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John Helmer: KURSK, BELGOROD, BRYANSK — IS PRESIDENT PUTIN PREPARING FOR ISTANBUL-II? (Excerpt)

By John Helmer, Website, 8/26/24

Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me.

In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost [3].

But for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff.

The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forego the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian territory between Kiev and the Polish border, and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk.

Call those terms Istanbul-II. As with the draft terms initialled in Istanbul at the end of March 2022 [4], Istanbul-II amounts to an exchange of dominant Russian military power for US and Ukrainian signatures on paper with false intention and temporary duration.  

The US administration says it believes Putin will concede. It also believes that by staging its war of pinpricks — that’s the drone, artillery and missile barrages fired by the Ukrainian military, directed by the US and UK – in the Black Sea and Russia’s western border regions, Putin’s red lines and threats of retaliation are exposed [5] as empty bluff. The same interpretation of Putin, and confidence that he will accept US terms, are the foundation of the Ukraine “peace plan” of Donald Trump’s advisors [6]. The Trump plan’s offer of “some limited sanctions relief” reflects the conviction in Washington that Putin’s oligarch constituency can be bribed to push Putin into the same “frozen war” concessions as Roman Abramovich got Putin to accept at Istanbul-I – until the General Staff stopped them both.

Putin’s restrictions on the General Staff’s proposals for neutralizing the US and British air surveillance and electronic warfare operations; and his orders to stand by while the Ukrainians have assembled several thousand forces, first to cross into Kursk, and then into Bryansk and Belgorod, are now as visible in Moscow as they have been in Washington.

Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. They understood the battlefield intelligence as it was coming in and requested Putin’s agreement to respond. In retrospect, they say “we told you so”; they imply their hands were tied by the Kremlin orders.

“My understanding for now,” says one of the sources, “is that these are pinpricks that feel painful but they are not life threatening. Russia will not take any land, for now, other than the four regions. It should be the eight regions but it’s obvious Putin doesn’t have the will and the military does not have the capacity to hold. So we will see Ukrainians inside Kursk for a while. But it should be downplayed because it should not be allowed to be a bargain chip in negotiations the other side is aiming at.”

Putin said this himself, the source points out at his meeting on August 12 [7] with the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and others. “These [Kursk] actions clearly aim to achieve a primary military objective: to halt the advance of our forces in their effort to fully liberate the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, the Novorossiya region.”  Putin also said: “It is now becoming increasingly clear why the Kiev regime rejected our proposals for a peaceful settlement, as well as those from interested and neutral mediators…. It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future. However, what kind of negotiations can we have with those who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, or pose threats to nuclear power facilities? What is there to discuss with such parties?”

“It’s obvious at this point,” comments a military source, “that the Americans and Ukrainians have decided that Putin will come to terms if they snatch enough Russian territory and keep up their strikes behind the Russian lines…The Ukrainians are going for broke in the north while the centre collapses. But they know, no matter how expensive it is, the longer they remain on the attack, the worse it looks for the Russian leadership. They also have the measure of Putin who gives orders for half measures.”

This is also obvious in the Security Council in Moscow. The Council’s deputy secretary, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev, made the point explicitly in his Telegram account declaration on August 21 [8], implying that until he had said it, no one else dared: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences.” Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I. “After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]” 

Medvedev’s reference to the “idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries” is to the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, whom Putin endorsed at the Kremlin on July 5 for the ill-concealed purpose of sending a message to presidential candidate Trump with whom Orban talked on July 10. For that story, click [9].  

Days before his meeting with Orban, Putin had announced [10] his abandonment of the demilitarization, denazification objectives of the Special Military Operation in exchange for “the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and from the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.” 

This change of objective has not yet been acknowledged by the Kremlin media; it is opposed [11] by the Russian military and by the majority of Russian voters.   “War is war — either we go to war or surrender” – is a popular slogan on Russian social media for Putin to stop restricting the General Staff.

 “The problem for the Russians,” comments a military source, “is that they, especially the Kremlin, the Defense Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry have lost the propaganda war. This puts them in a bad spot as they need more than stopping, then pushing the Ukrainians back in Kursk, or a Donbass victory, in order to recover. They need to knock the Ukrainians out of the war. But on that Putin says one thing — he does another.”

The Ukrainian border crossing began between 5 and 5:30 in the morning of August 6.

The first reports from the Defense Ministry in Moscow were false. On the afternoon of August 7, Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, in a public briefing of the president and other officials, claimed [12]: “At 5.30 am on August 6, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine numbering up to 1,000 people went on the offensive with the aim of capturing a section of the territory of the Sudzha District in the Kursk Region. The joint actions by the state border covering units together with border guards and reinforcement units, air strikes, missile forces, and artillery fire stopped the enemy’s advance into the territory in the Kursk direction…We will complete the operation by defeating the enemy and reaching the state border.” 

This Ukraine force count was much too low; their advance was not stopped; the restoration of the state border has not been achieved after three weeks of fighting. Either Gerasimov knew much better and was lying to Putin for public propaganda; or else he didn’t know what the true situation was.

