The Duran Podcast - Cracks in the NATO Narratives and NATO Unity - Chas Freeman, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Cracks in the NATO Narratives and NATO Unity - Chas Freeman, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone. My name is Glenn Dyson, and today I will speak with Alexander Mercuris and Ambassador Chas Freeman. And, well, for those who are not familiar with Chas Freeman, he was the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He was also the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He worked with Kissinger to open China in the 70s. He worked with developing the European security architecture after the Cold War. Well, the resume is perhaps too long and impressive to go through everything, but it's a great pleasure to be speaking, again, with someone, well, such a political heavyweight. So I thank you again for taking time. I've actually done some dieting, and I've lost some weight, but I appreciate the thought.

So, well, I thought since the last time the three of us spoke, there's been great changes in Ukraine, the Middle East, also the wider world. And I think as a result, it appears that the NATO narrative, as well as NATO unity, appears to be cracking to some extent. And again, in the past, to argue that the coup in 2014, a NATO expansion provoked the Russian invasion was considered propaganda. Now, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg more or less admitted that this, well, explicitly admitted this is why Russia invaded in the past, you know, to suggest that Ukraine was losing

or that this was a proxy war was also dismissed as propaganda. Now it's widely accepted. It's also become common knowledge that the Minsk Agreement was sabotaged for seven years, also the tentative peace agreements in early 2022. And yeah, it even used to be controversial to argue that NATO aims to fight Russia with Ukrainians. But again, when Stoltenberg recently visited, the US to sell the idea of continuing this losing war. His main pitch was, you know, this is a good way of weakening, degrading the Russians, and also it's great for American arms manufacturers. So to some extent, parroting what other leaders in Washington have said. And of course, when it comes to issues such as Nord Stream, it's simply no longer any narrative, it seems.

Yes, there's attempt now in Washington to blame the Ukrainians for the attack. So without any good narrative, we simply stopped speaking about it. But nonetheless, this fear of losing control over the narrative is, I guess, was very evident, especially with the panic over the Tucker Carlson interview of President Putin, which was denounced as propaganda before it was even released, which was interesting. But I would say maybe nothing new came out of this, but for many Westerners, it was perhaps their first exposure to the arguments from the other side. So, I thought we could start with this, Ambassador Freeman. What was your main takeaway from this interview with Putin?

Well, of course, Tucker Carlson claims, perhaps correctly, that he'd been trying to get this interview for three years, but that it was sabotaged by American intelligence agencies who hacked his email and leaked the information to the New York Times, which spooked the Russians and had them canceled the interview either earlier arranged. I think that's an interesting backstory. The main impact of the interview, of course, is that it's broken through the border fence that we erected against any contact with the much demonized Mr. Putin.

And anyone who watched the interview saw a man very much in command of his intellect with an encyclopedic memory, perhaps not the most brilliant performer on attention deficit media like television, but still a very impressive performance overall. And I think the interview has had several, at least 200 million views now. So it's clear that it has broken the taboo of hearing the other side's point of view. There were a number of points in it, some of which you mentioned, which were really very interesting, confirmations from Mr. Putin of things that others,

including German and Ukrainian and other Europeans, have confirmed about or Neftali Bennett's confirmation of the Turkish and Israeli, mediation five weeks into the war producing an agreement that was then sabotaged by Boris Yeltsin, presumably on behalf of an Anglo-American conspiracy of some sort. And so I thought it was very interesting and quite important. And it coincides with the fact that there is now increasing certainty that unless he dies from a cheeseburger or something before November, Mr. Trump is likely to be re-elected president. He has very different views of what the transatlantic relationship

should be than Mr. Biden, who is very much in the mold of a cold warrior. So I thought it was very interesting and quite impactful. I would agree. Can I just make two quick points? I was Reading today, the first actual discussion of the content of this interview in the British media, which was written by a journalist called Charles Moore, not someone perhaps very well known in the United States, but he's a very influential journalist. He's been editor of the spectator and of the Daily Telegraph, and he's a well-known journalist from the conservative view. He was very impressed by Putin.

I mean, this is, I mean, he's very critical of Putin, very hostile to Putin, but he spoke about Putin being completely in command of his facts, giving an accomplished account of, you know, the things he wanted to say. He said it was boring in places. He made all the usual criticisms, but it was clear that he was very, very impressed by the interview. But going back to the interview itself, there was two things about it. that Putin was returning to continuously, that really, I felt he was wanting to convey. Firstly, he does not blame himself for the breakdown in relations with the West. As far as he's concerned, he very much wanted a good relationship, above all with the United States. And he was talking about that, I thought, a great length and giving lots of detail. Perhaps more interestingly, going forward, it seems to me that in spite of everything, Putin is still prepared to reach out and sit down with the Americans and talk about things, provided they're prepared to do so.

He's much more doubtful and skeptical now than he was, but I thought overall he's still prepared to do it. he still says to himself, this is a relationship, and a relationship that is too important in the long term to allow emotions to, you know, my own feelings to get in the way of trying to come to some sort of, you know, compromises or understandings on the key issues. At least that was my thought. I mean, I don't know what others think about that.

