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Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon. I'm Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they occur in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historical context in which most events take place. During each episode of this podcast, my guests and I will have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between current events and the broader historic context in which they occur. This will enable you to better understand and analyze the events that impact the global village in which we live. On today's episode, we will discuss the recent belt and road form for international cooperation. Recently, over 500 people were killed as a result of an Al Ali Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza. And the US has provided Ukraine long range attack s missiles for insight into this. Let's turn to my guest. He's a Moscow based international relations and security analyst, mark Sloboda. Mark, let's connect some dots.

Pleasure to on connecting the dots.

So Russian President Putin recently went to Beijing to participate in the third Belt and Road forum for international cooperation. Mark, how significant was this meeting?

Yeah, so I think that this meeting was significant for a number of reasons. First, for President Putin on a personal situation, it is the first time that he has left Russia since the Wess pushed international criminal court charged Vladimir Putin with the crime of helping families and caretakers in East Ukraine move their own children out of the range of Kiev regime artillery that had been bombing them for the last 10 years, also known as abducting children, which evidently is a crime when Russia does it in a time of conflict, but is not a crime when the US does it, when they move thousands of children out of Afghanistan and many thousands of children out of Vietnam in a previous generation of conflict. But besides that, the Russian Chinese relationship bilaterally, I think is probably the most important bilateral relationship for both countries. And both presidents seem to have a good working relationship, often described as a friendship and a deep understanding with each other.

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Just asked Olaf Schultz in Germany that question you mentioned each time gee and Putin get elected, we keep hearing from Western narrative, particularly from Biden authoritarians, authoritarians G is an authoritarian, Putin is an authoritarian, can just briefly explain the fact that they're elected, they don't control their elections. They have different electoral processes than we do. They have different democratic constructs than we have, but that doesn't mean that they're authoritarian.

Yeah, I mean this is a label that is tapped on essentially to any country now that lies outside of US-led western global hegemony that does not align itself and does not meet the West's self-reflective standard of what democracy looks like. And it really, it is a way of exerting moral superiority. The idea that we are both morally and systemically superior than those people over there who are our adversaries in a different time. It was communists of course, and there have been other labels in history and certainly labels are applied to the Western countries. They are imperialists. They are hegemons. This is a standard othering device. I live in Russia, I immigrated to Russia from the United States, and I have lived here for most of two decades. And I have to be honest, after having some experience as a volunteer for the US Democratic Party, I find that politics in Russia on a whole is no more or less substantive than the democratic nature beneath the sheets of politics in the United States. I don't want to go out of the way to make it seem like it's a democratic utopia or anything like that far from it. But on a whole, knowing the warts inside and out of political systems in US and Europe and now Russia, I think that over in a general context that they're expressed themselves roughly equally. There is

Politics plus they also reflect the intricacies of their cultures. And so I was having a conversation with some folks a couple of days ago and I said they were, oh, well G is an authoritarian. And I said, well, I've seen polls from Harvard and Princeton and some other western universities that show like 96% of Chinese people like their government. And I think it was 87% of Russians polled like their government support government. So if it's working for them, then who in the world am I to say that it's not good, it's not right, or what we have is better. I know Joe Biden would love to see 60% approval rating, let alone 96% approval rating.

Yeah, I think not only approval of the current government, but I've seen similar polls that asking peoples of different countries whether they think they live in a democracy and quite overwhelmingly, certainly over the 50% margin, the people of Russia feel they live in a democracy and certainly the people in China do as well to an even greater degree. Again, it doesn't look like western liberal democracy, but perhaps you could consider it of a more technocratic bureaucratic nature. But as you point out, there is a thousand multi-thousand year history of Chinese bureaucratic constructs that they are laying their future and their choices on top of. Meanwhile, in the United States, people generally feel that they don't live in a democratic system, that their government is not responsive to their needs and interests. And you could say that that is, oh, I mean all the people in Russia and China are ignorant.