The General Staff’s misdirections were repeated by the only independent Russian media sources not directly under state control – the military bloggers, the best of whom are Boris Rozhin (Colonel Cassad) and Mikhail Zvinchuk (Rybar). Rozhin tried to downplay the attack through the first day, relying on Defense Ministry and region official releases. Rozhin’s first report appeared at 10:12 on the morning of August 6: [14] “The governor of the Kursk region reported an attempt by the enemy forces to break through on the territory of the region. The attack was carried out by limited forces and was repulsed. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the FSB did not allow the breakthrough of the enemy’s forces”. This was false.

Gerasimov’s report to Putin exposed himself, the General Staff, and the Defense Ministry to a round of allegations of incompetence and negligence which were published a week later by media under Kremlin control. These allegations [15] include a failure by Russian intelligence to detect the concentration of Ukrainian forces in advance of the border crossing, and a personal failure by Gerasimov to “ignore several warnings about a Ukrainian buildup near the Kursk border. ” An anonymously sourced report by a non-Russian reporter with a record of plagiarism and fabrication claims to be based on “hawks in the siloviki apparatus [who] don’t make it a secret that Gerasimov should be fired” and replaced, the reporter claimed, by a combination of the discredited General Sergei Surovikin and the head of the Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov.

The campaign against Gerasimov also appears to be a defence of Putin’s advance knowledge and his operational orders to Gerasimov before August 6 [15]: “President Putin’s reaction to the Kursk invasion was visible in his body language. He was furious for the flagrant military/intel failure; for the obvious loss of face; and for the fact that this buries any possibility of rational dialogue about ending the war.” 

Moscow sources explain these are Kremlin claims aimed at whitewashing Putin’s refusal to allow the General Staff to extend their operations into the Ukrainian Sumy region to break up the attack concentration in advance; and at concealing Putin’s purpose in preparing for the Istanbul-II negotiations. The sources also point out that the National Guard, the well-armed and highly mobile presidential force, has failed to appear in any role in the Kursk region, not even in defence of the predictable target of the Kurchatov nuclear power plant. The Guard commander, Victor Zolotov, Putin’s former bodyguard, did not appear in the Kremlin meetings on the Kursk operation until August 12, when he was at the bottom of the table on Putin’s right, sitting opposite Gerasimov; in the Kremlin record [7] Zolotov had nothing to say….

As the Russian analysts struggle to explain what has happened at Kursk, they have largely ignored the history illustrated in this chart and this map. In order to blame the regional administrations and scapegoat the governors, as the Kremlin has encouraged, the record of repeated requests to put the regions on a war footing in advance – not an anti-terrorism operation after the event – has been censored, along with the record of Putin’s temporizing, procrastination, and refusal. For Putin’s comparable form in responding to high-casualty coalmine accidents in Kemerovo region and to coke and steel plant pollution in Chelyabinsk, both of them caused by oligarch supporters of the president, click to read this [40] and this [41]. 

Because Martyanov is based in the US, he has used his military reports to imply political blame at the level of the civilian regional administrations. “The best equipped Ukrainian (practically all of it fresh NATO hardware) and motivated troops, and NATO generals who planned this catastrophe for them, covered part (about 11-12 kilometers) of what is called the security zone, which was not prepared (why, we will know in a due time–administration of Kursk Oblast has a lot to answer for)…”

The national politician closest to the war front has carefully reversed the scapegoating down the command line, and at the same time held the Kremlin to account for its insistence on the war as an anti-terrorist operation. This is Dmitri Rogozin [42] – at one time the civilian minister in charge of the military-industrial complex, a potential presidential successor, and currently senator for Zaporozhye . According to Rogozin as early as August 7 [43], “the transfer of responsibility for restoring order and legality in these territories to the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, which is headed by the FSB and which includes or involves all those who are necessary for the case, including the Ministry of Defense, is also a recognition of the fact that in the person of the Kiev regime we are dealing with terrorists, and not with the state. With all the consequences…” 

By that last phrase Rogozin (right) meant that since the Kursk attack was a terrorist operation directed by terrorists in Kiev, the Russian anti- terrorist operation should extend to Kiev, Putin’s restrictive orders to the General Staff  should be lifted, and the “terrorist regime” should be destroyed throughout the territory to the Polish, Romanian and Hungarian borders. “The situation in the world and in our country has changed radically, and these decisions are urgently needed.” Rogozin was addressing [43] Putin as the decision-maker.

“[Alexander] Syrsky is not a Ukrainian,” Rogozin said on August 11, referring to the Russian- born Ukrainian general staff chief. “He’s one of our traitors. Zelensky is also not a Ukrainian. He’s one of the Jewish traitors. They don’t feel sorry for Ukrainians. They’ll definitely throw them at us… Zelensky is threatening us with a series of terrorist attacks across the country, including the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. That’s how you should understand his words. If his threats are not military, but terrorist in nature, he positions himself as the leader of a state terrorist organization and is subject to liquidation. I hope that my logic is clear and obvious to those who should immediately make a decision to start planning an operation to eliminate Zelensky.” 

This is as close as a national politician has come so far to reverse the logic of Putin’s proposals for Istanbul-II, and instead to empty the territory of its “terrorists” and their weapons to the full limits of the demilitarization and denazification goals of February 2022.

