Brian Berletic argues the US is deliberately grooming Europe to replace Ukraine as the frontline proxy against Russia
Glenn Diesen interviews Brian Berletic, former US Marine, political analyst, and host of The New Atlas, on US strategic sequencing and the outsourcing of the war against Russia to Europe.
Summary
Glenn Diesen and Brian Berletic argue that the United States has never intended to end the war in Ukraine — rather, it is executing a deliberate strategic handoff, transferring the proxy war against Russia from Ukraine to Europe itself. Berletic contends this follows the same logic as the 2019 RAND Corporation paper Extending Russia, which outlined multiple simultaneous pressure points against Russia, including destroying its energy exports to Europe. He further argues that the US war against Iran is not a standalone conflict but a direct move against China and Asia, mirroring what was done to Europe by severing Asian nations from Middle Eastern energy and forcing them into dependence on US LNG exports. Berletic concludes that diplomacy with the United States is structurally impossible because policy is driven not by elected officials but by entrenched corporate-financial interests in the arms and energy industries, and that multipolarism is the only viable counter-strategy.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Elbridge Colby speech
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We are joined today by Brian Berletic, a former US Marine, a political analyst, author, and also host of The New Atlas. Thank you very much for coming back on.
Brian Berletic: Thank you so much for having me back on.
Glenn Diesen: So you often make the argument that the US pursues strategic sequencing — more or less a staged approach to how it confronts rival powers, essentially seeking to take on one at a time. For this reason, when the US engages in negotiation or peace, you make the point that it's essentially a delaying tactic, just setting things up for a later time. At times it can also include a different division of labour — that is, to outsource some of the war to allies.
I thought about you when I was reading the recent speech by Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in which he makes it, I would say, unmistakably clear that the US is not seeking to put an end to the Ukraine war. Rather, it's outsourcing it to the Europeans, who should continue to fight and escalate. How did you make sense of this speech?
Brian Berletic: It's just an update of the division of labour that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at the very beginning of 2025, almost as soon as the Trump administration came into office. He talked about how the US needed to pivot elsewhere — now we know to Iran and ultimately onward towards China — and he said Europe is going to take over and basically feed itself next into this proxy war taking place against Russia in Ukraine.
That is exactly what Europe did. He told Europe they are going to spend more on defence, and they have. He told them they're going to double down on their support for Ukraine, and they have done that as well. We're watching the natural progression of all of this take shape, with Europe itself throwing itself into this proxy war against Russia. It's extremely dangerous and very concerning. The rhetoric coming out of Russia, knowing and seeing this taking shape themselves, is very, very concerning.
Unfortunately, that's what this was always going to end up being anyway. I distinctly remember warning people that it didn't matter who you voted for in 2024 — this is exactly what was going to happen. The whole reason the US was fighting this war against Russia in Ukraine in the first place — and it is a US war on Russia, simply being fought through Ukraine — goes back to the 2019 RAND Corporation paper Extending Russia. The whole purpose of this is to create one of many dilemmas for Russia. They're doing a similar strategy toward Iran and ultimately China: create all of these dilemmas and extend Russia as much as possible.
It was never their intention to overwhelm and defeat Russia with just this war in Ukraine. It was just one of many policy options that were in that policy paper and have since been implemented. One of the things they were talking about was destroying Russia's energy exports to Europe and how the US was going to ramp up LNG exports to Europe. At the time it made no sense because Europe still had access to plentiful, reliable, cheap Russian energy. They said even in the paper that in peacetime this has a very low likelihood of succeeding — except it has succeeded. And do you know how they managed to make it succeed? They took peacetime and they simply turned it into wartime.
The only way this policy of keeping Europe dependent on American energy and off of Russian energy, and extending and undermining Russia, works is by keeping the war going. So there was never any intention at all, ever, of the US wanting to make peace with Russia. And this is the exact same reason why the US has absolutely no interest in making peace with Iran, because ultimately all of this against Russia and Iran is meant to target not just China but also Asia.