I thought he came across as rational, in command of the facts, capable of and engaged in strategic reasoning. I don't think it's a surprise that Mr. Putin, early in his tenure in office, like Mr. Yeltsin before him, wanted to become part of European, a transatlantic world. It was very revealing to hear the discussion of his discussion with Bill Clinton about joining NATO. That was a time when it was possible that the Partnership for Peace, which I had something to do with designing, was going to transform NATO into a pan-European cooperative security organization. And Russia was clearly signaling its willingness to be part of that. Now, to me, as a distant student of European history, not an European at all, my ancestors,

some of them were here 20,000 years ago on the other side of the Atlantic, and the Freeman's arrived in 1620 after a scandal in London. Anyway, and a convenient religious conversion, I should add. So I think as a distant student of European history, it seems to me that European peace does depend on an organic relationship, particularly between Germany and Russia. Germany now at the center of NATO and Russia, unfortunately, now severed from its European role once again, as was done after World War I with the Bolshevik revolution with tragic results. So I think Mr. Putin was very consistent in arguing for some sort of Russian role in the management of European affairs of a peaceful nature. And indeed, he reminded us without explicitly saying so, that this war began as a response to the refusal of NATO and the United States, particularly Mr. Blinken, the Secretary of State. to sit down and have any kind of talk about either Ukrainian neutralization or broader European

security architecture that would be non-threatening to Russia as well as to others. And it was the refusal to talk that left Mr. Putin with the option of using force, which he did. So I think it's all very consistent. And I'm not sure to what extent anyone in the West after the absolute avalanche of household propaganda we've suffered from, has an open mind on this. But I think anyone who does have an open mind would conclude that the reaction from Washington and Mr. Stoltenberg that we won't sit down and talk with Mr. Putin is very wrongheaded, and it's just going to result in a lot more dead Ukrainians.

and further, rather than further isolation and weakening of Russia, further reorientation of Russia toward the east and south, and further strengthening of Russia militarily and economically. So I thought this was, as I said, quite impactful. If anyone who listens, of course, immediately, going back to Tucker Carlson's claim that he was blocked from the interview by U.S. intelligence, for years. Immediately, as Glendison mentioned, even before the interview was aired, it was dismissed as propaganda. Well, it takes the propagandists to recognize one, I suppose.

But also, I guess, to some extent, drew a link between the failure of establishing a pan-European security architecture and the war, because I think that fact was, it has been long. lost on many because I brought it up myself when giving various speeches that both Yeltsin and Putin actually suggested that they could join NATO once it became evident that OSCE would effectively be non-functioning or not have the role at least as a pan-European security architecture institution after the decision was made to expand NATO instead, making NATO the main one. And again, once they got the cold shoulder there, of course they, you know, from 2010 to 2008, you know, several times they attempted to put forward the idea of negotiating some kind of

a common European security architecture, but every time they were rebuffed. And as both American and Russian officials have suggested throughout these years is, well, what's going to happen when we reach Ukraine? This is really, again, as Willie Burns said, this is the reddest of the red lines. once we cross this, we might have conflict. And again, I thought it was quite helpful to put that into our context. Because I heard people assume it was a conspiracy theory that they asked, even though it's well documented.

One has to ask why Ukraine, which is the poorest and most corrupt European country, why the Russians propping up Ukraine as a neutral country with an economic link, to both east and west and serving as a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe was not in our interest. I think it was very much in our interest. And what I think is happening now is the reduction of Ukraine to a rump state. It has already lost considerable territory, which is not coming back. And those who have conferences in Kiev in which they talk about recovering Crimea for Ukraine and bringing the Russian speakers back into under subordination to Ukrainian speakers are wildly delusional.

So I think we need to go back to basics here. And I would say that since NATO has become an issue with Mr. Trump saying various things about it, consistent with these earlier statements, but more extreme perhaps, I think it's important to remember that, at least from the American point of view, NATO has a number of merits, which argue for its perpetuation. One is that, to be honest, from an American point of view, left unto their own devices Europeans in the 20th century on three different occasions. mess things up to the extent that we had to cross the Atlantic to rectify the balance. That was the case in World War I, it was the case in World War II,

and arguably it was the case in the Cold War, although we had a good deal to do with the imbalance in that case. So the lesson is that from an American point of view that Europe and America are part of a single geopolitical zone, and we need to keep our hand in Europe. That's point one, point two. Keeping our hand in in Europe is very useful to Europeans because it submerges an otherwise dominant Germany

in a larger constellation and provides some balance. And third, there is a reason for balance between Russia and Western Europe, and we can supply that. Those are all positives. There are others. NATO is the only institution that ever developed an effective software, if you will, doctrine for managing true multinational military operations. The Warsaw Pact never did that.

The Eastern European auxiliaries of the Red Army were just that. They were not full participants. And the architecture that NATO developed the 3,000 standardization agreements, which enable Alexander a Greek to cooperate with a Turk, even though there's no love loss between the two, and perhaps different languages. This is a very precious legacy, which is valuable on a global level.

So all those are good things to preserve NATO. What is not a good thing is NATO as an instrument of American egemony in Europe. And what Mr. Trump is saying, as a populist is that there are arguments for a different American relationship with Europeans and with NATO in general. And I don't think that argument should be dismissed out of end. I'll stop here. Can I ask a question here, which is about Russian attitudes to NATO? Because there's a sort of widespread view that the Russians are straightforwardly hostile to NATO.