“Whoever is to blame on the Russian side for the invasion of Kursk,” comments [45]a military source, “this is officially now a tar baby for the Ukrainians.  They can’t afford to stay but they can’t afford to leave either. They should thank their lucky stars for Putin. It not for him, they’d have no place to leave for or return to.”

Reversing the operational logic of the anti-terrorism operation has a domestic political corollary which Rozhin admitted ruefully on August 24. [46] “Many people are already talking about the need to use useful organizational solutions of the Stalinist period, especially in terms of mobilizing the country and society in war conditions, starting with the former de-stalinizer [Dmitri] Medvedev, who now scares the directors of defense factories with Stalin’s letters from the Second World War. The reason for this is simple — referring to the previous historical experience, in the 20th  century, in terms of decisions in a difficult period for the country, there is no one to turn to except Stalin. Well, not to Gorbachev nor to Nicholas II.” 

For “organizational solutions of the Stalinist period”, read the end of the Russian oligarchy.

An oligarch source in Moscow denies this. “The oligarchs are having the best time in the last two decades inside Russia,” the source says. “None of them wants to leave for the west and no one is asking Putin to make any compromise with the US. Everyone understands the money is not coming back; they have written off their London, their Sardinia properties. Their children are fine in the US and UK with their new nationalities, but they were not going to return anyway. So no, there is no real pressure from oligarchs on Putin for a war settlement. But everyone wants some sanctions softened.”

John Helmer discusses these issues with the hosts of The Duran here.

Mark Episkopos: Ukraine & the West are crossing red lines. Why isn’t Russia reacting?

By Mark Episkopos, Responsible Statecraft, 8/27/24

The world of Cold War-era espionage was famously described by former CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a wilderness of mirrors, one of those rare coinages that so beautifully captures its subject matter as to require little by way of elaboration.

The wilderness of mirrors is itself a rather brilliant literary appropriation from T.S. Eliot’s 1920 poem Gerontion, a hauntingly foreboding portrait of interwar abjection that gripped a generation of Europeans hurtling at breakneck speed toward another, even greater calamity lurking just around the corner.

Angleton plucked this phrase from its original, admittedly vastly different context to capture the grasping in the dark — or, as Eliot put it, braving life’s many “cunning passages” and “contrived corridors” only to arrive at a distant echo of the truth — that is part and parcel of intelligence and counterintelligence work.

But these problems of perception are no less salient in the peripheral world of statecraft, where leaders must deter adversaries and uphold international commitments not, for the most part, by their actions but by the signals they transmit to their counterparts. The structure of the international system is held aloft by these signals and the vast array of policies, institutions, and arrangements underpinning them.

The basic currency behind signaling is credibility, backed by a commensurate capability to make good on the signal one is trying to send. For instance, the NATO alliance and its collective defense provision, Article 5, rest on America’s assurance that it will come to the defense of its European partners if they are subject to aggression by another state. As I have written with my colleagues Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, all the available evidence suggests that the Russian leadership more or less sees this U.S. security assurance as credible and shapes its approach toward NATO’s eastern flank accordingly.

Meanwhile, Russia’s most formidable challenge — one that rivals and potentially outstrips the battlefield difficulties it is facing in Ukraine and, now, its border region of Kursk– has been finding ways to credibly deter the West from continuing to aid and supply Ukraine. Just under 30 months ago, the day the invasion commenced, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that anyone who interferes will suffer “consequences like you have never seen.”

Since then, the West has successfully coordinated a colossal, by some measures unprecedented security assistance operation for Ukraine, steadily deepening its involvement with new types of weaponry and by relaxing or altogether abandoning its previous injunctions curbing Ukraine’s ability to strike within internationally recognized Russian territory.

Moscow enjoys a considerable degree of deterrence on the question of direct Western intervention in the war, if for no other reason than the eventuality of such a move spilling into a wider regional war one hair’s breadth removed from a nuclear confrontation. But the same cannot be said of its ability to deter the West from doing all it can to aid Ukraine indirectly.

Putin’s latest scheme to dissuade further Western involvement in the Ukraine war was to threaten to arm the West’s adversaries in retaliation, supposedly under the belief that this policy would raise costs on Ukraine’s Western partners such that they would either back down or at least refrain from further deepening their commitment to Kyiv.

Yet, three months later, Russia has yet to make good on this threat. As it turns out, this kind of punitive tit for tat was never quite fit for purpose, not least because Russia lacks the capacity to make good on it without running a red pen through other parts of its global portfolio of military, economic, and political interests.

Just as the Kremlin was reportedly getting ready to arm the Houthi rebels in Yemen against the United States, Washington coordinated a diplomatic push with Saudi Arabia to stay Moscow’s hand. Russia and North Korea signed a defense pact in June, advertised by both sides with much pomp, but there is no evidence to date that the Russians are planning to send any major weapons shipments to North Korea. It’s so far been the other way around, with the DPRK shipping millions of artillery shells to Russia.

Perhaps the North Koreans believe themselves to be benefiting in other ways, including the political leverage their relations with Russia give them over their prime benefactor and partner, China, but there has not been anything approximating a comparable exchange of weapons between Moscow and Pyongyang.