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You are absolutely right. I've been to Iran twice and was very blessed to lecture at probably somewhere between 10 and 15 universities throughout the country. And as I traveled throughout Iran, I was amazed at how well informed the questions that these students asked me. They were right on it, man, in terms of an understanding of the politics of the moment. And again, the questions that they asked me were spot on. It indicated that they were going beyond the rhetoric, they were going beyond the talking points. And it was shocking to me how well-informed in spite of the wall that you talk about in terms of the internet, they were on point, man.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that this label is applied to adversaries like Russia and China, Russia, which has opposition parties and elections. They don't do very good right now because since the economic catastrophe of the nineties, I think the Russian population has been more united in their political vision of a path out of that and forward and retaking what they see as their place in the world after the self dissolution of the Soviet Union. That will not last forever. And a lot of people question whether it will last after Putin at all. But there is opposition political structures. The biggest opposition political party in Russia is the communist party of the Russian Federation, which polls generally somewhere around 15% of the population. And in foreign policy, it must be said, they largely agree with the current government of Vladimir Putin, but in domestic issues, they constantly fight for the Duma for things that leftist parties always fight for, more social benefits, more spending on education and medicine and other things. And if anything, I think probably the communists would probably, if they were leading the country, would probably take a more hard line foreign policy position than the current government. I think that when the US

Speak to that, because a lot of people listening this will say, wait a minute, a harder line than Vladimir Putin. Oh my God. You can't get a harder line than that when the people making those observations have never listened to the man, have never read any of the speeches that he's given. And so they, again, he's evil, he's insane, all of these, he's a dictator, all of these kinds of things.

Yeah. Again, the fact that they don't hear what Vladimir Putin has to say for himself because the western media specifically does not reproduce it for them. And I have to say that Russian media does this. I mean, there are still government funded projects in Somi that translate word for word western articles in print media and televised and put it out there for Russians to listen to, not only from the United States and Europe, but from all over the world. That tradition doesn't exist on the west. It's not that it is banned, although in some cases in Europe, Artie and Sputnik are banned, aren't they? Or everything is done to take them off the airwaves as is done in the United States, and of course not just with RT and Sputnik, but now with press TV from Iran. And there are calls of course to do the same to the Chinese CCTV and now even Al Jazeera in the current climate because as the state media arm of Qatar, they are now seen as being anti-Israeli.

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Domestic government leadership,

Any real assessment of their domestic political system. And I have to

Say mbss is chopping heads. I mean

Literally as a chopping more than heads, these bones aren't sorry. Right. As a veteran, well, I'm both a military, a US military veteran and shall we say a veteran of the US political system with all the warts that the US political system has with its systemic suppression of third party movements. And I'm talking, I mean Americans don't even know this for the most part, but their own two parties of power, the Republicans and Democrats regularly sue third parties to keep them off the ballot, right? I mean, they regularly go to court every election cycle to keep them off the ballot and the whole structure of 50 separate elections and the intricacies run by the party in power, either the Republicans or the Democrats in the state does everything possible to prevent the emergence of any other voice than those two and the electoral college and the eternal problems with campaign finance and lobbying. But Americans somehow feel their political systemic superiority so strongly that they don't even think when their political and media elites judge the political system of another country. And as far as most Americans reflexively are concerned, they think they are the only democratic country on earth and the only good people, which is really kind of another iteration of we are the chosen people of God, political meme throughout history.

What is more authoritarian than not having a presidential primary in a system that is based on primaries? What is more of a dictatorship than imposing Joe Biden upon Democrats instead of holding a primary look at what the Democrats did to Bernie Sanders during the Hillary Clinton campaign, hence Julian Assange's email leaks, which demonstrated all the machinations that the Clinton campaign went through to see to it that Bernie Sanders could not become the Democrat nominee. What is more authoritarian than that?

I got to tell you.

