Transcript of 'Dialogue Works' edition of 13 February

Transcript submitted by a reader

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Hi everybody, today is Thursday, February 13th, 2025, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gil.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Good to be with you, Nima, to share good news.

Alkhorshid:
What do we know about the call, the telephone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin?

Doctorow:
We know relatively little about the content of that. But there were certain signs. This was very cleverly, written message that Donald Trump posted on his internet platform, Truth Social. I don't believe that he wrote that either. It was remarkable for its diplomacy, very un-Trump-like way of addressing his talking partners whom he tries to overwhelm with bluster and almost with insults, nothing of the sort. The Russians who looked at this last night who presented it all on television were first impressed by the diplomatic tenor of the message.

1:14
And the whole telephone call was described, I say in the most sketchy ways, but what was said was extremely important to understand the question that's on everybody's mind. Where does Europe fit into all this? Is this going to be, is the peace in Ukraine going to be decided without Mr. Starmor of Great Britain trying to find a place at the table, scrambling, without Macron looking for a microphone, without Ursula von der Leyen trying to demonstrate to the world that she is the right person to be Commissioner. All of them are gone, because of a few words.

1:54
And a few words were the subject of their discussion, which was not just Ukraine. Ukraine was one of the subjects. Other subjects included, one might say strangely, Artificial Intelligence, but not so strangely the Iranian nuclear program. And they're on the list. But the point is that Mr. Trump was outlining an agenda for a summit, in which Ukraine is only part. Therefore, all aspirations, all ambitions of the Europeans, of Mr. Zelensky to be sitting at the table were swept away. They have no place in talks between Russia and the United States about Artificial Intelligence. None.

2:52
That puts them in their place. It takes us back to great powers having summits, not a collection of flunkies like the ones that Zelensky put together, assembled with help from the usual suspects in Washington, Blinken and Sullivan, to surround Russia, to overwhelm Russia with an oppositional force and to bring them to heel. Gone. All of that mounsence is gone. Now we're talking serious realpolitik, where the United States counts for everything and Europe counts for nothing.

3:33
So there were, as I say, hints, very cleverly planted hints in the release that went out over Trump's name. And I want to stress that, not to take anything away from the president, but to remind us how hierarchies work. The man at the top is responsible, his signature goes on it. Who wrote it is a matter of indifference. The question is, does he agree with it? Does he back it? And it's his. That works in business and it works in any large hierarchy. Why do I say in business?

In business, once you're rich and successful, you have a line outside your door of people who are bringing to you the most brilliant and also the most stupid ideas for you to invest your money in. And you also have the ability to attract to yourself very clever analysts who sort out what is good and what is dross, and put on your desk only the ones that are prospective. That is how the world works. And Trump understands that today perfectly.

4:34
He has the advisors. Everyone's talking about Elon Musk, and Musk is certainly a major contributor, though quite shall we say, a quite eccentric contributor, to Trump's thinking and to his works, his acts. At the same time, we have this Steve Witkoff, whom the press, the mainstream press introduced to us all as a crony of Trump, another plutocrat in his group of plutocrats that are working against American democracy. That was the introduction that the likes of CNN or "Financial Times" gave to us all. Well, this plutocrat has got enormous experience in international dealings, business dealings and other dealings in the United States, of course, in the Middle East. He has an international investment profile.

5:30
When you're in this field, you are doing essentially what diplomats do. I know. I was in that field. I was the company face of a major corporation in Russia. My major activity had nothing to do with adding and subtracting or even preparing the marketing plans. It had everything to do with being the company's diplomat in the land where I was posted.

So it is with Mr. Witkoff, a man with much more diplomatic experience than many of the people his age in the State Department. And he's used it. He used it in an amazingly effective way by putting Netanyahu in his place and saying, forget the Shabbat, I'm coming and you're going to see me.

6:12
And he got what he wanted. He got Netanyahu's signature to the ceasefire that the wimps under-- the very boastful wimps who worked for Biden could not or would not do. Well, he was then named as Trump's emissary, broaderly, to the Middle East and to deal with Iran. And now we see from the information that came out yesterday also from Mr. Trump, that Witkoff has replaced Kellogg as his prime emissary in dealings with Russia and Ukraine to resolve the war. This is putting a man with a great experience and undoubtedly superior intelligence in charge of something that requires both. So we may expect this to go well.

7:06
Now about the question of being a plutocrat, yes, a plutocrat. Who other than a plutocrat could have flown his own private jet to Moscow last week and met with the top leadership in Russia? And that's what happened. I don't recall that we saw this in mainstream media, but yesterday, the Russians divulged that Witkoff spent three and a half hours with top leadership.

