American analyst: In Russia, television turned out to be not as one-sided as in the USA
Many of the 700 invited journalists were foreign correspondents. It can be argued that the speech is also addressed to the world, in particular the United States.
The final third of the speech, on defense, which featured unprecedented offensive nuclear weapons for the first time, represented Russia's bid for full strategic parity with the United States. This speech declared Russia's refusal to withdraw from its superpower status - a result of the collapse of the USSR. Some Russian commentators, in a fit of national pride, declared that the power of the Soviet Union had now been restored and the mistakes of the 1990s had been corrected.
“The message did not mark the beginning of a new arms race, but its completion with the complete victory of Russia and the defeat of the United States”
Putin's speech was perhaps more important than at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007, when he detailed his grievances about US global dominance in the 1990s and the complete disregard or denial of Russia's national interests. In relations with the United States, that speech was the turning point that led us to today's deep confrontation. The 2018 Address did not mark the beginning of a new arms race, but its completion with the complete victory of Russia and the defeat of the United States.
Putin's speech was a shock and awe event. The presented systems are called invulnerable to all existing or future missile defense/air defense systems. The United States, after its unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and its commitment to scrapping strategic parity, invested enormous amounts of money in these systems.
Since 2002, U.S. policy has been aimed at achieving a first-strike capability that would knock out most of Russia's ICBMs and then render useless the remnants of Russia's nuclear missile forces, which can be shot down in flight. New Russian highly maneuverable and ultra-high-speed (Mach 10 and Mach 20) missiles and underwater unmanned nuclear devices have turned into an illusion any scenario that does not take into account the fact that following an American attack on Russia, the United States itself will be dealt a destroying blow. In passing, we note that the new systems make all US Navy ships, including the AUG, meaningless, turning them into “sitting ducks.”
The reaction of the American and generally Western press to Putin's message varied.
The Financial Times tried its best to maintain a neutral tone of the report, and in the middle of the story even allocated a paragraph for statements by influential politicians involved in relations with the West - Konstantin Kosachev and Alexei Pushkov.
However, both reporters and editors lacked depth of thinking. They failed to understand what the Kremlin was doing. On the one hand, Putin's statements about Russia's "invulnerable" nuclear weapons are reduced to "statements," which suggests a certain skepticism. On the other hand, they note that the consequence of these “allegations” will be “inciting concerns and a new arms race with the United States.” It never occurs to them that this race is over.
The Washington Post quickly posted lengthy material on its online version. An unusually large portion consisted of quotes from Putin's speech. The editorial headline makes the publication's position clear: "Putin Says Russia Is Developing Nuclear Weapons That Can Evade Missile Defense." I would emphasize the words “affirms” and “develops.” Both the reporter and the newspaper’s management did not seem to understand the main thing - that one of these systems is already in service with the Southern Military District of Russia, while others are entering mass production.
The New York Times has traditionally been slow to report on an event that took both staff and management completely by surprise. A few hours later, the newspaper published two articles, one after another, devoted to the defense section of Vladimir Putin’s message. In both, but more so in the one co-authored by reporters Neil MacFarquhar and David Sanger, the emphasis is on the word “bluff.”
The authors blithely assume that Putin is simply making a campaign speech, the purpose of which is to arouse the “patriotic passions of Russians” and thus consolidate his victory in the elections. The writers console themselves with the fact that “deception lies at the heart of Russia’s current Military Doctrine.” Therefore, “questions arise as to whether these weapons even exist.”
“The new Russian systems make all US Navy ships, including the AUG, meaningless, turning them into “sitting ducks””
These speculations, especially in the New York Times, tell us one thing - our media is deliberately ignoring some simple facts related to Vladimir Putin. First: he always did what he said. Second: by nature he is very careful and methodical. The words “carefully” and “carefully” are permanent elements of his vocabulary. In this sense, the concept of "bluff" - on a question that would jeopardize Russia's national security and possibly cost the lives of tens of millions of Russians if answered - is complete nonsense.
I would like to believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington would not be so flippant and superficial in making judgments about what they heard from Mr. Putin. And if they behave this way, they will recommend that their president urgently enter into negotiations with the Russians on a wide range of arms control issues. They will also return to their headquarters staff to completely reconsider their recommendations regarding military equipment and weapons that the United States will finance in 2019 and beyond. Our current budget, including the trillion or so spent on modernizing nuclear warheads and ramping up production of low-yield weapons, is simply a waste of taxpayer money.
