"Scott Ritter on ‘Judging Freedom,’ 21 May 2025"
by Gilbert Doctorow, Gilbert Doctorow.com (May 21, 2025)
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/05/22/scott-ritter-on-judging-freedom-21-may-2025/
Various readers/viewers of my essays and video appearances have commented negatively on my remarks about how I stand apart from my peers on one or another issue. This type of comment was especially vitriolic when I took Scott Ritter to task for bringing repression from the Biden Administration down on his head by accepting payments from RT for journalistic work he did for them. The repression took the form of his being barred entry to a flight bound for Moscow where he was going to accompany some high-level meetings in Russia. Scott’s passport was confiscated at JFK airport and his residence was soon afterwards searched by FBI agents who took away documents relating to a book he was soon to publish.
My point was that by taking pay ‘from the enemy’ Scott Ritter was discrediting all of us in the Opposition. He was violating long-existing rules from Cold War 1.0 that my friend Professor Steve Cohen had explained to me several years ago: namely never to accept money or gifts from Soviet/Russian state agencies since you might appear to be acting on their behalf, against American interests in your publications.
For this criticism, I was denounced by some as a violator of Opposition solidarity. However, to my view, such solidarity is another word for conformism and equates to the same ‘go along and get along’ that we see in the hangers-on of the Establishment for whom we have no respect.
Allow me to say that Scott Ritter has unique experience as a former UN arms inspector posted to Iraq and has solid knowledge in arms control issues that I do not possess. I have read some of his essays with admiration. However, he has at times taken what I consider to be very wrong-headed positions on major issues and I have no reason to be silent about this given the broad following he enjoys.
One perfect example of what I find objectionable in what Scott Ritter says and writes came in his latest interview on ‘Judging Freedom.’
I cringe when Ritter says that Donald Trump is ‘a fundamentally weak person,’ a conclusion he introduces to explain why Trump does nothing about the horrific Israeli genocide in Gaza.
To call Donald Trump weak is dead wrong. A week ago, we all heard Trump speak out in Saudi Arabia, cutting to pieces the entire Neocon directed U.S. foreign policy of the past 30 years during both Democratic and Republican administrations. He praised the Saudis for their impressive prosperity, saying that this was due to their own efforts, not to the ‘nation building’ policies of the U.S. Government these past decades which had only brought destruction and death wherever they were applied.
Everything that Trump has been doing to decapitate the Neocon dominated intelligence agencies in Washington, to close USAID, the administrator of regime change programs drawn up and financed by the CIA, to remove woke and ideologically driven promotion of every weird minority in the Armed Forces and Pentagon – all of these actions bespeak the kind of bravery of a U.S. president that we have not witnessed for a century. And Scott Ritter calls this man ‘weak’!
This is not to mention the spontaneous bravery he demonstrated during the attempt on his life during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. After a bullet grazed his ear, he stood up, waved his fist and vowed to continue the fight.
My point here is that the Alternative Media are often as anti-Trump as the mainstream media. They do not want to believe that a U.S. president can do anything good or that he can know what he is doing. They insist that the last person to have his ear dictates what he will say next and they refuse to see how the President spreads confusion not because he is confused but because this keeps his enemies at bay. These enemies all believe, mistakenly, that with one more effort they can bring Trump around to their side of every argument.
I insist that Trump’s failure to speak or act against the Israeli genocide may be explained by realistic if cynical political calculus. This is the calculus that Machiavelli described for us more than five hundred years ago and it continues to be operative in many halls of power in this world.
In foreign policy, Donald Trump made it his first priority to resolve the war in Ukraine while re-establishing normal state-to-state relations with Russia. This was and remains an objective that does not enjoy majority backing on Capitol Hill. To win on this point, that is of vital importance to prevent the proxy war from becoming a hot war between the Collective West and Russia ending in nuclear exchanges that kill us all, Trump has needed the support of the Zionist majority in both parties. Had he ‘done the right thing’ on the Israeli genocide, he would have sacrificed at once this overarching foreign policy objective.
By the same token, doing the right thing on Israel early in his administration he would condemn his domestic program including his budget bill which even today hangs by a hair.
*****
In the video cited above, the hosts conducted an online poll of viewers in which 1500 persons participated. They were asked whether Trump understands Russia. 87% said ‘no’. As viewers of my own appearance yesterday on ‘Judging Freedom’ know, I was asked the same question and said ‘yes.’ That is to say, I was in the 13% minority.
However, this poll is biased against Trump, since the viewer population watching Scott Ritter is negatively disposed. While viewer comments on Ritter’s video all praise him to the skies, my own viewer comments praise my brilliance and essential contributions to understanding present-day events.
The fact that such different viewer groups are all subscribers to ‘Judging Freedom’ attests to the high value of this youtube channel as a platform for informing an enquiring public about differing expert opinions on key current events.
Before closing, I note that in the Scott Ritter video Secretary of State Rubio is lambasted as incompetent, knowing nothing about Russia. We are shown a tape of Rubio’s testimony in the Senate during which he says that Russia has no rights to the land it is claiming. However, those who question Rubio’s competence for his position are missing his utility to Donald Trump. By making such ill-informed and wrong statements in Senate hearings, Rubio is giving comfort to Republican skeptics of Trump’s policies on Russia and thus preventing them from ganging up to oppose the President.
And one last comment regarding linguistics. In this video, Scott Ritter notes that the Russians speak of their Minister of Foreign Affairs and of his diplomatic corps as ‘адекватный’. Ritter jokes that he did not understand this word in the past. It is usually translated as ‘adequate,’ which is not fulsome praise in English. Ritter turned it around in his mind and arrived at ‘competent.’
However, he is wrong there, as are the vast majority of English speakers who come across this word. In fact, адекватный ‘means suitable’ or ‘appropriate.’ Nothing more, nothing less, but in Russian culture it is a very positive notion.
The Russian адекватный was taken directly from the French adéquat, which English speakers also usually mistranslate as ‘adequate’ when it means precisely ‘suitable.’
Ritter was making the point that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is highly competent, head and shoulders above others, in particular the American diplomatic corps. Here, regrettably, I cannot agree with him.
Yes, many if not most of the senior diplomats in Russia are graduates of the prestigious and highly rigorous university that was specially created for this purpose, MGIMO. In the 1990s, these well-trained diplomats were given their freedom. The Yeltsin government was not cohesive; it was poorly run. In the new millennium, the ‘vertical of power’ has been the guiding principle and this pertains also to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As a practical matter, the Russian ambassadors around the world have almost no freedom to take independent actions of any kind. All power has been drawn back in to Moscow and the office of Sergei Lavrov. That is a depressing reality for the people in the field and it does a disservice to Russian diplomacy.
The Ministry also suffers from a widespread practice of excessive terms in office of people at the top. Lavrov has simply been in office for too long. He should have been rotated out to some consultative position while a fighter like his deputy Sergey Ryabkov would have been an excellent replacement for Lavrov during wartime.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025