I have never come across a statement by a single Russian official which say that they want NATO to be dismantled. They don't want NATO on their border. But why would the Russians want to see NATO and the United States withdraw completely from Europe and the Europeans left to themselves, given that Russian European relations have not always been easy. I mean, the Russians were involved in the two world wars. There have been other wars that they involved them as well. I mean, maybe I'm going too far now, but there might be risks that there might be a serious German rearmament, perhaps extending to nuclear weapons.

I've been, that was, I think, talked about it one time, you know, by Adonauer and others. Surely the Russians would not want to see that. From their perspective, this is, you know, my own view. I mean, I may be wrong here. But their optimal arrangement would be an understanding with the United States and with NATO there, but not on their own borders and their security. respected. That's a good summary, I think, of what Mr. Putin demanded in the fall of 2022, sorry, 2021, and which was rebuffed. But I think the issue of the Russian-German

relationship remains of great concern to Moscow. And for many reasons, they share an interest with Europeans of having Germany submerged in a larger architecture and not having nuclear weapons. And I think the fact that Russia argued not for the, of course, they demanded a rollback of U.S. deployments into Eastern Europe. But I think that was a talking point. The main focus was on not having Ukraine added to the American sphere of influence in Europe. and not having American troops on their border. And I don't think they particularly object to the Baltics in that regard, because the Baltics are amends to know one, really.

But it is what the Russians will see rationally depends on what they're presented with. And at the moment, they've not been presented with any vision consistent with the one you've just outlined, Alexander. I think it's more helpful to look at it, as you suggested, because often I think these issues get to polarize. Either NATO is all bad or it's all good, because I think the key challenge after the Cold War was, well, reforming it, if you will, to make it, to draw on the benefits, preserve them without, well, going down the direction we did. because I think the key problem is by beginning to expand NATO, and, well, we call it European integration, but effectively what we did, we told every country between NATO and Russia, if we choose between us or them,

moving the borders to the east, we're expanding our security at the expense of them. I think this was the key problem and also the transition. I think a lot of what gave NATO some stability as well during the Cold War was it was a status quo military block. But after the Cold War, it largely became revisionist when it began to expand, but also attacking countries such as Yugoslavia, which is called Out of Area missions. And so I agree with what Alexander said. I don't think Russians demanded that NATO had to be dismantled, simply that it shouldn't be an instrument against Russians. So I think this is why both Yeltsin and Putin suggested, you know, they could join NATO, then it wouldn't be an instrument against them. Or in 2008, when President Medvedev proposed this new security architecture, he even said,

you can keep NATO, but let's just have an overarching structure which we belong. And this was also a key issue at the end of 2013 when a lot of NATO countries were destabilizing Ukraine. At that point, the Russians and the Ukrainians came together. They actually proposed to the Europeans, let's make this a trilateral agreement. Let's have Ukraine as a bridge, not as a... as a border, we can have a deal where it's not a zero-sum game, not us or them. And that was the Europeans who said, absolutely not. Ukraine has to change, choose.

This is a civilizational choice, you know, civilization or the barbarians, effectively. So I think this is the main weakness, if you will, of NATO, that it never transitioned out of this block mentality. But I would agree, there's a lot of things we should. should preserve from this. The Turks and the Greeks, for example, having them together at the same table. Yeah, not a bad arrangement. So the question is, from the Russian point of view, is NATO a collective security organization aimed at Russia, or is it a management, is it a Council of Europe, concert of Europe instrument for the management of peace in Europe?

if it's the latter, which is what I think Mr. Yeltsin, certainly, in embracing the partnership for peace, wanted Mr. Putin tried to follow up on in the beginning, then I think you have a very different picture. We have successfully, however, demonized both the Russians and Mr. Putin, and it's clear that we have taken the Ukrainians into war with the Russia of our imagination rather than the Russia that exists. So there's the problem. Putin said that he's open to talks. Is there any possibility of talks between the United States?

And this is a point where actually I'd be particularly curious for any observations that you might have ambassador. because he spoke about his interactions with American presidents. The fact that he came to what he thought were understandings with them, with Bill Clinton about NATO membership, with George W. Bush on the situation in the Northern Caucasus. And what then happened, according to Putin, is that in effect, those presidents found that they couldn't work out, They couldn't push through or didn't want to push through the kind of understandings that Putin thought that he'd made with them.

And this has made him very cynical, it seems to me, about the whole position of the president of the US system. And he seems to say that, well, ultimately the president isn't really in charge. Other people are. The bureaucracy is. The elites are. There has to be a fundamental change. Is this really true? because the American system, the political system, it seems to me, is constructed to a great extent

around the president, who is the chief executive. And presidents in the past have been able to make a difference. Could a president make a difference again, a new president? Not necessarily, Mr. Trump, by the way. I think so, although I have to say that we are in the midst of a prolonged constitutional crisis in every sense. Our system is dysfunctional at the moment. One might argue that our president is senile, and there's a lot of visual evidence for that. And Mr. Trump is certainly a wild card. In connection with nature, I want to say a word or two about Trump's position and why it has the resonance it does in the United States. I think there are two sorts of people who see something constructive in Trump's position

that he won't honor Article 5 unless Europeans pay up. Of course, he has a completely misguided and mistaken view of what NATO is all about in terms and how it works financially and otherwise. But his basic point does resonate with populist sentiment. Americans ask, you know, after 75 years, why in Europe being wealthy and having a larger GDP than us and a larger population and spending four or five times as much on defense as the Russians, the designated enemy, why is it that we have to fund European defense? And I think that's not an unreasonable question.