We may assume that to mean also including President Putin. Three and a half hours, and they were not just talking about the release of this one drug trafficker. He was a drug trafficker. The Russians had the goods on him. And that's one reason why Biden didn't press all the buttons to get him released.

7:50
He'd been distributing narcotics among the school children that he was looking after. Well, that's another story. The point is that that had been a promise of Trump, a pre-electoral promise to his mother, who appealed to him personally, to free her son. And you know, with the help of Mr. Putin, they did.

The man was taken back in the jet that Witkoff had. So we didn't know very much, but we assumed there was some quid pro quo. Why did the Kremlin release this man? [What] expectation of good will and honest dealing could they possibly have had that'll allow them to do that? Clearly it was a substance of talks that Witkoff had with let's say with Putin and his close advisors, which indicated that it is a new team in Washington, and that they are looking realistically, not in a deranged way, not in a delusional way, at what is going on in Ukraine, and they genuinely want to be useful.

9:01
So a lot happened. And I say: in a little sketch that was in Mr. Trump's online social media communication, we learned a lot. I can say that the Russians who commented on this last night-- of course, it came in very late. Most of the news programs already had been taped, filed away, and the commentators weren't available. But one show was, and I watched that show; it was the Vladimir Solovyov evening show. And his panelists understood at once the direct link between what Trump was announcing-- which was, I say, sketchy, you had to understand the points in it, which were not manifestly clear to an uninformed reader, but were perfectly clear to the panelists on Solovyov's program, and I think to a few of us here in the West also who have our heads screwed on properly.

10:08
This announcement of the content of the talk has to be linked directly to something that was much more substantive and easy to understand. Again, if your brain is operating. I'm talking now about the debut, the introductory speech that the American Secretary of Defense made, this Pete Hegseth made, here in Brussels, when he was meeting with the coordinating group for aid to Ukraine, which included all the usual European contributors.

10:51
His speech was maybe five, seven minutes long. I watched it, anyone else can watch it. It's available from several different sources on YouTube, and it pays to listen to. It is surprising, but surprising about it again, if you have a little sense for analysis, is that there was a vast contradiction between the very nice big sounds, like "peace through strength". "Peace through strength" was repeated maybe 10 times in that seven minute speech.

11:27
But behind that was nothing, an absolute vacuum. He was talking about peace through strength while introducing us to the positions of the Trump administration. There will be no membership of Ukraine in NATO. The idea of returning to Ukraine, its pre-2014 borders is unrealistic, which means it won't happen. The ... what to go on here.

There's a whole series of questions. Oh yes, the United States will seek a division of labor with Europe. Europe looks after conventional defense of itself. We can assume by that he meant, but he didn't say it, that the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States will continue to be in place to provide deterrent and to show that America has some value to its allies in Europe. But to look after their own defense on the ground is their problem.

12:36
And therefore they're called upon to raise their defense expenditures to five percent of GDP and to decide themselves how they're going to handle it. At the same time, we understood from what happened the day before that the United States is handing over Ukraine as an issue, the Ukraine war, to Europe. The Brits took the place of the United States at the Ramstein gathering of global supporters of Ukraine. It was pretty obvious also from the remarks of Hegseth that the United States is going to draw down its military presence in Europe. If Europe is looking after its ground defense and the United States isn't, then why are there soldiers there?

13:24
So he didn't say it directly, but is the obvious follow-on to the notion of Europe looking after itself, and put in very flattering terms. Europe should not be a dependency. So he is calling out, in other words, what the Russians have been saying all along and what Brzezinski said in 1997, that all those wonderful so-called-allies are vassals. They are dependencies, and they have no voice. Now, what is the big outcome of all these things in the defense secretary's speech, in the remarks from Trump on what he discussed with Putin, the result is that Trump is looking for a summit in the traditional great-power summits.

14:20
He's also looking to come to Russia in the near future, because that's obviously a face-to-face meeting with Putin that he expects to iron out all the details that go into successful ceasefire and long-duration peace with Ukraine. But what does the near term mean? Is there a date in the near term that would be highly symbolic and would also match up with what Trump said about his respect for Russia as America's cooperation partner in World War II and as the country that bore losses counted in the millions where America had also some losses? What is the sense of all this? May 9th.

15:05
The Russians there were looking at-- last night, Russian talk shows were looking at May 9th. After all, in May of, in a run-up to May 2020, while he was still president, Donald Trump had expressed the wish to come to Moscow and to be present at the big parade that the Russians have every year to celebrate Victory in Europe Day. He was dissuaded from doing that by his advisors who said, "Oh no, you can't do that, boss. It's going to look bad. It'll hurt you in the November elections." This was 2020. And so he didn't come. But now he should come. It's logical.

