Chas Freeman on the US-Iran war, Ukraine's collapse, and NATO's role in escalation
Glenn Diesen interviews Ambassador Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Summary
Ambassador Chas Freeman, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, joins Glenn Diesen to examine the renewed US military campaign against Iran, the failure of sanctions as a foreign policy tool, and the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. Freeman argues that the US return to kinetic strikes against Iran — after briefly claiming economic pressure had made them unnecessary — reflects an administration that knows no method of influencing foreign behavior other than bombs and missiles. He contends the war was undertaken on behalf of Israeli interests rather than any direct American interest, that it has no stated objectives or "yesable proposition" for Iran, and that each escalation has been met with a higher-level counter-escalation. On Ukraine, Freeman describes a country falling apart politically and militarily, a Zelensky government that has exceeded its constitutional mandate, and a NATO alliance that has openly used Ukraine as an instrument to weaken Russia — at catastrophic cost to Ukrainians themselves. He warns that Ukraine's threat to attack civilian aircraft in Russia represents a potentially catastrophic escalation that could cross a Russian red line.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the US return to war against Iran
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by one of the great American diplomats, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was the former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and also the Assistant Secretary of Defense. Thank you for coming back.
Chas Freeman: Very glad to be with you, Glenn, and good to see you.
Glenn Diesen: We see that the United States signed an MOU to get out of the war and then more or less shortly thereafter returned to war. Last week we saw the US announce — Bessent said it, and I think Marco Rubio as well — that the economic sanctions and the blockade were so successful that there was no need to go back to kinetic strikes anymore. And then this week the US restarted the fighting against Iran with bombing, especially of its port cities. In the last 48 hours the Iranians have really been responding — hitting targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, and also at least one target in Iraq. I was wondering how you assess the situation — not necessarily the actual damage on the ground, because we haven't seen that — but why going back to war?
Chas Freeman: I think of the famous remark by the great Israeli foreign minister in the early days of Israel, Abba Eban, who said of the Palestinians — but it really should have been referring to the United States — that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The MOU was an opportunity to call it quits and cut our losses and leave. We didn't take advantage of that. Quite the opposite — we immediately began eroding it and violating it and eventually ended up with no compliance at all.
The Iranian position remains that when and if the United States implements its undertakings in the memorandum of understanding, there will be the opening of the strait, and of course the 60-day period for negotiating a settlement of this dispute has expired. It's apparent that the Trump administration does not know of any method of influencing foreign behavior other than thumping the pesky foreigners with bombs and missiles. So we are back at it, and very predictably our escalation has been met with counter-escalation on a higher level by the Iranians.
As you said, we don't know the extent of the damage in the various American military facilities that have been attacked, because the Pentagon has a rule — it conceals, covers up whatever the damage is — but there's undoubtedly some bad damage and it may be significant. Enough time has passed so that equipment which had been destroyed in earlier Iranian strikes may well have been replaced and now destroyed again. So this is a losing game. It does nothing.
I know that in the middle of this, the claims that the strait is open are belied by the attacks on two Saudi oil tankers which were apparently attempting to sneak out with American support and which struck mines in the Strait of Hormuz — which gives the lie to the claim by Central Command that they had removed all the mines in the strait. In effect, a blockade of a strategic line of communication like a strait is enforced by the insurance companies, and they must judge that in fact any ship that attempts to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz is in jeopardy. The insurance rates must be colossal, and very few tankers will risk a transit under these circumstances.
There's a lot of nonsense on social media, some of it swallowed by reputable organizations. Goldman Sachs, for example, has a really absurd report on how much oil is getting through the strait — totally incredible. This brings me back to the final point, which is that all of this is as much an information war as a kinetic war, and the American information war is transparently built on gossamer fictions — lies. They don't work. Reality has a habit of destroying — or refuting — the absurd statements that come out of the Pentagon and the White House briefing room.