I would argue that the war on Iran and disrupting all energy coming from the Middle East — disrupting not just China's supply of energy from the Middle East but all of Asia's supply — is simply the US doing to Asia what it has already done to Europe. They cut Europe off from Russian energy through war, and now they're using war to cut Asia off from energy from the Middle East.
The Nordstream sabotage and European complicity
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. What's very frustrating about this whole thing is that all the evidence is there, yet there seems to be this very deliberate desire to just live in a fake little world. The way it's being sold — you can look towards the people who discuss the benefit of the Ukraine war, from Graham, McConnell, Kellogg, Romney, the list is long — they make the point: oh, this is going to be a good war, we can fight with Ukrainians, we don't have to waste our own soldiers, and using Ukraine to knock out Russia we can focus on the Chinese instead. It can be said in the open, but again it's not a world these people are comfortable living in. So they essentially ignore it.
And the same with what you said about decoupling Europe from Russia in terms of energy. This is a disaster for Europe. But they said this long in advance. All the strategic documents say Nordstream is a bad thing. Then, of course, just as they said they would, they knock out Nordstream, and then they can sell all the stories — yeah, it's a Russian playbook, obviously Russia destroys its own infrastructure. We repeat it even when it's exposed, and we say, okay, well, guess Russia didn't do it anyway. We will embrace any ridiculous story as opposed to face reality.
So it's quite weird that this is actually real. But it seems kind of obvious now that the goal is to outsource the war to the Europeans, which will essentially make the Europeans into the new Ukrainians. These escalations worry me, primarily for two main reasons. The first is the massive drone programme, which is being done very openly, and it's becoming very hard for Russia not to respond to this. Making matters much worse, we know now that attacks are coming out of NATO territory — out of European states, Finland, and the Baltic states. All of this is happening while the US is pulling back and handing this war to the Europeans, who seem very eager to take over. Do you think the Europeans are being set up for war?
Brian Berletic: Yes, absolutely. I would say the Americans are backing away in the sense of absolving themselves of responsibility, but they're very much still involved in the war. The US command is still in Germany overseeing the entire war. All of these drone strikes deep inside Russian territory — according to the New York Times itself, and as is obvious to all of us who know the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities required to do this effectively — it had to always have been the US. They admit it was the CIA and the US military overseeing this drone programme striking deep inside Russian territory. Not only that, but also the maritime drone attacks taking place all around the globe, targeting tankers carrying Russian energy exports.
So the US is still very much deeply involved and overseeing this entirely, but they're absolving themselves of responsibility and putting the Europeans out there in front. As you mentioned, they're also getting the Europeans ready to be the next proxy into the breach as Ukraine slowly crumbles.
I think you will watch a very gradual, incremental, salami-slice approach, having the Europeans just get a little bit more involved. There was a little bit of a scare where people thought maybe British warplanes were trying to intercept Russian drones over Ukraine. But they might have just floated that story out there to test the waters a little bit, and they might actually start doing things like that to incrementally get Europe more and more deeply involved.
They're already utterly involved in the war. The US is fighting Russia through Europe just as much as they're fighting it through Ukraine in many ways. European weapons are going into Ukraine. As you mentioned, the drone production — we knew this wasn't really all taking place inside Ukraine. All of these weapons, missiles, even tanks that they say Ukraine is making — they're not making any of those. It's all being built all across Europe and the United States and in other US proxy territories, and then it's simply being finally assembled in Ukraine, and that's how they can say it was made in Ukraine. So it's a whole process that has been taking shape for years throughout the course of this proxy war.