15:47
If he wants to pay his respects to the Russian war contribution and to the cooperation that these two countries had in a common effort to wipe out Nazism, then it's logical he comes on May 9th. And who else may be there on May 9th, by the way? President Xi from China. Hmm. Understanding what this combination means, there was a little joke last night, that they couldn't restrain themselves. The Russians have been under such stress that they have to enjoy a laugh when they can.

And they said, maybe if all three are there, they'll recess to continue the talks in Crimea. So what we're talking about essentially is Yalta 2. It would make a lot of sense. I have personally been saying that this is what the Russians want, and it looks like it may be what the Russians will get.

Alkhorshid: 16:51
In your opinion-- Peskov said that Putin and Trump agreed to maintain direct contact. Many people should remember what has happened during the last three years, that there were no direct contacts between the United States and Russia, which was one of the main problems, in my opinion. How is that? Do you think that those people who have decided to do that in Washington are going to put pressure on Donald Trump?

Doctorow: 17:27
Well, I'll answer this in two points. One is what this means for the coming two or three months. And the second is what kind of opposition has been generated by everything that happened yesterday. For the second, I'd make reference to the CNN program this morning, which tells you who's against all of this.

The announcement that there is a working team on the Trump side and that a key figure in that is Steve Witkoff tells you that Trump understands that the meeting with Putin will be a real summit, for which traditionally there were preparatory teams. And the logic of such things is that in several hours meeting, you do not resolve thorny issues and multiple issues that have not been prepared and fully by your sherpas, as I call them, people who are scaling the heights of the summit, as they do in the Himalayas. These Sherpas will have reached agreement on the outstanding issues and prepared the papers that only require the signature of the big boss.

18:44
That is how, clearly how Trump, Team Trump is viewing this going forward. Not just that Trump and Putin will share a meal and share some phone calls and the rest of it. No, no. They're viewing it much more seriously. And the naming of the working group persuades me of that.

19:05
Now as to the second side of your question, well, it was open on CNN this morning. They had their review, they had their so-called experts all talking about what we are now discussing. And denouncing Trump-- well, they didn't denounce him as such, they just put it in terms, that you understood, it was a severe condemnation.

"This is the man who always admired dictators, and he is himself a strong man. He likes to associate with this kind of people."

You get the idea. Everything that they were saying about Trump in the Hillary Clinton paid defamation campaign against him as being a stooge of Vladimir Putin, it's all back on CNN this morning. Don't miss it.

Alkhorshid: 19:49
You've mentioned the two key figures since Donald Trump took office in Washington, Keith Kellogg and Witkoff. What are the main differences between these two characters that you consider Witkoff much more successful than Keith Kellogg?

Doctorow:
We all have our personal baggage. We all have our personal CVs and our experience in life which we cannot disown. And General Kellogg, to my knowledge, he got his initiation, his military service in the Vietnam war. He is a person who, like Biden, was shaped forever by the values of the Cold War, of who the good guys are, the bad guys are, and who are the KGB operatives who have taken power, and who are the nice people like Zelensky, who are fighters for freedom. That is all ingrained in [General] Kellogg.

20:50
And even if someone were to give him a balanced intelligence report, he would walk away picking and choosing those parts of that report that fit in with his preconception of who is who, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. In the case of Witkoff, he's a pragmatist, he's a businessman who deals with the information on his table that looks at all sides, the upside, the downside. There's always in all business decisions, this matrix of threats and opportunities. And this is what would be on the desk of Mr. Witkoff, a typical business scorecard of threats and opportunities.

21:47
And that's a wholly different approach to dealing with these questions. It has positive and its negative sides. It does not pay attention to pre-existing history. That is a real failure of American psychology, I can say. There's an optimistic, almost blindly optimistic belief that everything can be redone if the will is there, and ignoring the differences between peoples and their historical point of reference. That's the weak side of someone like Witkoff.

22:27
On the same token, he is insensitive to another set of pitfalls that are characteristic of the State Department, which is legalism. By that I mean, looking at the whole world in terms of its conformity with legal concepts that are relevant to domestic jurisdiction. It's a kind of equivalency to this whole question that was raised by Machiavelli in "The Prince", the difference between morality at the personal level and morality at the state level.