Israel's strategic position and the war's origins
Glenn Diesen: Given the decision to go back to war, we see Israel already somewhat overstretched. How do you see its strategic position in the region? I can understand that if the US succeeded in the war against Iran it would strengthen Israel's position, but going into this war and then failing — it looks as if Israel, which is already very vulnerable, would be put in an even worse situation.
Chas Freeman: The war was undertaken, as we know from explanations by Marco Rubio and others, on behalf of Israel. It did not respond to any direct American interest. It was derivative from the Israeli interest in subduing Iran and eliminating opposition to its Greater Israel project of expansion in the region and subjugation of its neighbors. And it failed.
There is no military option now, especially since the United States has depleted its magazine — its stores of weapons relevant either to the Persian Gulf or to other theaters — and the US military is essentially in revolt against the White House, counseling the president that he does not have the military options he imagines he has. Therefore, notwithstanding Israeli pleas that the United States continue the war against Iran, even though Israel is no longer participating in it — Israel is instead concentrating on ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, completing the genocide in Gaza, turning southern Lebanon into a wasteland, and annexing land in Syria while contesting influence in Damascus with the Turks — it has basically left the United States to fight a war it instigated.
But there are no military options, and therefore the US government has fallen back on the tried and true, failed approach of economic warfare — a warfare of attrition economically — on the theory that the Iranian economy is in difficulty, which is true, and that the Iranians will therefore fold before the United States does. But this is highly improbable. I don't think it has any credibility outside the Oval Office which invented it.
The prospects are that we will — and I think I've discussed this with you in the past — return to the normal situation, which is warfare in post-Ottoman West Asia. I guess we're back to that, with tit-for-tat exchanges now between the United States and Iran, affecting the interests of American client states whom we can no longer protect, and eventually probably reaching back to Israel. So we're in a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation, much as is the case in Ukraine.
The absence of stated objectives and the nuclear dimension
Glenn Diesen: I just want to add one more question about this. The calculation about Trump, at least listening to his rhetoric, is that if we just strike the Iranians hard enough — the military pain — if we can destroy their economy enough, pursuing this economic pain, then this would compel the leadership to surrender. And if they don't want to surrender, then at least we can make it so painful that the people take to the streets. This is what Donald Trump wrote on social media as well — the country is being destroyed, the people could rise up. But given that any defeat of Iran wouldn't just mean going back to the old 47 years of status quo of continuous threats and sanctions, but could even mean the destruction of Iran itself, it doesn't seem that this would be likely. In other words, the Iranians will be prepared to absorb these costs. Where does the US go from here? You mentioned being stuck in escalation. If there is no path to peace, if none of these military and economic means are working — do you think it is likely that the US could reach for a nuclear weapon? And if the US wouldn't, I just spoke with Joe Kent and he was making the point that perhaps the Israelis will tell the Americans, "We could launch a nuclear strike — you just look the other way." Do you see this as a likely possibility?
Chas Freeman: There are quite a few things in that question that need to be addressed. One is the obvious point that there are no stated objectives — there is no yesable proposition being put forward to the Iranians. What could they do that would halt the maximum pressure campaign? Nobody knows. Their judgment is that the United States is simply biding its time to reconstitute its forces and try again.
The irony is that we started all this with an alleged objective of getting rid of the purported but never confirmed Iranian nuclear weapons program. We had an objective of regime change. We had an objective of inciting rebellion in the streets. We had an objective of depleting Iran's arsenal of missiles capable of striking Israel and cowing Iran into submission. We're right back at the regime change thing because there is no specific demand.
When you try for regime change, you should know what the new regime is going to look like and how it will be better than the old regime. We tried for regime change following the strikes of February 28th and June last year, and in each case the successor regime has been more hardline, more difficult to deal with than its predecessor. I don't see any reason to doubt that that dynamic would continue. So this is a pointless war that Trump has gotten the United States into, from which he has no apparent exit. He's not willing to admit that the United States would be better served by cutting our losses and retreating.