Unfortunately, it does look like Europe is going to end up in almost indirect conflict with Russia. People will say, why is Europe doing this? It doesn't serve their interests at all. But this is the danger and the power of American political capture over these countries. They control the information space. They control the political space. US corporations are working in tandem with some of the largest European interests, but American interests are actually dominant even in Europe in many cases. This is why this is happening. And this is the same reason why we watch the Persian Gulf Arab states go along with the US war of aggression against Iran. This is why we're going to watch countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines go along with US escalation vis-à-vis China — even though their largest trade partner, import and export, is China. They'll go along with it because their governments are politically captured. Those handful of individuals — this is how elite capture works — work for US interests at the expense of their own country's interests. Their position is owed to the US and they do everything on behalf of the United States.
The mechanics of elite capture and the European Union
Glenn Diesen: This incrementalism is very subtle, because you don't notice it from day to day. But given that this war has been going on at least since the Russians invaded more than four years ago now, the rhetoric and openness — it is quite evident what has happened. For example, in this country, in Norway, when the Russians invaded we had a prime minister who made it very clear that under no circumstance would we send weapons to a country at war. Now, of course, four years later, there is not a single member of parliament who opposes sending weapons. Not a single member of parliament suggests that we should even talk to the Russians. While today I looked in the paper and I see a headline that Norwegian drones will kill Russians. There's no more pretence. The hatred is already out there. The intention is there. It would have been unthinkable to have this kind of language and position only four years ago. But it's this incrementalism — it builds up, all the guardrails are wiped away, and it's quite frightening when you see this shift and how the public just walks along and follows it.
I wanted to ask about this concept you just brought up — elite capture. Because if you live in Europe, you tend to get the impression that a lot of the political leadership were trained very closely with the United States. Sometimes their loyalties are also not very clear. It shouldn't be controversial to say that Europe has a very denationalised political leadership, very much influenced by the United States. But how do you see the instruments of this elite capture?
Brian Berletic: I think the European Union itself played a central role in all of this. The European Union was essentially a layer of bureaucracy the US draped over continental Europe and smothered individual national sovereignty. We can see how Europe systematically searches for, hunts down, and eradicates any sense of national interests within the entire European Union.
I can't remember what the referendum was for — it was maybe Ireland being part of the European Union or something like that — but there are many, many examples of this. I'm sure you could provide several as well, being in Europe, where they have the referendum, it doesn't go the way they want it, so they just hit the information space for a year or two and then they do it again and again and again until the information space has been sufficiently manipulated and they get the results that they want. Except that's not actual self-determination. That's using the illusion of democracy and self-determination to manipulate and control people and to channel them in a direction that is actually objectively contrary to their own best interests.
Having all of these European countries collectively placed under the European Union and subjected to a collective foreign policy that is detrimental to all of Europe's best interests and each individual member state's best interests — how is that objectively against the best interests of big business in Europe, ordinary people across Europe, all kinds of groups of people big and small all across the continent? And you can see how it has harmed Europe.
We could just talk about the period since 2014. Actually, before 2014, I thought there was a good chance that Europe would work its way out from under US subordination, because they were building the Nordstream pipelines. They were working closely with Russia and with China, and I thought for sure that they were going to make it. But then again, the US provoked war, and under war you have so many options to manipulate people emotionally, politically, economically, and in terms of military power. That's exactly what they did. They used the conflict they created with Russia in Ukraine to upset that process that was taking place, to cut Europe off from Russia, and also to begin the same process of cutting off Europe from cooperation with China. All of their alternatives were removed. The US literally just blew up Nordstream, and then through the persistence of this war with Russia, they've forced Europe to cut all energy incrementally off from Russia.
This is what has fully and completely subordinated Europe to the United States. Primarily the European Union, but there are also a lot of institutions and programmes the US runs in Europe — very similar to the National Endowment for Democracy — through parallel or adjacent organisations and institutions, both American government programmes and private corporate foundations. They've just chipped away at it. Like you say, it happened so slowly people really didn't notice it until it was too late. They've already accumulated this huge amount of power over Europe, and there's really nothing Europeans can do now to organise against it, unfortunately.
