CRITICAL CONDITIONS with Dan Perry and Claire Berlinski – Details, episodes & analysis

Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She now lives in Brussels and writes, on Substack, about foreign influence operations:

I’ve spent the last several years screaming from the rooftops about the corrosive effects of foreign influence operations on democratic societies. Now, I’ve decided to put all that information into a newsletter so that maybe you will start screaming from the rooftops, too. The more we understand how these influence operations tie into national security and corruption, the better we can arm ourselves against them.

I thought it would be interesting to have her on the podcast to discuss what we’re seeing.

How Russia captured a slice of the American mind

America’s response to Trump’s so-called peace plan proves just how successful Russia’s influence operations in America have been.

The KGB’s” active measures” system, refined in the late Soviet period and later adapted into the FSB/GRU playbook, rests on three principles: 1) Exploit existing divisions; don’t create fissures; widen them; 2) Use truth, half-truth, and lies interchangeably, whatever advances the psychological objective; 3) Obscure the source: The greatest triumph is when the target population spreads your messaging for you. Russian intelligence thinks in terms of cognitive openings: Any weakness—cultural, emotional, political, historical—becomes an entry point. America has a lot of entry points.

I recorded this podcast with Vladislav Davidzon on Zoom on Wednesday. I thought we’d covered some interesting ground. But when I listened to it, I was horrified to discover that something was seriously wrong with the audio. Vlad’s voice was mostly fine, but mine was often inaudible. I don’t know why. I record conversations on Zoom several times a week, and this has never happened before.

I spent yesterday trying to salvage the recording, but I could only improve it so much. Finally, tired and frustrated, I gave up and decided to deal with it today. Having slept on it, I decided that it didn’t merit my wasting another full day trying to fix it. Too much is happening in the world that I want to write about, and I didn’t want to see another day go down the tubes.

So I’m putting it up as is, with the transcript, below—read the transcript, listen to as much as you feel like, or don’t. I also gave the transcript to Google’s NotebookLM, which created a completely new podcast, with perfect audio. in which two slightly dopey AI speakers discuss the transcript in a chirpy tone. It’s just as good as the original, really. Voilà:

Claire: Welcome to the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. I’m here with my friend Vladislav Davidson, who is in Amsterdam. Is that right?

Vlad: I am in Amsterdam indeed, Claire. Hi.

Claire: Hi! Are you coming back to Paris?

Vlad: I should be back in about a week or so. I’m waiting for a meeting with a politician. As soon as he tells me what his schedule is, I should pop back in.

Claire: Right.

Vlad: I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. I know you missed me.

Claire: You going to be back for the 14th?

Vlad: Um, possibly. What do you think, you mean the parade?

Claire: Firemen’s ball. I thought it might be fun to go this year.

Vlad: You're going? Do you have extra tickets?

Claire: You don’t need tickets.

Vlad: I only have a white jacket with me while I’m on the road. What do you think?

Claire: Oh, you don’t need to dress up. It’s for the whole neighborhood.

Vlad: Is it on the street? Where is it?

Claire: It’s at the firehouse. It’s just across on the rue de Sévigné.

Vlad: I think it’ll be nice.

Claire: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

Vlad: Let me know. Actually, I’ve never done that.

Claire: You absolutely should.

Vlad: Right?

Claire: Yeah, speaking of the 14th, they’re practicing now for Bastille Day with the planes overhead, the fighter jets, and you know, when they pass overhead, the sound terrifies the cats—they run under the bed and they can’t be coaxed out for hours. And it actually terrifies me, too. I find these sounds terrifying. Just—

Vlad: I have flashbacks to the war. I can’t, even now in Amsterdam, sometimes the car back stops, sometimes it takes me a few seconds to realize I’m not in Ukraine. I’m not at the frontlines that—when some alarm goes off, I’m continuously thinking, are the Shaheds firing? So, uh—

Claire: It scares me and I know that they’re not coming for me. They’re just practicing for a parade. What is it like to deal with that for real, knowing that they are coming for you night after night? It’s just—

Vlad: It’s terrifying. And I have an extremely high appetite for risk, more than most people. But it’s really, really scary when you are in a situation where you’re getting bombed and you know you’re getting bombed. It’s not pleasant

Claire: Night after night. It must just leave people—it must just leave people beyond exhausted, beyond, beyond empty.

Vlad: Yeah. Well, that’s the point. That’s why they do it. They know that this is a way to grind down the population. They purposely do it in the middle of a night in order to wake people up and not allow them to sleep and to grind out the population’s capacity to resist.

Claire: I feel so bad for everyone who's living with this. I feel bad for the people in Gaza living with this. Obviously, I’m not a great enthusiast of Gaza’s political leadership, but—

Vlad: One has to have empathy for ordinary people who are caught in between the bad decisions of the leaders or the decisions of other leaders, right. I support Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas, and I also feel bad for every collateral casualty, for the suffering, by innocent people. Obviously it’s terrible. War is terrible.

Claire: Yeah, I know. I—that’s not a very original observation, but I—

Vlad: It’s not, it’s not.

Claire: But still, I just really feel bad for everyone who’s going through this, and I don’t understand why my fellow Americans don’t seem to feel for what Ukrainians are going through.

Vlad: Well, they did. They did and they still do. The polling is very obvious on this. But some people on the NatCon MAGA right have been, I wouldn’t say manipulated, but it’s become a partisan issue, and it’s easy for people not to care when they feel they're not being taken care of by the state.

Claire: Well, you have to be pretty stupid to allow that to be a partisan issue. For most of American history, there was an edict that politics stopped the water’s edge. And to make this partisan issue—

Vlad: It became a partisan issue because of the stupidity of some people, on both the Democratic Party and on the Ukrainian leadership side. The Ukrainians obviously have made a lot of mistakes in their dealings with Donald Trump over the last nine years.

Claire: I really think you’re blaming the victim on this one.

Vlad: I was a US law enforcement witness on this. I was there and I saw this, the Ukrainians got off on the wrong foot with Donald Trump from the very beginning. And obviously there was no playbook for how to deal with an insurgent Trump campaign in 2016, and the Ukrainian Embassy made some unfortunate calls in a difficult situation—I discussed this very recently with the Ukrainian ambassador at the time, and he’s very grateful to me for what I did back then.

Claire: You mean by handing over the information from the Party of Regions?

Vlad: That was one of the things they did. Yeah. Hmm.

Claire: What else?

Vlad: Uh, how discreet do I wanna be? The Ukrainians made a bad decision about, thinking that the Clinton campaign was gonna win and they made they made less effort to talk to the Trump people in the beginning, Ambassador Chaly—and I’ve told him this to his face—made a bad call with the way he published an article on The Hill in the spring of 2016, when Donald Trump was talking about Crimea as Russia—I mean, it should have been done at the level of the Foreign Ministry. It shouldn't have been the Ukrainian ambassador to Washington that made that call and wrote that op-ed.

Claire: Mm-hmm. I still think you’re blaming the victim. No normal administration would pay attention to that. They would act in the American interest.

Vlad: I mean, obviously he got embroiled in the Ukraine impeachment stuff. Obviously, that’s his own fault. But he did get embroiled in Russiagate, which was a lot of psychosis from the legacy media. And he saw the Ukraine stuff as an extension of Russiagate psychosis. So, he should get over it, but there’s multiple instances of things that he continuously got involved in. As a MAGA guy says to me, the Ukrainians somehow keep getting involved in Trump’s business. It’s a very vulgar but not incorrect way of explaining why Ukraine kept getting involved. And for whatever bizarre reason, as I put in one of my articles, Ukraine was fodder for presidential elections, three cycles in a row, 2016, 20 and 24, and that’s weird.

Claire: I don’t want to spend all of our time on this, but I still think that you're blaming the victim. The abnormality here is—

Vlad: I’m not blaming the victim because these are my people. I’m on the Ukrainian side. I think the Ukrainian leadership, before Zelensky, has a lot to answer for. Zelensky inherited a bad hand and a bad relationship. I don’t like the way they were treated. I don’t like what happened with him in the White House, that’s all terrible. But certain things happened between 2016 and 2019 that when Zelensky came into office, he already inherited a not-great relationship with the Trump administration. There’s a bad relationship, why there’s bad blood, why there’s lack of trust, you know?

Claire: What are you hearing about the latest insane episode in which it was reported that Pete Hegseth and perhaps Elbridge Colby unilaterally decided to hold up arm shipments to Ukraine? Is that true?

Vlad: Look, I don’t want to discuss Mr. Colby because I don’t want him to stop replying to my DMs on Twitter.

Claire: At some point you’ve gotta stop DMing and report what he says, right?

Vlad: Yeah. I mean, I don’t wanna—

Claire: He doesn’t listen to this podcast.

Vlad: I put a lot of effort into having conversations with those people and a lot of people told me it was a wasted effort, and it turns out—

Claire: So your sources are so carefully cultivated that you can’t ever use them?

Vlad: Yeah. Right, right. I don’t know, I tried, and a lot of other people tried to have conversations with the other side on this stuff, and some of them have come around, some of them have not, and I think it’s—

Claire: Well, you don’t have to say anything. But if he’s responsible for it, chuckle. And if not, I—

Vlad: I’ve read the same reporting that you have. Ha ha ha, ha ha.

Claire: I see.

Vlad: So, I really wish that wasn’t the case. They are really committed to their pivot away from Ukraine to Taiwan. They are committed to having the Europeans deal with this, and they are committed to offsetting this situation onto, NATO and European.

Claire: But Colby isn’t committed to Taiwan. He’s said so, explicitly. He said that he doesn’t think Taiwan is a vital American interest, and he thinks we should reach some kind of accommodation with China. It’s all just stuff he say. He’s a total opportunist. I know you don’t want to ruin your relationship with him, So I—

Vlad: Honestly, I don’t want to attack this gentleman. He has power, and there are a lot of vindictive people in the world, and people in power typically have egos and or sometimes thin egos. And I really hope that this is just a more of a kabuki game, which it very well could be. A lot of what happens with the Trump administration is kabuki games, allowing Trump to have his daily change of mood on whatever it—

Claire: Trump just said something about the Russians b**********g him, to which the entire world said, “Um, yeah.”

Vlad: But he knew this for months. I mean, he’s frustrated enough to actually call them out publicly on it because he knows he’s not getting anything from them. The Russians are just really stubborn, and they don’t want deal, and they don’t want anything and they’re just pushing Trump around. So at a certain point, even Donald Trump, whose policy was not to publicly criticize them and try to get them to make some sort of small concessions privately, said, “Okay, f**k these people.”

Claire: So why is he trying to rescue them economically?

Vlad: I mean, he has, again, a complicated relationship with Russia. He has a difficult relationship with the Russians and he obviously, like several other administrations, wants to park the Russian relationship and see if we can just get back to business as usual. Of course, there’s no going back to business as usual, and I think even he gets that, but he’s trying. Did you read my piece from December with Mark Galeotti?

Claire: The one about Trump scheming to get a Nobel Prize? I read about a third of it before you called.

Vlad: What’d you think of a first third?

Claire: You know what, just let me tell you something interesting that I heard, which I haven't written about yet.

Vlad: Yes?

Claire: Actually Trump has done something important in Congo. Something that

Vlad: Is that right?

Claire: He could legit get the Nobel Peace Prize for if anyone paid any attention to it. You know, that is the worst armed conflict since the Second World War. And it was heating up again. I found this out—it wasn’t reported anywhere—from my cab driver. I know it’s a cliche to cite the cab driver, but what can I do, it was a cab driver who told me this. My cab driver was from Congo, and we ended up talking about it. He was kind of surprised that I knew anything about the conflict. But he said “The Americans have really helped us”— and did you know there are American troops there in quite large numbers?

Vlad: When?

