"CrossTalk: 'Korea solution'"
RT.com (February 10, 2023)
https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/571223-ukraine-war-korea-solution/

A new narrative is making the rounds in a sure sign that the West’s Ukraine proxy war on Russia is not going as planned. It’s called the 'Korea solution.' The end of active hostilities and an armistice. Keep in mind, the side considering an armistice seeks to avoid complete defeat. We all know which side that is.

Peter Lavelle: “I want to ask your reaction to Seymour Hersch’s article concerning the U.S. planning, executing, and destroying the Nord Stream pipelines. . . .”
. . .
Ray McGovern: “I’m shocked. John Brennan said it was the Russians. Everybody else said it was the Russians. It was a stretch to think they would blow up their own pipeline. … I’m just shocked, Peter. I can’t say any more.
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Larry Johnson: “I trained once a top secret CIA site in the United States and, believe it or not, they actually had a gift shop and they sold items in there that carried the slogan: “Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter Accusations.” And that’s exactly what the Biden Administration is doing with Sy Hersh’s revelations. They’re admitting nothing. They’re denying it. And then they accuse Sy of being an addled old man who gets everything wrong, ignoring the fact that the man is a legend. . . . Sy always gets his figures right. I sent him yesterday further confirmation. It turns out that that dive center in Panama City is also the headquarters for a certain three-letter outfit that Ray and I used to work for. Their maritime branch is based there. So, the story’s true. And it’s an act of war by the United States. And Europe as I understand it has completely shut down this story.
. . .
Gilbert Doctorow: [reporting on his own German sources] “who took part in those naval exercises in the summer and who overheard or listened to one or two of the talkative divers who explained what they were doing. . . . but the whole story corroborates what Hersh has reported. So, I’m satisfied.
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Peter Lavelle: … but of course there will be complete denial and no investigation of this. Now to the main course here. … “The solution is Korea. We need an armistice. We need to freeze the battlefield. Considering that we just found out that the Americans were lying about blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines here, why would the Russians agree to any negotiations that would include a cease-fire or armistice?”
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5:40 Ray McGovern: “They won’t consider that, for the nonce. But let me just add a footnote to the Seymour Hersh story. The real story now is whether this really can be kept secret in European circles, and in particular German circles. Germany is the key. There stood Olaf Scholtz while President Biden threatened to destroy the pipeline and, like Br’er Rabbit, ‘he didn’t say nothin.’ This is a battered wife syndrome . . . ‘Our industries are falling apart and we’re getting really cold in our apartments. If this is true, how are we to look at the U.S.?’ I’m saying simply that Germany will be the key. And it will be very interesting if they can act any more courageously . . .”
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Peter Lavelle: “. . . the side that is losing wants an armistice, not the winning side. …”
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7:21 Larry Johnson: “It’s a sign of the desperation that is starting to take hold in Washington, because they realize they’ve made a bet that they can’t deliver on. I’m sure that Burns, the CIA Director did propose that while Putin and Lavrov had to look at each other and ask: ‘Is this guy on drugs? He can’t be serious.’ Russia has finally awakened to the fact that they can no longer trust anything that Washington or the rest of Europe says, any deals, any proposals, any negotiations are not to be trusted. They can’t be relied upon at all. I think that Russia will wisely reject it, refuse to accept it, will press on with its military campaign, which is ultimately going to lead to the defeat of NATO. That’s what is at stake here.”
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8:14 Gilbert Doctorow: “ . . . this war has been called a proxy war. It is not the first proxy war between nuclear powers. We had a proxy war beginning with the Korean War. We had a proxy war in Vietnam. You can speak of a proxy war in Syria and Afghanistan. However, there is a significant difference in what we now see as the Russia-Ukraine war. And that is that this is a war on Russian territory, as declared by Russian legislation. Therefore, it is unlike anything that has preceded it. And for Russia it is an existential fight, whereas the previous proxy wars were not.
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10:19 Peter Lavelle: "Ray, let’s weigh in on that there. Because the way things stand right now, let’s just entertain the thought that there was an armistice here. It means that NATO would turn the rump state of Ukraine into some kind of fortress to continue the conflict. I mean, no one in their right mind would agree with that because nothing is settled. Nothing will be settled if there is a ceasefire."