Glenn Diesen: Well, the EU has a very interesting history. It has a tendency of looking at opposition as a temporary speed bump to be overcome. For example, the EU constitution they wanted to have back in 2005 — two of the few countries who had a referendum on it, France and the Netherlands, said no. So then they sat down and thought, okay, how can we overcome this? Let's reframe it as a treaty instead. So they made it into the Lisbon Treaty, essentially rewrote it and just packaged it as a treaty so there wouldn't have to be a referendum. But then of course the Irish still needed a referendum and they also voted no. And then there was a campaign to re-educate them, enough pressure, and they made them vote again the following year, and then they got it right.
This is how it advances. They have this way of reassuring that as the EU takes on this power, you know, they're still going to have unanimous decision-making — these kinds of things. But now you see von der Leyen say, well, we can't have this, this makes us a hostage, unable to make decisions, we have to be able to defend ourselves. So now of course they're going to centralise more and more power, something that's causing quite a lot of tension. It is becoming a very — I would put it as an ugly project, but I'll probably get in trouble for calling the EU an ugly project. But this is what it's become.
However, whenever you look at how the United States is trying to put Russia on hold — that is, handing it over to the Europeans — it's obviously because they couldn't defeat Russia and the United States has other objectives. The main peer rival would be China. How do you see China fitting into this wider sequencing logic? Because they seem to be deprioritised at this moment. The US is still in Europe, still fighting Iran. We're not seeing that much pressure against China at the moment.
The Iran war as a move against China and Asia's energy supply
Brian Berletic: I would argue that the US war of aggression against Iran is actually a direct move against not just China but even US allies — I would call them proxies — in Asia. If you look at the energy exports from the entire region, not just from Iran to China — because Iran was basically exporting almost all of their energy to China, and that has been reduced mainly through the US blockade — the US is lying when they say they're not controlling all shipping in and out of Iran. They are turning back some of those ships, and a lot of those ships are bringing hydrocarbons to China.
But the problem is the whole conflict — and everyone knew this was going to happen if the US attacked Iran — they knew Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz. They knew Iran would retaliate against any country hosting US troops, which is practically every country in the region. And that's what happened. It reduced gas production and therefore exports, and also oil exports. It got so bad that there are countries here in Asia — countries like Vietnam, Japan, South Korea — that are buying more gas now from the United States than they are from the Middle East. This is unprecedented because they got virtually all of their energy from the Middle East. Some of these countries got 90% or more of their energy from the Middle East. Now they're buying it from the United States.
Just like the US did to Europe vis-à-vis Russia, they had all of these LNG export projects that they were building that people said, why are you building this? There's no way you're going to compete with steady, reliable, cheap gas from the Middle East. Except the US always knew they were getting these ready for a reason. Just like they were getting LNG export projects ready for Europe for a reason before it was economically viable — they were getting them online and ready because they always knew they were going to start a war with Russia in Ukraine and force Europe off of energy from Russia, and they would have the solution already there in the process of coming online.
They are doing the exact same thing. I stumbled across this Alaska LNG project run by Glenfarn, and that's exactly what it is. They've been working on it for years and it makes no economic sense. If you look at presentations from last year, 2025, they were sitting there basically pleading with the audience: yes, this makes economic sense. They mentioned contested waterways many, many times, saying that if Asia is getting energy from them in Alaska, it's like a virtual pipeline — there's no way anyone can touch it — and there are so many other contested waterways that aren't very safe. But they didn't say that it would be the US and its war of aggression against Iran that ends up closing those waterways and making this otherwise unviable project suddenly viable. It was a definite premeditated conspiracy. They are doing exactly to Asia what they have done to Europe.
First of all, they're deliberately cutting China off from energy from the Middle East — that was like half of China's energy imports. But now they're forcing countries in Asia, not just US proxies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, but even countries like Vietnam, to place themselves under energy dependence on the US. That gives the US extraordinary control and leverage over these countries strategically and politically, to basically transform them into what the US has already transformed Europe vis-à-vis Russia. They can transform these countries in Asia into battering rams all aimed at China. So it will accelerate that process that was already underway.
