Larry Johnson: West Doubles Down on Failed Wars in Ukraine & Middle East (Transcript)

It’s a small country, you know, only 8 million people, probably less than that now with the number that have fled overseas in the wake of the different conflicts and attacks both by the Houthis and then by Iran.

The thing that’s really sort of fascinating to me, I keep using the imagery of a book written by Leon Uris 50 years ago called “Mila 18.” And it was about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto by a small group of Jewish fighters and how they held off the German army for three weeks.

Well, here we have Hamas, who is not heavily armored or equipped with advanced weaponry. They’ve got rifles, pistols, so basically small arms. They’ve got some RPGs and some explosives they’ve built themselves, made themselves. And they’re going up against what is a modern army with tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, combat aircraft that can drop bombs, advanced intelligence systems.

And with every advantage that Israel has had, it has been unable to defeat Hamas. Now, I don’t believe that’s been a deliberate choice, because the Israelis, well, they’re inflicting terrible, terrible casualties on the Palestinians. The Israelis are still suffering some significant casualties themselves.

And the emotional strain is starting to show with there’s been an uptick in suicides among Israeli soldiers or reservists because these are people still with a conscience and are haunted by the murdering of children and women in particular that’s taking place in Gaza.

And so then here is Israel trying to fight in Lebanon, fighting in Syria. And again, it’s one thing if you’ve got unlimited resources so you can move it here, move it there, but they don’t. They have finite resources. And then the Houthis continue to lob, in the case of our missile into Israel. And then against this whole backdrop, they continued to trash talk about attacking Iran again.

Iran’s Strategic Pivot to Russia and China

And yet what we’re seeing take place is Iran is now solidifying its military and political position by forging closer ties than ever with Russia and China. In fact, the Ayatollah Khamenei sent Ali Larijani up to Moscow with a direct message from the Ayatollah to Putin.

So there, unlike in the past, when Iran was reluctant to be too dependent upon or have too close of relationship with Russia and China, that’s now complete 180 complete change. And they are actually forging closer ties and working in coordination with Russia and China.

And both Russia and China are willingly and happily working because they recognize what they’re up against now is a global struggle against the west, as led by the United States that is intent on destroying all three. It wants the destruction of Russia, the destruction of China, the destruction of Iran. And so I think they’ve now come to realize that, and they’re pushing back.

The Syrian Crisis and Artificial Leadership

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: It does appear almost that World War III has begun, given that they go after now. Well, not just a war on Iran, but also ongoing war with Russia. And of course, the continued talk about war and preparation of allies to also go after China.

But the Middle East is really unique in this sense, given that there’s so many minor, not minor, but different wars being played out at the same time. I guess the big one, of course, is Syria at the moment. How do you make sense of this? Is this now? Is the process of cutting up Syria in spheres of influence or breaking it up in pieces? Has this already begun, in your view?

LARRY JOHNSON: Well, I’ll defer to you with your historical background as an expert, but I think this is a classic example of outside powers trying to insert somebody in a leadership position who has no organic tie to the country.

In other words, even though Al Jolani Al-Sharaa was born, I believe in southern Syria, he doesn’t represent a particular ethnic group, he doesn’t represent a particular tribal group. He’s not known as having a vision for what Syria should be.

But in contrast to say, what the Ayatollah Khomeini was, even though he was in exile in France, his teachings, his philosophy, his speeches still resonated throughout important segments in Iranian society. So that when he came back in, he had a base of support.

Whereas Jolani Al-Sharaa. I posted a cartoon by a fellow named Nemo on my blog last night. And it’s sort of like, you know, you’ve seen those evolutionary charts that go from like a sea mollusk up through apes and then man is finally walking upright. What’s the evolutionary chart of ISIS? Al Nusra HTS Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to “hey, I’m the president of Syria” Al-Sharaa, you know, completely the, you know, he is a device, an artificial device created by the west to try to create this illusion of, “okay, now we got a new Syrian in charge.”

And yet he’s got no natural base or ties to the Druze, to the Kurds, to actually the Bedouin tribes and then to the Alawites and to the Christians. So you’ve got, you know, he has no political power or mojo other than the fact that I was the head of an ISIS descended terrorist group that was helped created and funded in part by the west in order to, you know, help create a narrative to get rid of Assad.