Claire: Now.

Vlad: I had no idea.

Claire: No, me neither. I mean, I’ve taken this from my Congolese cab driver, I haven’t tried to find out if it’s true. But why would he make that up? That’s kind of a hard thing to be mistaken about, right?

Vlad: I’m going to Google this. Immediately. US troops in Congo. I’m gonna Google this. It should be—I mean, unless it’s a secret and we’re secretly—

Claire: We pushed back M23, which is a significant achievement. Negotiated a ceasefire. And apparently, Donald Trump is popular there because he’s credited with stopping the war.

Vlad: Al Jazeera reported three years ago that President Tshisekedi authorized the deployment of US counterterrorism forces in the Eastern DRC. And the US Embassy says US Congo Military Cooperation continues. “A new chapter opens military cooperation.” This is on the US Embassy Congo website and “The need for US action for Democratic Republic.” Amnesty, USA. It seems that there are troops.

Claire: There are indeed. I was surprised to hear that, and surprised to hear the first non-American person I have encountered, probably, who was genuinely enthusiastic about Trump.

Vlad: African News has a piece on us deploying Army to secure the DRC election last summer. So it’s obviously true

Claire: —and this is a significant accomplishment. Now, obviously, the only reason, I’m sure, that we’re there is because it’s such a significant source of absolutely essential minerals. But—

Vlad: —but so what? You stop a war. You stop a war.

Claire: —you stop a war, you stop a war. So why isn’t Trump talking this up? Is it because he thinks his base will disapprove of sending troops to Africa?

Vlad: This may not be even in his top priority list. He may not even understand how successful his own policy may be. It’s entirely possible.

Claire: Well, he is a much more realistic candidate for a Nobel Prize for that achievement than for anything else.

Vlad: Well, I’m not against him getting the Nobel Prize if he actually does something worthy of it. Yeah. At this point he probably deserves it more than Barack Obama did.

Claire: Well, Barack Obama didn’t deserve it at all. He hadn’t done anything when he got it.

Vlad: Right. And in fact, he caused wars, and caused a lot of people to die.

Claire: Yeah, no. But Trump does seem to be quite obsessed with getting a Nobel prize. He’s having everyone who visits him submit his application to the Nobel Committee. He’s not going to get it, of course. And I don’t know—

Vlad: I had lunch with a very prominent Anglo-American journalist the other day, and he told me that he’s talking to his Norwegian friends and Swedish friends about getting their governments to back the committee to get it. And that’s the one way that we’re going to get influence on them, is the thinking. So, some serious people have had this thought.

Claire: Yeah. Pakistan came over and offered to nominate him for having negotiated a ceasefire with India, which India completely denies, and then the Israelis are nominating him for … having bombed Iran, I guess. Can you make any sense of this proposal in Gaza? I mean, what is he talking about when he talks about taking control of it and turning it into the Gaza Riviera? Does he—

Vlad: Is there an actual proposal, or that was just him—

Claire: —there was a press conference, a couple days ago. And I actually happen to have the transcript. Someone asked me about it. Let me just pull it up. His speech is so incoherent that it’s really hard to figure out what he’s getting at, in even the most literal sense.

Vlad: Do we just annex Gaza, make it into the 51st state? Is that what you're asking?

Claire: Well, he seems to be talking about “taking ownership,” which has to mean annexation, right? Or maybe it means taking ownership in the sense of “taking responsibility.” And—

Vlad: Anything?

Claire: Okay, here’s the transcript. Here we go. “We brought peace and stability to the Middle East like we haven't seen in decades. Together, we defeated ISIS, we ended the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, one of the worst. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Vlad: Blah, blah, blah.

Claire: “We starved Hamas,” which is a really unfortunate turn of phrase, “and other terrorist proxies. And, we starved them like they had never seen before.”

Vlad: Cool.

Claire: Blah, blah, blah. Says we’re going to have a lot of people signing up for the Abraham Accords very quickly.

Vlad: Good.

Claire: And then he says, “The horrors of October 7th would never have happened if I were president. The Ukraine and Russia disaster would never have happened if I were president”—

Vlad: By the way, I agree with that. It’s actually the case. It happened because we had a very weak and brain dead cadaver in the White House, and Putin made the decision to go all in because he saw weakness. I do believe that actually if Trump had been president of the war, and that sort of—

Claire: I am sure the debacle in Afghanistan was a significant part of his decision making, but I also think he felt internal pressures that had nothing to do with us. I think it was an act of regime consolidation.

Vlad: Yeah, I know, but he made a decision to go thinking that, it was not gonna have any kind of—

Claire: The ones he really thought were weak, compared to reality, were the Ukrainians. And that was obviously a major miscalculation.

Vlad: Yeah. Obviously there were miscalculations all around. But, that doesn't mean the Biden administration doesn’t have a lot to answer for.

Claire: Hey, we dispatched Bill Burns, the CIA Director, to Moscow before the war. Do you have any idea what he said to them?

Vlad: No, that’s top secret. But he threatened them. Obviously. They didn’t care. They didn’t believe him or care. Yeah. So—

Claire: I’m just wondering what he threatened them with. Alright, so here's what he says:

“Gaza strip has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly, who’ve been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It's been an unlucky place for a long time. Being in its presence just, uh, has not been good. And it should not go through a process of rebuilding or occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it, lived there and died there, and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains, which will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly, bad luck.

“This can be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth. It could be the numerous sites, or it could be one large site, but the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll get, I’m sure, we’ll get something really spectacular done. They’re going to have peace. They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilization of wonderful people has had to endure.

“The only reason Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down. They’re living under fallen concrete, and that’s very dangerous, precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.

“Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for a hundred years. I’m hopeful that the ceasefire could be in the beginning of a larger and more enduring peace that will end the bloodshed and killing once and overall, but the same—”

Vlad: Claire, okay. I’ve had enough. Claire, what are you parsing there? What are you getting out of it?

Claire: I’m just trying to figure out what on earth he’s getting at. What is his idea here? Who is he talking about, even?

Vlad: I think he is sending signals to whichever Sunni Arab allies of ours we're trying to blackmail into paying for it and policing it. That’s what I would guess. But who knows?

Claire: Americans are not going to be happy with the idea of sending troops into Gaza.

Vlad: No, no. And we shouldn’t. And I personally want nothing to do with that. And that’s a bad idea. Obviously no one needs to do that. And—

Claire: On one thing, he’s right. Doing the same thing will get the same results.

Vlad: It’s totally right. Yeah.

Claire: It’s just—I just don’t know what he’s proposing as an alternative,

Vlad: Both the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes will collapse if they take on more responsibility for it. And the other Sunni Arabs don’t want to do it and the Palestinian authority doesn’t want to do it. I don’t have an answer anymore than anybody else does to, sorry to say.

Claire: I saw something—was it coming from the administration or was it just something I saw online?—about turning the Sinai into Palestine?

Vlad: People have been wanting to do that for a long time, but that would lead to the collapse of Egyptian regime, one way or another. And we’ve promised our Egyptian friends that we wouldn’t make them do that. So no one serious is actually demanding that they do that because it would bring the war to Egypt.

Claire: Trump doesn’t care what we promised.

Vlad: He understands power dynamics extremely well. He has an extraordinarily predatory and clear-eyed understanding of power. He is the president who is most comfortable, and most understanding of, power dynamics that we’ve had in a very long time.

Claire: That's why he can’t figure out how to handle Russia?

Vlad: He sees Russia as having nuclear weapons and very difficult to deal with and rightly so. I mean, what are you gonna do if the Russians don’t want to make peace? What are you going to do? You could.

Claire: Arm Ukraine! Give weapons to Ukraine!

Vlad: Yeah, I know, I know. And that, yes—I’m calling for that, obviously, but, still. It is a difficult situation. I don’t know why I’m defending him. I mean, I just like being on the contrarian side of things. Anyways, what did you make of my piece with Galleoti, as much as you read of it?

Claire: So far it was interesting. I just didn’t finish it. I mean—

Vlad: Basically we predicted that he would put a lot of pressure for some of the Ukrainians and that when that wouldn’t work, he would put the pressure on the Russians, and that's exactly what happened. Sadly, it didn't happen quickly enough.

Claire: He’s not putting a lot of pressure on the Russians.

Vlad: No, he is not. He’s not, and he doesn’t think he has a lot of sticks.

Claire: When we spoke to about this when you were here the other day, you said that Ukrainians are holding on for Russia’s economic collapse, which I think really could come quite quickly.

Vlad: The system is very shaky. It’s shakier than anticipated. And the Ukrainians are extremely smart and they know what they're doing and they are really putting a lot of effort into blowing up stuff like oil refineries, right? And so they are very good at blowing up oil refineries and oil tankers and arms munition sites. So they’ve—according to Ukrainian intelligence—created US$10 billion worth of economic damage inside Russia already just with drones, right? Just a couple of days ago, the Ukrainian drones shut down all of the flights, the entire night, in one of Moscow’s four major international airports. So nobody was flying in and out of Moscow that night, and the cell phone jammers were turned on in order to jam the drones. But basically, all those people in the airport didn’t have cell phone service, so they sat there for hours waiting for their flight, which didn’t happen until maybe the next day. They couldn’t call anyone and couldn’t go home. So that’s a knock-on effect. No one likes that. You get on a plane and then you have to sit at the airport and then you have to go home, right? So the idea is to make life very difficult for the Russian population and also to blow up a bunch of stuff that the regime needs to consolidate its economic control. So do Ukrainians think they’re gonna kill every last Russian soldier? No, they don’t. But they think they can, they can wait this out. And, um, maybe they—

Claire: Then what?

Vlad: Then? I don’t know, honestly. We’re waiting for the regime to collapse. He’s only human. You don’t make a deal with with him, because he doesn’t want to make a deal. You just wait it out.

Claire: There’s been an impressive number of Russians falling out of windows recently.

Vlad: Yeah. Like three of them just over the last three days. Yeah. Regime consolidation is real.

Claire: So these are people who were suspected of disloyalty in some way?

Vlad: Even a former defense minister, Timor what’s-his-name, went to jail for 13 years for corruption. There is a lot of internal politics in Russia and some of the regime elites are unhappy. Some of them are looking for quiet ways of making a deal. And some of them are falling out of windows because the regime both needs to scare some of them and also to take away their assets in order to pay off others, right? The system cannibalizes its own, once in a while, and even very high-level guys, a former transport ministry guy, a former defense minister, going to jail. This is just the way they run the regime, you know?

Claire: Yeah. Of the elites who aren’t happy, are there more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to make a deal, or more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to become more aggressive and take more risks?

Vlad: Well, there are those of them who just want to keep going and keep fighting. And then there are also those who are like, “This is stupid. This isn't going anywhere,” right? I think the ones who were okay with the war have consolidated their support for a really long time, and they’ve just priced in the fact that this war’s going to go on for a long time.

Claire: Who are the notable figures? Who would like to cut a deal, do you know?

Vlad: No, because if we had their names, they wouldn’t be in the game anymore. So I know that people do talk to them, and I have two names that have been bandied about, but I’m told I can’t make that public. There are regime insiders who do talk to Western intelligence agencies, but if they get caught, they do get killed.

Claire: So, do we have any insight to Putin’s state of mind right now?

Vlad: I personally don't know. There are people who look at that all day long, but it’s very difficult. And he does sit in a bunker, and Kremlinology is real, of course, but that’s a very difficult one. So I can’t say for sure. He thinks he’s winning.

Claire: Does he?

Vlad: Yeah, he absolutely does. Yeah. Why wouldn’t he? He is winning on the merits of his own position. He’s kind of winning. Yeah. So why wouldn’t he think that?