It’s not difficult to see why: any large-scale effort to arm the DPRK could prove fatal to Russia’s relations with South Korea, which have not completely tanked following the 2022 Ukraine invasion despite the ROK’s tight-knit partnership with Washington and obvious susceptibility to U.S. interests. Beijing, too, would be left unsmiling by the destabilizing effects that large Russian arms infusions into North Korea could exercise throughout the region, and the China relationship is one Russia can ill afford to complicate.

Turning to the Middle East, Iran emerges as an obvious candidate for Russia’s generosity — it is, after all, a U.S. adversary locked in a bitter struggle with one of America’s closest allies, Israel. But here, too, the Kremlin finds itself navigating gingerly between Scylla and Charybdis.

Part of Russia’s complex Middle East strategy following its intervention in the Syrian civil war has been to support a stable, partner-level relationship with Israel. Both Putin and his Israeli counterpart Bibi Netanyahu regard cordial ties between their two countries as a personal achievement, and they have been remarkably loath to jettison this relationship even as the Ukraine war and 2023 Gaza War have found them on different sides of the barricade.

Though Moscow has recurrently needled Israel over its conduct in Gaza, these kinds of rhetorical pinpricks are one thing; supplying Israel’s avowed Iranian enemy with major weapons systems is quite another, and, so far, not a bridge Putin has been willing to cross.

Simply put, Russia is running out of Western enemies that can be armed without negatively impacting its own interests. Smaller potential players remain in Latin America and parts of Africa, but in these cases, the impact of such provisions is likely to be far too small to carry the punitive effect that is Russia’s raison d’être for pursuing this arms transfer policy in the first place.

The conundrum Moscow finds itself in reveals a deeper facet of its war effort in Ukraine: Moscow’s ability to maintain relationships with almost the entire non-Western world in spite of the West’s persistent isolation campaign is both an asset and a liability. It buffers Russia from Western economic and diplomatic pressures that may otherwise have successfully crippled it in the war’s opening stages. But these relationships also carry with them a set of barriers constraining Moscow from pursuing many forms of escalation and retaliation.

These limitations point to a wilderness of mirrors that has developed around the war in Ukraine — a set of expectations and norms that, though never codified and largely unspoken, nevertheless has a real disciplining effect on its participants. This logic should be studied more deeply and integrated as part of the U.S. policy toolkit for bringing the war to a close on maximally advantageous terms for the West and Ukraine.

RAY McGOVERN: Conditioning Americans for War With Russia

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, 9/5/24

As the drums beat louder and louder about alleged threats from Russia, the Biden administration today blew perilous new life into the debunked and disgraced Russiagate disinformation operation.

Russiagate seems too good of a weapon for the Democrats to give up. Its initial appearance, beginning in 2016, dangerously raised tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.  But in the midst of today’s escalating crisis in Ukraine, a Russiagate repeat recklessly raises risk to insane heights.   

Here’s how The New York Times reported it today:

“The United States on Wednesday announced a broad effort to push back on Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters.

The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that U.S. officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which Russia invaded more than two years ago.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland detailed the actions taken by the Justice Department. They include the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned broadcaster, who used a company in Tennessee to spread content, and the takedown of a Russian malign influence campaign known as Doppelgänger.

‘The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse,’ Mr. Garland said. …

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information pertaining to foreign interference in an American election.”

Garland testified: “The effort in this case is to affect the preferred outcome of the presidential election. … the Director of National Intelligence has testified that Russia’s preferences have not changed from the preceding election.”

CNN’s Breaking News alert dredged up thoroughly disproven myths of “Russia’s 2016 activity, which included hacking the Democratic National Committee and leaking documents aimed at undercutting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”  

The Lie That Won’t Die

Most Americans (not attentive readers of Consortium News) will believe this recycled drivel from top Justice Department and F.B.I. officials, whose predecessors promoted the same gambit.

As we pointed out four weeks ago in “Decay, Decrepitude, Deceit in Journalism,” thanks to Establishment media, Russiagate continues to survive “like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.” This, even though the $32 million Robert Mueller investigation found no conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign — a main plank in the Russiagate tale. 

The other main plank, that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers, was also debunked, as we shall get to shortly.

The government’s actions today were preceded by more Russiagate drivel last Saturday from a repeat offender, Michael Isikoff (via Spy Talk). This time around, Russiagate is consequential drivel as it helps grease the skids for war.

In 2017 Isikoff wrote (with David Corn) Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump —  “how American democracy was hacked by Moscow to help Trump” (Amazon); a “most thorough and riveting account” (The New York Times).

It was all, as the British say, bollocks! In fact, a year after the “riveting” book came out, Isikoff had to admit publicly that the “Steele Dossier” and infamous “pee-tape” were “likely false.” He confessed during an interview on Dec. 15, 2018, (with an unsuspecting — and somewhat shocked) admirer.

[See: Michael Isikoff Cuts His Losses at ‘Russian Roulette’]

The Timing of Isikoff’s Confession

Isikoff during the Collision tech conference in Toronto in June 2023. (Vaughn Ridley/Collision via Sportsfile, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

I wondered why Isikoff volunteered his confession at the time (I had thought prematurely). Perhaps there is a clue in what follows:

On Dec. 5, 2017, the House Intelligence Committee took closed-door sworn testimony from Shawn Henry, a top official of the cyber security firm CrowdStrike hired by the F.B.I. to do the forensics on the Democratic National Committee computers. 