But nobody thought through what comes next. And then how does he acquire legitimacy? So without that legitimacy, it’s just, this is like hitting a ball of mercury with a hammer. It fractures into different, smaller balls. And so, you know, the Bedouins fighting the Druze, you’ve got divisions even within the Druze. You’ve got the Sunni tribesmen, you’ve got the attacks in the Alawites and the Christians. It’s just, it’s a recipe for continued chaos.

And I think, you know, the United States and Britain have zero ability to actually influence events there other than to create, you know, extend the chaos. And Erdogan, despite his pretensions for grandeur, I think have come up against the limits of his power.

The Strategy of Chaos and Global Power Realignment

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: You mentioned the word chaos a few times, and it doesn’t seem as if there’s any clear grand strategy behind this besides, I guess, sowing chaos and then ruling over the split, divided chaotic region.

But if you look over the past two decades plus from Iraq, Libya, this destruction of Syria leading now to the toppling of Assad, the jihadist attacks on Iran, Yemen, you know, you can go on and on with Libya, now Gaza. None of these conflicts have ended up in a very favorable position or at least hasn’t brought security or stability. Instead, there seems to be efforts to merely exploit the weakness of the states caused by all these wars.

But it might have worked, I thought, if there was a hegemon, you just weaken all the regional actors and you dominate. But this is pulling a lot of big players like Iran with the other actors, such as China and Russia. Do you see any great power collaboration here? Because as you mentioned in the past, it would be unthinkable for Iran to link itself so close with, make itself dependent. But does this go both ways? Do you see the support coming from the Chinese and the Russians? I mean, do they see this as now a global struggle against the United States?

The Absence of Strategic Vision

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what has happened over since the start of the special military operation. The United States is really not governed much by a strategic vision. And I know that first. Well, secondhand, through one of my former CIA colleagues, a friend, he was actually put in charge of the Iran task force back, I think it was like 2006.

And then there was open discussion about attacking Iran now, overthrowing Iran, destabilizing it. And I remember he ultimately left that job because he said he asked the question, “okay, so we get rid of the Ayatollah and we take down the mullahs, then what?” And the answer was, “oh, don’t worry about it. It’ll work out.”

That’s not strategic vision. That is, you know, just swinging away and hoping something sticks to the wall or throwing jello at the walls, they say, and hoping something sticks. So there is no strategic vision with respect to that. But apart from they want to weaken and destroy Russia, they want to ultimately see China as the ultimate threat that they got to take out. And Iran is just a stepping stone along that route.

The Great Financial and Economic Decoupling

The problem, what they’ve done is if you go back to 2015, when the JCPOA was negotiated and signed, at that point, both Russia and China were cooperating with the United States and Europe in bringing pressure to bear on Iran. They were willing to support sanctions on Iran.

Now in just this 10 years, a short period of time, it’s now completely flipped where both Iran and China have come to realize they can no longer be dependent on or linked in a way that they can’t separate themselves to the Western financial system. They’re having to create an alternative.

And so the alternative is expressed in part through BRICS. There’s news out that within, you know, within this year the Moscow is setting up its own gold market, global gold market for pricing gold, selling gold, buying gold independent of the London bullion market. So they’re separating from that.

Russia has set up now its own ship insurance business. They’re called ghost ships. The only reason they’re called ghost ships is that these ships are no longer insured by London. Instead they’re now being insured out of Moscow. So you’ve got the separation now of these key insurance financial institutions. They’re coming up with another path.

China-Russia Military Partnership

And China and Russia, you know, four years ago their relationships were not that close. And I know there are some analysts that believe that China has long term ambition to take over the, you know, the eastern part of Russia. I don’t think that’s the case. The Chinese have not been aggressive land grabbers at any point in their history.

But what they have come to see that they have a necessary essential partnership with Russia that’s not just economic, not just political, but also military. And they’re coming together like as we’re speaking today, the Iranians are in Moscow meeting with the trilateral delegation, Russia, China and Iran and they’re talking openly that it’s about Iran’s nuclear program, how both Russia and China are going to be there to help defend Iran against future attacks or at least make sure that Iran is equipped with what it needs to defend itself as it proved to be quite capable of inflicting more damage on Israel than Israel is able to inflict on Iran.

