Gilbert Doctorow discusses how the U.S. and Russia are testing each other's red lines in a bid to avoid Doomsday. Russia felt existentially threatened and thus needed to push back U.S. and NATO presence in Ukraine. The war is also existential for the U.S. Both sides seek to prolong the war. The most depressing thing is that everything Gilbert disliked about the Soviet Union has now moved to the United States.
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Geopolitics & Empire · Gilbert Doctorow: The U.S. & Russia Are Testing Each Other's Red Lines #341
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Website https://gilbertdoctorow.com
Transcript
Geopolitics & Empire:
Geopolitics & Empire is joined by Brussels based political analyst Gilbert Doctorow. Welcome to Geopolitics & Empire, Gilbert.
Gilbert Doctorow:
Thanks for having me.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I've been enjoying your work for many years, so it's a pleasure to finally speak with you and here on Geopolitics & Empire, I like to get right to the heart of the matter and jump straight into the fray and examine the existential issues and you've recently been writing about the coming existential threats. You discussed Russia revising their nuclear plans in light of fears the US via Ukraine targets Crimea and heartland Russia, these plans for sea counterstrikes against US military instillation in Europe and in the continental US using hypersonic missiles and you point out that a panelist on Russian TV for the threat of counterstrikes in Europe and the US to made public and explicit so that no one is in doubt about what to expect from the Kremlin. You also wrote that, "The Russians are stripping away the fiction of a proxy war and revealing the cobelligerent status of the US and its NATO allies in preparation for a kinetic war with NATO."
And your conclusion in your recent piece, freaking me out, you write, "Back in 1937, there were Jews in Berlin who decided they could ride out the storm and stay put, there were others that took the first boats out to England, to the US, to South America. All of us in the Northern Hemisphere now may be facing the same existential choice," and apart from what you've pointed out, I am seeing many similar signals, reports, and movements to back up what your possible vision of the future. And so could you give us your breakdown of the Ukraine war and this East versus West proxy war, which is basically a World War 3 scenario, could you tell us from your vantage point what's going on?
Gilbert Doctorow:
First of all, there is a lot of mirror imagery here between what the Russians are doing and the United States are doing. In the United States, they don't see this, there is a condescension towards Russia, a condescension towards most of the world, and in Washington, they cannot simply take in the fact that the Russians could be playing them the same way they think they're playing the Russians. What do I have in mind? Both sides have been playing what is commonly described as turning up the temperature on the frog in a pot. That is to say both sides have been doing baby steps, incremental escalation of the sort that they're testing the red lines of the other side and as for the United States, they don't see the Russians are doing this. But I assure you they are and what is behind it on both sides is a caution not to do something dramatic.
The Russians have from the very start, for a variety of reasons, have avoided the American way of war of shock and awe, devastating the enemy and then proceeding to clean up. Of course, that shock and awe and easy cleanup was done is in recent by the United States against third-rate military powers, whether it's Iraq or any of the smaller countries that the United States has devastated, and there've been many of them in the last 20 years, they were never peer to peer fights. What we see now in the case of Russia and Ukraine can be described as a peer to peer combat. Ukraine, after all, may be three times smaller than Russia, but none the less, it is packed with weapons and they had built over the last eight years very competently defense trenches and fortifications on the border, at the point of demarcation with the Donbas to ensure that they would be well protected in case the Russians came up to the line and started striking them.
So the Ukrainians have, what was called, the second largest military in Europe and the United States was very happy to pit them against the Russians or to provoke the Russians into attacking them very much as the United States hoped and nearly succeeded in destroying the Iranians and the Iraqis some time ago, feeding both sides, in that case with military aid, and letting them slaughter one another. And there the Russians didn't need any help with munitions and with equipment, they've be doing quite well on their own, thank you. But the Ukrainians were being fed every imaginable kind of destruction and support discipline by American and British primarily, instructors over a period. So you had the potential for a very dramatic fight between these two major European countries egged on by the United States.
And it has been widely assumed that the existential nature of the war pertained to Russia, after all this was stated by Vladimir Putin himself that Russia will come up and will fight for its national interests when it feels challenges in an existential way as the continuing arms deliveries due to Ukraine had been changing the security situation of Russia. In defacto, Ukraine had by the time of the outbreak it of this war achieved the equivalent of NATO status, NATO membership status in terms of the military support it had been receiving. So from the standpoint of Moscow, the need was there to turn back the American and NATO support for Ukraine to move back, to push back the American and NATO presence at its borders and to stymie the plans, which the Russians were well aware about, to install in Ukraine missile systems which could conceivably reach Moscow in seven, eight minutes and left no decision time for leaders in the Kremlin to take action, essentially giving the United States, and through Ukraine, a first strike capability on Russia.
So we know that from the Russian side this was, from the very beginning and before the beginning of this, went back to the discussions which Russia held with United States and with NATO in December of 2021. It was described as existential, but it has been assumed by most everyone that United States, this was a conflict of... it was optional, a conflict which would be played out by proxy, by cat's paw, the Ukraine being the cat's paw, and that at any time, United States could walk away from it. I have been reading some very interesting commentary by a French historian the last few days, which forces [inaudible 00:09:32] to persuade you and listeners to this program that the war is existential to the United States as well. And it's precisely for that reason that this conflict is so dangerous and runs the risk of escalating into a nuclear exchange.
The other fact that should be bought in as we try to size up what the conflict is and how it differs from what conflicts we've had in the past between, what used to be said, superpowers from the 1990s Russia was no longer a superpower, but Russia had remained a preeminent nuclear power, which is highly relevant to our considerations of will we survive or not this current conflict. There have been, since the start of the Cold War, a whole series of proxy wars. Everyone knows it's called a proxy war but people have short memories. The first proxy war in the Cold War was the Korean War. The war in Vietnam was a proxy war between the superpowers. In some ways the both sides came as close to being cobelligerents in that war as we see today with NATO supposedly holding back and crossing red lines to [inaudible 00:11:06]. But that's all how you want to read those red lines and how you want to understand the promises that the West has been giving to Ukraine.
Well [inaudible 00:11:19] there's a slight side remark, the Russians freely admit that in the Vietnam War they had pilots and jets fighting on the Vietnam side, they had navy fighting on the Vietnam side. So if we looked at what's the United States NATO are doing today in Ukraine, it is not greatly different from proxy wars that took place, including the Vietnam War. If you look at the wars in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war in Libya, the war in Syria, these all were described as proxy wars.
So what's different now and why should we be alarmed? The difference is that all of us preceding proxy wars Cold War 1 and in Cold War 2 were taking place in third countries. The present proxy war is taking place on the territory of the Russian Federation. Now there are some people they dispute that, but from the Russian standpoint, from the standpoint of Russian law, Crimea, the two Donbas republics now are regions of the Russian Federation. South Zaporizhzhia and Kherson [inaudible 00:12:45] these territories, formally part of the Ukraine, are not under Russian law, parts of the Russian Federation, and that is where the fighting is going on. So from a standpoint of the Russians,...