Henry testified, we only found out years later, that there was no technical evidence that those DNC emails, which were so embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton when published by WikiLeaks, had been hacked, by Russia or by anyone else.

Did someone privy to that testimony tip Isikoff off, so that he could do a pre-emptive “modified, limited hangout” just 10 days later?

Wait! You did not know about Henry’s sworn testimony? Here’s why. Adam Schiff, then chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and the Establishment media have been able to keep that testimony hidden from nearly everyone for almost seven years.

The indignities do not cease. The C.I.A. analyst who wrote the first draft of the meretricious “Intelligence Community Assessment” of Jan. 6, 2017, which was used far and wide to “prove” Russian hacking of the DNC and other offensives, is bragging about the role he played.

Now retired, Michael van Landingham has told his story to Rolling Stone. We dissected it in our last piece

The unrepentant Isikoff, just a few months ago, in Jeff Stein’s SpyTalk pushed the (now thoroughly discredited) claim that Russia hacked the DNC emails.

To remind one: those emails showed that, because of DNC and Clinton campaign machinations, Bernie Sanders had as much chance of becoming the 2016 Democratic Party nominee as the proverbial snowball in hell.

The Vampire

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with U.S. President Joe Biden in Kiev, Feb. 20, 2023. (White House/Adam Schultz)

“Russian hacking the DNC” is like a vampire, with no one able to drive a wooden stake into its heart and keep it there. President Barack Obama himself knew it was phony, yet he expelled 35 Russian diplomats for hacking and other alleged meddling in the 2016 election. 

Is Isikoff’s latest redux in SpyTalk a harbinger of more Russophobic brainwashing as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepare a response to Russia prevailing in Ukraine? 

In the piece, Isikoff peddles the dangerous fantasy that Russia is threatening Europe beyond Ukraine, while at the same time saying Russia can’t even win in the Ukrainian “stalemate.”  Isikoff does this in an interview with John Sullivan, a former U.S. envoy to Moscow, who’s just published a new book about his time in the Russian capital. 

He says:

“’This is all about Russian aggression,’ Sullivan continued. ‘It happens to be directed at Ukraine, which is why the point of the spear is sticking into Ukraine, but it won’t end there. And I draw the analogies, many analogies in the book, to the Second World War and the start of the war in the 1930s and the late 30s.’” 

Former President Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway coined the expression “alternative facts.” With folks like Isikoff and van Landingham back in the saddle — and outlets like Spy Talk and Rolling Stone willing to promote them — expect as many “alternative facts” from Donkeys as from Elephants.

What is important to bear in mind is that the “alternative facts” about Russia are more dangerous by far, given the extremely high tension between Washington and Moscow.

— Joe Lauria contributed to this story.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a CIA analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Michael Brenes: The Harris Doctrine

By Michael Brenes, Boston Review, 8/26/24

Michael Brenes teaches history at Yale. His next book, coauthored with Van Jackson, is The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

President Biden is fond of saying the United States is at an “inflection point” in world history, whether in regards to fighting climate change and racial inequality, protecting Ukraine and global democracy, navigating a new era of U.S.-China relations, or restoring an economy that benefits the middle class. If Kamala Harris defeats Donald Trump in November, she will inherit these inflection points, along with a foreign policy that is increasingly anachronistic and unproven to confront them. Would the Harris Doctrine simply extend the “Biden Doctrine”?

Philip H. Gordon, Harris’s current national security adviser, is expected to remain in the role if she becomes president. His counterpart, Jake Sullivan—who also served as Biden’s national security advisor when Biden was vice president—has transformed the role unlike any figure since Henry Kissinger. Under Sullivan’s tenure, the National Security Council has further become the most undemocratic yet essential institution of U.S. foreign policy making. He is reportedly the chief architect of Ukraine policyU.S.-China policy, and America’s industrial policy.

Harris has her own views about a range of foreign policy issues—including Israel/Palestine, a major point of contention in the Democrats’ base—but Gordon exercises a large influence over Harris, and would likely play as significant a role in shaping her administration, as Sullivan has under Biden. “Harris depends heavily on [Gordon’s] advice given his deep experience and knowledge of all the players,” commented the late former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, in December 2023.

Gordon’s career, as well as his voluminous scholarship, reveals someone thoroughly ensconced in the Beltway yet aware of its hallmarks: groupthink and a dearth of self-reflection. His most recent book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (2020), chronicles the history of U.S efforts to depose leaders in the Middle East. It is also a parable for policymakers. In seeking to overthrow dictators, Gordon documents, the United States has perennially misjudged its capabilities, acted with impunity, and substituted good intentions for careful, well-developed strategy. “The U.S. policy debate about the Middle East suffers from the fallacy that there is an external American solution to every problem, even when decades of painful experience suggest that this is not the case,” he writes. And regime change is the worst “solution.”