The Self-Defeating Nature of Sanctions

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: What if I’m concerning about the strategic thinking, everything appears to be so there is zero sum, that is whatever is bad for our opponents is assumed to be good for us, which makes it very difficult to criticize stupid policies.

As you mentioned now with all the sanctions, every time there’s a sanction on insurances or banks, currencies, whatever it is, of the economic, I guess economic hegemon which the political west used to have. Every time you use these sanctions now the other powers respond by creating alternatives.

So one ends up again this is a key rule of sanctions. It seems if they’re severe and prolonged, then the rest of the world will learn to live without you. And it seems that this is what is happening. But on the military front you mentioned not just political and economic, but how do you see the military cooperation between Iran, China and Russia intensifying?

Iran’s Military Transformation and Strategic Alliances

LARRY JOHNSON: So Iran reportedly has received several advanced combat aircraft from China. I don’t see those as critical in Iran’s military strategy. They can be useful for perhaps augmenting air defense to attack incoming combat aircraft from Israel. But the willingness now of Iran apparently to accept aid – you know, Russia and China all along have offered to provide Iran with aid.

But prior to June 13, that attack on June 13, the sort of these moderate crew, the Pesceskians and others, they were like, “No, you know, mother, please, I’d rather do it myself. We don’t want to be our own person. We want to be friends with you, but we just don’t need that kind of help.”

Well, that’s now changed. They recognize they were idiots for taking that approach because Iran’s air defense system still was no match to deal with what Israel has. The only combat proven effective air defense system in the world right now is in Russia. China has a system, but I don’t know what the technical parameters of it are. All I do know is it’s not been tested in combat against a whole variety of systems.

Whereas Russia’s had to deal with storm shadows, with harm, the high Mars rockets – so they’ve dealt with artillery shells, they dealt with a variety of systems that have been used against it and proven pretty effective. So Iran getting access to those is I think as well a step towards a game changer.

The Year Military Myths Were Shattered

US has limited military power that has been, I think, the most – there’s one astonishing message out of this year, out of 2025, that 2025 can go down in history as the year that the rest of the world realizes the limits of both US and Israeli military power.

The limits on the United States were exposed in the Red Sea with their inability to defeat the Houthis. I mean, it’s not like the Houthis were a pure military power. They would be considered poor, they’re relatively backward as far as Western standards go. And yet not only they forced a retreat of the United States from the Red Sea because it became too costly for the United States to sustain operations. It was like just one month cost well over $2 billion.

They lost close to a billion dollars in equipment alone, not ignoring what it cost to keep a carrier strike group at sea. And then here’s Israel had always labored under this mythology of this invincible Israeli military machine. So they’re now 21 months into a war against the Hamas that they’ve been unable to win.

And then on top of it, their Iron Dome turned out to be an iron bust as it was shredded by Iranian ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles on top of that. And the Iranians inflicted significant damage in Israel, shutting down the two ports at Ashdod and Haifa, as well as the refineries that are located in those two cities, as well as the international airport, as well as strikes on key facilities.

Whether we’re talking their equivalent of the Pentagon, their equivalent of the CIA, their equivalent of FBI, their equivalent of research laboratories, and then hitting actual military bases. So all of a sudden, if you’re Egypt or even Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, you’re going to have a different reaction. You’re going to realize, “Holy smokes, Israel’s not invincible and Iran actually has some incredible military power and capability.”

So what that shows you right there is this changed perception and moving it forward. I think that’s going to affect some of the political decisions that’ll be made in the coming six months to a year.

NATO’s Diminishing Appeal

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: That was also a big attraction for NATO in Europe that – well, it’s been the only security institution in Europe since the end of the Cold War. So either you’re in it or you don’t. You’re not part of any security community. But also the idea that the United States as the military hegemon, would have the final say in any conflict around the world, this was also very much assumed by the Europeans in Ukraine.

As long as the war or America would be kept in the war, it would eventually come out on top. But as you said, it’s not really the case anymore. But it kind of takes me nice to my question about Ukraine because, well, in a different way than Israel, but nonetheless, it seems to exhaust itself more and more. This is not sustainable.

When you look at the Russians fighting the war, they seem to be building up greater and greater industrial capabilities. Every day they’re recruiting more and more troops which are being built up in the rear for God knows what they’re planning. But Ukraine appears to go from bad to worse day by day. What do you see being the main challenges for Ukraine to stay in the fight in the months ahead?