Claire: Certainly in the larger sense of demoralizing the West, leaving it too confused to understand the difference between its allies and its adversaries, bringing allies to power in Europe, and—

Vlad: The Russian Army’s grinding—at tremendous, unspeakable, inhumane costs, 1,300 Russian men dead and wounded every single day—they are making gains, they’re making substantive gains. And the Ukrainian army will run out of men at this point. It’s just the way it is.

Claire: Are Russians noticing all these wounded men coming back, do they—

Vlad: Well, it’s a good question actually. The Russians have made a point of not cycling people out of the war zone. Unless you’re really terribly maimed, you’re not going to be allowed out of a war zone by the Russian authorities. They try to keep the mobilized men in the war zone or in the regions around Russia in order to keep them from going back to their hometowns in Siberia and telling everybody how terrible things are.

Claire: Well, they remember 1917.

Vlad: Yeah, it’s a real policy at the presidential administration level. The number of demobilized guys is tiny. Actually, most people who were mobilized since September 22 have not been demobilized. There’s no demobilization structure. All the contracts that have been signed, with exception of the six-month ones that were given to the Prighozin guys, the Wagner guys, those have been honored, but everyone else, their stop-loss stuff has prevented them from going home. So the Russian regions are sort of getting information and if 200,000 Russian men are dead, those are substantive losses and—

Claire: People must have noticed that their loved ones are not in contact anymore.

Vlad: There’s a lot of that, but again, people will find out how bad it is when the demobilization starts, and there are gonna be huge, huge knock-on effects to the Russian economy and Russian society for decades to come as veterans come back, and crime, PTSD-related incidents skyrocket and roil the society. But that’s in the future. In the meantime, they’re not being let out of the staging grounds. And the population of Russia doesn't really know quite how bad the war’s going for them in terms of losses.

Claire: The POWs that were released recently, they didn’t even let them go home. They just sent them right back to combat.

Vlad: That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That’s Russia. Ukraine is worse. You know, there’s a new term in Ukraine. It’s called a double widow. Do you know what a double widow is? A double widow is a Ukrainian woman who lost her husband to the army, remarried after 23, and lost her second husband. Can you imagine that’s a social term?

Claire: “Ukraine is worse”—not in the sense, however, of keeping people at the front so to conceal the extent of losses, I presume?

Vlad: No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, in terms of per capita dead, per capita wounded. Probably a lot worse for the Ukrainians, but the population is a quarter or a fifth of the Russian population, so it’s not the same.,

Claire: It’s an utter catastrophe. An utter catastrophe for Ukraine, for Europe, for Russia too. I mean, it’s just, just—

Vlad: It’s their own fault, but yes.

Claire: It’s their own fault in one sense, but there’s—really, I cannot think of anything that would make a country deserve this.

Vlad: The Russians put up with this regime for years and years, and actually in some ways they do deserve it, to be honest. There was a reckoning coming and they absolutely got what they deserved. Any Russian man who wound up in the war zone and was not forcibly thrown into it, with no agency of his own, deserves this in one way or another. I’m sorry to say that. I have very little sympathy.

Claire: I think I’d agree with that, but I wouldn’t agree that the whole society deserves what’s coming to them.

Vlad: I’ve asked soldiers, Ukrainian officers, on the front line, “Do you feel bad for anybody?” And they're like, “No. Look, you go to jail. Just say no to mobilization orders. Go to jail. Don’t kill anybody. Don't wind up dead in a ditch.”

Claire: I think I would agree with that—but—

Vlad: The Ukrainian officers do not have even the least bit of empathy for any Russian man who wound up there, and it’s completely normal. You have to dehumanize totally. You have to dehumanize your opponent in order to win. Obviously. That's a normal thing to do.

Claire: Sure. But I cannot condemn Russian civilians for being easily propagandized and incurious about the wider world, and willing to accept things that a free society shouldn’t accept, because if I use that standard, I’d have to condemn my own country, and I’m not willing to do that.

Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, no, I have more empathy for MAGA guys who see this as one more lie from an elite that has been lying to them and sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan than I do for any Russian on the frontline. I’m sorry to say.

Claire: Guys who think that are not the ones who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Those guys are actually much more aware of what’s going on and they tend to be extremely supportive of Ukraine.

Vlad: No, actually I do talk to people who were in Iraq and Afghanistan who are like, “What was I there for?” Like. “This is the one more lie. This is just—”

Claire: Well, I understand that bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan for the veterans of those wars, but I don’t think that, by and large, that people who served are completely ignorant of why there’s a war in Ukraine, and who’s the bad guy.

Vlad: The Americans aren’t stupid. They know what’s going on anyways. Um, anything else we can talk about in terms of—

Claire: I contest that statement. I have to contest that statement.

Vlad: Really?

Claire: Yeah. I don’t think Americans know what’s going on. No. I think by and large Americans exhibit very little understanding of foreign relations and would be very hard pressed to answer simple factual questions about this conflict..

Vlad: Well, why is that?

Claire: Most people, not just Americans, but most people are not interested in international relations, or even politics. They become interested when it touches them personally. And Americans have a long history of feeling insulated from the rest of the world, different from the rest of the world, and they’re also unbelievably badly served by the media. It’s not really even the media’s fault either. We all know that the media’s been destroyed by the internet.

Vlad: Well, and their own stupid decisions.

Claire: A lot of them too. A lot of them too.

Vlad: Yeah. Anyway, Claire, thank you so much for this. It’s been a lovely, lovely time talking to you. I’m a bit miffed by all this also, so I, I can’t really—

Claire: Come back on the 14th and we’ll go to the firemen’s ball.

Vlad: Yeah, lemme try it. Lemme try. Okay. Okay.

Claire: A little plug for your new Substack?

Vlad: Are people gonna listen to all the way to the end?

Claire: You don’t want the ones who don’t as readers.

Vlad: Okay, I’m Substacking about art and politics, so I really hope everyone will tune in to my Substack about art and politics. And I think I'm good at what I do. I know a lot of interesting things,

Claire: Lots of lively writing and very informed commentary about both art and politics.

Vlad: Yes I just had my first piece. Claire was nice enough to cross post it. Claire, what was it about?

Claire: It was about the Rijksmuseum.

Vlad: Oh. And, hanging out, looking at arts. Yep. Right. You, you feel like you’re on a little walk through the Rijksmuseum, in art—

Claire: I left you a comment saying, “I got hung up on the word ‘garrulous’ to describe Otto Dix.” He had a fine pictorial feel for what things looked like after an exchange of artillery. You could say that.

Vlad: Right? That’s right. Alright, so do I. So do I. Thank you. Thank you Claire. Okay.

Claire: Alright.

Vlad: Bye bye.

Claire: Bye

Vlad: Bye.

While I’m at it, here’s the conversation you missed with Sergei Cristo. He’s the hero of the podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, in which he offered evidence of a spy ring operating at the heart of the British establishment.

I apologize for how long it took me to put this up. My computer wasn’t able to handle a file this big, so I couldn’t get it down from the cloud. Every time I tried, it crashed my computer. I finally broke down and bought a new computer. (It was time. My old computer had serious problems, including a broken keyboard—I could no longer type the letter “a,” which was a handicap in my line of work.) Then it took me a little while to reestablish all my files from the old computer. But I’m now good to go—and this will be followed by more video files that I haven’t been able to upload.

I’m a bit puzzled, though, because while I have the whole audio transcript, I can only find the highlights of the video, below. Did I move the video file somewhere else in the hope of opening it? Sergei, I’ll keep looking for the complete video file—it’s very likely that I moved it somewhere clever, and it will come back to me what I did with it. For now, this is actually quite a good summary:

UPDATE: I found the full video. I’d uploaded it to Dropbox in the hope it might open there.

Here’s an AI summary:

Russian Intelligence Operations in the West

Sergei discussed the Russian intelligence operations in the UK and the West's readiness to accept these operations. He highlighted the growing realization of autocracies working together, regardless of their ideologies, and the need for a unified approach to confront this growing threat. Sergei also touched on his research into Western investments in oppressive regimes and how these investments damage the national security of democratic countries. He mentioned parallels between the recent history of Turkey and Russia and the importance of understanding the Gerasimov doctrine, which outlines the role of non-military means in achieving political and strategic goals.

Russian Warfare and Western Intelligence

Sergei discussed the Russian approach to warfare, emphasizing that they view their intelligence operations as part of a war plan. He suggested that the West's successful use of soft power in the Cold War was weaponized by Russia in an inhumane way. Claire expressed concern about persuading Western publics that Russia is at war with them, particularly regarding the 2016 US election. Robert and Arun discussed the difficulty of convincing people of the truth, even when faced with evidence. Kay asked why there hasn't been a factual reveal from their own intelligence agencies. Sergei suggested that the UK could conduct a proper review of the evidence they have.

Trump’s Russian Organized Crime Ties

Sergei discussed the potential connections between Trump and Russian organized crime, highlighting Trump's business relationships with Russian criminals and the potential influence of the KGB. He also touched on the topic of cryptocurrency and its potential use for money laundering. Claire asked about the significance of Elon Musk's connections to the Kremlin, to which Sergei responded that while he doesn't have a definitive answer, there are potential links through new industries and the legalization of cryptocurrency. Andre Bauer asked about the connection between Alexander Lebedev and Boris Johnson, to which Sergei explained that Lebedev's father was a former KGB officer and that Lebedev himself was elevated into the House of Lords by Boris Johnson.

Aaron Banks’ Russian Financial Ties

The discussion focused on Aaron Banks, a major donor to the Brexit campaign, and his financial connections to Russia. Sergei and other participants share information about Banks’s business practices, including his use of offshore companies and potential involvement in money laundering. They also discuss Banks’s Russian wife and his meetings with Russian diplomats. Xavier adds that Banks was known for laundering money for Russian oligarchs through Gibraltar. The conversation touches on the broader implications of Russian financial influence in British politics and the need for further investigation into Banks’s activities.

Russian Influence on Trump’s Behavior

Claire discussed the influence of Russian operations on Donald Trump's behavior. The group agreed that Russia's influence is significant, but some participants, including Robert McTague and Robert Zubrin, expressed concerns about the public’s willingness to accept this fact. They suggested that a major incident, similar to the 9/11 attacks, might be needed to convince the public. The group also discussed the media’s role in educating the public about these issues, with some participants expressing frustration at the media’s failure to do so.

Russian Influence in Politics

Robert Zubrin discussed the dilemma faced by generals and politicians like McCarthy in acknowledging Trump’s potential ties to Russia, as it conflicts with their institutional loyalties. Sergei then shifted the conversation to Russian influence in politics, particularly focusing on the Brexit campaign and the harassment of journalist Carol Cadwalladr. He highlighted the role of Russian intelligence in orchestrating online abuse campaigns and the importance of exposing political figures with Russian connections, especially in Britain.

Financial Deals and Political Manipulation

Sergei discussed the potential consequences of exposing the financial dealings of politicians and bloggers, emphasizing the damaging impact of populist figures. He also shared his concerns about the British government’s reluctance to investigate Brexit. Sergei suggested that the revelation of Trump's financial deals and alleged misconduct could lead to widespread disillusionment among his supporters. He also expressed his belief that the rule of law should be used while it still exists, and he criticized the lack of action from the British authorities. Claire agreed with Sergei’s points, highlighting the need for democracies to harden against manipulation while remaining open societies.

Statesmanship and Sovereignty in Democracies

Robert Zubrin discussed the importance of statesmanship in democracies, citing historical examples such as Pericles in Athens and Churchill in Britain. He emphasized the need for a patriotic political movement to reverse current trends. Sergei brought up the issue of sovereignty and foreign interference, while Arun highlighted the division in American society and the perception of Russia among Trump’s voters. Robert Zubrin clarified that the majority of Americans support Ukraine, not Russia. The discussion also touched on the role of media and the importance of understanding the difference between criminal and counterintelligence investigations.