However, the even more important takeaway from Vladimir Putin's message is that for the last 14 years or longer, American intelligence has been asleep at the wheel. It is a national scandal for a country to fail in an arms race without even suspecting that this race is taking place. Heads will roll, and that process must begin with proper hearings on Capitol Hill. Among the first witnesses to testify are former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
What happened is much worse than the “missile gap”** of the late 50s. That statement, intended to galvanize the campaign to restore American political culture after Eisenhower's dormant years of complacency on security issues, brought John F. Kennedy to the White House.
Moreover, the demonstration of Russian weapons that are changing the global balance of power was just one link in a chain of astonishing Russian achievements over the past four years that have taken the US leadership completely by surprise. Until now, this has been explained by the notorious unpredictability of Vladimir Putin, even though absolutely nothing of what he did could have been predicted by anyone who carefully monitors him.
One such striking example was the occupation of Crimea by the Russians in February-March 2014 without a single shot fired and without casualties, although twenty thousand Russian troops based in Sevastopol were opposed by the same number of Ukrainian troops stationed on the peninsula.
The Pentagon was then caught with its pants down in September 2015 when Putin announced Russian warplanes were being sent to Syria for the campaign against ISIS ( prohibited in the Russian Federation. – S.D.) and with the aim of supporting Assad.
In the same theater of operations, the Russians again “surprised” the Americans by establishing, jointly with Iraq and Iran, a military intelligence center in Baghdad. They again “struck” NATO when they began flying over Iranian and Iraqi airspace to bomb terrorists in Syria after they were denied overflight rights over the Balkans.
The point of my statements is that the confusion in understanding Putin's statements regarding Russia's new defense capabilities is a systemic failure in the activities of American intelligence. I wonder what intelligence bosses do when they're not investigating Trump?
The answer probably won't be found in one or two components. And this is not a failure that formed quite recently. After the 1990s, when Russia was on its toes, there was a blinding complacency throughout the US foreign policy establishment regarding Russia as a “failed state.” No one simply could have imagined that the Kremlin would rise to the point of challenging it with its actions in Crimea, Syria or the development of the most advanced high-tech weapons.
And this is not only blindness to everything Russian. This is a fundamental failure to recognize that the power of another state depends not only on GDP and demographic trends, but also on the strength of character, patriotism and mental qualities of thousands of researchers, engineers and production personnel.
Conceptual poverty has afflicted some of the most brilliant realpolitik - representatives of our scientific community, who by definition should see the world as it is, and not as they want it to be.
All these years, the country has been flying blind, taking ridiculous and intolerable positions in order to frighten and intimidate the whole world, as if we had the full spectrum of dominance and as if Russia did not exist at all.
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The author (Gilbert Doctorow) is a Doctor of Science (specialization in Russian history, Columbia University, 1975), an independent political analyst living in Brussels. International observer at the presidential elections in Russia on March 18, 2018.
Published with permission of the publisher (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48896.htm).
*Most likely an allusion to the military doctrine developed in the United States in 1996 and subsequently applied in Iraq
**The statement that the United States lags behind the USSR in the production of nuclear missiles was made by John Kennedy in 1960 during the election campaign. It influenced Congress and public opinion and led to the massive deployment of ground-launched ballistic missiles
Gilbert Doctorow
During the last couple of days we’ve been learning a few things about oneGilbert Doctorow , who, together with fellow Putin apologistStephen F. Cohen , and with the backing of Cohen’s wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and her deep-pockets family, has founded something called the American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA). Perusing a few of Doctorow’s recent commentaries, we’ve recognized the truth of Cathy Young’s statement, in an illuminatingDaily Beast piece about the ACEWA, that Doctorow is even “more pro-Kremlin” than Cohen.
Maria Gaidar Here’s one last tidbit from Doctorow’s oleaginous oeuvre. This summer, writing inRussia Insider, he trashed Putin's liberal opposition; as in much of his work, sneering was his principal rhetorical device. He ridiculed Maria Gaidar, whose father was a pro-free market prime minister under Yeltsin, for relocating to Ukraine to work for Putin opponent Mikhel Saakashvili, and for exchanging her Russian passport for a Ukrainian one. Likewise, he jeered at Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of a popular, pro-liberty St. Petersburg mayor, for taking a job with an anti-Putin TV channel. Throwing around words like “neo-fascist,” Doctorow charged that when these and other high-profile Russians accept employment from critics of Putin – or, quite simply, just move abroad, presumably to escape his thuggery – their motive isn’t a love of freedom but “just money.”