Ukraine’s Insurmountable Challenges

LARRY JOHNSON: Trained manpower which they don’t have and they have no way to get it. When you step back and evaluate the last 30, 36, 42 months – I think we’re about 42 months into this war now – the initial sanctions that were intended to hurt Russia, in fact strengthened Russia. It showed Russia, “Hey, you’re going to have to do this on your own and you’ve got all the natural resources within your country that you don’t need any of these external relationships.”

And as a result, over the last three years, instead of the Russian economy going into tatters, last year grew at a rate of 4.4%. This year the growth rate is down because of Russian economic policies to quash inflation. So that’s being reduced. Whereas in Europe, their economy is going down and it’s stagnant. You got stagnant growth or negative growth in the UK and France and in Germany.

And Germany is essentially shedding industry. Industry that some factors, some important manufacturers are moving out of the country, some moving to the United States. They’ve allowed the price of energy to go up. They want to impose – if the west continues to try to impose sanctions on Russian oil, all they’re going to do is create a scarcity in the market that is not served by Russia, that will drive the price of oil up and it’s going to further exacerbate things.

The Economics of Unsustainable Warfare

So you got that economic pressure. Then you got the issue of can Ukraine produce enough weapons, ammunition, artillery shells, artillery barrels? No, it can’t. It does not have the internal capability. It’s relying on NATO. Well, they turn to NATO, “Hey, let’s get what we can from you.”

Except, like right now, pay attention. The Garand drone that Russia’s launching apparently costs about $50,000 to build. The Patriot missile battery to shoot down one of those Garand drones is firing up to four Patriot missiles. So each launcher has a 16 tube launcher on it and four of the 16 will get launched at a Garon. Each one of those patriot missiles costs 7 million.

I can do basic math. I can multiply. That’s $28 million being fired to take out a $50,000 drone. That is unsustainable economically. Absolutely unsustainable. If Trump sent the 17 batteries that he was talking about, it’d be over a billion dollars right off the bat.

And then you run into the problem. Just do the math. That for 10 batteries, so you got four launchers per battery. And that means you’re going to have a total of 64 missiles, 10 batteries, total of 640 missiles. And that means they only fire once. Lockheed Martin only makes 550 a year. So if all 10 batteries fire off their missiles, good luck, you’re going to have to wait another year to get a reload. This is how crazy it is.

The Manpower Crisis

And then add into that the manpower problem because we’ve seen in recent exchanges of bodies of dead soldiers. Russia got 19 back the other day and they turned over a thousand Ukrainians, and the numbers have been a thousand. They’ve turned over close to 8,000 bodies in the last three weeks. And the Russians, total Russian death is fewer than 50.

Right there is prima facie evidence of the lopsided losses Ukraine is experiencing. And then when you realize that you can go recruit somebody off the street. That doesn’t mean they’re ready to know how to operate in a combat environment. Candidly, that process is going to take about a year.

I’d encourage people can go on YouTube and they can watch episodes of a HBO series called Band of Brothers. And Band of Brothers was about the formation of this paratroop regiment. And it gives you some idea of the length of time involved because they show up in July of 1942, they don’t go into combat until June of 1944. Almost two years of training. And so minimum, you need about a year of training.

So that’s what Ukraine is losing personnel at a rate is unsustainable. And they will – the point will come. I don’t know if it’s next week or next month or six months from now, but there’s going to come a point where it will collapse, it will break the stress. It will no longer be able to feed the personnel into the pipeline.

The Drone War Economics

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Well, this draining the missiles or the interceptor missiles, making the war fighting unsustainable. This was also a theme in the war against Yemen as they were using quite inexpensive drones. And then the Americans had to shoot off the very expensive missiles from ships, go back to reload effectively. It was simply not sustainable.

But the Russians are ramping up in a quite a big way with the drones. So is this countermeasure now just talk about sending patriots? Is this just aimed at least trying to secure some strategic sites or is it just hot air and not any – just the sense that they have to do something?

Paper Tents in a Hurricane

LARRY JOHNSON: It’s like somebody trying to put up a paper tent in the middle of a hurricane. It’s just going to get blown apart. The United States does not have any weapon system other than a nuclear weapon that it could send into theater and put into use that would change the course of the war. If they did provide a nuke, yes, that would change the course of the war. It would lead to the end of Western civilization and cause just incredible losses. But I don’t think they’re that crazy, at least I hope not.