Am I right?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I don't want to go too much myself into US domestic politics because

I just raised that

As examples myself from that. I don't want to cast stones. I don't necessarily feel that it's my place to, but I'm actually a confession. I'm originally from Scranton, Wilkesboro, Pennsylvania. That's where I was born. Anyway, that's also Joe Biden's hometown, where he was born. And I distinctly remember the video. I mean, I was too young at the time to remember it politically, of course, but I've seen the videos of Joe Biden running for Congress admitting open, right, that the system is corrupt, that corrupt people are elected to office, and that at the time, the only reason he wasn't corrupt is because he wasn't given the money by the oligarchs, by the rich of the country that he had asked for because he was too untested of yet, but that if he was, he would've taken, I mean, I think there is no greater condemnation of the US political system than admissions like that coming from the very seat of the president, or I mean, shall we take the words of prior presidents Jimmy Carter coming right out and saying, America is no longer a democracy. It is an oligarchy.

You mentioned that President Putin went to China for the conference and that this was the first time that he had left the country in quite a while. That to me speaks volumes in how comfortable he must be in the midst of the Russia, Ukraine conflict. His country is at war, and he feels comfortable enough to leave his go to China for a couple of days. That to me says that he's comfortable not only in his position domestically, but he's also comfortable in his country's position internationally.

Yeah, I don't think Putin does. He perfectly understands, I think as a leader what he knows and what he doesn't know. And he has made it quite clear that he does not micromanage his generals in the conflict and in the intervention, the special military operation as they call it in Ukraine, the intervention in the Ukrainian civil conflict that has been going on for a decade. Also, of course, neither Russia nor China, nor it must be said, or the United States or India, are signatories to the Rome statute of the international criminal court. So that is not an issue on the trip. In fact, when the international criminal court tried to bring charges against the US, US leaders and military leaders for crimes, alleged crimes, yeah, committed in Afghanistan, in Iraq, they sanctioned the court, they sanctioned the judges, they sanctioned the prosecutor, they threatened to remove funding from the United Nations. They put arrest warrants out for the judges and the prosecutor until the issue was withdrawn. From my understanding is there were even threats made against the families and lives of

SDA was the judge. Yes. I don't remember her first name, but her last name is sda, and her family was sanctioned and threatened.

Yes. So I don't place any credits to that. And one of the reasons I don't place any credits on these charges is anything more than an instance of geopolitical capture of a un institution, which unfortunately happens far more often than it should. But my full disclosure, my wife is from Crimea, which is considered, at least according to the us, to still be part of Ukraine. And we have family all over East Ukraine, and there are some 5 million Ukrainians living and working in Russia. And that is a side of that conflict. The fact that there has been a civil conflict in that country since the openly US backed overthrow of the government there in 2014 is the internal divide in that country. And again, I know Americans think that through their propaganda bubble of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the ancient three networks and Fox and CNN, that they have a better idea what is going on in Ukraine than most Russians do. No, they don't because there are 5 million Ukrainians living in Russia who tell them all the time on tv, in media and in person because of how much families are interrelated on both sides of the border, they know far, far more about what is happening and has been happening politically in that country, not only for the last year or two, but of course going back decades. And it is the height of hubris, I think, to think otherwise.

Switching gears a bit, recently, over 500 people were killed as a result of the Al Ali Arab Hospital bombing in Gaza. And we are seeing this escalation of the conflict in occupied Palestine. As I've been listening to President Xi, as I've been listening to President Putin, they have been trying to find a way to first of all bring about a ceasefire and second of all, negotiate a settlement. I listened to Joe Biden talk about peace, but all he really seems to say is we back Israel a hundred percent. We'll provide more weapons into the region, but we need to have peace. So

Go ahead. Joe Biden has also said, you don't need to be Jewish to be a Zionist. And I think

And has said very clearly that he is a Zionist

And has said that if Israel did not exist, then the United States would have to create it to pursue its interests in the Middle East because it serves such as a convenient platform for the US projection of power into the Middle East.