Russian Influence on US Political System

Larissa expressed concern about the Russian influence on the US political system, emphasizing the need for new ways to maneuver in the face of changing political dynamics. Sergei discussed the potential for Russian interference in the US electoral system, particularly with the suspension of cyber defense operations against Russia.

Western Investments in Oppressive Regimes

Sergei discussed his research on Western investments in oppressive regimes and its impact on national security. He is working on a case study of asset managers and sustainable funds, which often invest in regimes like Putin’s. Sergei is collaborating with investigative journalists and publications like The Economist and Berlin Times to publish his findings. The discussion also touched on the influence of Trump and other American politicians on European far-right parties like the AFD in Germany.

Social Media’s Impact on American Politics

The group discussed the impact of social media and Russian influence on American politics, particularly in relation to Trump’s presidency. Robert Zubrin suggested that social media has created a “post-truth environment” that made Trump’s rise possible, rather than an increase in racism. Claire recommended Adam Garfinkle’s work on the effects of social media. The conversation concluded with Sergei emphasizing the importance of exposing crimes and the group agreeing on the need to find solutions to combat misinformation.

Help Sergei expose Western investments in dictators here.

And just for fun, here’s a briefing and a podcast created by Google’s new one-click AI podcast creator, which turns everything you feed it into banal but completely realistic podcast slop. It’s amazing.

Listen to Google Slop’s podcast version of our conversation

Briefing: Russian Intelligence Operations and Western Influence

This briefing summarizes the key themes and important points discussed in the provided transcript, focusing on Russian intelligence operations and their alleged influence in Western democracies, particularly the UK and the US.

Main Themes:

* Russian “Active Measures” as Warfare: The core theme is that Russia views its intelligence operations, including propaganda, covert influence, and disruption, as a form of warfare against the West, not merely espionage. This is linked to the Gerasimov Doctrine and a perceived lesson from the Soviet Union’s collapse and Western "soft power" success.

* Historical Context of Russian Influence: The discussion places current Russian activities within a historical context, noting parallels with Soviet ideology and methods, as well as drawing lessons from the Cold War.

* Targeting Western Democracies: Russia is seen as actively targeting Western democracies through various means, including exploiting political divisions, supporting populist movements, and using financial and commercial links.

* Difficulty in Western Recognition and Response: A significant challenge is the difficulty in persuading Western publics and institutions of the reality and severity of Russian influence operations. There is a perceived reluctance to acknowledge being “at war” with Russia in this unconventional sense.

* Specific Cases of Alleged Russian Influence: The discussion delves into specific cases, including the US elections, Brexit, and individuals like Donald Trump, Aaron Banks, Alexander Lebedev, and potentially Elon Musk, examining their alleged connections and the mechanisms of influence.

* The Role of Finance and Organized Crime: The transcript emphasizes the intertwined nature of Russian intelligence operations, organized crime, and financial dealings, particularly through offshore structures and potentially cryptocurrency.

* Challenges in Investigating and Prosecuting: The offshore nature of some financial activities and the political sensitivity surrounding these allegations are presented as significant obstacles to effective investigation and prosecution.

* Impact on Political Discourse and Public Opinion: Russian influence operations are seen as contributing to the amplification of divisive narratives and potentially impacting electoral outcomes and public understanding of events.

Most Important Ideas and Facts:

* Russian “Active Measures” as Grand Strategy: According to Sergei, referencing the Gerasimov Doctrine, Russia considers intelligence operations and covert actions as the “cheapest in terms of grand strategy” and a “more effective way of achieving those goals,” making them a “part of the war plan.”

* Western Democracies are “at War” from Russia’s Perspective: Sergei states, “if we're asking ourselves... in Russian's eyes, are we at war with Russia in the West, NATO with Russia? The answer is absolutely, categorically, we are because they're already conducting that war as per Gerasimov doctrine.”

* GRU Involvement in US Elections: Sergey mentions that “according to CIA, what they’ve disclosed was that the part of the intelligence machinery of Russia that was engaged with the first Trump election was GRU group, which is part of which is military intelligence.”

* Trump’s Relationship with Russians: Sergey suggests Trump’s trust in Putin likely stems from his “long established relationship with Russians” through his business dealings, describing it as a “fusion of the KGB, organized crime under Putin, and weaponizing Trump’s commercial links.”

* Aaron Banks and Brexit Funding: Aaron Banks is highlighted as a significant figure in the Brexit campaign who received scrutiny for the source of his large donation. It’s noted that his business is structured through offshore companies and that his companies had similar names with small differences, a potential sign of illicit activity according to due diligence practices. The largest political donation in British history was Aaron Banks’s £6 million to UKIP (now Reform UK).

* Alleged Russian Influence on Aaron Banks: Connections between Aaron Banks and Russian intelligence are suggested through his meetings with Russian diplomats and alleged discussions about gold and diamond investments. The use of diamonds as a historical KGB funding method is mentioned in this context.

* Aaron Banks and Money Laundering in Gibraltar: A personal account from someone with connections in Gibraltar alleges that Aaron Banks and his companies were “laundering money like it was going out of fashion for the Russian mob” through Gibraltar.

* Lebedev’s Elevation to the House of Lords: The elevation of Alexander Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer and owner of UK newspapers, to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson is presented as a controversial event that occurred just before the publication of the Russia report, despite leaked objections from the Security Service.

* The “Bad Novel” Problem: Claire Berlinski suggests that one reason people struggle to accept the reality of Russian influence operations is that “it sounds so much like a bad novel or a bad movie makes people think it cannot be true.”

* Brexit Referendum’s Legal Status: Sergei points out that the Brexit referendum was “advisory,” meaning “the same strict rules is applied to elections to see what was actually legal result of election. What could have been an illegal result in the election. Those rules do not apply to advisory referendums.”

* Western Investments in Oppressive Regimes: Sergei mentions his research on how Western investments in oppressive regimes can damage national security, focusing on asset managers investing in the “Putin regime” despite it being labeled a “sustainable fund.”

* Undermining NATO as a Russian Objective: The boosting of the AfD in Germany by figures like Vance and Musk is seen as making “perfect sense in terms of our operating assumption,” as undermining NATO and splitting Western alliances is a “big Russian grand, strategic, objective.”

This briefing provides a snapshot of the concerns raised regarding Russian influence operations and highlights the complexity and perceived lack of preparedness in Western democracies to address this challenge.

NotebookLM can be inaccurate; please double check its responses.

For those of you who missed it, here’s the conversation we had on Sunday with Vivek and Raja Muneeb.

Here’s an AI summary of the conversation—it’s remarkably accurate:

Pakistan’s Nuclear Threat and Implications

The meeting involved a discussion about the potential threat of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the implications of their use. The participants discussed the possibility of Pakistan using nuclear weapons as a bluff and the potential consequences of such an action. They also touched on the issue of Pakistan's nuclear technology being sold to rogue states and the need to prevent this from happening. The conversation ended with a discussion about the stress and sleep deprivation experienced by the participants due to the ongoing tensions.

India-Pakistan Tensions and Terror Groups

Vivek and Raja discussed the recent developments between India and Pakistan, focusing on the events that took place in Pahalgam and the speech made by the Director General of Military Operations. They also touched on the history of Kashmir and the role of terror groups in the region. Raja explained the Pakistani military’s mindset and the political situation in Pakistan, while Vivek provided context on the formation of terror groups in the 1980s. The discussion also included the evidence of the terror attack and the reasons behind Pakistan's denial of involvement.

Kashmiri Pandits’ Experiences and Historical Context

Raja shared his personal experiences and memories of the 1989-1990 exodus of Hindus from Kashmir. He described the violence, harassment, and terror faced by the Kashmiri Pandits, including extortion, rape, and murder. Raja also discussed the impact of the conflict on the education system and the economy in Kashmir. He mentioned the role of Jamat-e-Islami and other terrorist organizations in subverting the society and the government institutions. The meeting also touched upon the historical context of the Kashmir issue, including the Instrument of Accession and the role of Sheikh Abdullah.

Pakistan’s Government and China’s Influence

Raja explained that Pakistan’s government, feeling isolated internationally, has rekindled the conflict to boost its legitimacy. He also mentioned the influence of China in the region, particularly in Balochistan, where the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is facing challenges due to the Balochistan Liberation Army’s activities. Vivek added that Pakistan's economy is in trouble, and the CPEC projects have been criticized for being poorly negotiated and expensive. The group also discussed China’s interest in keeping India destabilized, as they are competitors in the Asian space.

Indus Waters Treaty Conflict

The meeting focused on the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan, particularly regarding the Indus Waters Treaty. The participants discussed the treaty’s history, its implications, and the challenges it poses. They also touched on the role of the United States in mediating the conflict and the potential for de-escalation. The discussion also included the effect on the treaty on the region’s demography and the potential for a plebiscite. The participants also discussed the potential for international intervention. The conversation ended with a discussion on the economic interests of the United States in the region and the potential for a hyphenated approach to the conflict.

Pakistan’s Identity and Military Power

The group discussed the fundamental insecurities within Pakistan about its identity, stemming from its formation and the reasons behind it. They highlighted its psychological insecurity and the talk given by General Assi Muni on April 16th, which stated that only two nations were formed on the basis of the Kalma, one being Pakistan. The team also discussed the challenges faced by Pakistan in building a truly Islamic identity, the problems within the country, and the question of whether Pakistan needs to emerge from its religious mindset.

They also touched upon the role of the Pakistan military and the myth of the threat from the Hindi, which has been a core reason for the army’s power. The speakers concluded that without othering India, Pakistan’s right to exist is questioned, as a large part of Pakistan shares the same gene pool, food, and practices as India.

India-Pakistan Relations: Challenges and Reconciliation

Vivek and Raja discussed the complex relationship between India and Pakistan, highlighting the challenges in fostering peace due to Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism. They noted that India’s attempts at reconciliation have consistently been met with aggression from Pakistan. Raja emphasized that the Pakistani military’s rejection of cultural ties and its support for radical groups have hindered efforts towards peace. The discussion also touched on the role of political parties and the impact of democratic regimes in Pakistan on its relations with India.

Terrorist Group Connections and Funding

In the meeting, Vivek, Raja, Robert, and Jim discussed the connections between various terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. They highlighted the complex networks and funding sources of these groups, with a particular focus on the role of ISI.

The discussion also touched on the challenges of tracking and countering these groups, with Robert mentioning the division between India’s Indo-Pac Command and Pakistan’s Central Command.

The conversation ended with Claire expressing interest in having Raja write about these topics.

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You’ve heard, I’m sure, of my famous but highly elusive brother, Mischa Berlinski. He’s the author of FIELDWORK—a finalist for the National Book Award— and PEACEKEEPING. His writing has appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. He got a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award. He’s the big family literary success. But he’s very shy, and until now, he has categorically refused to come on this podcast.

However, he’s written a new book. He would very much like you to pre-order it, and so would I, because pre-ordering is hugely important: If it looks as if people are excited and eager to read a book, the algorithms will start flogging it.

So, capitalizing on his desire to sell his book, I’ve managed to persuade him to introduce himself to you and tell you a bit about MONA ACTS OUT—a novel that just happens to take place over the course of a single Thanksgiving Day.

We’d be ever so grateful if you were to pre-order it now. I promise you won’t regret it. It really is so good.

I’ll add some extra motivation too: If you pre-order a copy today, I’ll comp you an extra month here at CG.

Here’s the cover blurb:

Both beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, MONA ACTS OUT is a novel about acting and telling the truth; about how we play roles to get through our days; and how the great roles teach us how to live.

Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of a household of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband, who has not forgotten what happened last night; and in just a few weeks she is supposed to step into the rehearsal room as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. It’s the hardest role in theatre—and the first role Mona has ever attempted without her sister, who died just over a year ago, by her side. When her father-in-law starts fighting with her niece about Donald Trump, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!”) to find the only person she doesn’t have to act for: her estranged longtime mentor, Milton Katz, who may or may not be dying and who was recently forced out of the legendary theatre company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s trek turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face to face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has loved and still loves.

A brilliant, highly-anticipated return of a writer of almost magical descriptive and imaginative powers.

The reviews so far have been fabulous:

Kirkus (Starred review):

Berlinski follows acclaimed novels set in Thailand (Fieldwork, 2007) and Haiti (Peacekeeping, 2016) with a New York–based comedy of of manners and morals featuring a brilliantly imagined female protagonist, Mona Zahid, one of the stars of a Shakespearean theater troupe based in the East Village. Until recently, the company was led by legendary director Milton Katz, but an article in The New York Times, filled with accusations of misconduct from a slew of actresses, led to his disgrace. Mon herself “an out-and-out, unabashed Miltophile,” was not among the accusers. We meet her as she awakens in her Morningside Heights apartment on Thanksgiving Day to a full house—in addition to her surgeon husband, teenage son, and canine companion Barney, her in-laws and her college student niece, Rachel, are milling about. Absent is Rachel’s mother—Mona’s sister, Zahra—who died less than a year earlier, leaving Mona a stash of 150 pain pills of which there are now only six. Mona starts her day by taking two. Not long after, she hears the assembled family members begin to argue about Milton Katz and Donald Trump. She knows she should go out and save the day, but by then she has vaped some weed so strong she suspects it of being laced with “hallucinogenic toad drippings” and can only bring herself to put Barney on his leash and race out the front door, claiming she’s off to buy parsley. At this point the novel takes an amazing left turn; suffice to say, Mona will not be home for dinner. Readers who know their Shakespeare will thrill to Berlinski’s brilliant distillation of the power and relevance of the plays and characters, but those who don’t will find they can easily come along for the ride. And a great ride it is.

Wonderfully constructed, witty, warm, wise, and filled with an extraordinary sense of the relation between theater and life.

Publishers Weekly (Starred as well):

In the sharp-witted and weighty latest from Berlinski (Fieldwork), #MeToo allegations roil an off-off-Broadway Shakespeare company, prompting a 50-something actor to reevaluate her life. Mona Zahid is already grappling with the difficult new role of Cleopatra and what it says about her career; after playing everyone from Juliet to Lady Macbeth, being cast as the Egyptian queen means she’s just about aged out of Shakespeare’s heroines. Mona’s also dreading hosting Thanksgiving dinner, especially after the death of her younger sister, Zahra, whose daughter, Rachel, will be in attendance. Recently, Mona learned that Rachel, following an internship at the theater company, was one of the women who accused its octogenarian founder, Milton, of sexual misconduct. On Thanksgiving Day, Mona escapes her cramped Upper West Side apartment for a last-minute grocery run, during which she frets over a recent postcard message from Milton, in which he claimed to be dying. She decides to make a detour to Brooklyn to see him, and on the way, she burrows deep into memories of her younger years as a player in Milton’s company, when scoring an audition at his dingy Avenue C squat was akin to “winning one of Willie Wonka’s Golden Tickets.” Mona’s thoughts are laced with scathing humor and piercing insight into the actor’s craft, resulting in a surprisingly moving exploration of the courage required to play life’s many roles. Berlinski deserves a standing ovation for this bravura performance.

“Mischa Berlinski has written an instant-classic New York novel about theater, aging, sex and love, and the promise and price of life’s second acts.”—Joshua Cohen

“After a few pages, I canceled my dinner plans rather than put this one down. I absolutely loved this novel’s stunning, almost alarming, insight into one woman’s longing. An unflinchingly honest exploration of the complexities of the human condition and the ambiguities of contemporary morality, MONA ACTS OUT epitomizes great comedy; deftly woven throughout its fabulously hilarious prose is significant wisdom and sorrow.”—Binnie Kirshenbaum

“The delightful MONA ACTS OUT takes us where we all dream of going: away from the irritations of our present moment, into the open streets, to confront everything that still haunts us and reach, surely, hopefully, the Promised Land.”—Daniel Handler

A delightful, insightful, and critical view into the world of theater, New York City, and one woman’s reflection on her life as she enters her later years. Mona, one of the star performers in a Shakespearean troupe, struggles to reconcile her life as she lived it and the modern criticism of the mores of that time. The story asks, how will Mona reconcile her truth and experience while acknowledging that times have changed and she may be left behind if she does not change with them? Humorous, reflective, and insightful; I enjoyed taking the journey with Mona. A thank you to W.W. Morton for an advance readers copy. —Joanna on Goodreads

Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning. Her in-laws are there, along with her husband (with whom she is unhappy), her son, and more. Mona is a skilled and experienced Shakespearean actor, soon to begin rehearsals for Cleopatra. Given her age, it is likely the last leading role she will have. She needs to have some time, so she heads out with the dog to buy parsley. This leads to an overnight ramble that brings past and present together. As a long-ago English major, I read most (maybe all) of Shakespeare’s plays. My roommate and I found the plays to be much more approachable and enjoyable by doing two-person readings. We were on the right track, but this novel explains so much more about how Shakespeare should be presented. (Does that sound horrible? It really is much more casually informative and fascinating than didactic.) In any case, this is quite a great novel that shows how much we learn from the roles we play. —Lee Cornell on Goodreads

“I’m head over heels for this witty, tender, keenly intelligent exploration of art, artifice, and the human heart. Mischa Berlinski is a masterful and deeply empathetic storyteller, and MONA ACTS OUT is a pure delight.” —Antonia Angress

Only one bad review, so far—from a woman who also panned Shakespeare:

First, I didn’t like Mona at all. I found her unsympathetic, annoying, and selfish. That makes for some tough reading. Next, I found all the Shakespeare unbearable. Too much with all the quotes and references. I had to stop halfway through. Too many wonderful books out there and for me, this was not one of them. —Sylvia

I loved this book so much that I made this collage for Mischa, for his birthday, with all of the book’s characters in it. When your copy arrives, you can check back to see how, exactly, I imagined everyone in the book. (The original is really big, so you have to look at the close-ups for the details.)

Close up:

Even closer:

🎟️🎭🎼➪☛☞ BUY IT HERE☚☜⇦🎼🎭

Once. you’re hooked, you can also read my brother’s first two novels: FIELDWORK and PEACEKEEPING.

And you can read about how my brother tried to buy a Zombie in Haiti, too.

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers! Among the many things for which I’m deeply grateful today are you. It’s a joy to have readers to whom I can introduce my brother (on the very rare occasions he emerges from his cave)—and vice-versa.

And should you be finding discussion around the Thanksgiving table slightly taxing this year, do not do what Mona did.

I invited Bob Holley on the podcast to discuss the article he recently published here, Fracturing the Security Map, warning that the return of Donald Trump, coupled with Ukraine’s defeat, could spark a stampede to redraw the world’s nuclear security arrangements.

Discussed in the podcast

This is the remarkably prescient article by John Measheimer I mentioned: The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent

America First

I’ve been thinking about this problem since the first Trump presidency. I’ve explicated my own arguments about this risk in these and other articles:

Five Alarm Fire: The 118th Congress is destroying the world our grandparents built.

At 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945—when a ball of fire rose in gold, violet, grey, and blue over the Jornada del Muerto desert, melting the sand into light green radioactive glass and illuminating every peak and crevasse of the nearby mountain range with a searing white light—American statesmen began a frantic, desperate effort to forestall the emergence of precisely the world we are now ushering into being.

“[T]he US is basically making the case to all states that they should try as hard as they can to develop nuclear weapons,” writes the war historian Phillips O’Brien … There is nothing wrong with his logic. His observations are correct and so is his reasoning. But the same logic applies to every other power in the world that would prefer not to suffer Ukraine’s fate.

The United States is pursuing a feckless, shortsighted policy that will lead to moral disgrace, generational shame, global nuclear proliferation, and an uncontrolled, multipolar nuclear arms race. We’re not pursuing it deliberately. It isn’t what we mean to do. But we could not be pursuing this policy more industriously if we had dedicated all the resources of our federal bureaucracy to the goal.

America First means nuclear war. The inevitable end point of losing the world's trust is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation:

… Here’s where a devout cadre of Trump’s supporters jump in on Twitter and say to me, “Great! All these freeloaders can start paying for their own defense!”

No. That’s not what’s going to happen. No single country can conceivably match the power of the full NATO alliance. That’s why we had it.

It would be a catastrophe if every country with the ability to do it acquired the Bomb. Never mind whether they would use them in anger, it would multiply the risk of an accident, which we already know is insanely high.

But they’re going to to do it if we keep this up. Any American who owns a gun, even though rationally they grasp that fewer Americans would die if there were no guns in America, should understand the calculation other countries are now apt to make. Is it a rational thing for the world to do? No. Rationally, the world will be, objectively, less safe if everyone acts on that impulse.But the world isn’t a rational place. People want safety for themselves, even if it means putting the world at greater risk. The inevitable end point is uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. What “America First” means, in the end, is “Nuclear war.”

If you missed it the other day, here is the case for believing that under these circumstances, the risk of an accidental nuclear war would be insanely high.

If you’re unconvinced by this case, you may be suffering from one of these common cognitive errors.

It’s Happening

This is no longer theoretical. We’re not discussing an abstruse theory in international relations, or something that might happen. It’s happening now. The news is scarcely being reported in the United States, crowded out by discussion of Trump’s Cabinet picks, but as soon as the election was called for Trump, the world began to change:

“NATO or Nukes.” Why Ukraine’s nuclear revival refuses to die:

Addressing a European Council meeting in Brussels on October 17, Zelensky invoked Ukraine’s decision to surrender nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security commitments from nuclear states—the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia—recorded in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (China and France pledged similar security assurances in separate letters.) The Budapest Memorandum commitments failed spectacularly to prevent Russian aggression against Ukraine. So, how does Ukraine provide for its security? Zelensky outlined two options: “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons, and then it will be a defense for us, or Ukraine will be in NATO. NATO countries are not at war today. All people are alive in NATO countries. And that is why we choose NATO over nuclear weapons.”

On the same day, Zelensky revealed that he had delivered a similar message to presidential candidate Donald Trump during his visit to the United States in late September and added that Trump responded that his reasoning made sense … the international community cannot blame [Zelensky] for stating the obvious: NATO members, under their nuclear umbrella, are at peace while Ukraine is at war. Russia and NATO exercise restraint vis-à-vis each other based on a shared understanding that a direct conventional confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries would carry the inherent risk of nuclear escalation and possibly a nuclear war. Russia does not exhibit a similar restraint toward a non-nuclear, non-allied Ukraine. To add insult to injury, Russia, with its nuclear saber-rattling, has succeeded in partly influencing the timing and conditions of Western arms supplies to Ukraine, hampering Ukraine’s defense effort. In short, peace is the prerogative of those who are fortunate to benefit from nuclear deterrence. The unfortunate ones must suffer war.

“I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God.”

Could Zelensky use nuclear bombs? Kyiv could rapidly develop a rudimentary weapon similar to that dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 to stop Russia if the US cuts military aid:

Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. …

With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine’s nuclear reactors. Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996.

… The paper, which is published by the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country’s deputy defense minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine’s ministers for defense and strategic industries. It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection. “The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the non-nuclear choice made in early 1994,” the paper states.

…. Trump has pledged to cut US military aid unless Kyiv submits to peace talks with Putin. Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser, has already said that Ukraine will have to surrender Crimea. This week Donald Trump Jr. taunted Zelensky, posting on X: “You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.”