And it's not unreasonable among other things, because if you analyze what we've been doing, what we've been doing is saying, Europeans, you must spend more and do more in your own defense. But if you don't, we'll come and do it for you. And that deprives Europeans, has deprived Europeans, until recently of any incentive to boost self-defense capability, whether collectively or individually.

That has changed, mainly as a result of fear of American lack of resolve, unreliability, erratic behavior under Mr. Trump, who, as I suggested, is very likely to be reelected, it appears. Sofea has driven Germany to double its budget, supposedly, and others, Poland, to produce really quite a formidable defense establishment, and others to boost defense also. And it has brought now Finland and Sweden into NATO. So this is, the legacy of American erratic behavior is a stronger. European defense impulse. So that's the first point. The second point is there are those in the United States who are not populists, but strategic thinkers, who imagine that a more effective,

efficient, and appropriate, politically appropriate arrangement would be for the United States to be the backup to European balance conducted mainly by Europeans. And those who argue for this might come to the logical conclusion, given the merits of NATO that I mentioned, that NATO should be Europeanized, that the Supreme Commander in NATO should be a European, not an American, and that America's role should be supportive rather than leading, and that Europeans should be responsible primarily for European affairs. That would tie into the possibility of a pan-European cooperative security system. It would backstop that.

This discussion is not going on very much because Mr. Trump's premises basically remind one of the stopped clock that is right twice a day. The reasons for he's taking the positions he is are quite mistaken, and yet he's on to something, probably, both at the level of populist sentiment and at the level of strategic reasoning.

So your question, Alexander, can a president make a difference, may well be answered as people try to make sense of what Mr. Trump has put forward, which he himself is probably incapable of doing. It's reminded when, because I heard Putin speak about this more than once, because he met so many U.S. presidents in his very long presidency. And it reminds me sometimes about Milton Friedman's tyranny of the status quo, that, you know, if you want to make big change, You have to do it immediately because if you wait too long, the bureaucracy, if you will, it will take over. But I also had the same thought about Trump, though, because it seems to me that his main concern was the lack of return on investment, if you will, because if you look at, well, his view on NAFTA or the TPP in Asia, you know, he would mine a trade agreement in either, you know,

Americas or in Asia where America could write the trade rules. But if that means U.S. leadership vis-vis China's good, but if it means transferring competitive advantage to allies, then it would be a negative thing. So I think, but again, he had liked how he framed it. Okay, right twice a day. He seemed to stumble into this, which had a wider appeal. And I guess it could also help the Europeans would have a greater role in security. it would be less, NATO would be less of a hegemonic instrument,

which would make it less anti-Russian as well. But beyond Trump possibly coming in and wrecking NATO, do you see any other possible cracks emerging? Well, I think the neo-conservatives are taking some hard knocks as we speak. And they have been very much the intellectual inspiration for disastrous policies, not just in Ukraine, but in the Middle East, and I would argue with regard to China. Mr. Trump is, I would say, an economic moron, just to put it clearly, has no understanding whatsoever of basic economics, and it's very much involved, thinks of everything in terms of

a zero-sum game when economics by definition is not zero-sum. So I think he will indeed be a wrecking ball, and he has unfortunately got quite a number of equally lunatic followers who have been preparing to help him wreck things. So his second term, he will be more empowered by political appointees than he was in the first term. And it's clear that he has a grip on the Republican Party, which has become a kind of cult. It's no longer a broad-based political party. Who else is out there on the horizon?

I see Kamala Harris declaring that she's ready to serve. I don't think anyone wants her to serve. And they, I don't see a clear leadership ahead. So I think, you know, we're going into an election in November, which appears likely to be a choice between someone who is in essence, if not senile, and incompetent, and also has got us into numerous forever wars, versus someone who's a very unstable,

non-genious. So this is a choice that is not welcome. And you can see the number of people deserting the two established parties growing up, independence emerging as the major block in our voting system. This is what happened in the 1850s, preceding our civil war, but also preceding the reorganization of our politics and the emergence of a third party, the republic party with an anti-slavery platform. I think it's entirely possible that we could see a third party emerged with an anti-war platform. If you look at the reactions to the genocide in Gaza, then you see, particularly among young

people with intellectual pretensions, a great deal of outrage. They don't want to be, they condemn Mr. Biden. he's beginning to squirm and he's leaked that he's been very annoyed with Mr. Netanyahu, but he hasn't done anything, so that's clearly a political stance or posture rather than anything serious. So this is, you know, a train wreck waiting to help him. And out of train racks come new arrangements. So I don't know. But I don't see any leader on the horizon that can grip all these things.