But up to this it is – this is inevitable. Just as the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Following the battle of Stalingrad, the German fate was sealed and it was further sealed after the Battle of Kursk. All it could do then was try to prolong the war, try to inflict more losses on the Russians. But the Russians could absorb it and they did. And in the end they prevailed. And that’s exactly what’s taking place here.

Russia’s Hardening Position

Sure, Putin would prefer to say, “Hey, let’s get a negotiated settlement, we’ll stop the killing now. But these are our conditions” and the conditions haven’t changed. The territory that was incorporated by plebiscites in September 2022, those are now permanently part of Russia. And if Russia is occupying parts of Sumy and Dnipropetrovsky, they’re going to keep that too, because they’ve repeatedly told the Ukrainians, “Get out, surrender. And then you can keep like Nepropethrovsk and Sumi. But if we have to go in there and we’ve fought and had men die for that, we’re keeping it. So you choose.”

Ukraine now is in a desperation mode because up until last week they’re saying, “Hell no, we’re not going to go to any more talks with Russia.” Now this week they said, “Hey Russia, can we meet? Let’s meet in Turkey this week to talk.” They’re getting enormous pressure from the United States to try to settle this or at least keep the optics open that they are willing to negotiate.

But people that think that Russia is going to soften in its position – I think Russia’s position is getting harder each week, particularly. I don’t know if you had the chance to read the piece I put up at sonar 21 the other night about the CIA’s war on Russia, but it was based upon an article written by Tim Weiner in Foreign Policy, the journal – I call it the Journal of the Deep State. One of the journals of the Deep State.

The CIA’s Terrorist Recruitment Campaign

And within this, the premise, the thesis of Weiner’s article was that you got a bunch of Russian controlled stooges now in control of the CIA because of Donald Trump. And he’s interviewing one former director of operations, a guy named Sylvester, and also comments about Sylvester’s predecessor named Tomas Rakasan and what Rakasan said in there.

Even though we’ve now had revelations by Tulsi Gabbard this week that the Russia Gate was an entire fabrication, that the intelligence community knew about it. And at least some brave, honest analysts tried – that was their judgment. That’s what they tried to present. And it was politically overturned by Barack Obama directing James Clapper and John Brennan and James Comey to create an alternative narrative.

And so even though in 2016, 2017, they knew it was a lie, here you got Tim Weiner quoting this former chief of operations for CIA, the guy in charge of all the spies overseas, cursing Russia and ordering CIA officers to go out and recruit terrorists to attack Russia. The Russians may have been aware of this before, but once this appeared in print, I think Russians got to step back and say, “Okay, the CIA, they knew this was a lie. They knew the Russia gate, the Russian interference was a lie. And yet here’s their chief of operations using a lie to justify recruiting terrorists” – his words, not mine – “to attack and destroy Russia.”

There is no foundation for peace with that.

The Reality of Western Military Capabilities

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Well, it used to be a… Well, there was a piece, I think it was two years ago, both in the New York Times, where they recognized that the United States effectively hijacking the Ukrainian intelligence services, that is rebuilding it from scratch in order to be able to use it against Russia was a key reason for Putin to go into Ukraine in 2022.

But I thought it was interesting this, as I mentioned, the whole Russiagate event, this was really important to drum up more support for, well, yeah, for confronting Russia and, well, effectively making any de-escalation almost criminal, to see it as some sort of appeasement.

But now that we know what we know… Well, some of us been saying it for, well, since 2016, that obviously the Russia Gate was a big hoax, but now that it’s out in the open, it can’t really be disputed anymore that they knew it was fake and they pushed it anyways just to escalate tensions.

You would think this could be used as a way to de-escalate. Now that we know that the war was built on fraud and we’re losing the war, surely this would be a way of shifting narrative, because again, one of the things the intelligence agencies would do would be to be engaged in narrative control.

And now that we’re losing the war, wouldn’t you expect to see some efforts to change the narrative? Because there has to be some kind of a plan. As you said, the Ukrainians are being exhausted. We’re looking for a collapse in the not too distant future, and, but still, no one’s talking about peace. No one’s recognizing that… Well, perhaps the Russians had some legitimate concerns.