What they're doing is essentially surrounding China with hostile nations that are dependent on the US for energy and really have no other option. You could blame Vietnam for buying energy from the US, but what was their alternative? It's mainly cooking gas at this point — not buy it and leave tens of millions of people without cooking gas? It really wasn't an option. So the US got a lot of countries in Asia exactly where it wanted them, and they had the solution already in the works and ready to take advantage of it.
There's literally a National Council of Energy Dominance created by the US government for this specific purpose, and it has transcended administrations. This is not President Trump doing this. This began all the way under the Obama administration and has been incrementally advanced every single administration since then. Eventually the US will have Russia and China in a situation where they're surrounded by hostile US proxies, and the US will be chipping away at Russia and China themselves. Just like the US is outright attacking Russia with these drones, they will begin a process of doing something similar with China. This is what they're openly preparing to do.
Europe's de-industrialisation and the limits of the Iran strategy
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Sometimes you wonder why different leaders don't appreciate what's happening. On one hand, Trump is talking about how he wants the Ukraine war to come to an end because he's so appalled by all the killing — even though the US is still up to its eyeballs in terms of how it's involved. But at the same time, I saw just yesterday that US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was in Croatia promoting Trump's so-called peace pipeline framework, in which he advocated how all these countries that have always been dependent on Russia for energy — well, that's a horrible position to be in, so they would all be liberated now and would have American energy instead.
Again, it's very in your face. But at the same time it begs the question: the only reason they would go for more expensive and, I would say, less reliable American energy is because the war is going on. So to what extent can they afford to actually let the war die out?
Towards the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev made a point to the Americans that if we put an end to the Cold War, we also have to recognise and manage what this means for the power structures, because the whole alliance systems which put Washington and Moscow in a very powerful position had become dependent on war. So if we end the Cold War, we also have to keep our hawks in mind. But it doesn't look like the US is prepared in any way to walk away from this war.
It's just shocking that the European leaders don't seem to mind that they're just going to be de-industrialised and put in a situation of perpetual conflict with the world's largest nuclear power.
But what do you see as the possibility of keeping the Iranian situation going long enough? Because in Europe, you can hand over the war to the Europeans — they seem more than willing to throw away their economies and send their sons and daughters to die. But in the Middle East, you can't hand over the war to the Gulf States. First of all, they don't have the capability, but also they're not willing to fight either. How long can the United States keep itself in this position, because it's bleeding out as well in terms of ammunition?
Brian Berletic: At the level they were expending munitions from the beginning of this most recent phase — because again, the US has been on and off at war with Iran since the end of the Biden administration; people remember Israel, acting on behalf of the US, attacked Iran in late 2024 — at that level of munition expenditure, there's no way they could continue sustaining it. But of course there's a ceasefire right now.
Except ceasefire or no ceasefire, the amount of energy coming out of the region and going to Asia has been strangled and reduced significantly. I would surmise that if energy does start flowing through again, whether from Iran or from some other states in the region, the US will just start it again for a week or two — strike at maybe Kharg Island, have Iran retaliate against energy production in the Persian Gulf Arab states, and reduce all of that capacity again and thus reduce exports out of the region.
The US has been building these otherwise completely irrational LNG export projects to Asia. The only way they make economic sense is if this war with Iran continues. And it doesn't have to continue at the pace the US was pursuing it in the beginning. They just got it going. They did this initial damage. Some people are saying it might take a year or more for some of the damage to be repaired in terms of energy production and exports in some of the Persian Gulf states. So all they have to do is maintain that and just keep the flow of energy under threat and reduced while they make this transition.
The transition from Russian energy to American energy in Europe is still actually taking place. They still haven't completely cut themselves off from Russian energy. So it's a process that's going to stretch over a couple of years. The US wants to accelerate this as quickly as possible, but there's also a limit to how fast they can speed through this. They don't want to do it overnight because it would be too obvious. And it might create so much instability that nations might say, look, enough is enough — no matter how much we benefit from US policy, this is going to literally destroy our country.
