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The John Batchelor Show

#Ukraine: Heading to the negotiation tables. George Friedman, @GPFutures, GeopoliticalFutures.com

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PHOTO: NO KNOWN RESTRICTIONS ON PUBLICATION.
@BATCHELORSHOW
Rostov 1917

#Ukraine: Heading to the negotiation tables. George Friedman, @GPFutures, GeopoliticalFutures.com
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/forecasting-russia/

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:36.0

This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bachelorette. Here's John Bachelorette.

0:42.0

NATO, Ukraine, the headlines from Europe, Bloomberg. NATO is papering over the cracks after Zelensky loses his school. Subhead, Ukrainian team angered by lack of clarity on NATO timeline. Subhead, leaders spent Wednesday these last hours.

1:03.0

Cleaning up after Zelensky's outburst. I welcome George Friedman, the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, to sort through these competing metaphors.

1:14.0

Lose this is cool, cracks open, clarity, leaders spent cleaning up. George, a very good evening, too.

1:22.0

This is Geopolitical Futures, a subscription side. I recommend George writes often about things that we can see, but we can't quite get between the lines.

1:32.0

So between the lines here is that there's been a tantrum thrown by the president of Ukraine, a nation at war fighting for its existence.

1:44.0

And the leaders of NATO all very cool and relaxed in excellent suits in Vilnius, Lithuania. And the way the headline is written, it was Zelensky who departed the script. Is that accurate George?

1:59.0

No, he knew well before that formal NATO membership wasn't coming because the Russian position has been that NATO at the border of Russia, 300 miles away from Moscow, was a fundamental threat.

2:24.0

Now, the ability to negotiate a settlement, which we're talking about, declines dramatically. The Putin really can't, this was the beginning of the war, what it was about, he can't get away.

2:38.0

On the other hand, practically speaking, Ukraine is more part of NATO than France. I mean, Ukraine has just seen a huge influx of NATO power, and it's based on that.

2:56.0

Now, he doesn't get to the cool guy's party as you know, meeting, but it really doesn't matter. Plus that outbursts, he'd been told weeks before that this was going to happen, and it was staged. And it's fine. He had a good time.

3:11.0

You write about the cluster munitions, the decision by the Biden administration after much debate within the administration and within NATO. Why cluster munitions, why now if we're leaning towards negotiations, does this move the story?

3:31.0

Well, Russia has had a very bad month between Wagner group and everything else. You don't want to go into negotiation being the weak guy.

3:43.0

Right? You go into the negotiation with some strength. Therefore, I think the Russians have to stage some sort of offenses, whether it fails or not doesn't matter, to show they still have a military.

3:56.0

We talked about these cluster weapons because they are perfectly designed to destroy heavily forces that are really closely tied together. You can take them out.

4:10.0

I don't think the United States is any intention of using them. I think the president put on quite a performance when he told how difficult it was to make this decision, was a message to the Russians do not carry out this offensive.

4:24.0

But we also have another message that was coming. We're not letting the Ukrainians into NATO. It will not be American troops permanently get permanently based against your border. And so this is how the negotiations go.

4:39.0

The Bloomberg reporting and financial times and the London telegraph these last days have used other ways of characterizing the debate in NATO. One that I especially liked was NATO light, L-I-T-E, like a beer.

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