Given Harris’s nomination, Losing the Long Game is more than a good history of a failed policy; it offers a window into how Gordon could shape Harris’s foreign policy, particularly on the Middle East. Some see grounds for cautious optimism that things may change for the better. Are we at a potential inflection point in U.S. foreign policy itself?

Gordon’s career is unique but not an anomaly, in many ways reflecting an earlier history of foreign policy making in Washington. The Cold War created a pipeline between academia and government, a demand for so-called “defense intellectuals.” Policymakers looked for experts to assume control over a potential nuclear war and to provide reasoned analysis. Persistent Cold War dilemmas—how to win a nuclear war, how to obtain technological superiority over the enemy—encouraged input from academics.

Social scientists had a conspicuous influence in the White House during this period. As David Halberstam memorably documented, President John F. Kennedy consulted with the “best and the brightest” from Harvard, turning to young academics like Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy for recommendations on how to deal with the Soviets. Subsequent presidents followed Kennedy’s lead, recruiting what former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (quoting Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) called “eggheads” into the ranks of the national security establishment. Men like Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeziński—the latter a counselor to Lyndon Johnson and later Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor—began their careers as Ivy League stars. This became a common pattern. In recent years, figures like Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice (no relation)—both PhDs—did the same, becoming advisors to candidates-turned-presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.

Gordon has followed a similar trajectory. He earned a PhD in international relations and international economics from Johns Hopkins in 1991, writing a dissertation on the legacy of French President Charles De Gaulle’s assertive foreign policy that Gordon revised into his first book, A Certain Idea of France: French Security Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (1993)Gordon turned his expertise in European affairs into a position in the Clinton administration as director for European affairs in the late 1990s. He served a similar role in Obama’s presidency as the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs during Obama’s first term before becoming special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region from 2013 to 2015.

In the period between the Clinton years and the Obama years, Gordon was a senior fellow at Brookings and wrote regular reviews for Foreign Affairs and several books on international relations. He returned to the Council of Foreign Relations in 2015, staying there throughout the Trump presidency. He then became a foreign policy advisor to Harris during her 2020 campaign before taking up his current post.

The presidency of George W. Bush marked a turning point in Gordon’s thinking. Until the early 2000s he had produced work almost exclusively aimed at other academics; the Iraq War made him more of public commentator and critic. While many in the Democratic establishment backed Bush’s war without hesitation, Gordon was more cautious. Writing in Foreign Affairs two months before the invasion, he offered an oblique criticism of Bush’s heedless rush to invade, hoping that the president would do more to recruit Europeans.

After the invasion, Gordon condemned Bush’s foreign policy in stronger terms. A year into the occupation, he wrote that the “war in Iraq was a significant distraction from the war on terror” if Bush’s goal was to target the “direct threat from global terrorism.” The war could only succeed, Gordon contended, if it brought about a “transformation of the Middle East,” but that outcome was unlikely—and would take significant international resources to accomplish.

Gordon reiterated this claim in his 2004 book Allies at War, coauthored with Jeremy Shapiro. The particular way the U.S. went about deposing Saddam Hussein had alienated European allies to the detriment of global security, Gordon and Shapiro argued. Differences between the United States and Europe on how to wage a “war on terror” and what constituted threats to global security marred the system of alliances, but it was the “philosophies, personalities, decisions, and mistakes of the leaders who happened to be in office in 2001–2003 that led to the depth of the transatlantic clash over Iraq.” Both the United States and European powers could make “wrong choices” that might fracture transatlantic alliances in the future, but the differences were not irreconcilable, and harmony lay beyond the “the caricature of unilateral and militaristic America and a pacifist Europe.”

In a 2006 article, as Iraq descended into sectarian violence, Gordon celebrated the end of the “Bush revolution” in U.S. foreign policy—the doctrine of “pre-emption” as the basis for U.S. strategy. The objective of building a thriving, democratic state in Iraq had not only failed but likely been impossible to achieve. The war had also overwhelmed other issues at home and abroad. “By overreaching in Iraq, alienating important allies, and allowing the war on terror to overshadow all other national priorities,” Gordon wrote, “Bush has gotten the United States bogged down in an unsuccessful war, overstretched the military, and broken the domestic bank.” Even if Bush faced new terrorist threats, or anxiety about prospective terrorist attacks on the home front, “the scenario whereby dictatorships start falling like dominoes and the United States feels rich, powerful, and right is highly desirable but unlikely to unfold anytime soon.”


Gordon expanded this critique in Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World (2007), which took Bush to task for squandering America’s “reputation” and “legitimacy” as a global protector. America’s history in the Global South certainly made this an overstatement, but Gordon was right that the September 11 attacks had generated nearly universal sympathy and goodwill toward the United States, which needed to adopt a policy of “maintaining America’s strength, cohesion, and appeal” beyond the use of force, the book concluded. Engaging in diplomacy with Middle Eastern countries, reducing America’s dependency on foreign oil, and avoiding threat inflation were safer alternatives. The United States could not win a war on terror, Gordon concluded, but it could develop a “new strategy for confronting the terrorist challenge”—including a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis, diplomacy that would lead to the “containment” of Iran, a secure Iraq and Afghanistan, greater outreach to Turkey as stabilizing force in the region, and a shift away from a militarized, bloated homeland security apparatus.