Now, on the question of nuclear weapons — there is a possibility that Iran's notable exemption of Israel from its attacks on American installations, aircraft, and the like is the result of some private Israeli communication to Tehran which threatens nuclear attack. In other words, Iran is playing it safe by not re-involving Israel, despite the fact that the memorandum of understanding required Israel to end its depredations in Lebanon among other things. So there is an undertone of Israeli nuclear threat here — circumstantially, with no proof that that's the case.
There is also talk in the Pentagon of the use of tactical nuclear weapons, not just in Iran but elsewhere. This is a very frightening thing because that would cross the nuclear threshold once and for all and legitimize the use of these weapons of mass destruction. I don't think anybody wants that.
I've made the point that on the Iran nuclear program, we have provided Iran with the best possible argument for developing a nuclear deterrent, since all other deterrents have failed. And yet Iran has apparently not — at least openly — developed a nuclear weapon. We don't know what it may have done clandestinely. Israel has been obsessed with the notion that Iran might emulate it by clandestinely developing nuclear weapons, thus ending the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the region. That monopoly has been interestingly not ended but compromised by the Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey tripartite arrangement, which implies a Pakistani nuclear role in security for the region, the Pakistanis being an openly declared nuclear power.
Would the United States use nuclear weapons? I think there would be tremendous resistance at senior levels of the US military. Whether that would sway Donald Trump and his sycophantic advisers, who apparently fear saying anything to him that he doesn't want to hear, I don't know.
At the moment, however, it's very interesting — we're seeing regime change in Washington. The devotees of Marco Rubio are on the rise, pushing out the followers of Vice President Vance everywhere, the Secretary of the Army being the most notable case in point. We're seeing the military object to the deployment orders they're getting — the regional commands, which are the war-fighting commands, objecting. We're seeing the Secretary of Defense, the self-proclaimed Secretary of War, under increasingly vicious attack in the press for incompetence and for damage to the prowess of the American armed forces, as well as for his racist, misogynist attitudes and his persecution of military officers of color or the wrong gender.
The United States is in a bit of turmoil at the moment and no one can tell what will happen. We've just seen the president of the United States threaten Great Britain that if it didn't buy more weapons from the United States, we would turn over the Falkland Islands to Argentina somehow. I suppose we could do that, but what would be the point? I guess we like Mr. Milei, the president of Argentina, a great deal — he's another character — and I guess the world's mentally ill leaders need to stick together, so perhaps we will support him in the Falklands. Who knows what will happen, and that is precisely the point: since nobody knows what is going on or what might go on, nobody is inclined to follow the American lead.
So we have a request from Bessent — everybody should double down on sanctions against Iran. But the United States has no trade or financial dealings with Iran, so we can't sanction Iran ourselves. We're demanding that everyone else do it for us, and we're demanding that at the point of an economic threat — sanctioning the biggest bank in Egypt, for example, and threatening to do other sanctions on countries that continue to deal with Iran. This has not cowed either the Chinese or the Russians, or the Arabs more generally. We've just seen the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meet in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and roundly condemn American policy toward Iran, demand an end to the war, and repudiate these secondary sanctions which are aimed at them as the means of putting pressure on Iran. So this is all crazy stuff. It just doesn't compute and isn't going to go anywhere. Therefore I come back to the thesis that we're in a state of war expressed in intermittent strikes and counter-strikes for as long as we can see forward. There's no diplomacy going on at all.
The failure of sanctions as a foreign policy instrument
Glenn Diesen: The sanctions policy — we saw the same problem in Europe. The idea that they think they can control the markets when they cut themselves off from Russian gas and oil, but they still needed energy. So they instead went to the Middle East and started snatching up all the energy which India would need, driving up the prices. That essentially forced the Indians to go buy from Russia, where they hadn't bought much before. Even the Americans told them they should go to Russia to buy. So it stabilized the energy prices, the Russians ended up making more profit, and the whole thing was kind of pointless. Now the Europeans are upset with the Indians because they're buying Russian energy after the Europeans went for the Middle Eastern energy.