Andrei Kozyrev Doctorow concluded his piece by slamming opposition leader and former foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who in recent op-eds for theNew York Times and Washington Post had dared to criticize Putin’s human-rights violations and to broach the subject of regime change at the Kremlin. Accusing Kozyrev of “courting sedition” and “giving comfort to the enemy,” Doctorow warned in the strongest terms against regime change (“Most of the obvious candidates to succeed to the presidency are far less experienced, far less prudent than the incumbent”) and, without addressing Kozyrev's actual charges about human rights, suggested he was obviously not “someone sincerely wishes his native country well.”
Doctorow’s columns on Russia, then, are easily summed up, and Young has already done the job: as she puts it,he“serves up a steady diet of Frank Kremlin apologism and vitriolic attacks on Putin foes,” all the while suggesting that any Russian who has anything negative at all to say about the president is an out-and-out traitor. “Opposition treachery,” Young writes, “is a Doctorow leitmotif.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen Interviewing Cohen, Young asked him about what she called Doctorow’s “crude dissident-bashing.” Cohen seemed to try to distance himself from it, averring that he and his fellow ACEWA board members “probably disagree as much as we agree about specific issues.” But if Cohen really has significant disagreements with Doctorow, why put him on the board? Why list him as a co-founder? He’s no ex-Senator or ex-Ambassador; nor does he seem to be a moneybags like William vanden Heuvel. What, other than his noxious views, does Doctorow bring to the table?
No: plainly Cohen and his wifewant to have an extremist like Doctorow on board.It makes sense: he can mount even more fervently pro-Putin arguments than they themselves dare to put their names to, all the while doing Cohen the service of making him look like a reasonable moderate by comparison.
Just a reminder that Cohen and vanden Heuvel are, to all intents and purposes, the Boris and Natasha of the American left It’s a neat deal: Doctorow’s arguments get out there – perhaps even in the pages of theNation and they achieved a certain credibility thanks to his association with ACEWA, even though, at the same time, Cohen and vanden Heuvel are fully free to claim (if strongly or unpleasantly challenged by, say, his colleagues at NYU, or her friends on Capitol Hill and on Manhattan's limousine left) that Doctorow's opinions aren't necessarily their own.
In short, a sneaky stratagem, eminently worthy of this wily pack of pro-Putin propagandists.
Yesterday we were introduced to the American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA), which is yet another brainchild of NYU KremlinologistStephen F. Cohen and his heiress wife Katrina vanden Heuvel , and which is obviously meant to be a vehicle for spreadingpro-Putin propaganda far and wide. We also metGilbert Doctorow, who, with Cohen, is listed as the group’s co-founder, and who, as it turns out, is even more fervent an apologist for Putin than Cohen.
Gilbert Doctorow Since November, Doctorow has been writing regularly for a website calledRussia Insider. His contributions, not to put too fine a point on it, read like Kremlin press releases. Last November, for example, he attributedthe European Parliament’s overwhelming vote in favor of two resolutions condemning Russia to “a Cold War mentality that never faded since 1989.”
A week later, Doctorow blamed anti-Putin attitudes among left-wing U.S. peace activists on “years of denigration and information warfare coming from Washington,” including “propaganda about an authoritarian regime that allegedly jails dissent, about homophobia and about conservative family values of Russia’s silent majority, not to mention about greedy, raw capitalism.” Doctorow discussed that Putin has in fact promoted “peace and international cooperation, justice and indeed human rights,” and is the only head of government on the planet who’s “directly challenge American global hegemony.” For these reasons, he argued, Putin should be treated by sensible stateside peace-lovers not as a bad guy but as a hero.
Anne Applebaum In January, Doctorow penned a column that was one long, drawn-out sneer. The topic: a book calledPutin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha. He smeared Russia expert Anne Applebaum,author of the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winningGulag: A History, as a “blowhard” for the crime of favorably reviewing Dawisha’s book in the Washington Post. And h e made a mocking reference to “the saintly Khodorkovsky” – meaning human-rights activist and former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Putin robbed of billions of dollars and then tossed into prison on trumped-up charges.Doctorow lamented that once reliably left-wing American media, such as the New York Review of Books and PBS, have now “join the jackals” who engage in “Putin bashing.”