… “You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation,” said Valentyn Badrak, director of the center that produced the paper. “There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags.” Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.

Western experts believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable carrier, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own ballistic missiles. “In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers,” Badrak said.

Signatures collected in favor of stationing nuclear weapons in Latvia.

The Future of the Zeitenwende: Scenario 5—Poland Becomes a Nuclear Power:

… Given that Poland would have to fear Russian preemptive action, especially in a world where Washington had withdrawn from NATO, Poland’s best bet would be to hide its nuclear ambitions for as long as possible. In this regard, Poland would likely aim to present the world with a fait accompli once its nuclear weapons program has started to bear fruit.

Interview with Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski:

“If America cannot come together with Europe and enable Ukraine to drive Putin back, I fear that our family of democratic nations will start to break up. Allies will look for other ways to guarantee their safety. They’ll start hedging. Some of them will aim for the ultimate weapon, starting off a new nuclear race.”

Center-right leader Weber supports Macron’s call for European nuclear deterrent.

Germany debates nuclear weapons, again. But now it’s different.

Germany and a European nuclear deterrence capability

Germany must go nuclear! 

With Russia inching forward in Ukraine, the US threatening to flake out as an ally and the rest of Europe in a state of paralyzed shock over Donald Trump, Germany should waste no time in pulling together a nuclear arsenal. In a nutshell, that’s the position of Germany’s atomic hawks, who have been screaming from the rooftops this week that the clock is ticking to take action before Germany finds its collective self once again staring down the barrel of der Russe (the Russian).

To be sure, Germany’s nuclear debate isn’t new. In recent years it’s come up again and again. But this time, the debate is much more urgent. “We’re running out of time,“ Maximilian Terhalle, a German security and military expert  who has spent years pushing his country to reconsider its stance on nukes, tells the Bulletin. … Putin could see an opening to test the US’s resolve to protect “every inch” of NATO territory as soon as Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025 by moving into Estonia or another Baltic nation (or as Trump has been known to call them, the “Balkans.”)

Iran reaffirms stance against nuclear weapons amid regional tensions:

In recent months, there have been calls from certain figures within Iran to reconsider Khamenei’s fatwa in response to Israel’s nuclear capabilities and escalating tensions. In May, Kamal Kharrazi, Chairman of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Iran could reassess its position if Israel were to threaten Iran with its nuclear weapons. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also stated that such a threat could lead regional countries to reconsider their nuclear stance.

Saudi Arabia will build a nuclear bomb “as soon as possible” if Iran succeeds in developing its own.

Turkey needs to acquire nuclear arms to stop Israel, urges Erdoğan’s chief fatwa giver:

Hayrettin Karaman, the 90-year-old Islamic jurist and chief fatwa (religious edict) giver for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a prominent ideologue for the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood, has said Turkey must pursue nuclear capabilities to counter Israel and establish deterrence against its adversaries.

In an article published September 8 in the Islamist Yeni Şafak daily, Karaman argued that Turkey’s current efforts are insufficient to stop Israel. He urged that “either the Islamic world must unite and collaborate with China and Russia, or Turkey must move forward by acquiring nuclear warheads and weapons.”

Erdoğan’s nuclear itch. Why Turkey’s nuclear program is a threat to regional stability and the international nonproliferation regime:

The year 2023 is an important one for observers of Turkey’s nuclear program, as that year is when the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey’s first, is scheduled to come online, making Turkey’s ambitions more clear. The threat may very well come to pass as nothing but a threat. This rests upon the international community adopting several measures to reestablish confidence in the nonproliferation regime, something which looks unlikely at the moment but is necessary to prevent a new nuclear arms race. A nuclear Turkey would help realize Erdoğan’s dreams of a Pan-Turkic Empire. So long as Erdoğan continues on his revanchist path of returning Turkey to its Ottoman glory, the threat posed by Turkey gaining nuclear capabilities cannot be disregarded.

Taiwan must get serious about nuclear weapons:

Since its February 2022 invasion, Russia has repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation if NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Predictably, NATO has refrained from sending troops. Equally predictable is that the US would avoid sending troops to Taiwan if it believed the decision might lead to nuclear war. … Ukraine tried to deter Russia with conventional weapons, and it did not work. Instead of repeating Ukraine’s mistakes, Taiwan should learn from them. … Ukraine and Taiwan have no choice but to face their nuclear-armed adversaries alone. Their best chance of long-term survival is to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.

Trump’s comeback fuels nuclear debate in South Korea:

"In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.” …  That concern will be heightened if, as has been speculated, Trump pursues an agreement with the North that bans its development of the long-range missiles—the kind of missiles that could be used to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons—in return for the West effectively accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. Such a deal would provide no assurances to South Korea, whose capital city is only 50 kilometers from the North Korean border.

Trump win fuels campaign for nuclear arms in South Korea:

“Mistrust of the U.S. is growing,” said Cheong, who founded the ROK Forum for Nuclear Strategy, a group of 50 analysts, former military officials and academics who share his view that South Korea should acquire nuclear arms. …In 2020, Trump ordered the withdrawal of around 12,000 US troops stationed in Germany, calling the European nation “delinquent.” “Germany’s not paying for it,” he said at the time. “We don’t want to be the suckers anymore.” Trump has similarly dismissed the US-South Korea alliance as an unnecessary drag … As president, he canceled joint military exercises between the two countries for being “tremendously expensive” and told aides that he wanted a “complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea”…

“Rhetorically, nuclear weapons are on the table,” said Mason Richey, a professor of politics and international relations at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “And that will be significantly affected by how the Trump administration approaches the alliance with South Korea and how it approaches the relationship with North Korea. In general, the more the Trump administration denigrates and neglects the alliance with the South and the more it shows signs of wanting to reach an arms control deal with North Korea that provides Pyongyang with nuclear weapons status, the more South Korea will entertain its intention of obtaining its own nuclear weapons.”

“So much has changed since the Ukraine war, with the nonproliferation regime once managed between China, Russia, and the US having been considerably weakened. Who will tell South Korea that it can’t have nuclear weapons for its own survival?”

Push for Seoul getting own nuclear arms gains steam after Trump win.

… “There are a lot of concerns about former President Trump having been re-elected,” the first-time lawmaker said. “Gaining nuclear potential is going to be a long game for South Korea. But I think we can and should try to get there faster.”

Retired three-star Army general Rep. Han Ki-ho, reputed as a leading military expert in the ruling party, went a step further and said South Korea getting nuclear arms may no longer be a choice given North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons program. “For South Korea’s survival, nuclear armament may be the only path left to us,” he said. Within the People Power Party, a National Assembly resolution urging the government to pursue nuclear arms as a means of North Korean nuclear deterrent is underway.

How Trump could push Japan, South Korea to go nuclear:

“If South Korea has nuclear weapons, Japan will surely have them,” [said] the prime minister’s advisor, who had recently returned from a visit to Korea. …Technically, while South Korea can move faster politically, Japan has the fissile material already in storage—the plutonium stockpile from reprocessed spent fuel—as well as a potential long-range delivery system in its H-2 and H-3 rockets. “We have to face the sheer reality of who is leading the US,” the former senior Foreign Ministry official concluded. “We cannot change that.”

The Inexorable Logic

Imagine that you are the defense minister of an American ally. When you open the newspaper today, this is what you see:

* Russia and China: Two Countries, One Threat:

The combat deployment of 10,000 North Korean troops to the battlefield near Ukraine’s border has confirmed that Russia’s war of aggression is now a multi-theater global confrontation—China’s critical role in sustaining Putin’s war machine through the supply of dual-use goods, as well as drone and missile technology, and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles and other armaments to Russia, make it hard to argue against the de facto existence of a four nation authoritarian axis. These developments should put paid to the notion that the theaters can be neatly separated.    

Pyongyang’s active engagement in the conflict, in particular, is a turning point. Not only does the transfer of North Korean military personnel to Russia represent a major escalation, it also marks yet another failure of US deterrence.  Whether in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, or the South China Sea, Moscow and Beijing seem increasingly keen to test US responses to their escalation. The deployment of troops to Eastern Europe by one of Moscow’s allies from Asia creates a precedent that defies residual assumptions from the Cold War era.

* Trump’s secretary of defense pick is a wildly unqualified Fox News host.

* The curious case of Tulsi Gabbard: Is she a Russian asset or a dupe?

What would you conclude?

The moments when an adversary is on the precipice of acquiring the Bomb, or a secure second-strike capability, are the most dangerous. That’s when the incentive to launch a first strike is the greatest. But rivals have incomplete information about each other’s capabilities, so the chances that one party will miscalculate, sparking a blood-soaked conventional war or a nuclear exchange, are enormous. Israel and Iran are the obvious example of this dynamic.

No one should console himself with the thought that the world will be safer when our allies, or former allies, acquire the Bomb. We don’t have the ability to say that friendly countries may have nuclear weapons but hostile ones may not. The demise of the NPT will even destabilize regions that are for now tolerably stable. A global proliferation cascade will ensue.

By electing Donald Trump, the United States initiated a de facto withdrawal from its treaty commitments and alliances around the globe. The effect of this will be much like that of the sudden collapse of the British or the Ottoman Empire. When empires suddenly collapse, they leave a security vacuum and chaos. There are no examples from history of such a thing proceeding peacefully.

There are now superpower-sized holes in the world’s security architecture. We will very likely see multiple regional nuclear arms races, under circumstances and in configurations the world has not seen before, as a consequence. This will be a world completely unlike the one every living American has known. Many Americans believe, wrongly, that the power configuration of the world and all that implies is simply the natural order, rather than a thing we built deliberately. For people like this, the ramifications of its destruction will no doubt come as a great shock.

We’re willingly embarking on a project to create precisely those circumstances most likely to give rise to terrible accidents and miscalculations. Even if the world’s luck holds, which is unlikely, we will live for the foreseeable future in a world where nuclear showdowns like the Cuban Missile Crisis regularly occur, but we will have no power to shape their outcome. No one will be looking for advice from their former security guarantor.

By the time we realize what we’ve thrown away, and what it meant to have it, it will be too late. We will be hostage to other nations’ fortunes. Our power to shape our own destiny, in the most fundamental of ways, will be gone.

Historians, if they survive, will be puzzled that we barely thought twice about it.

My friend Ariel Cohen joined us today from Netanya, where he’s celebrating the holidays. A political analyst, Ariel focuses on Russia, Eurasia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and energy policy. Obviously, we had a lot to talk about.

We spoke about a question that’s maddening me: Why can’t the people who make our foreign policy learn from experience? W…

“There are smart pollsters, insightful pollsters, accurate pollsters … but few are all three. Christine Quirk is. She makes people who hire her look smarter than we really are.”—

Christy Quirk is a more cosmopolitan globalist than most. I met her in Istanbul about twenty years ago, where I discovered she had an interesting job: She’s a public opinion res…

Vladislav Davidzon joins us to discuss his latest article in Tablet.

Ukraine defies the US to launch a showy offensive into Russia: Observing Israel’s moves in the Middle East, Kyiv gambles on an American power vacuum:

… What changed in July is that the Ukrainians, like other embattled US allies, were faced with a new opportunity in Washington: The cognitively impaired president had been forced out of his reelection bid in favor of his vice president, who was now out on the campaign trail, three months before the election. With this emergent power vacuum at the White House, the Ukrainians decided to bypass both the deposed occupant of the White House as well as the staff of his hypercautious National Security Council, instead of slowly bleeding to death under rules guaranteed to produce slow-motion defeat. …

Kyiv observed carefully how Israel conducted its strikes immediately after Prime Minister Netanyahu returned from a triumphant speech before the US Congress. In fact, earlier this week the chair of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, Roman Kostenko, explicitly referenced the Israeli example in a televised interview. “So Israel announced that they would take the advice of their partners very seriously but would afterward make their own decisions in the best interest of their own national security. I think that we can simply mirror that approach in our own case.”