In all this, Gordon presaged Obama’s foreign policy. Obama felt that U.S. foreign policy had lost its focus in Iraq, that its misadventures were symptoms of overstretch—in short, that the United States had not curated its conflicts well. The president outwardly defined his foreign policy around limits, about dealing with the “world as it is.” Four months into his first term, Obama said “I do know with certainty that we can and will defeat Al Qaida,” but he avoided using the term “war on terror,” instead describing “a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Losing the Long Game shows that Obama did not always live up to this vision of limits for U.S. policy in the Middle East. In Gordon’s narrative, Obama is part of the problem and hardly exceptional.

The book presents readers with outcomes they already know: American strategy for the Middle East has failed. It is not a holistic narrative of U.S. foreign policy in the region but a history of “regime change”—efforts to nation build and steer history in an American direction—and why it has failed to serve U.S. interests. Gordon offers a chronological narrative of seven case studies, moving from the 1953 coup in Iran to Afghanistan (the Soviet, then American invasion), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The names and contexts change, but as Gordon sees it, the origins and results are the same. Regime change should remain an option for U.S. policymakers, he concludes, but it should never be indulged, as it too often fails to consider the “inherently high costs, unexpected consequences, and insurmountable obstacles.”

This is a persuasive critique of regime change, but in the end the book is an indictment of the character of policymakers, not the history or structure of U.S. foreign policy itself. As Gordon sees it, the United States does not invade countries because of material pressures stemming from its large military, say, or because it possesses unrivaled power, but because the “temptation” to overthrow a regime becomes too great to the point that policymakers ignore other options.

Indeed, Gordon blames regime change on the hubris of foreign policy leaders, who he sees as too consumed by American exceptionalism and wishful thinking and too ignorant of the histories and cultures of the regions they invaded or intervened in. His portrait of Iraq policy is devastating in this regard; he shows that most of the figures overseeing the 2003 invasion and occupation did not speak Arabic, did not understand the tensions and histories between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, or they had too much faith that a democratic government could emerge from political protest. Even when the United States did not invade countries to depose leaders, as in the cases of Iran and Libya, or failed to overthrow dictators, as in Syria, Gordon argues that the results created “unanticipated and unwelcome consequences.” U.S. leaders lacked the necessary foresight and the information they needed to realize it would not work, since “expertise is in short supply.”

The upshot, in Gordon’s account, is that we must recognize that foreign policy is made by people who share enduring traits of human frailty: egoism, overconfidence, and incuriosity. Americans are inclined toward optimism, toward utopian plans, but this is the handmaiden of a disastrous foreign policy if it is not checked by a severe, rigorous, and strategic realism. As Gordon sees it, the institutions of U.S. power are not in themselves wrong; it is the people who run them who make them fall short of their promise. Staff them with better leaders, those inclined to make more humble, cautious decisions, and we’ll have better policy.


Reading Losing the Long Game provides hints on how a Harris administration might diverge from the Bush and Obama eras, but what does it say about a remaking of foreign policy? After all, Biden has avoided regime change, has extricated the United States from Afghanistan—the last “forever war” of the post–9/11 era—and boasts (misleadingly) that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

Gordon’s worldview defies easy categorization, departing from the traditional foreign policy “Blob.” He does not believe, as Biden seems to, that U.S. power is always a force for good, or that the United States invariably falls on the “on the right side of history,” as Sullivan has said and sought to be. On the contrary, Gordon thinks the “good” must be demonstrated. He also believes the United States has a historical role to play in world affairs and wants it to be a catalyst for democracy, but the devil is in the details. If the United States must act to help others—and it should, Gordon thinks—it must do so judiciously, wary of unintended consequences. Above all, he fears events that the United States cannot control even if it wanted to, and he seeks to avoid “mission creep” or unnecessary escalation.

His disgust for escalation may offer insight into how a Harris administration would approach war in Gaza. Gordon wrote in 2015 that it was impossible for Israel to “remain a secure Jewish and democratic state—at peace with its neighbors—if it tries to govern the millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.” But nearly a year into Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks—with tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, Gaza totally devastated, and some Israeli leaders declaring intent to reoccupy Gaza permanently—that is where Israel is headed now.

If Gordon adhered to his conclusions in Losing the Long Game, a Harris administration would work to avoid wider wars in the Middle East. That would mean rejecting moves to escalate the war—whether by Israel, Hamas, or Hezbollah—and prioritizing a political resolution. It would mean not just telling the Israelis that winning a war on terrorism is futile but actively discouraging Israel’s own self-described war on terror. All this would require the United States to change course from its current direction of preparing for regional conflict and giving unconditional material and ideological support to Israel’s war plans.

Whether such change is in the cards is uncertain, but some movement seems possible. Harris has publicly opposed an arms embargo against Israel and refused to repudiate Biden’s Israel policy, but she has privately criticized it. She has talked over protesters at campaign events but has also called the destruction and death in Gaza a “catastrophe.” Gordon has used similar language, as he believes a two-state solution must remain the “ultimate goal,” as he put it in a speech delivered in Israel at the Herzliya Conference on Israeli security in June—where he also did not refrain from calling “settlement expansion, settler violence and other destabilizing activities on the West Bank . . . counterproductive to peace.”