Chas Freeman: At a big discount too, usually. Think of the absurdity of the United States telling countries that import oil from the Persian Gulf: don't use dollars to buy oil, because you can't — we're going to stop you if it is possibly Iranian oil. You are going to be cut off from Swift, the messaging center in Brussels that is the center of the dollar transaction trade system. If you say to people you may not use dollars to buy something you need, what do you suppose they're going to do? I think they'll find another currency to do it with. And indeed that is happening. So this is self-destructive and idiotic — rather like the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States. Iran probably would have been able to conduct an effective blockade on its own, but we are helping it. Every country in the world is suffering from energy shortages increasingly as a result of the joint US-Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's crazy. Alice in Wonderland.
Glenn Diesen: I think that was one of the Iranians' concerns — they wanted the economic pain on the United States because that was the main instrument, but they were a bit concerned that the rest of the world might blame them. And then Trump puts a double blockade on and relieved them of that concern. It reminds me of when Obama essentially said we're going to make the ruble into rubble — we will be behind their economic problems — and essentially all economic trouble that emerges in Russia, the government no longer holds responsibility for, because Mr. Obama was on TV taking credit for it. Some things I don't think they think through.
But it's a bit the same with wars, because you went through the different US objectives in Iran — they wanted regime change, the people to go against the government, but instead they rally behind the government. They wanted Iran to cut its ties with its allies, but now the allies have become more important to Iran than ever before. They wanted to scale back the ballistic missiles, but now Iran is replenishing its missiles at a rate we didn't expect, and it's imperative for their survival — there's no way they're going to do it now. And of course the nuclear issue, where they didn't even pursue a nuclear weapon in the past, they might do now.
Chas Freeman: I think the principal constraint on Iran now — obviously Iran is not subject to any international supervision of its nuclear programs anymore; that ended with this war and it's not going to be renewed — is Iran's understanding that if it emulates Israel in going nuclear, this will cause the Saudis, Egyptians, Turks, and possibly the Iraqis to do the same. So it will be surrounded by nuclear powers — not just menaced by Israel, but by other powers in the region with whom it has a tangled history. It now has two nuclear powers on its flanks, Pakistan and Israel. It would end up with four or five. So I think that is the principal constraint on the Iranians actually going ahead to develop a warhead.
The other thing is I suspect there are people in Iran who imagine that the only effective use of a warhead would be to put it on an ICBM, much like the North Koreans have done, to strike the United States. That would give Iran the deterrent against American action that it has lacked. I think we have done ourselves a very bad disservice and greatly increased our own insecurity while increasing Iran's apprehensions about us.
I think there is a possibility that Israel is not doing well. You mentioned that it was overextended on many fronts — that is true. The chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Halevi, has warned that the IDF may fall apart. We have Israelis emigrating in very large numbers, and the people who are emigrating are the best and the brightest — the backbone of the startup economy that Israel has been so famous for. Israel is draining its talent in the direction of other countries — Europe, the United States, elsewhere. This is very bad for its prospects of survival.
It has also alienated the majority of people in the countries that traditionally supported it, whether it's the United States, Britain, or Europe beyond Britain. It has isolated itself politically and potentially economically. More and more countries see a reason to sever their economic ties with it.
One has a sense that with the Israeli election coming up in October, Prime Minister Netanyahu and his opponents are going full blast on Israeli nationalism and anti-Palestinian programs. The Minister of Interior, Ben Gvir, has shown — and now taken down — an AI-produced video showing overweight Palestinians on a conveyor belt going into a torture chamber, a concentration camp, and coming out emaciated and trembling at the other end. In other words, he's basically reimagined the Holocaust for the Palestinians. What is the point of this? I can see the point in terms of extremely dysfunctional attitudes on the part of much of the Israeli public, but the foreign reactions to this are obviously horrendous and not taken into account at all. Israel is doing itself in quite without regard to what happens with Iran.
Glenn Diesen: The weird thing about this AI video posted by Ben Gvir was that it's intended for the election — they're supposed to win votes with this, making an abattoir for the Palestinians, this industrial conveyor belt leading them into the slaughterhouse. It's quite strange.