We have a generation of leaders who are militarily illiterate, have no concept of diplomatic history. Our foreign policy is now almost entirely diplomacy-free. We regard bombing as the principal form of communication with other nations. I mean, in fact, if you read what's being said about, you know, bombing Yemen and bombing in various pro-Iranian groups scattered around the Middle East, you know, that's exactly what people are saying. We're sending them a message. Well, it might be cheaper and more effective to sit down and talk with them, but we don't

believe in that anymore. And I think the Ukraine thing is discrediting this approach. so is the unfolding tragedy in Gaza. So, and I believe the same dynamic is playing out with China, but that's a different discussion. What you seem to be saying, if I understood this, is that we're in drift. We are drifting both in Ukraine and in the Middle East, and certainly in Ukraine. I have to say this. I mean, I've been looking at the situation in Ukraine, you've both and our own.

I do my programs every day. I look at the situation. I do think any person who is looking at the situation closely now has any real expectations any longer that Ukraine is going to win this war. The only question is how bad and complete the defeat is going to be and what the outcome in terms of a negotiated settlement that the Russians might seek might be. you would have thought that given that reality, people in Washington, especially, because that's the main capital, would be thinking about what to do in this situation and that they would be talking to the Russians about it and trying to find some way out and some way forward.

If only in order to preserve Ukraine itself, or at least to preserve something there. And there's nothing. Putin says, you know, I'm prepared to talk. All his Zelensky has to do is cancel this edict that he's made. And we got this message from the White House, I think it was to the Washington Postal, New York Times, U.S. official, well, you know, there need to be negotiations, but Mr. Putin clearly isn't interested in them.

So nothing. And the situation just deteriorates. Day after day, people die, more destructive. more death, more territory lost, more cities destroyed. It's drift, but it's dangerous and demoralizing drift. It's not only drift. Victoria Newland went to Kiev, and if I understand what she said and what she counseled, it was to start long-range strikes deep into Russian territory.

In other words, she doesn't care, despite her, Ukrainian heritage. She doesn't care about Ukrainians. She's in this as an anti-Russian move. And so I would say, Alexander, that you're absolutely correct. I sometimes wonder whether we have not come up with the world's first genuinely autistic government. You know, you kick us in the shins and we don't notice. Or maybe it's just solipsism. We think we can rearrange the world mentally. without doing anything. But in any way, in any rate, it's delusional. And it's a historical, and it is contrary to any good principle of statecraft. Just think in that context about the extent to which our policy has pushed China and Russia

into an embrace, which is an unnatural embrace in many ways. and how we have failed to come to grips with the rise of the rest, as Farid Zakaria, aptly put it, well, our relationship with India is quite self-contradictory at this point. So to go back to European security architecture, Iran country committed Brexit. which arguably has not strengthened Britain on a global level, contrary to the wild claims of those who advocated it. And I think there's now concern about exit, alternative for Deutschland, carrying out a German exit from the EU,

again, based on populist, reactions to immigration and other problems. in Europe. So this is the moment to go back to the train wreck. This is a moment when Europeans ought to be thinking about what happens when Mr. Trump is elected and does what he says he will do, which is in the first 24 hours, ends the war in Ukraine. He will have to end it on Russian terms because what's happened on the battlefield will determine what is possible at the negotiating table.

And what's happened on the battlefield is Ukraine has failed to reassert itself effectively against a more powerful Russia. And it's in a war of attrition that it can't win. So we've run out of Ukrainians with which to harass the Russians, basically. So what happens when there is a ramp Ukraine, possibly having lost its Black Sea coast entirely? This goes on long enough. What do we do about that? I think we'll be left with Mr. Putin's original demands. First, neutralization for Ukraine.

The second, protection for Russian speakers in Ukraine now. presumably under Russian rather than Ukrainian sovereignty. And third, an invitation to talk about security architecture in Europe, given the changed circumstances. Is Europe going to be ready for that? What is European Council to the United States going to be? There was always this wonderful metaphor of British Greeks advising American Romans, you know? where are the British Greeks these days?

Where are the wise men helping the neophytes at statecraft to work it out? I don't see it. So I think there is a challenge here, regardless of what happens in my country, there's a challenge for Europeans. Europe is much less than the part to some of its parts. And that is something that is, I think, injurious to Europeans. It's injurious to global balance. It's injurious to world peace.

And it needs to be redressed. What ideas do Europeans have for this? I don't hear too many. I think that's one of the takeaways from this interview by Tucker Carlson was, I think many people were surprised because, well, maybe they didn't know that Russia's been open for negotiations all along. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians had a law will have a law against action negotiating. But what was also very interesting is that the demands for Russia, they will incrementally increase.

And I don't think people appreciate how this conflict has spiraled out of control. Because again, before 2014, no one in Russia made any claims to Crimea. That was the result of the coup. And of course, in the seven years of the Minsk Agreement, what the Russians offered was, you know, we'll commit to Donbass should be reintegrated into Ukraine. And then, of course, after seven years of sabotaging it, that was off the table now, Donbass was for independence. I'm just wondering if we get it's longer.