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10:42 Ray McGovern: “Foreign Minister Lavrov has said four or five months ago that Geography has changed the Russian calculus. HIMARS and other long-range missiles. The intention to pacify, occupy, and incorporate Donbas has now widened. Now they have to go farther. And they’ll go farther and farther. I think that Putin would prefer to stop at the Dnieper and deal. We’ll see. But there will have to be somebody to deal with, somebody who realizes that Putin can go all the way, here’s the time to make the deal. It will be two months from now in my view. But it will be real and up to the benighted souls in Washington: Jake Sullivan, Blinken, and the others who will have to realize that they’re smoking their own hashish for god’s sake. They actually believe they can win when they can’t. And Secretary Austin is just doing what he always did, what he did when he was chief of CentCom: he’s falsifying the intelligence. It’s blatant and it’s stupid but all is fair in love and war.”
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12:03 Peter Lavelle: “yes, well why should the trajectory of American foreign policy change all of a sudden? A road record of catastrophy. [break] Larry, one of the problems I have in looking at reporting on the conflict, the whole spectrum of opinion and all that, one of the things that is missed all the time is why this happened in the first place and Russian security demands. We can talk about a ceasefire, an armistice, geography, and we can talk about all these kinds of things, but at the end of the day, Russia got into this because of its security demands and it will only stop when it has met those demands. It’s pretty simple here.”
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13:11 Larry Johnson: “Gilbert made a good point with respect to the proxy wars. But what makes this one so different is the utter, complete demonization of all things Russian. In the past during the Cold War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, the United States could still find a way to talk to Yuri Andropov or Leonid Breznev. There was no complete rupture of dialogue between the two countries, with recognition that we needed to talk. That is gone. The presentation of Russia as this demonic, authoritarian dictator desiring to take over the world, is psychological projection on the part of the United States. Because if you look at the history of the last seventy years, the only country that has been consistently involved with expeditionary military adventures overseas and killing foreigners is the United States. It’s not Russia. It’s not China. And so, that is what makes this different. And this is the ultimate existential threat for Russia, because if the West has its way, it is going to carve up Russia into at least five pieces and rape its resources.”
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14:37 Peter Lavelle: “Gilbert, one of the greatest mismatches in all of this here is that, as I have stressed earlier, Russia’s ultimate goal is to assure its security. But for the West it’s messianic. It’s ideological. I’m glad Larry brought this up. It’s a huge broad brush: Russians, Russian culture, Russian history, the works. Everything. It must be annihilated. And that’s the mismatch here. Russians are saying something completely different. ‘We have security demands. You ignored them. We warned you, over and over again. Now this is what has happened. And we’re not going to stop until we meet our goals. But the West doesn’t think in those terms. They’re thinking in terms of ideology.”
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15:21 Gilbert Doctorow: “Well, the Russian issue here, what it has sought from this campaign, has a second dimension to it. I agree fully with your prioritizing security. But a subset of security is the nationalist issue. And that is the Russian identity of the Donbas and the population there. If the war were to end in this Korean style ceasefire, what you have, you could say, on the Russian side is that they will have achieved at least one of its two goals. They saved the Donbas. They’ve captured 25% of Ukraine and what is the industrial and valuable part of Ukraine. They saved face of their co-nationals in a way that the 1990s they were unable to save their co-nationals in the Baltic states, simply because of a lack of military and economic strength. They have that now and they will have, in any case, have achieved one of their two goals. The greater goal, as you have identified it is purely security and that is in terms of halting NATO, turning NATO back and rendering NATO a defeat.”
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16:42 Peter Lavelle: “Stopping NATO, halting NATO -- for now. That’s not going to compute. That’s not the result the Russians will accept. Because we all know that if the Zelenski gang stays in power, it will continue to be supported by the West, and the continued NATO infiltration into their armed forces. I don’t see that as a tenable outcome.”