Chas Freeman: It's awful. It's unspeakable, really. It's so destructive of any residual affection for Israel internationally. It tells you a great deal about the attitude of the voters as seen by politicians like Ben Gvir, who is an effective politician, whatever else he may be — they respond to, they approve of sadism. They approve of torture. They approve of sodomy of prisoners. They approve of slaughter. So that is an own goal if there ever was one.
The escalation in Ukraine and NATO's role
Glenn Diesen: On the topic of reckless escalations — you mentioned Ukraine before, and we are already going up the escalation ladder, but it appears that it's going to be hard to control from now on. After this 40-day strike campaign with deep strikes inside Russia — where Western leaders say what a great strategy this is, and of course they're providing the weapons and the intelligence to strike these civilian targets — we saw Russian retaliation being quite brutal: not just bombing of Kyiv, but the naval blockade on Odessa. Things appear now to be going, let's say, off a cliff for the Ukrainians on many levels. There are a lot of problems building up, which makes me concerned that NATO would do something foolish to try to rescue this situation or at least stabilize the front. How do you read the situation now in Ukraine?
Chas Freeman: President Zelensky — acting President Zelensky, since he's exceeded his constitutional term in office — has just threatened all aviation in Russia. That means those airlines that did not follow the North American and European boycott of Russian airspace: Chinese airlines, Qatari airlines, Emirati airlines, Middle Eastern airlines generally, African airlines, and of course Russian airlines. This is an escalation that invites a response which would be terrible for Ukraine. Every time Ukraine has escalated, the Russians have counter-escalated, and that pattern is going to be repeated.
Meanwhile, two things are happening. One is that in Western Europe, in the European Union, in the Baltics and elsewhere, there is a ferocious campaign of disinformation intended to alarm people about a Russian threat of invasion. Frankly, I don't think it has much credibility. We have an incident at Riga airport which has immediately been attributed to Russia — maybe it was a Russian action, who knows — but the whole effort to alarm people and rally support for Ukraine by doing that is in full force, and it does support the escalation counter-escalation cycle.
In the middle of all this, Ukraine is falling apart politically and Zelensky is in an increasingly shaky position. When CIA Director Ratcliffe made his mysterious visit to Moscow, my initial thought was: the key to a peace agreement now is obviously a change of government in Kyiv. Ukraine is falling apart. It's trying to recruit women to replace men on the battlefield because it's run out of manpower. Its industry, its infrastructure, its energy — its heating ability before the winter comes — are all being destroyed. It can't export anything. Its import of military equipment by sea is stopped. It's basically landlocked now. It's really on the ropes.
The Ukrainians have proven remarkably resilient, so one can't write off Ukraine, but it is clear that it has never been under this degree of pressure before, and the calls for the removal of Zelensky are mounting. So I thought maybe Ratcliffe was going to Moscow to say: what if Zelensky is displaced by someone who's willing to actually negotiate along the lines of the Istanbul agreement of 2022 — what would your reaction be? Would you embrace a negotiation? Could we get rid of this war in that way? The implication being that maybe the United States might, instead of threatening Britain with the loss of the Falkland Islands, rein in MI6's encouragement of Zelensky's escalations and maybe even help to arrange a graceful departure for Zelensky to one of his numerous villas elsewhere.
I thought maybe this would have been an intelligent approach — not terribly noble, but intelligent. I don't think that's what happened. I think Ratcliffe went there with a message from Washington that was not conciliatory, that offered no off-ramp for the Russians, and I think the Russians are about to go hell-bent for leather against Ukraine. So we have an emerging crisis. Europeans are now more agitated than ever, less willing to talk to the Russians than ever, criminalizing dialogue with Russians actually. Ukraine is falling apart politically and the Russians are on the warpath. This is about as bad a situation as you could imagine. How does it end? Again, Abba Eban's remark comes to mind. The United States never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. I think we had an opportunity with the Ratcliffe visit given the circumstances. I see no evidence that anyone thought about that.