Moscow Victory Day Parade, 9 May 2015 And on and on it goes. In May, after attending the Moscow parade marking the 70 th anniversary of victory in World War II, Doctorow gushed exuberantly over what he described as Putin's ascent to the very “heights of statesmanship”: by allowing ordinary citizens to march in the parade while holding up photographs of their relatives who'd died in the war , the Russian leader had driven home “the point that this is a day for every Russian family and not just a pompous show of military capability for the high and mighty to strut on the stage.”
Sochi Olympics opening ceremony, 7 February 2014 If at the Sochi Olympics, enthused Doctorow, Vlad had sent a message “that Russia has its own traditions of both popular and high culture but is open to the world and hospitable to all,” in Moscow, his people had pulled off the parade at “a supremely professional level” and shown “very great respect for the spectators, both those on the Square and the others watching it on their television as I did.”
Ugh. It’s the kind of cringeworthy bootlicking that’s rarely found outside of the propaganda organs of totalitarian states. And itraises certain questions. Such as: can this guy really be such a convinced disciple of Putin? Or is he on the payroll? Have Stephen F. Cohen of NYU and Princeton, Katrina vanden Heuvel ofThe Nation, her rich dad, Bill Bradley, and others in fact chosen to hitch their wagons to a paid Kremlin operative?
We don't know the answers to these questions. But we can say one thing, for which we’ll provide more evidence tomorrow: when it comes to propagandizing for Putin, Doctorow churns it out as naturally as a slug leaves a slime trail.
Stephen F. Cohen
There’s no keeping up with the multitudinous mischievous machinations of veteran Kremlinologist Stephen F. Cohen. Russia’s thug-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, has no more high-profile apologist anywhere in the Western world than the 76-year-old NYU and Princeton prof. Every time we turn around, Cohen – almost invariably in league with his moneybags wife, Nation publisher/editor Katrina vanden Heuvel– has come up with some new stunt, some new angle, some new scam designed to pump up ol’ Vlad’s image in the West.
Cathy Young In mid October, Cathy Young reported at theDaily Beast on one of Cohen’s latest capers. It appears that back in the Cold War days, Cohen helped found something called the American Committee on East-West Accord (ACEWA), one of those groups that, in the name of peace, “consistently abandoned U.S. trade, foreign policy and arms control concessions to the USSR.” Established in 1974, the ACEWA was shuttered in 1992, in the wake of the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Now Cohen, along with some allies, appears to be reviving the ACEWA – kind of. The name of the new organization, the American Committee for East-West Accord, is almost exactly identical to that of the old one – the only difference is that “on” has been replaced by “for.” (The change, Cohen explains, reflects his desire to be “more proactive.”) The group, whose stated objective is to promote “open, civilized, informed debate” on U.S.-Russian relations and ensure “a conclusive end to cold war and its attendant dangers,” had its formal launch in Washington, D.C., on November 4.
Bill Bradley As Young notes, the whole thing “couldn’t sound more benign.” The seven-member board includes some soothing, solid establishment names: Bill Bradley, the former U.S. Senator from New Jersey; Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union; and John Pepper, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble.
But Cohen is one of two official co-founders, and this is plainly his baby. The other co-founder is something of a wild card: he’sGilbert Doctorow, whom Young describes as a “Brussels-based U.S. expatriate and self-styled ‘professional Russia-watcher.’” Vanden Heuvel, though not officially affiliated with the ACEWA, is a major player, promoting the venture inThe Nation and “ mentioning the group’s activities to its contacts in Congress.” Also heavily involved is vanden Heuvel's dad, former UN ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel: he's on the group's board, was identified as the group's president in its inclusive papers, and has allowed the address of his philanthropy, the Melinda and William J. vanden Heuvel Foundation, to be listed as the ACEWA's Manhattan address.