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17:08 Ray McGovern: “I think I need to inject the most important tectonic shift that has occurred over the last year. And that is that China is in full support of Russia here, that when Putin was asked on October 27 at Valdai ‘Why do you think the Americans are taking on China, too?’ he replied: ‘I thought there was some subtle reason behind this but now I’m convinced that they’re crazy. [his words] This is a function of arrogance and a feeling of impunity.’
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17:46 Peter Lavelle: “But, Ray, I agree with you but it’s because it is ideological for them. That goes into a different realm of logic. This is a messianic adventure on their part.”
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18:00 Ray McGovern: ‘I don’t like the word ideological. It’s straight power. It is ‘elites’ thinking that the U.S. is still ‘exceptional’. We haven’t learned that lesson yet. But my point is that the reason Putin can be so secure and so confident moving West, as he is about to do, is because he has got China at his back. He solidified that exactly a year ago. People don’t get it, least of all the people running our foreign policy.”
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18:32 Peter Lavelle: “Larry, weigh in on what Ray just said there. Because there is a huge shift going on. We could talk about de-dollarization, supply chains are changing, the relationship that India has with Russia, which is getting better and better. The West is closing itself off from the rest of the world. And the last straw, it’s military. If the U.S. allows the dollar to become so compromised, I mean, that is the death of a superpower.”
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19:06 Larry Johnson: “Washington, in particular, but as always the rest of Europe have painted themselves into a corner and then tied a plastic bag over their head and believe that somehow this is going to result in victory. What the war in Ukraine has exposed – and I think, frankly, that this has surprised Russia – they never anticipated that the West so hollowed out in terms of its ability to replace and replenish military stores, particularly artillery shells and other weapons. I think there was an underlying assumption that the West actually had a pretty robust industrial base. And what has been exposed is: that’s gone. That’s history. This is not World War Two where United States factories roared into production. They are struggling to produce in one year what Ukraine is shooting in one week in terms of artillery shells. It has been a terrible miscalculation. And yet, despite that, nobody is coming to grips with reality. From a military standpoint, the only thing the United States has left in its quiver are nuclear weapons. And even then, the prospect of using those weapons successfully is problematic. So, the United States has to come to grips with the fact that it is not the power that it once was.”
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20:41 Gilbert Doctorow: “The question of industrial capacity of the United States is really a function of the thinking of its military planners about the kind of wars they would enter. And the war that is now going on in Ukraine, the course of that war, has been decided by the Russians, not the Americans. The Russians have made it an artillery war. And it is precisely that era where the Western industrial capacity is woefully behind, because that was not the kind of war that they had anticipated that they would be fighting. Whether that shows brilliance or stupidity is a separate question. And this has a bearing on the potential threats and risks ahead of us when one considers where we go if there is an escalation up the line with the US/NATO versus Russia. The assumption in our newspapers is that the Russians will go nuclear. And that is because the whole West underestimates what Russia has done in the last decade to build a very powerful conventional weapons system. That is extremely important. Also, in the case of hypersonic missiles, all we hear about is that they can evade anti-aircraft and air defense systems. There is another dimension to that which is more important as we go forward and consider the Russian thoughts about a response to an attack on Crimea. Namely, that they would counter-attack U.S. bases in Europe and the United States. How? The assumption in our papers is nuclear. Dead wrong. The Russians demonstrated with an attack by one of their hypersonic missiles on an underground silo storing munitions in Ukraine, that the firepower, the devastation of one of these hypersonic missiles is vast with a conventional warhead because of the laws of physics.”
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23:08 Ray McGovern: “I completely agree with Gilbert. That’s the dangerous thing, the nuclear aspect. As for the conventional, NATO generals do not usually agree with Gilbert Docdorow, but just this past week the top general said, you know, we said explicitly, we misunderestimated. We got this wrong. It’s scale, scale, SCALE. And we ain’t got it and the Russians do. Hello. That’s what is going to win in Ukraine and the only question is when the U.S. and NATO’s back is up against the wall, what will Biden be pressured to do.”
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23:58 Larry Johnson: “The United States is exhausted militarily right now and it doesn’t have any good options. And the Russian offensive, I believe, has already begun. It is not going to come. It is underway. It will expand from what it was. We are looking at the defeat of NATO. And that is something that the West has not come to grips with yet.”