Let me interrupt, because I think Mr. Pooke deserves some credit for not having moved the bullposts yet. Now, he probably will, but he has not done that, really. and therefore you can still refer to the original draft treaty that he put forward as a basis for discussion in December of 2021. So I think he may, as you said, as Ukraine falls back, Russia is likely to escalate its demands. is certainly going to be in a better bargaining position, and thus current trends are somehow reversed, which, as Alexander said, nobody expects. So I think, you know, he's been pretty consistent.

And the consistency is not the swimming at the mouse monster demonized Putin that we've been told is out there. I still receive enormous amount of material from the Ukrainian vilification industrial complex directed at denigrating Mr. Putin. Well, I don't have any fondness where I am either. I remember once in Beijing being invited to dinner by the head of the KGB there and having him examined me as the oh, I were a side of beef that he was about to cut up with a, you know, a scalpel. When Mr. Bush, George W., the shrub, not the bush, looked into Mr. Putin's eyes and saw his whole, I looked into his eyes and saw a KGB guy. I think he's pretty realistic, cynical,

manipulative, all those things. But that doesn't mean you can't do a deal with him. when it's in Russian interest. And I think Russian interests have been willfully mispertrayed. I think Mr. Putin is absolutely correct. He was asked, do you want to take Latvia? Do you want to, you know, march into Poland? And he said, no. And I think that is quite credible.

You know, it's not a little history, which he's clearly quite familiar with, required that kind of advance by Russian. Yeah, well, where was going with? It was we, well, we seem now to accept that Ukraine and NATO is losing this. So I'm just, if the losses then would imply, if we don't negotiate an end, this could end up Ukraine losing its entire Black Sea coastline. It seems, as Alexander suggested, did we, surely there's a time, we need an exit strategy at some point while we still have some negotiation power. I agree. I quite agree. You know, things are not going to get better. They're going to get worse, very likely.

And so if you care about Ukraine and Ukrainians or you care about European security, you want to bring this to an end. And we should be thinking about that. But there's not much evidence of much thought anywhere at this point. We're in the same position that we're in with Gaza. So we say, well, we're very dissatisfied of the way things are going, but we're not going to do anything to stop it. Could I just turn to the Middle East? Because, of course, it's a region you also know.

I mean, you were ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Putin has been recently to Saudi Arabia. I think I can remember a time when Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations. And in fact, they were on extremely bad terms to all appearances. Now he's very well received in the Gulf. The Saudis themselves seem to be annoyed with the United States. They issued a statement recently after Admiral Kirby made some comments about normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which I found uncharacteristic.

I mean, you're much more familiar with the Saudis than I am, but they always impress me as people who speak very softly about international relations. I may be wrong here. But it seemed to me an unusually strong statement coming from them. What have we done to lose the Saudis so completely? I mean, I say we, I mean, because the British also, I've had a strong relationship with the Saudis. But the Saudis seem to be looking at their region, looking at our policies.

And they're saying, well, it's time for us to make new friends, or at least so it looks to me from a distance. So one way of looking at what's happening on a broader level that unites Europe and the Middle East is that American degemony is in retreat. It is ending. And it's ending with the usual sort of unseemly rattles in the throat that people to have. when they die. So in the case of the Saudis, you know, they have lost confidence in the West. They are taking advantage of the collapse of the bipolar order and the unipolar order and the emergence of a new global disorder to do what other middle ranking powers are doing, namely assert their own interests independent of any patron.

This is something that has led them to drive for the diversification of their international relationships. Now, I mean, I made the point elsewhere that Saudis are Muslim, they can have four lives. They're not limited to one. And America's too big and fat and stuck in their bed. they can throw us out, but they can have other wives. And they're busily courting the Chinese, the Russians, and some Europeans, who have, Germany, for example, France has always had a role in Saudi Arabia. The Brits, of course, had a role and still do.

But they are reaching out to Brazil, among others. They're trying to patch up their relations with Turkey and other middle-ranking power. And so it's very clear that they see safety in the diversification of their international relationships. They just had a huge defense show in Riyadh, where the dominant presence was the Chinese, the first time ever. Now, whether that will result in concrete transactions of any consequence is a real question. about the Russians were there too, not rather modestly. And the U.S. influence has been undermined by a series of things, beginning with the U.S. glee at the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak,

which discredited our role as the protector of rulers. 9-11, which led to the consolidation of Islamophobia in the United States and a sense of American unreliability, a betrayal, if you will. And the fact that others are rising, the Chinese, the Russians are resurgent, and they've proven the Russians have become the go-to diplomatic power with the Chinese in the region. It was the Chinese, not the United States, that brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. It was the Russians who managed the crisis with so-called chemical weapons in Syria. And so the United States has lost clout, influence, leverage, and the Gaza War is now destroying what remained of that. since the United States is clearly intervening in the Red Sea against an avowed Yemeni, the de facto government in Yemen, which is the Houthis,

effort to conduct the world's first land-based sea blockade of a genocidal Israel. And so the war is spreading. The United States keeps saying Admiral Kirby, who resembles no one, so much as the famous Baghdad Bob, who claimed that nothing was happening while we were invading Iraq, has no credibility, really. This is a retreat. Now, it is there not a retreat in military terms where there, but it's a demonstration of the inefficacy and the limits on military power.