Wait a minute, lemme throw one more in there. Tony Blinken said the last time that he was in the region, he said, I am not only here as a Secretary of state, I am here as a Jew. So forget independent thinking. Forget being a neutral arbiter here in a Jewish state. That sounds more like imperialism and

Neocolonialism than anything. Mark Sabota. Yeah. Tony Blinken also by the way, mentioned that his family were originally from Russia and that they left the country, his grandfather because of pilgrims in Russia. And I'm really interested in the timing of pilgrims and his grandfather because certainly in the distant past there were pilgrims against Jews in Russia as there were many countries, but within the lifespan of his grandfather, it would make me really seriously question that characterization and feel he's inflating his family's political disagreements within the country. But that certainly also says in the current tensions with Russia in Ukraine and the proxy war there, that he also has a personal ax to grind as do so many people driving US foreign policy on the region like Victoria Newland, whose own family is originally from Ukraine, so there is that as well. But Putin, the Russia has already put forward at the UN Security Council a resolution calling for immediate ceasefire, and this was shot down by the US and Western countries with the US saying that the resolution could not, they couldn't vote for it because it did not criticize Hamas enough, which is obviously the most important thing when you're trying to craft a ceasefire to stop people from actively killing each other.

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One of the things that I found incredibly telling and quite a contrast was as Tony Blinken was on his Middle Eastern tour talking to US allies, the foreign minister of Iran was on his tour of the region talking to Iranian allies. In fact, lemme take a step back. When Trump assassinated Qem soleimani, the revered Iran in general, Iran said, we will retaliate. And a lot of people thought that that meant, oh my goodness, well, over the next few days, Iran's going to do something and Iran didn't do anything. Now we've got Tony Blinken, he was on his trip. Joe Biden was there on his trip, and at the same time, the Iranian foreign minister was talking to Iranian allies, and now the Iranian foreign minister has come out and said, Israel, your time is up. Talk about what an even height, another escalation of this conflict could mean in the region and what it could mean in the world.

Yeah, there was an interesting article out yesterday in the Financial Times where an anonymous US official acknowledged that as a result of the US and the rest of the West, so wholeheartedly backing Israel in this to the degree that they have, and this obvious green light for the ground operation, which is a ethnic cleansing of Gaza, of the Palestinian population, ordering 1 million people to get out of the way. Of course it's an impossibility, where would they go is the most obvious question, even if you were able to order a million people at a time to leave their houses. But there is an alignment of global sentiment and forces, political forces going on the financial Times. This US official and the Financial Times laments that as a result of this, that this is incredibly damaging to us influence in what the US usually likes to call the global south, where if you think of the West, you think of the rest and he says they will never listen to us again. I mean, if they were already, then we've lost them, not just the Islamic world, but more broadly. And because of the recent reproach month between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the normalization of diplomatic relations, thank

You, China.

Yeah. It's brokered by China and not all peaches and cream. But the last week saw the first direct phone call between the president of Iran and the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, and they both agreed, they expressed a common position on what is happening in Palestine, in Gaza, and is what Israel is doing and how unacceptable it is. And that is already an amazing geopolitical change. Like the world has shifted, and I have to constantly ask myself, is this real right that the world has changed so much? And there's a saying attributed to Lenin that decades pass and nothing changes. And then at other times in weeks, decades pass decades of change ensue. And we're I think, living in one of those periods, one of those latter periods now where things are changing so fast and we

Minute, wait a minute, a minute. Because to that point again, China helped to broker the reproach mon between the Saudis and the Iranians and the United States was in the process of brokering a reproach mon between the Saudis and Israel, and then Hamas attacks Israel and the Saudis say out Israel, that conversation we were about to have, let's put that on hold because that decade of change has taken place in the matter of a day.

Yeah, Saudi Arabia was really looking for under, shall we say, a newly foreign policy mature Moham bin Salman, who has obviously changed himself a lot in recent years from what he was when he first came into power as the heir to the ailing king who has really been running the country. He is looking for a multi-vector foreign policy with a minimal amount of conflict. So he wanted to have the foreign policy options with bricks, with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but it doesn't mean that he wanted a complete severance of relations with the United States either. And since the Trump administration, the US has been pushing very, very hard on their policy of trying to get Arab countries to recognize in Israel and to normalize relations, diplomatic relations, and others, which would also be tantamount to accepting Israeli occupation of large parts of Palestine and ever increasingly more so, you can see where the Palestinians probably regarded a normalization deal being pushed by the US between Saudi Arabia and Israel as an existential issue for them.