Which it's going to do anyway. But these people need to be kept in the delusion that somehow they're going to benefit by cooperating with the US through every part of this. That includes the Persian Gulf Arab states, proxies of the US hosting US troops. No matter what they say publicly, they're benefiting from this relationship and they feel sufficiently insulated from the worst consequences of it. I'm sure the US made all sorts of assurances to them, to their European proxies, that somehow down the road this will all be better for them. That's what convinces them to go through these very, very difficult times.
That, and the fact that ultimately, if everything goes completely wrong, they have the financial means to just leave and go somewhere else and leave everyone in their country behind. That's ultimately what will happen to the Ukrainian population. Their US proxy leadership could just leave and go somewhere else if everything went totally catastrophic.
So unfortunately that's where we're at, which means there won't be peace in Europe. There will not be peace in the Middle East. And this conflict is eventually going to migrate its way directly to Asia. If you're here in Asia, you can see the US trying to encourage the Philippines to become more militant towards China over what are essentially World War II-era rusted-out shipwrecks they're fighting over. It makes no sense at all. But the Filipinos are doing it because the US told them to, because they're politically captured by the US. That's why they're picking a fight with their largest import and export trade partner.
And Japan — we see them becoming increasingly militarised. I was just watching a Senate hearing where they were celebrating how bold Japan has become, how they're going to start exporting weapons, making US Patriot missiles and exporting them back to the US. It's surreal, but it is actually happening. And considering the direction everything in Europe went, and everything in the Middle East, the direction that has gone, I don't know why people would not expect and just assume it's going to continue in that direction here in Asia.
Glenn Diesen: Well, Romano Prodi, the former Italian prime minister and also former president of the European Commission, made the prediction that at some point Russian gas will start to be sent again to Europe, but only once the Americans have taken control of the pipeline infrastructure — that is, to be able to get their cut. I think some people know what's happening, but as you said, there's no way of breaking out of this either.
We also don't see that the connectivity between many of these Eurasian powers is also increasingly by land. Both the Chinese and the Russians have very heavy land-based infrastructure connecting with Iran — be it road, rail, or energy. How do you see this fitting into the wider calculations of the United States to disconnect Iran as a very strategic piece of real estate?
China, Russia, and Iran's preparations for this confrontation
Brian Berletic: That's true. The Belt and Road Initiative is one massive Chinese project that stretches across Eurasia and even beyond. The massive reserves that China built up — this is all evidence that China knew this day was coming and invested heavily in preparing for it. Russia as well. I remember before 2014 wondering why Russia was building its military up in the way that it was, because it seemed excessive at the time. But of course they could see all of this coming and were preparing for it. Iran has been doing the exact same thing. The mosaic defence that I spoke about at the very beginning of the conflict, which almost certainly helped them prevail through at least this phase of the war — that was something they had been preparing for years. The ballistic missile programme, and as you mentioned, these linkages between Iran, Russia, and China over land.
I don't think there's sufficient capacity for say Iran to export energy to China to replace what they were doing by sea. Transporting by sea is so much easier than by rail. If there were a pipeline that would be a different story, but there is no pipeline, not that I know of.
So they prepared for this. The question is: did they prepare enough? And what can Russia, China, and Iran together do to help the nations in Asia that are now being forced to pick between no energy at all or placing themselves under US energy dependence — which is a horrible place to be, because the US is not just going to sell you gas. As expensive as it will be, there's always an additional cost of a political exchange that needs to be done. The US will expect it, and they will use that energy as leverage. That's the whole reason they set this up. This is the leverage they have over Europe, whether Europeans were agreeable to what they were telling them or not. And it will be the same case for Asia.