Military power can decide a few things, but they are just a few. It has to be coupled to a political strategy, and it has to be managed with diplomacy, or it doesn't produce anything. That is the lesson of the communication through bombing rather than dialogue. And so I think in the end, for those of you who are, I think Glenn Dies and you're a famous academic, this will give you much to study. and many new books to publish about the ineptitude of Western statecraft and some lessons that are to be learned. And I'm hopeful that like the famous mule in Kentucky, that, or sorry, Missouri, the Missouri mule, which is box and fails to understand everything until it's hit on the head with a two by four, we will wake up. with a concussion and rethink things with help from academics. Well, on the topic of retreat, given all this attacks on the US troops in Syria and Iraq,

and also in Iraq, they're voting yet again, were voted already, to ask the foreign troops to leave Iraq. Do you see this as being realistic? or do you, well, I don't want you looking at crystal ball, but what would be your main expectation? Do you think the U.S. will pull out of Syria and Iraq, or will they dig in? I think we'll have to, but I think we will not like it, and we will resist, as we have been doing. It's very clear from that Iraqis don't want us there anymore, and our presence there is in part, as it is in Jordan, with the entire 22 base directed at the vivisection of Syria, which is an Israeli interest that apparently we have embraced. So we have an illegal troop presence in Syria. It's not there

with the permission of the Syrian government or under any international egos. It's entirely unilateral. And we even bomb once in a while. as the Israelis do almost daily. So, no, I think we will be forced out of that little corner of the world. And I note again, Mr. Trump, through his credit, wanted us to get out. And he was essentially vetoed by what some call the deep state, which is the neocon-infested political leadership that he installed at the head of American agencies.

You talk to American military officers, for the most part. They don't want to get into a war with Iran. They don't particularly like what we're doing with Yemen. They don't see the cost-benefit analysis working out and so forth. And they're uncomfortable with their presence in Syria. And they don't like to be in a country where they're not welcome. So, but we have a political leadership which insists on American primacy everywhere. And that is being shattered.

The primacy is being shattered. And eventually those who advocate it will have to come to grips with that. One last comment from me. I'm basically done. But about the Middle East, again, one of the things that I always remember, I mean, going all the way back, my memory stretches back to the 70s time when you were working with, I think in the Nixon administration. But at that time, the United States was always coming up with plans for the Middle East, plans to try and secure Middle East peace. I can remember Kiersinger flying backwards and forwards from one capital to another.

the United States was always trying to find some kind of resolution to the underlying problems of the Middle East. And they always understood, or so it seemed to me at that time and since, that they always understood the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, at its center. I don't get anything like that sense today. It's as if a policy, decision-making has been contracted out to Prime Minister Netanyahu, which seems to me a most strange state of affairs. And how has that come about? Well, I think you must remember that the Kissinger shuttle diplomacy and other efforts,

which I think were sincere to make peace, Jimmy Carter's effort at Camp David, which produced a peace between. not a cold peace, but a peace between Egypt and Israel, and relieved Israel of the need to defend itself against the Egyptian threat. All these things took place in the context of U.S.-S.-S.-Soviet rivalry, and the driver behind the sincere effort to make peace was to eliminate what it was perceived as an opportunity for malign behavior by the Soviet Union. Now, the Cold War ended. The Soviet Union defaulted on the contest for global hegemony.

And the United States experienced a period of unilateralism, unipolar moment it was called, in which we imagined we were omniscientom and invulnerable and all those things. We failed to deal with the lesson of 9-11, which is that if you bond, people, they'll find a way to bomb back, even if they don't have, you know, advanced aircraft. And we saw passenger aircraft converted into cruise missiles. So we didn't take that less than aboard. But sometime in the Clinton administration, the United States succumbed to two phenomena. One was, or maybe three, during the Cold War, there was a famous statement by President Kennedy, who said, if I make a mistake in domestic policy, it can embarrass me.

But if I make a mistake in foreign policy, it could kill us all. And there was a sense of the gravity of foreign affairs to disappear during the moment the period of American apparent omnipotence. And foreign policy became a discretionary activity. You could either have it or not. Second, in that context, we applied to foreign policy, the venal model we have applied to domestic policy. Namely, we enfranchise whatever interest group is most vocal on the issue, and able to deliver the most votes.

And in the case of the Middle East, that's the Israel lobby. So just as the, Glenn, I'm sorry to say, the Save the Wells lobby got the Norway for a while. But, you know, and the Greek lobby got Cyprus and the China was a coalition of lobbies of one sort or another, but the Middle East became the sole prerogative of the Israel lobby. And we saw this in action with Mr. Netanyahu's defiance of the president and his address. to Congress, where there was widespread coutowing to, I should say, domestic American donors to campaigns. So that happened.