William and Melinda vanden Heuvel To our surprise, Cohen, in a conversation with Young, actually tried to walk back some of his own more outrageously Putin-friendly statements – though not very effectively. He admitted that when discussing Putin's invasion of Crimea on TV, he'd been “insufficiently critical of Russia's contribution to the crisis,” but maintained that he'd taken a strong pro-Putin line as a “conscious strategy” intended to counter what he saw as the mainstream media's excessively anti-Putin spin. “Russia’s side of the story was not being told, and I knew I was going to get grief for trying to tell it as I understood it,” Cohen insisted. He added that if he’d been insufficiently nuanced, it was, well, because his TV time is always so brief. In response to his claim, Young pointed out that Cohen has been just as uncritical of Putin in his articles for the Nation where his wife gives him enough space to be as nuanced as nuanced can be.
Cohen's efforts at backpedaling are, it must be said, rather entertaining. But the major achievement of Young’s article is to draw our attention to Doctorow, Cohen’s co-founder. Unlike Cohen, Doctorow has virtually no profile in the U.S. He maintains his own blog, writes for an obscure Russian news and opinion website, and last year contributed an article on Putin to theNation . There’s pretty much only one reason he’s worth paying attention to – and that reason is that, as Young puts it, he’s even “more pro-Kremlin” than Cohen.
How pro-Kremlin? We'll get into that tomorrow.
Contrary to Western stereotypes about the powerful pressure of Kremlin propaganda on public opinion, Russia has many popular political talk shows, which are characterized by sharp discussion and diversity of assessments, writes Gilbert Doctorow, coordinator of the American Committee for East-West Harmony, for Consortium News. The analyst took part in one of these programs and became convinced that in this aspect Russian programs differ from American ones for the better.
- RIA News
Despite the fact that in the United States the Russian media is described as nothing more than “solid Kremlin propaganda,” Russia actually produces a lot of interesting talk shows that demonstrate a huge diversity of points of view—much more significant than on American television. Gilbert Doctorow, the coordinator of the NGO American Committee for East-West Harmony, responsible for Europe, writes about this in his article for Consortium News. The presentation of the material is given.
As the expert notes, such shows attract millions of audiences in front of television screens. Among them, for example, is a program by Russian TV veteran Vladimir Solovyov, as well as the “Special Correspondent” program with host Evgeny Popov.
Doctorow personally participated in Popov's program in early May, and in his own words, what he experienced as a participant "confirmed his impressions as a television viewer": Russian television is indeed, as he puts it, a marketplace of ideas that distinguishes “respect for pluralism of opinions.”
Both foreigners and foreigners become guests of Russian talk shows. In most cases, they feature both people who support the Kremlin’s policies and oppositionists, the author writes. Almost every episode features at least one American who expresses Washington's point of view. Israelis are also regularly invited to political programs to present Netanyahu's views. Poles and Ukrainians are often called upon, “whose speeches add spice to any discussion regarding the Maidan protests and the current Kyiv regime,” he explains.
The only side that remains deprived of airtime, according to Doctorow, is the so-called non-systemic opposition, which failed to gain the required number of votes and get into parliament. However, from the point of view of an analyst, this state of affairs is quite understandable: the authorities are unlikely to want to show on state television channels politicians “promoting very seditious views” and visiting representatives of the American establishment, such as, for example, John McCain, who speaks in support of anti-Russian ones.
Russians are big fans of ultimate fighting, and Russian talk shows are often held in a free-form discussion format, especially when high-ranking politicians are not among their participants, the analyst says. He notes that debaters often resemble ancient Roman gladiators, and their sharpest remarks - as Doctorow saw firsthand while attending the program - are rewarded with applause from the audience.
At the same time, the presenters manage to maintain order in the studio: according to Doctorow, during his participation in “Special Correspondent” he never had to shout down anyone. And before the broadcast, they explained to him that all he had to do was show that he wanted to take the floor, and they would immediately give him a microphone.
As the author writes, during his graduation he expressed his views three times while participating in discussions. At the same time, he draws the attention of readers to an important fact, from his point of view: Evgeny Popov knew very well that the position of the American guest was diametrically opposed to his own (Popov argued that the concert of the Russian orchestra in Palmyra, which took place a few days earlier, was very warmly received by the world community, while Doctorow expressed confidence that this event did not make a strong impression and the reaction of the invited foreign journalists was rather negative) - and nevertheless, each time he let him finish to the end, restraining the emotions of the rest of the program participants.
“It would be great if the most popular American television programs allowed similar—spontaneous but deep—debates about policies towards Russia and other countries,” Doctorow concluded.