If you’re in a hurry, here’s a transcript:

Claire: Hi, it’s Claire Berlinski, and you’re back in the Elephant Cage with my guest, Vladislav Davidson. Vladislav, let’s talk about your big scoop.

Vladislav: Hi, Claire. Thank you for having me on. I have a big piece out in Tablet Magazine, and a lot of other people seemed to have missed the obvious. On August 6th, the Ukrainians began their long-awaited mechanized invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The Ukrainians had been preparing for their annual counter offensive for a long time and picking their target of convenience. And they chose to go all in into Kursk because they saw that it was very weakly protected, and it turned out to be a very good decision. A lot of the Russian border guards and conscripts just gave up as soon as they saw Ukrainian mechanized forces and combat-ready, battle-hardened divisions. A lot of those guys just ran, to a point where the Ukrainians seemed to be taking between 100 and 200 Russian POWs a day, and times10, 12 days. They already seemed to have taken two divisions worth of Russian POW conscripts, thus refurbishing their exchange fund to the point where the Russians have, according to Ukrainian sources, initiated a POW exchange for the first time in two years.

Claire: Yeah, I saw that. It’s actually quite amazing. I’ve been seeing a lot of photos and a lot of videos of Russians surrendering en masse. I have not been sure whether those photos are real, but it sounds like they are.

Vladislav: I think they are real. I’ve seen a lot of those videos. Those are hard to stage. And a lot of those guys are 19, 18-year-old conscripts who are technically not supposed to be fighting outside of Russia, but they’re fully usable to defend the Russian border so the Russians throw them at the Ukrainians to stop them while they bring in better forces, Interior Ministry troops, fast response guys, national guard, hardened, battle-tested troops from inside Ukraine. While they’re trading land for time, as one does in that situation, they’re throwing conscripts with four or five, six months of training under their belts directly at these really excellent Ukrainian airborne troops. It’s Soviet, Ukrainian, and Russian doctrinal policy to use airborne troops for raids. This is a textbook raid, which was transformed into a territory holding situation. The incursion is being done with the best troops, airborne troops.

Claire: Tell us how the Ukrainians decided to do this. Obviously, they’d been planning this for at least three to six months. But they decided to go all in after they saw the Israelis do what they wanted to do, after Netanyahu returned from Washington, DC. On July 30th and 31st, the Israelis carried out assassinations against two high-value targets, one in Beirut, one in Tehran. These assassinations were carried out immediately upon Prime Minister Netanyahu returning from his trip to Washington, DC, where he addressed Israel, Congress, and where he had private meetings with whoever was in the White House. And he saw Harris in the White House and he saw the national security people of the Biden administration. And he nodded politely to the finger wagging that he received. And immediately upon returning to Jerusalem, he launched assassinations against high-value Hamas and Hezbollah operatives. And it was obvious that he was told to do one thing by the White House, and he did quite another thing.

Claire: I don’t think that’s obvious, actually. There’s been a lot of speculation that he cleared that with the White House before doing it.

Vladislav: I’m not sure he did. Why would he do this right as the Democratic Party is having its convention today?

Claire: They’d do it because Haniyeh was only going to be in Iran for those days.

Vladislav: And he’s not there all the time. He was there for the swearing in of a new Persian president. And he was a target of opportunity. They obviously used a lot of effort and regional resources, operatives to get that bomb smuggled into that house. And it’s not every day that you get a chance to take him out. And they had the opportunity and they took it.

Claire: But what about that makes you think that he didn’t clear the White House beforehand? I don’t know whether he did or not. I’ve just seen speculation that he did. And as for Fuad Shukr, of course, we would have said, yeah, take him out. He’s responsible for the death of 242 Marines.

Vladislav: Yeah, but he’d been operating for decades in Beirut.

Claire: I’ve been wondering about that myself, but I just cannot imagine the Americans saying to Netanyahu, “Don’t do that.”

Vladislav: Really? Just the opposite. I can’t imagine them saying, “Do it” in this situation. This is a very delicate time, and it’s a very complex situation in terms of the Americans’ internal interests, which is, obviously, this administration is carrying on the Obama-era foreign policy of normalizing relations with Tehran. They hate the Israelis. And they hate the Israelis complicating their regional foreign policy pivot, which is obviously not something the Sunni Arabs or the Israelis want.

Claire: I’ve seen no evidence that the administration hates the Israelis. Biden likes the Israelis, he just doesn’t like Netanyahu.

Vladislav: They see them as a problem, the thorn in their side for their big foreign policy shift.

Claire: No more than every other administration always has.

Vladislav: This is a really big difference. This is a continuation of Obama-era foreign policy with a lot of the same people in charge of Middle East foreign policy, people like Blinken, people like Sullivan.

Claire: I don’t believe that the Biden administration is more vexed by Israel than almost every previous administration has been. Because our interest in Israeli security has always been at odds with our other interests in the region.

Vladislav: There’s always been a contradiction. It’s true. But with the Obama foreign policy, there is a direct contradiction between the historical American foreign policy and what the Israelis see as their existential interests in the region of keeping Tehran boxed in. And the Obama foreign policy is to normalize Iran and bring them into the Middle East security architecture as the Americans are trying to leave the Middle East. So, this is a completely radically new situation.

Claire: The radical situation is Iran’s approaching a deployable nuclear weapon. That creates all kinds of problems without easy solutions.

Vladislav: Correct. That’s true.

Claire: So tell me about how the Ukrainians reacted to this.

Vladislav: The Ukrainians spent a few days observing the American response to the move. That is obviously not a happy situation for the White House and the National Security Council led by Mr. Jake Sullivan. The State Department under Blinken does not love it. And they made the decision that they too could run their own foreign policy, independent of their American allies’ scolding and red lines of constraint. They saw the Israelis getting away with it. Act first and apologize later, which is one of the quotes from a high level source in the Zelensky team in my piece.

Claire: The people who spoke to you, they must want the administration to know what they’re thinking?

Vladislav: After I reported the piece, a gentleman who is head of the Defense Intelligence and Security Committee inside the Rada went on TV and said, look, the Israelis listened very carefully, very politely, very generously, to the advice of their allies. And they said, we will act first in our own interests, and then we will answer our allies’ concerns afterwards. He said this openly. The head of a national security committee in the Ukrainian parliament, who’s one of the very few MPs inside Ukraine who knows what’s going on in terms of defense, because even Ukrainian MPs don’t know very much about operational stuff, because the army is keeping the Ukrainian parliament in the dark, most of them.

Claire: Tell me how they understand what’s going on in America right now.

Vladislav: They see a zombie regime in the White House and they see an overcautious National Security Council administration infrastructure, which is fulfilling the orders of a zombie regime. They see a gentleman in the White House who has Parkinson’s or dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever, and who is no longer fulfilling the president’s duties, who has given a policy to his State Department, to his Pentagon, and to his National Security Council, but is no longer making radical decisions.

Claire: Is this based on their meetings with him or publicly available information?

Vladislav: Why do you have to meet with them?

Claire: I’m just trying to figure out where they got their information, whether they specifically met with him and came to the conclusion this guy’s not in charge anymore, or are they just reading the reporting. Have they had a personal experience with him?

Vladislav: I don’t think that they’ve had a personal experience with him and they’ve had a lot less time with him because he did a lot fewer meetings. I’m not sure who the last Ukrainian to have a one-on-one with him was that the Ukrainian government decided this is a zombie situation.

Claire: But this is a really important thing to know. Because we want a sense of whether other governments are likely to have decided that this is a zombie situation, therefore we’re just going to do whatever we feel like.

Vladislav: But isn’t it the case that the entire world has access to this information?

Claire: The entire world has a strong suspicion of it.

Vladislav: But the Democratic Party made him step down from running for a second term because it’s obvious, after the debate, that he’s no longer the man that he was. Isn’t it obvious to everybody?

Claire: But it’s unclear to what extent he’s capable of discharging his duties when the spotlight is not on him. For five hours a day, or whatever.

Vladislav: Absolutely right. This is a very serious thing. The lame duck situation plus the fact that he’s no longer running and that Harris is trying to establish her own foreign policy credentials while getting the campaign into high gear has created a space of opportunity for American allies to no longer be constrained by American red lines.

Claire: Yes, and American enemies as well.

Vladislav: Yeah, American enemies and American allies, yeah. And this is a testing of red lines set forth by both Moscow and Washington, DC, one; two, this is a declaration of independence; and three, the Ukrainians know full well that they got away with it because two or three days after the start of the Kursk offensive, the Americans delivered the next tranche of US$125 million worth of previously promised assistance.

Claire: And all Biden has said about it is, “Gee, that must be a very difficult situation for the Russians.”

Vladislav: That legitimizes the act of crossing the border on August 6th. The fact that the Pentagon said, “Yeah, this is what we agreed to previously.” And yet, the new tranche is not being held up. The Pentagon did not stop aid on the eighth or ninth when they greenlit the next trench, which means—

Claire: But Biden is still saying no use to the long-range missiles in Russian territory, right?

Vladislav: Yeah. Correct. And the new reporting as of today, and today being Monday, 19th of August, shows that the Biden administration is still telling the Brits to not allow the use of long-range British rockets.

Claire: But the British have actually said, go ahead.

Vladislav: With some kinds of rockets, yes. With other kinds of rockets, no. And the Americans are telling them no. So the zombie policy set by the zombie president is still being carried out by the Pentagon, the State Department, National Security Council. It’s just that they really cant say no to the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are all in and they’re winning. And everyone loves a winner. You know that.

Claire: Yes, of course. Everyone loves a winner. Were the Ukrainians at all concerned that they would trigger Russia’s nuclear defense doctrine in doing this?

Vladislav: This has been a concern for some time, but every time the Ukrainians go against Russian red lines, Moscow turns out to not have any red lines. First, it was bombing anything inside Russia. They did nothing. Then it was bombing inside Crimea. They did nothing. Then it was bombing the Russian Black Sea fleet inside Sevastopol dry docks. The Russians did nothing with nuclear missiles. Then it was Ukrainian troops inside Russia, which is why the Ukrainians used exiled troops, Russian proxies. Last time they did it with raids, last year, the Russians did nothing. Then this, they did nothing. Every time the Ukrainians or the Americans actually scratch the surface of these red lines, nothing happens.

Claire: Do you know anything about how the Americans have really reacted? Have you heard anything about what they’re saying to each other?

Vladislav: I don’t know for a fact, but they can’t be happy.

Claire: I wonder. Biden has now been liberated from having to seek re-election.

Vladislav: It’s interesting what he actually thinks. He has not doubled or tripled down on helping the Ukrainians, despite the fact that he is not seeking re-election, as you say. He’s not jettisoned the Sullivan Doctrine, whatever you want to call it. They’re just doing what they’ve been doing.

Claire: So do you think that the Biden administration is assuming that Kamala will win and therefore they don’t need to do anything now to ensure Ukraine’s victory before Trump gets in office?

Vladislav: I just think that they have, as one of my sources in the piece says, no serious policy. They’re just trying to pocket their gains. They have had gains because Ukrainians have outperformed all expectations, but they don’t have a policy and they’re just trying to muddle through and keep the Ukrainians from losing big time while also keeping the Russians from losing the war, which isn’t much of a policy at all. The Ukrainians saw that this attritional thing was not working and they decided to completely change the narrative and they did. And what’s interesting about this is they did so based on what they understood Israel was doing.

Claire: Have they had any contacts with the Israelis?