So we have to wait and see how this all works out. I know that Russia, Iran, and China prepared for many years — decades in some cases — for this eventuality, but I'm not exactly sure how much they can do for the rest of the multipolar world. The US is pretty much trying to destabilise, strangle, and knock over Russia, China, and Iran and leave them isolated and alone. I have to look into it more.
What happens when US allies refuse the burden?
Glenn Diesen: Regarding this division of labour as you define it — what happens if these strategic allies do not want to play this role or take on this burden? Because I guess one of the lessons from the Gulf States is: what is the benefit for us? We host all these American bases and it doesn't give us security. Instead, it will crush us.
I'm assuming — or hoping — that one day the Europeans will come to the same realisation: why did we accept being frontline states for the United States as opposed to finding a common security architecture with the Russians, as we initially agreed in the early 1990s, which would have prevented all of these conflicts and wars?
And of course in East Asia as well — to what extent, what happens if these allies, be it the Philippines or Japan, realise that this is not a great division of labour? That is, they will be destroyed in order to contain or weaken an adversary of the United States. I keep making the point: I don't understand why the Ukrainians will continue to fight. They could have gotten a good deal any time over the past twelve years — every day the deal gets much, much worse — and the US isn't there to help them. What happens at some point when surely the allies must recognise that this burden-sharing is hardly equal?
Brian Berletic: You're absolutely right. If Europe — and that includes Ukraine — or these countries in East Asia, Japan, South Korea especially, if they had independent, sovereign leadership, of course they would say this arrangement makes absolutely no sense. The US is a liability. Protect us from what? What war would South Korea be having with either North Korea or China when China is their largest trade partner, imports and exports? Why would China want to go to war with these countries that they're doing business with?
And the same goes for Ukraine. Russia had no intentions of going to war with Ukraine before 2014. Ukraine's one of its largest trade partners at that time was Russia. The only way this was flipped upside down was because of political capture by the US. They got the independent, sovereign leadership — however imperfect it was, people could argue how well that government worked for the Ukrainian people — but they scooped it out and replaced it with a handpicked client regime. Then they built up a whole structure around it to make sure that client regime stayed in power. Again, back to the New York Times admitting that the CIA took over all of their internal security apparatus. That means that no matter how the Ukrainians feel about it, the US is going to be able to keep their handpicked planted regime in power in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, they seem to have the ability to do that through the European Union all across the rest of Europe, and also in Japan and South Korea. It doesn't matter who the Japanese people or South Korean people vote for — they always get an obedient proxy to the US. And so when you're faced with that sort of situation, unfortunately there is no way out. This is why Ukraine is being consumed by this proxy war. You said it perfectly: it makes no sense for Ukraine to continue. They had so many possible ways to get out of this and they haven't. It's completely irrational and it can only be the result of being politically captured and an irrational handpicked client regime put in place serving US interests at the expense of Ukraine. Same goes for Europe. Same goes for East Asia.
I honestly don't know what the solution is. Obviously the people inside these countries need to try to find a way to organise against this, but it's just so hard when your information space is under American control, your political space is under American control, and in many cases US troops are literally occupying your country. South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines host US troops. Europe hosts thousands and thousands of US troops in many countries across the continent. It's an empire. And so how do you fight an empire when you're inside and underneath it? It's very difficult. There's no good answer to that. There's no appealing answer to that question.
I guess it comes down to people dissatisfied with this working together with multipolarism to undermine the power the US uses to capture and control these countries, and try to reverse it and help one country after another out from under US subordination. We have to hope that that can work and try to work towards it.
Is diplomacy dead? The structural impossibility of negotiating with the US
Glenn Diesen: Well, let me squeeze in one last question. If that's the situation with the allies, what about the opponents? Because it appears that whatever goodwill or enthusiasm there was about the Trump administration has faded away. I remember I was at the Valdai meeting where the Russian president attends as well, when Trump was re-elected, and there was some genuine optimism — they thought, this is someone we could work with, get an end to this century of hostility between us and Russia. I mean, rationally, what are really our conflicting interests, especially now that the world is becoming more multipolar?