The thrust of Gordon’s remarks is that Israel’s current war now runs contrary to its own “long-term security” and the stability of the Middle East. “The reality,” he said, “is that there is no enduring defeat of Hamas without a credible governance and security alternative in Gaza—as we in the United States learned the hard way from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.” But the government of Benjamin Netanyahu does not see it that way, and a month after the Herzliya Conference, just before Netanyahu’s trip to the United States, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly for a resolution stating that Palestinian statehood would pose an “existential threat” to Israel. What actions a Harris administration, with Gordon’s counsel, might take in the face of this intransigence remains to be seen.


Gordon’s views have earned him the moniker of “progressive” in some corners. To reject the idea that the United States cannot make the world in its image—that it does not have a solution to every problem, that short-term solutions create long term problems—makes one a progressive in Washington’s national security circles, but the characterization is not quite accurate. Most foreign policy progressives embrace some form of restraint or retrenchment of U.S. power. But as Gordon sees it—and as most in Washington see it—the United States can have global engagement or global withdrawal; there is only internationalism or isolationism, and though the United States has erred through policies such as regime change, it must continue to exercise its power as the world’s global leader.

The orientation evident in Gordon’s writings is a pastiche of idealism and realism, a propensity for global stasis with the hope that the world can be remade through better, more reasoned leadership. He rejects the cold realism promulgated by balance-of-power advocates such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as well as the anti-imperialism of the left. “I do not share the view, often expressed both by Trump himself and by some of his critics on the left, that the United States has little at stake in the Middle East,” Gordon writes in the introduction of Losing the Long Game.

It would be more accurate to call Gordon a pragmatic internationalist, for whom foreign policy must be conducted with inhibition and reason and must properly align means and ends. Gordon is sensitive to what can go wrong in U.S. foreign policy, to the “long game”—the unforeseen yet predictable contingencies that can jeopardize U.S interests. He endorses the well-worn premises of U.S. national security, yet he expresses a persistent disappointment in its architects. In short, he is an insider with empathy for the outsider. Above all, his writings and policy record reveal a faith in liberal internationalism and the promise of American power—a faith chastened by bad outcomes but unwilling to deny the potential for better results.

In this chastened faith, Gordon is not exactly a typical representative of the national security apparatus, but he does have counterparts. His views are similar to those of Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, who belatedly accepted in 2017 what Gordon has argued since 2003: the United States cannot construct democracy in the name of stability or will it in existence. At the same time, Gordon thinks we cannot give up on influencing world affairs—that is, that “there are often practical things that the United States can and should do to reduce conflict, alleviate suffering, promote prosperity, deter atrocities, and advance political reform.”

But doing “the practical things” on a global scale is a much more delicate exercise than even Gordon and other reason-minded liberal internationalists have acknowledged. The United States has proven to be reliably bad at making hegemony more benevolent or effective. The problem is not the people who oversee U.S. foreign policy but the structures of American power themselves—its global archipelago of military bases, the budgets and largesse of the national security state, the relentless militarization of America’s foreign policy. The idea that primacy can be improved—without recourse to international law or multilateral institutions—is historically blind.

In this respect, it is notable that Rhodes has now crossed a bridge that Gordon has not. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Rhodes argues that the United States cannot afford to retain primacy in a world—including much of the Global South—that no longer wants it. Biden has carried out his foreign policy with “one foot in the past, yearning nostalgically for American primacy, and one foot in the future, adjusting to the emerging world as it is.”

A Harris administration that rejects great power competition with China (which has intensified under Biden), that gives up on pursuing primacy for the sake of it, that prioritizes justice over unbridled military power, would truly be a departure from precedent. The world, including much of the Global South, is looking for relief from a warming planet, from rampant inequality and exploitation, from great powers that disregard the futures of the less fortunate. The United States has a role to play in addressing these problems too. But holding onto American primacy to resolve them is not realistic.

Foreign Affairs: US Permission for Ukraine to Strike Deep Inside Russia Unlikely to Change Course of War

Russia Matters, 9/3/24

A decisive change in the course of the war is unlikely if U.S. and its allies permit Ukraine to use Western-made systems for deep strikes inside Russia, according to Stephen Biddle of Columbia University. If given such permission, Ukraine could strike distant logistical and command targets, including even the Kremlin, and defense enterprises “would reduce the efficiency of Russia’s offensives,” Biddle writes in FA. In addition, “damaging factories or infrastructure inside Russia” in such strikes “might help boost Ukrainian morale… But even if the West lifts its restraints on Ukrainian deep strike capability, the consequences are unlikely to include a decisive change in the trajectory of the war,” he argued shortly before U.S. was reported to be considering transfer of long-range missiles to Ukraine.3 For one, deep strike systems are expensive, while their precision guidance systems are vulnerable to disruption by countermeasures. In addition, Ukraine would need to deploy its new capabilities on a large scale and all at once, which would be problematic, according to Biddle. Thus, “Kyiv’s partners should now ask whether the modest military benefits are worth the escalatory risk,” Biddle writes of deep strike systems.