23:08
Unfortunately, the typical diplomat has a legal education and would fall into the category of people who look at, well, does this violate international law or not? And would not look at the question of, is this workable from political realism? Why are they behaving this way? These are very different mindsets coming from different professional educations. And the first one who really called our attention to this was Henry Kissinger, who was the first American Secretary of State in, I don't know, 100 years, 200 years, who was not a lawyer, who was an historian by profession and who was a realpolitik, anyone could say a cynical individual, but I don't want to be judgmental about it, I wanna be descriptive about it.

24:00
And being in the sense of description, he was understanding of violators of the law if there are really proper cause. You'll notice everything about the notion that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, depends on the timeline, when you start looking at it. If you look at it from the day before it happened, of course it's unprovoked. But if you look at it from the historical perspective, it was entirely provoked.

And this, I say, the professional biases and mindsets-- You've had on your show a leading ambassador, the United States former ambassador, who was a brilliant man and a great linguist, all sorts of wonderful attributes that I cede to him without any qualification.

24:52
But at the same time, he's a product of precisely this legalism, which is deadly, absolutely deadly. And in his own way, he was no more farsighted in ability to see, to fight his way out of a paper bag than John Foster Dulles was in the 1950s. These are people whose legal education has to be held against them, not in favor of them.

Alkhorshid: 25:23
Zelensky, Donald Trump also said that he talked with Zelensky, and when he was asked if he would accept Zelensky exchanging, I don't know, Zelensky has the Kursk region or he can negotiate with the Russians. He said Zelensky, it doesn't seem that he's doing well in Ukraine.

The polls that he was talking about, his popularity in Ukraine is just diminishing. Do you think that Zelensky right now understands what's going on with Donald Trump and what the president of the United States would do and would want from Ukraine?

Doctorow: 26:03
Well, I don't know what the timing is for him jettisoning himself out of Ukraine before he's murdered. I don't think he's so stupid as to misunderstand where all this is headed, and it's not good for him. You said not high ratings. The last figures I heard had about 11% positive ratings.

He won't survive in the election, that's clear. Not just politically, but probably not physically. So when he's going to get out -- we've been talking about this. I take the blame for having predicted, just like I said a moment ago, going back more than a year. And he's held on, he's held on because he was propped up, given oxygen by the Americans, and was busy counting the money.

27:02
But I don't think that he's a fool as regards his own mortality, and so he must be looking at the exit. He's tried everything. The latest gimmick was to try to get the Americans to continue their participation in the war by allowing them to buy on the cheap the mineral deposits in Ukraine, even though this was like selling the Brooklyn Bridge. And those mineral deposits are owned by people and that were privatized a long time ago. And the latest we hear from Ukraine is that the government wants to renationalize the mineral holdings that are in private oligarch hands today.

27:47
Aside from the fact that the real value of the mineral deposits in Ukraine, that the real value is not known, but it's most likely nil. That is to say, no one developed them in the last five years. No one developed them in the previous 75 years. They were part of the Soviet Union. And there was a damn good reason for that. They're not profitably exploitable.

28:16
So since all the exploitation would be done not by the US government but by private investors, no one eventually will step forward when they receive the detailed geological information about those deposits. Deposits are real. The value of exploiting them is nil.
28:36

28:53
Are we still together? I think your frame is frozen.

Alkhorshid: 29:09
Can you hear me, Gilbert?

Doctorow:
Yeah, I hear you. Your frame was frozen.

Alkhorshid: 29:14
Yeah, yeah. The question is right now, you've mentioned China. Peskov said that they didn't talk about China and China's role in any sort of negotiations between Russia and the United States. Do you feel that Donald Trump is ... starting a new era of the relationship between the superpowers, Russia, China and the United States, which would help, by the way, the situation in Ukraine and in Taiwan.

Doctorow: 29:44
I think it's definitely in his intentions. He's the one who said, as you just remarked, that he wants to bring China into the pressure on Russia or into consultations with Russia on how the war ends. Well, I think that is putting it very gently. He wants to bring them in, period.

Because as they will quickly discover when they move on to the general security issues-- which the Russians want to discuss with the Americans, and judging by what Trump is doing, that the Americans want to discuss with the Russians-- they inevitably come up against this issue. There are two issues really.

30:20
One is on the American side. It is, and this was called out in the last week by the Russians, how can we talk about the nuclear balance when we've never brought into these discussions the British and the French. They also have nuclear forces. And it is unacceptable for us, for the Russians, to do a deal with you, the Americans, that doesn't take into account that they are part of your nuclear equation in deterrence.

30:47
Similarly, the Americans wanted to see the Chinese brought into this because [of] the Chinese deployment of their deadly intermediate range missiles along their coast, which have the possibility of destroying American naval assets in the South China Sea, as well as destroying Taiwan. They would like to see that issue addressed. So this idea of a troika of a big three meeting in Moscow or wherever else has a lot, has feet under it.