Glenn Diesen: In 1998 George Kennan gave this interview to Friedman in the New York Times, and at the end of it he made this comment — the whole interview was about him warning against NATO expansion that would essentially take us where we are today. He was making the point that getting out of the Cold War alive was one of the great achievements, and it was sad to see it all being thrown away by essentially restarting the Cold War by expanding NATO. But we did get out of the Cold War. We survived it. It's just strange that we're now willing to essentially risk nuclear war on the principle that NATO must expand — there is no other option, there is no middle road, any compromise that may be made is off the table. We criminalize diplomacy. We signal that we're now ready to essentially fight the Russians. We show that intention even though we don't have the capability. It's incredibly risky.
Chas Freeman: I would dispute that we still have an agenda of NATO enlargement. I think that is pretty much drawn to a close. What we do have — what the Europeans have and the Americans have — is a retreat to Lloyd Austin's formulation for what the war was about: to weaken and isolate Russia, and to do it through Ukraine at the expense of Ukrainians. Ukrainians have been terribly abused by NATO, by the European Union, by the United States. They have suffered terribly — not in their own interests, because as was shown at Istanbul, they could serve their own interests in a negotiation with Russia. They basically signed up for the American and European agenda of doing Russia in. Kagan talks about breaking Russia up into its constituent parts and other wild schemes. I suppose the Lapps in Finland would be happy to have Russian support for secession, but anyway — this is not a fruitful approach, and the risks are rising.
I hope someone takes advantage of the apparent opening in Ukraine for more flexible policies. Ukrainian polls show the people are very eager for an end to this war, for understandable reasons — they've had enough. Those who are left — and you have a very shrunken population by comparison with the start of the war — would welcome a regime change in Kyiv. We now have Federov and others advocating that — calling for elections, which means a change of regime, a government that is prepared to do what Zelensky ran on in his election campaign: namely, deal with Moscow, work out a deal, work out a modus vivendi, a way of living side by side with the Russians.
Of course, there's so much hatred now, and it's even spilled over — Ukrainian actions have now alienated the Poles to an alarming degree. This is a country that is in desperate condition and flailing around in ways that are essentially self-destructive. Someone needs to put an end to that.
Glenn Diesen: I agree with the assessment that NATO is abusing Ukraine, but the general public in Europe at least — they do not see it this way, because the political and media establishment has very well formulated what they're doing to Ukraine as helping Ukraine. Yes, the majority of Ukrainians want immediate negotiations — the vast majority — but when the Europeans boycott diplomacy, they say this is to support Ukraine. They will never put any of this Ukrainian majority on the TV screen. You will only see on our TV screens those Ukrainians who are chanting for a fight to the end, and most of them are, of course, abroad. It doesn't make much sense. But also "pro-Ukraine" now means supporting Zelensky, ignoring any call for elections, ignoring the conscription, and so on. They support Zelensky's uncompromising position as supporting Ukraine.
Chas Freeman: Of course — because Ukraine is doing their dirty work for them, and they've actually openly said so. They didn't care about the Ukrainians. They care about weakening and isolating the Russians. This whole thing is bass-ackwards — it is upside down. Helping Ukraine would mean helping to produce a democratic, prosperous Ukraine that was at peace with its neighbors — Russia, Poland, Romania, Hungary — and which dealt with its minorities fairly rather than prejudicially. That's not what we're doing. We remain, as I said at the outset of this war, prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian, and the last Ukrainian is somewhere out there at this point.
Glenn Diesen: The celebration of Ukraine as this wonderful democracy under the stewardship of NATO is also a bit absurd, because Ukrainians had democracy in 2014. Now they have a ban on elections, purging of media, political opposition, language, culture, the church. It's a dictatorship.