Vladislav: Yeah, the Israelis and the Ukrainians have a very complex and interesting relationship, which I write a lot about. Relations are closer and closer, more warm and more interesting than they have been. The Ukrainians have tried to shame the Israelis into supporting them. They’ve not been able to do that because of Netanyahu’s personal relationship with Putin and the Israelis’ calculation that they don’t need to do any more in order to look good or they don’t need to isolate themselves from the Russians and create problems.

Claire: Evidence of Netanyahu’s inability to grasp the big picture. Obviously, Russia is a problem for Israel. They’re Iran’s closest ally.

Vladislav: Correct. Yeah. And so he’s playing this kind of balancing game where he has input on being allowed to bomb in Syria and he has the safety of Russian Jews, their property, agreed to, but nothing much else. The Russians are making pro- two-state solution comments. They’re meeting with Hamas and Hezbollah delegations. They’re involved with the war in Ukraine, and with Iran, having closer and closer relations.

Claire: If he had any kind of vision, he would be fully supporting Ukraine.

Vladislav: I’m one of the people who's been saying that and pushing for that. I’m one of the people who has really wanted that to happen. But Netanyahu’s policy is what it is, and he doesn’t see any need to change it.

Claire: But do you know if Ukrainians were actually speaking to Israelis? Were the Israelis saying, “Hey, you can just do what you want and ask for permission afterwards?” Or was this completely based on their interpretation from open sources of how this had gone down?

Vladislav: Interpretation. I don’t think the Ukrainians trust Israeli intelligence and Israeli politics, especially with so many Russian Jews having portfolios in the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence circles. You have to remember, last summer, everybody knew about the Ukrainian offensive, and that went badly because they told everybody. So they made a decision not to tell anybody. The number of people who knew about this is very small, including a lot of my own friends in the Ukrainian parliament.

Claire: In your article, you alluded to this, and you made it sound as if the Ukrainians think that something is leaking from Washington back to Russia. Is that what you meant to suggest?

Vladislav: It’s leaking from everywhere. They just did not give information to anybody. Their own frontline troops have to be kept in the dark about this, let alone Washington, DC.

Claire: Do they think, though, that there’s something in Washington that is leaking back to Russia?

Vladislav: I asked that question and I was given no good answer, to be honest.

Claire: Right.

Vladislav: I just think they don’t trust anybody after what happened last time. “Stop telegraphing your intentions.” And that turned out to be the correct insight for this one.

Claire: Yes, certainly. They really maintained tight security on this. Came as a total surprise to everyone.

Vladislav: Including the Russians. The Russians really screwed up. Russian intelligence services had inklings of this. Some people in Russian intelligence figured it out and sent it up the pole, obviously. And the Russian command didn’t figure it out.

Claire: So what do Ukrainians say is the strategic goal of this operation?

They’re not. They’re not saying what the strategic goal of this operation is for all sorts of reasons, including operational reasons. They’re going to see what sticks, and then they’re going to explain what happened based on what succeeded afterwards.

Claire: Is your intuition that this is an operation aimed more at Russia or at the United States?

Vladislav: Both. And also, as a couple of my sources said, they really needed a peremoha. They really were starting to lose nerve, and this is the best situation in terms of morale inside Ukraine since the war started. People are over the moon. People are happy. This is really gaining another year or two of good morale for the Ukrainians. They really needed a victory.

Claire: Are you in touch with people close to the Trump camp? Do you know how they’re reacting to this?

Vladislav: I am in touch with Trump people. They’re obviously calculating, and Trump is obviously watching this very closely. I don’t think he himself knows what he’s going to do, but obviously this is a big issue for him. He’s stepped back from criticizing the Ukrainians in order to have more leeway for whatever he’s going to do when he comes to power. He’s obviously going to try to make a deal, but it’s not apparent whether that deal will be very good for Ukraine or very bad. It could go either way. It’s a radical situation with Trump. You can’t know what’s going to happen. He’s obviously observing. He obviously likes winners. He’s going to say whatever he needs to say in order to make this administration in the White House look bad.

Claire: Yeah, I noticed that a lot of ultra-vatniks like David Sacks, the lamentable David Sacks, have been extremely quiet since this began.

Vladislav: 100 percent. And that is policy in the Trump camp. The Trump people have been talking to a lot of European conservatives who’ve been making nice little trips to Mar-a-Lago. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, Orban, Lord Cameron.

Claire: Tusk and Orban are going to come with very different messages.

Vladislav: Correct. But he’s talking to every single European conservative. Lord Cameron went down there and he spent hours talking to him. And it seemed to me, based on my relationships with British diplomats and intelligence people, it was a very fruitful discussion. Trump does listen, weirdly enough. He’s a politician. He takes stock of the water and the polls, and he follows his instincts, which are politically pretty good. And he’s stopped attacking the Ukrainians because he sees that he could get more mileage out of making a deal when he comes to power, if he comes to power.

Claire: Changing the subject a little bit, what should we make of these stories about Nord Stream? Is there anything to them? I don’t think we know what actually happened. Mr. Pancevski of the Wall Street Journal had a scoop, reported a thesis on what happened. I don’t believe that is the case. I still think that the Russians did this. I don't think that the sitting ambassador to the United Kingdom of Ukraine, the former head of the armed services of Ukraine, did this, that they felt they could get away with this. I don’t believe that the Ukrainians did this. But the Germans do now, and they asked for extradition of a Ukrainian serviceman, intelligence agent, which the Polish president and prime minister denied. I don’t know if you saw Donald Tusk’s tweet from yesterday. Donald Tusk’s excellent tweet was: “To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2, the only thing you should do today about it is apologize and keep quiet.” The Poles are neither extraditing people nor are they backing down from their narrative. The prime minister of Poland didn’t necessarily need to tweet that himself, but he did.

Claire: Okay, back to Kursk. I’m trying to understand the Ukrainian endgame here, what they’re hoping for.

Vladislav: The endgame is the collapse of the Russian Federation and Putin being in The Hague, that’s the best case outcome. But there is a hierarchy of outcomes, right? They are not telegraphing what their endgame is. So we can speculate and I can give you all sorts of very clever answers and I can go through different outcomes from best to worst. But ultimately, no one knows yet because the Ukrainians are keeping their cards very tight to their chest.

Claire: I don’t know if you saw it: I responded to something that Garry Kasparov said yesterday on Twitter, where he was stating that the only possible explanation or at least one possible explanation that he favored for the Biden administration’s timidity and caution was they had some kind of backroom deal with Russia. And I responded that I just didn’t think that was the conclusion to which Occam’s razor would lead you. I think the Biden administration is just an exceptionally timid administration when it comes to foreign policy. What do you think?

Vladislav: I agree with you. I think he was just mouthing off on Twitter. That’s just how Russian elites talk at the bar.

Claire: How are Americans reacting to this? Are they even hearing the news? Because all I find in the US news, anytime I look, is the election. I never find any news of this.

Vladislav: I’m hoping that my reporting will have a sobering effect.

Claire: Why sobering?

Vladislav: Is it good that American allies are ignoring us?

Claire: Who are you hoping to sober?

Vladislav: I’m hoping to sober up large swaths of the American public who should understand that American allies are just ignoring American foreign policy edicts because they’re stupid. I’d like to sober up the National Security Council, but they’re going to be out in a couple of months anyway. They could do a lot of damage in those couple of months. It’s the American public that should be sobered up, American elites.

Claire: I’m not sure they’re going to take that message from it.

Vladislav: Really?

Claire: Yeah.

Vladislav: What would they take from this?

Claire: It depends where they’re already ideologically inclined. Someone like, in worst case scenario, David Sacks is going to say, “Look, these Ukrainians are risking nuclear war without our permission, using our weapons.”

Vladislav: Right.

Claire: And someone who’s pro-Ukraine is going to say, “Good for the Ukrainians,” but it doesn’t necessarily mean you think a different way than the way you already think. Except the one thing I take away from it is that it’s an incredibly dangerous situation to have the world wondering whether the President is compos mentis or paying attention to anything

Vladislav: Yeah, it is audacious, and it’s taking advantage of the fact that there’s a gentleman in the White House who should not be in the White House. If you’re actually a proceduralist, just resign. He should not have been president for already two years or 18 months, obviously, depending on how long he’s been this out of it.

Claire: It should lead the White House to be on the phone with people who can communicate to our adversaries that there’s enough intelligence at the top of the food chain in the US that we would notice if they tried to do something.

Vladislav: If our allies are going against our will, why won’t China or Iran?

Claire: Exactly, exactly. But they seem to be doing a reasonably good job somehow of deterring Hezbollah in Iran right now.

Vladislav: They don’t actually want a full-on war because that would be very bloody for everybody. I don’t think that either the Ayatollahs, having been embarrassed not being able to protect their own guests, nor the Hezbollah brass actually want a full-on war right now. So, you know, when the Americans bring in their aircraft carriers into the Gulf and into the—

Claire: That’s exactly what I mean. They don’t want to go to war because they’d be up against us. So we must have convinced them that we would be serious about using those aircraft carriers.

Vladislav: It’s interesting that we’ve been able to constrain them, but maybe it wouldn’t even take that much to constrain them. Maybe they just don’t want a full-on war with the Israelis. I wouldn’t if I was them.

Claire: All right. Anything else you would like to say about this remarkable story?

Vladislav: I believe this is an opportunity for course correction in Washington, DC. I think they should stop constraining American allies.

Claire: We should actually support our allies instead of indulging in this pathological fear of escalation.

Vladislav: Correct. Correct. So thank you, my dear Claire. I will see you in a couple of weeks in Paris.

Claire: Are you going to be here?

Vladislav: I’m passing through in a couple of weeks on the way to Tunisia, on the way back to Ukraine.

Claire: Where are you going in Tunisia and why?

Vladislav: I’m going to a Berber Jewish wedding in Djerba.

Claire: Oh, how nice.

Vladislav: Yes. I’m taking my mother to the Middle East. Her last vacation to Israel on October 5th of ‘23, where she went down to visit her relations in Ashkelon and got on a bus on the morning of October 7th in Sderot, did not go so well.

Claire: Yeah, no kidding.

Vladislav: She randomly survived an attack on her bus. She got off the bus, and 30 minutes later, all other 15 people on the bus except the bus driver were executed. Okay. Thank you, Claire. I’ll see you in a bit.

Claire: Thanks very much.

Vladislav: Bye-bye.

UPDATE: Some of you didn’t care for the sound effects, so here’s a version without them:

Since I have a philosopher in the family, I thought you might enjoy hearing a conversation with my father about what it means that we’ve built machines that can think and what we might learn from them about what it means to be human.

We discuss the way Large Language Models have altered our understanding of natural languages and learning algorithms, and the possibility that theoretical science may be obsolete: Perhaps it’s really data all the way down.

We discuss Chomsky and Skinner, human cognition, stimulus-response models, and the parallels—if any—between biological and artificial intelligence.

We also talk about the existential risks of AI, whether humans will remain the dominant species on this planet, and the broader implications for human knowledge. My father also reflects on the historical and sociological aspects of scientific innovation and the backgrounds of the key contributors to AI development.

I took the opportunity to practice my podcast production skills. I experimented with a few programs I’d never used before. If the sound effects strike you as peculiar, it’s because I couldn’t quite get them to do what I wanted, but also felt I’d devoted far too much time to trying to insert the sound of a flying bird at just right point and could no longer justify the effort. Let me know what you think: Should I keep trying to master the skill of professional podcast production? Or should I just throw the raw files on your plate from now on and say, “Eat. It’s what’s for dinner?”

I’m really unsure. Everyone tells me that journalists these days must have podcast and video editing skills, but acquiring them has proven awfully time consuming. On the other hand, I think probably I only have to learn once, and having learned, it won’t take nearly so much time.

Then again, I could just wait another year and have an LLM do it for me.