And third, I think one of the consequences of the Cold War, I've argued elsewhere, is that we lost the capacity to think strategically because we had a grand strategy devised by George Kennan called containment. And the idea was, if you wall off the Soviet Union, it will eventually die of its own deficiencies. Its own demerits will bring it down, which is actually what happened. But by the time it happened, we forgot what containment was all about. And we thought it was a military strategy rather than a political military strategy or an economic strategy. Anyway, so we lost a capacity to reason strategically. You also lost diplomatic vocabulary distinctions. Anybody who cooperates with us as an ally. Well, historically an ally is someone who has an obligation

to you, and you have an obligation to them, and there's mutual commitment, and it's fairly unconditional or it's defined in a treaty. It's different from an Entente, which is a limited partnership for limited purposes, perhaps for a limited time. We've, forgotten all these distinctions. And we seem to now believe that the world is organized around two things. One, ideological contests between autocracy and democracy, which is not irrelevant, but which is hardly the organizing principle of global affairs, and great power rivalry. This is the very moment that, as we were discussing, countries like the Saudis or the French or others, middle-ranking Turkey or Russia, arguably resurgent, are more assertive.

And the world is more complex. It is not a simple rivalry between the United States and China or the United States and Russia or whoever. It's much more complex. It's a shifting kaleidoscopic geopolitical picture. But we don't see that. We cling to the old views because they're comfortable. We thought we won the Cold War. And so why not win the next war by doing the same thing?

Well, a one-trick pony is not a very successful animal. And that is, I'm afraid, what we've become. So that's my answer to you on Middle East, but also I think on European affairs. We need to rediscover basic principles of statecraft and reintegrate diplomacy with with the military and rethink trade policy because there is now a great deal of handwringing in the United States about the demise of our shipbuilding capacity and the collapse

of naval construction in relation to China. I think I saw one figure that Chinese have three or five commercial ships under construction. I mean, sorry, we do, three or five, and they have 1700. And there's just no comparison. Well, why is this? It is because of protectionist measures, which began in the 1920s, including the Jones Act, which prohibited foreign-made ships from being used between American ports into context to the Panama Canal.

That was pretty important. And it killed the shipbuilding industry. So, and yet we're about to embark on further protectionism. We're promised a 60% global tariff on imports if Mr. Trump went. He somehow thinks foreigners pay tariffs, not consumers in the United States. Anyway, I did describe him as an economic moron. I will stand by that. You have a final, just the last question.

I was curious if you have any, well, prediction or expectations. what might happen in Europe because you talked about the Americans becoming too comfortable and one-trick pony, but I feel the same applies to Europe. When there's instability, there seems to be this instinct to run into the embrace of the United States. But again, this is at the same time as the Europeans are not quite comfortable with the genocide being supported in Gaza. No one's very comfortable with going off to Iran or China,

but at the same time, Europe is becoming one big front line now, it seems. We're cutting ourselves off from China, Russia, de-industrialization, economic decline. Yet there's this impulse that the familiar and the comfortable is if we just go into our line system. And in this country, specifically in Norway, it's quite shocking. At least during the Cold War, we had no base policy. Now we're handing over a ton of bases to the United States with sovereign control, even though they have objective or challenging the Russians and the Arctic, which is not necessarily in Norway's interest. And all of this, betting everything, the whole house on the partnership with the US, at the same time, the media is telling us, well, in a few months, Trump may take the election and he's the new Hitler.

So there doesn't seem to be much of a coherent plan going forward. and, of course, a huge absence of any reasonable debate. And I see this across Europe. There's a bit of a difference. Europe is, from my perspective, I have to say, I always considered European discussions of the new European man and other interesting ideas, the equivalent of sticking your head in the oven,

turning on the gas. I mean, it was quite soporific by any standard. And Europe doesn't seem to have gotten over this. Europe is at a moment comparable to that in the history of my own country after our war of independence when we had the Articles of Confederation, a very weak union, which didn't work. And fortunately, we had quite brilliant leadership at the time. and which we don't know, I'm sorry to say. And we rose to the occasion and created a federal system, which worked very well for 200-some years.

It's now becoming a bit of a problem where we're back with nullification by Texas of federal government decisions. So Europe has failed to transform itself, and in fact, it has had been. has been diverted by terrible issues like immigration, illegal immigration, the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean and from the Middle East. Europe, of course, the United States and Europe had something to do with destabilizing these regions.

The intervention in Libya comes to mind. The intervention in Syria comes to mind. But the intervention in Iraq comes to mind. The intervention in Afghanistan comes to mind. And yet, so we have an Italian government that is quite out of step with other Europeans. I'm not quite sure what is going on in France. It's very puzzling. Britain has conducted its exit from the EU with a lot of unresolved issues hanging over the relationship.

And Germany is in a populist mood. And I must say I was quite surprised by the Norwegian change on basing policy. Because I always felt that Norway was quite sensible, part of NATO, very much part of the West, willing to allow exercises on its territory, but not any permanent presence. That made a great deal of sense. The same with the Finns. but these things are now changing, and we'll have to deal with the consequences of that. Again, I don't think you'll find answers in the United States.

Just as the United States didn't find an answer in Great Britain to the failure of the Confederation. So, I don't know, you're Europeans. Get your act together. Great advice. Very good advice. Difficult to do. I mean, you talk about the political crisis in the United States. We have a similar, I think, institutional political leadership crisis in Europe at the moment,

which I think is profound, and seems to be universal right across Europe. And difficult in some ways to understand why it's happened, and very difficult to resolve. But anyway, that's my... last comment and perhaps good advice for us to listen to here in Europe as well. I can say bunch of chance. Good luck. Thank you very much.