Chas Freeman: It is a dictatorship, and it may be a valiant dictatorship — we can all extol the warrior spirit in Ukraine — but it's suicidal and needs to be recognized as such. You can have elections. We have elections in the United States — or maybe we do, we're not sure at this point, but we'll have them. They have them in Russia, they have them in Kazakhstan, and so on. Does that make democracy? Ukraine is not having elections. As you said, it's banned political parties. It's nationalized the media. It's banned the Russian Orthodox Church and created a nationalist alternative. It has continued to enforce draconian conscription practices. We're now told that it needs to recruit 30,000 people a month to replace those who are either killed or desert on the battlefield.
The end is coming — when, I don't know. Ukraine has been enormously resilient and resourceful, and so have the Russians, by the way. They are after all cousins. This is not headed to any outcome that will please anybody in Ukraine or in Europe, and it will leave the Russians oriented eastward rather than westward, which is not a strategically desirable outcome.
Glenn Diesen: Earlier on you spoke about the efforts of isolating Russia — that could have worked in the '90s, but these days you've pushed them out of Europe and pushed them into Asia, and I think that's what we've been seeing. But even when Ukrainians had elections — the last one being in 2019, where 73% voted for this peace platform — immediately thereafter the Western-backed nationalist groups, in cooperation with these Western NGOs, essentially drew red lines under the entire peace platform. So all of this about speaking to Donbas, implementing the Minsk agreement, making peace with Russia — all of it was reversed. It was referred to as capitulation: "We stand with Ukraine, we can't accept that 73% want capitulation." So it was reversed. You can have elections, but if you can't change the policies, is it still democratic? Anyway, I had one last question. You mentioned before that the Russians might unleash hell on the Ukrainians now. What do you think the Russians are going to do? Because if the Ukrainians are on their back foot, I don't expect this to be the time to stabilize the fronts.
Russia's likely response and the threat to civilian aviation
Chas Freeman: They will push hard on the front as hard as they can. They are doing it apparently largely with standoff weaponry — glide bombs and the like. They're now using the jet-propelled version of drone, which is apparently more difficult to intercept because it flies at a faster speed. All of this will be stepped up.
But I think the most dangerous thing that the Ukrainians have proposed is attacks on civilian aircraft in Russia. Two can play that game. Remember the Malaysian airliner that was shot down at the beginning — apparently by the Russians, although we don't know that for sure. We're headed back into that. Ukraine could lose total control of its airspace. Ukraine has lost access to the sea; it may now be about to lose access to the air. This is not a good plot.
I've thought all along: if you are the smaller party in a war of attrition, the weaker party, and you escalate, you basically give the other side an excuse to counter-escalate, and you can't match them. Why pick fights where the other side has the preponderance of strength and better options than you do? And yet Ukraine has repeatedly done that, apparently at Western urging. That's where we are. I don't know what the Russians will do. All I know is they will do something. They will not fail to respond to what is an incredible violation of international law, basically under the rubric of terrorism — terrorism against civilian airliners. They will respond.
Glenn Diesen: The worst part is that while our media will portray this as simply a Ukraine-Russia escalation, I think the Russians will see this as NATO-backed terrorism against Russia. As you said, it's an incredible escalation. I'm still surprised they were willing to go this far. But for NATO, we're not really absorbing any of the costs because we're fighting with Ukrainians — they have to take the punishment. But if we go after their civilian airlines, then it's going to be very hard to pretend that NATO is an innocent party to this. We're going to go somewhere very dangerous.
Chas Freeman: You have to assume, if that policy is more than a threat, that it will rely on American and British intelligence to target the aircraft. So we're talking about a major escalation with terrible consequences. I think this could be what Zelensky hopes for — he hopes to provoke a Russian attack on NATO, validate the thesis that Russia is a threat. Of course, Ukraine has validated the Russian thesis that association with NATO is a threat to Russia. Ask anybody at a refinery in Russia whether that's the case or not. But I think we could be at a moment which goes over a red line for the Russians.
Glenn Diesen: Well, I guess we won't end on an optimistic note today either.
Chas Freeman: Another cheery conversation.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, it tends to be very gloomy. But thank you nonetheless — I always appreciate your insights.
Chas Freeman: Well, thank you, Glenn, for what you do.