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Other hand, wait a minute, and don't forget the Russian killing of babies in the Ukraine, the women's hospital that wasn't a women's hospital.

That is I think, a case for the point, again, for the way the US wages information war mostly against its own people, which is another fascinating at a rabbit hole to go down. But I mean, it's not to say that Israel doesn't routinely kill, I mean, on an essentially daily basis, Palestinian civilians through its process of settling, ethnic cleansing, political

Oppression, it bulldozers, villages, indiscriminately arrests, detains people without charge, and basically

Regularly summarily executes people who resist that,

Right?

So anyway, I believe that Hamas' primary motivation in launching this attack, a wasting military resources that they had spent years building in secret plans that they had. The timing of this tells me that it was to prevent that Saudi Israeli reproach month deal being pushed by the US from going through, because they saw it as existential for them. And if that was the goal, then it has been successful because as a result of Saudi's disproportionate response to, if Israel had said, we are going to do a targeted anti-terrorist operation in Gaza against the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad leadership who were responsible for this, and the people who carried it out, I think there would've been a very different global reaction to this. If instead we didn't have Israeli leaders saying that we're going to destroy Gaza, that we're going to wipe Gaza off the face of turn it to

Dust,

Dust, and that all Palestinians civilians are the enemy. We heard that from Naftali Bennett. That would've been a very different situation. And there is, I think a much more substantial reaction, not only from the usual suspects, we've heard that from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Sufi, sorry, the Shia organization there. That is demonized wrongly in this particular case because it doesn't use terrorist tactics by the US and Israel, and no country in the world really outside the West as a terrorist organization that if Israel goes a ground operation and begins cleansing Gaza, then Hezbollah will open up a second front war on the Israeli north, and then there will be a two. Iran has voiced very similar that prospects that if the Israeli government's atrocities against the Palestinian people, which as a result right now are approaching 4,000 dead, which by the way is almost four times the number of people that the Hamas' operational s of flood attacks killed four times.

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Rocks, rocking chairs, and I want to reiterate hypersonic missiles. That means that Joe Biden has basically sent two targets for Russia to attack.

Now, Russia is not going to just attack American aircraft carriers

World

War ii realize. No, I realize that it's meant as a deterrent,

Which, so what is a deterrent that does not deter?

That's a good question. Unfortunately, I think Russia has seen several red lines be crossed in the recent years with the US escalation in Ukraine and hasn't responded, which has led numerous White House officials to say outright, we don't believe in Russian red lines. That means that we can keep poking the bear. And no matter what they do, they won't respond because they fear a nuclear conflict more than we do. That is, well, it's more than madness. It is the death of mad. It is the death of mutually assured destruction, which takes us back to a very early Cold War era that we should all be afraid of.

Just really quickly, we have just about two minutes left, and I'm glad you made that point, because whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Syria, whether it is the Black Sea, the United States seems to continue to believe a, when Vladimir Putin or when Xi Jinping says something, they don't mean it. And when they make a commitment, they will not honor it. And what I have come to see over the years is they don't bluff. They don't play, they don't joke. We got a minute.

Yeah. So how to mesh that difference between, I think demonstrable reality and what the US ruling administration as seeing as their politicized reading of their opponents, that does not match up with reality. That's a recipe for disaster,

Really. Wow. Well, I want to thank my guest, mark Sloboda. Mark, thank you for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Dr. Leon. It's been an honor and a pleasure to be on the show.

Thank you, mark. Big shout out to my producer, melody McKinley. Thank you so much for joining the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wimer Leon. This is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history, converge talk without analysis is just chatter, and we don't chatter on connecting the dots. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe. Leave a review, share my show, follow me on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. I'll see you next time. Until then, treat each day like it's your last, because one day you'll be right. I'm Dr. Wier Leon. Peace and Blessings. I'm out.