Many believed in the rhetoric. I think this is all gone away now. That's kind of my point — there appears to be a waking up now to this strategic sequencing. Most of America's adversaries, if you see the Iranians — after two negotiations where it was said they were close to deals before they had this surprise attack, and now after two of these fake negotiations, they had the negotiations in Islamabad, which I would frame as a hoax. It doesn't seem very serious in any way. All the US committed itself to was the starting point of the Iranian ten-point plan, which was thrown out the next day. So it doesn't mean anything.
And the same with the Russians. They saw seven years of nonsense over the Minsk peace agreement. The Istanbul agreement was sabotaged by the US and UK. And now Trump has just been pulling them along. These are not serious negotiations anymore. I think the Chinese will also come to this realisation, if they haven't already, that the US isn't looking for a way to harmonise interests and manage competition — they're looking to knock out their rival. So what does this mean? Do you think diplomacy is just dead? Are we heading towards world war? How do you see this?
Brian Berletic: People have to understand that the whole reason there was no change with the incoming Trump administration is because presidents are in charge of nothing. Congress is in charge of nothing. It is the unelected corporate-financier monopolies inside the United States that are running everything and benefiting from everything. A $1.5 trillion defence budget — that is the arms industry benefiting from that. Big oil is benefiting from these projects that they proposed, got approved by the US government under Obama, Trump, Biden, and the current Trump administration — projects that made absolutely no financial sense at all until wars of aggression were fought by the US to make them viable.
So when you have interests like that, driven by perpetual power and profit and ultimately global domination, you cannot deal with a country like this with diplomacy in the way we think about diplomacy. There's nothing you can say. It's like trying to negotiate with a virus that's eating your body alive. You need to identify how it works and how to displace it from the global body and push it back to a more proportional role within the global network of nations.
That's what multipolarism basically is. That's what is driving it. It is displacing US-led unipolar hegemony. It is offering alternatives — not just in terms of how countries interact with one another, but corporations, goods and services that countries can get access to without fuelling the corporate-financier interests that are driving US foreign and domestic policy.
This is what's going to have to happen. People are going to have to forget about accommodation — the US will never accommodate anyone anywhere at any time. They will never accept being a part of the multipolar world. They want global domination. So as long as that's their obsession, multipolarism has to be resolute in displacing them from around the globe, because everywhere you don't — just like a virus inside your body — if it's in that part of the body, it's going to eat it away and eventually everyone will get sick and die. And as goes with viruses, they end up killing their hosts in the process. That's what global empire has always done — it becomes unsustainable and it itself ends up collapsing.
This is why multipolarism is so necessary. This is why that is the solution. I think Russia, China, and many other countries have always understood this. They use diplomacy as a way of trying to make this transition from US-led hegemony to a multipolar world as painless as possible. But as you can see, there's still tremendous death and destruction and instability caused through this process. We can only hope that it continues transitioning in the right direction and minimises the death and destruction caused by US aggression. Unfortunately, I still think it's too little at this point.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Well, you once told me that to understand what the US is doing, don't listen to the words coming out of their mouths in Washington — look at the policy papers, which have been funded by the arms industry through the think tanks they fund. Sadly, that appears to be very, very true. I just think we're moving into a very dangerous area now, where essentially the vassals of the US are now signing up to go all in as frontline states, while the adversaries have now woken up to the fact that there is no diplomacy anymore — there's only delaying inevitable war. So it's not a great position to be in.
Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Brian Berletic: A lot of people feel depressed when they hear these types of conclusions. But again, multipolarism is a real thing. Everyone on every level, big and small, can invest in it, and that's our only hope. It's what we have to try to do. Even you and I, creating alternatives to Western media — basically Western propaganda — we try to offer an alternative to what US special interests are trying to force people to listen to and believe. I think this all does make a difference, and we all have to in our own way continue trying. What else can we do?