Alkhorshid: 31:29
And about Europe, Europeans were totally stunned by this talk between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Do you think that they're finally getting to the point to understand that the war in Ukraine is not going to benefit them, or is not going to be the case for the United States for the near future. That's why they have to change their policies.

Doctorow: 31:57
It won't happen at once. The people who have been saying that we have to fight further, particularly the British have been the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for Ukraine and trying to egg on their European colleagues to be big contributors of military and financial aid to Ukraine. The people who are in power, both in Britain and in France in particular, and the big candidate for the leadership in Germany after the elections on the 23rd of this month, Friedrich Merz, they all are facing severe pressure and possibly will all be swept from power.

32:48
While the so-called extreme right, that is the people who gathered in Spain last weekend, and that is Marine Le Pen from France and Salvini from Italy, Orban from Hungary, the leader of the far right in Netherlands, whose name escapes me at the moment, they gathered and they were celebrating what Trump is doing because it enhances their position within Europe as Europe's future, and looking at von der Leyen as Europe's past. So there will be very big fights across Europe.

I believe that Trump [succeeding] in what he's now undertaking sidelines European discussions, leaves Europe to decide for itself whether and how it can further the war in Ukraine. I think that these so-called right parties are going to emerge as the real decision makers in Europe.

33:56
And that will suit Trump and particularly Musk just fine. And in a long run, it should suit everybody fine, because Europe will have to face the facts and find some accommodation with its big neighbor to the east, put an end to this forever war in Europe itself.

Alkhorshid: 34:20
Do you think that Donald Trump would consider Europeans to be part of negotiations?

Doctorow:
Absolutely excluded. This was-- he's saying you negotiate, you fight the war yourselves, boys, which means you negotiate the peace, because they're unable to fight the war without American participation. He is sidestepping it all. He is not going to have them at-- As I said, the very purpose of listing five, six different subjects for discussion at the summit was to make it clear that nobody else has a place at the table. They don't have, the Europeans don't have a voice in any of these things. Therefore, why would they be present? They just get in the way.

35:03
So he's agreeing totally with what Putin has been saying all along, that this is to be solved between the two superpowers. I admitted something, I admitted the other side of the story, I was talking about what Trump has said about the conversation, but the Russians also said something. Peskov, the press secretary of Vladimir Putin, he made a statement, which was recorded and was shown on television here in Russia last night, outlining what the Russians said.

35:38
And the most important thing was that Putin had stood by his point that the summit and the discussions over a peace in Ukraine have to address the reasons why Russia went to war in the first place, which were all about rolling back NATO. So in that sense, the Europeans really don't have a voice in this. NATO is dominated by the United States. NATO is unworkable without the United States. And so NATO will have to do what Putin and Trump agree to, like it or not.

Alkhorshid: 36:20
Do you think that's why they're talking about new form of NATO for Europe and it seems---

Doctorow:
They can talk about a lot of things to try to justify their puffed-up positions. But when push comes to shove, the Europeans do not have the money, they do not have the lending authority or the creditors to finance this move from 2% to 5% on defense. They don't have it. They are barely able to maintain the falling social standards, falling levels of service to their people. No one has asked the European publics directly whether they are willing to sacrifice their medical care, their pensions and the rest for the sake of more defense. Nobody has asked that question because we all know the answer. The answer is no.

Alkhorshid: 37:18
And how about the security architecture of Europe, that Russia being part of that?

Doctorow:
It will have to be adapted to the realities of a very strong Russia and a Russia that cannot be beaten on the ground, a Russia that does not have to use nuclear weapons against the massively larger manpower of Western Europe because it has the hypersonic missiles capable of destroying the decision-making centers, the arms manufacturing factories, the airports, and everything else. It doesn't need nuclear weapons.

38:05
The American nuclear umbrella is almost irrelevant to the power balance between Western Europe and Russia today. Therefore, there will come forward some sensible statesmen who say, basta, enough, let's just cut a deal with the Russians and we don't have to go to 5% on defense. We can stay where we are. We just won't need those weapons. We didn't have them now.

We downsized all of our weapons production facilities after 1991 because we properly understood that Russia poses no threat. And we should return to that status quo ante.

Alkhorshid: 38:57
Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure, as always.

Doctorow:
It was a pleasure to talk about positive rather than negative things.

Alkhorshid: 39:08
Finally. See you soon. Bye-bye.

Doctorow:
Bye-bye.