy.
I read with great amusement this morning in the Financial Times, an opinion article, one of their more serious, or he thinks he's a serious journalist, in which he was explaining how the world's most key autocrats have lined up in support of the re-election of Trump.
And they had Erdogan there, of course, and he had Putin there.
And he was basing his remarks on Putin backing Trump by some comments from Bolton, from John Bolton.
That was the only so-called evidence that he could put into his article that Trump really likes Putin, and will back him in the election.
Of course, it is all this is rubbish.
But it's the level of the strategic thinking that you find every day in major media.
And it's terribly sad, because they're leading us into conflicts and into risks that they have no idea.
Right.
I mean, that's, again, I was a youngster in the days of the old Cold War.
But it seemed like there were people who knew a little bit more about what they were talking about in charge at the time there, where you can have your rhetoric.
But at the end of the day, we're going to make our decisions based on a more core set of things that we know to be true.
That might have just been because I was a kid still, and the adults seem like adults compared to me.
Well, there were certain ground rules, and they came out of the near disaster of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The end result was, you knew where the red lines were, and you didn't cross them.
Regrettably, in this new Cold War, there are no red lines.
And the possibility of infringing on what the other side considers to be its vital interests and triggering an unwanted war, those possibilities, regrettably exist today, whereas they did not exist when you were a kid.
Yeah, man.
Isn't that something?
The whole threat of world communism over the Red Army dissolved and pulled back 1000 miles east of where it had staked its claim.
And then, and here we are in the same position again, only now, who's the evil empire expanding through Eastern Europe and picking the fight?
Yeah.
Something else.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time again on the show.
I really do appreciate it a lot.
It was a pleasure, Scott.
Great stuff, as always.
Okay, guys, Gilbert Doctorow.
It's gilbertdoctorow.com for his great blog.
And his most recent book is Does Russia Have a Future?
And this one is at antiwar.com.
It's in the viewpoints there.
Provocative US air and sea maneuvers at Russia's borders.
All right, y'all.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5000 of them now going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