We might not agree with how they would address these concerns, but this idea that you don’t discuss the concern of your opponents, I mean, this is fine and, well, if you want to drum up and move towards war. But now that we lost the war, that is NATO, we lost the war. Doesn’t have to be some kind of a… I just find it shocking that there’s still not significant shift in the narrative that they’re not preparing the public enough for what is coming.

The True Purpose Behind Russiagate

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, it is. The reason Russiagate was launched against Trump is not because they didn’t like his personality, not because they didn’t like his style. And the reason the Europeans collaborated with the CIA, it wasn’t just the MI6, it was also French intelligence. German and other European intelligence agencies collaborated in this attempt to paint Trump as this Russian asset is because they feared what Trump is actually doing, which is distancing the United States from NATO.

And, you know, you saw, it was sort of hilarious, actually. Trump’s latest proposal to rearm Ukraine is basically, “Hey, NATO, you give us the money, we’ll give you the weapons. You pay for it, though. We’re not paying for it now.” He sort of ignores the fact that US is still the largest financial contributor to NATO. So sort of we’re paying ourselves.

But in dumping it on NATO, you’ve now seen, you know, Meloni in Italy. “Oh, sorry, we’re broke. No money here.” Or Borne. “Nope, nope. We’re not going to play.” Faeser. “No, no.” Macron. “No, no, I’m not.” You know, so all of a sudden this, you know, we kept hearing about, “Oh, you… NATO, more unified than ever.” They’re gone.

When it comes time to pick up the check, everybody’s busy looking for their hat under the table, you know, trying to leave Uncle Sam there. “You buy it.” So, you know, and… And if they don’t pay for it, Ukraine’s not getting the weapons. Now we can go up. We’ve already talked about, even if they send the weapons, they’re completely useless.

But this is why Russia gate… Part of what… Why Russia gate happened to cripple Trump so he could not move forward with normalizing relations with Russia. Because if you normalize relations with Russia, then you no longer have an excuse to keep the military industrial complex fully funded, which, you know, Trump is doing up to a trillion dollars this year, so there’s no letting up in that.

And they keep, you know, manufacturing. “Oh, yeah, we got to be, be prepared to go to war with China because China’s a threat.” So the whole element in this intelligence community, not just in the United States but across the board, have got a vested interest in maintaining the conflict, maintaining the chaos in order so that they can stay in business.

America’s Weapon Production Reality

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, that kind of takes me to my last question. Well, you addressed it, this new excitement in Europe that Trump would finally join the war. And he seemingly has made it his war now. But this excitement appeared to be a little bit short lived because they realized that entering the war means “we will sell you weapons.”

But that’s kind of the question. Does America have the weapons to sell and does Europe have the money to buy it? Because, well, you refer to the Europeans being broke and this is, or at least not wanting to cough up the money. But to what extent does America actually have the weapons they want to sell?

I heard Trump speak of a lot of Patriot batteries that could be sent by the Europeans and America would eventually replace it. What is the, what is the actual reality? Because there’s a seemingly a lot of hot air here because he spoke about our European country who had a lot to send. But I would have liked to know which one. What is actually happening here with this new news of America joining the war?

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, now you phrased it precisely correct. Hot air, it’s all talk with not much reality behind it. I mean, again, with just the production of Patriot missiles, let’s assume that you can produce a Patriot missile battery in a year. You know, right now you go down a variety of different weapon systems. Like the F-35 jet reportedly takes between 18 and 24 months to produce. B-2 bomber. 18 months. M1 Abrams tank is reportedly taking 18 to 24 months to produce. And that’s where you start with actually the actual tank shell already built. They’re just refurbishing it to modernize it.

Total Patriot missiles per year was 550. They’re saying they may be able to get it up to 700. Which when you sit back and think, “Wait a second, 700, that means you got about 20, you’re building a total of enough missiles to fire out of 25 different batteries.” It’s nothing.

I mean, when you look at here’s Russia, last week, one day it fired 500 drones and missiles, next day 550, another day 700 returning back to 550 those volumes. And when you figure that if each one of those drones that you had to fire four Patriot missiles, you would have need like 3,000 Patriot missiles that don’t exist.

Artillery shells, 155 millimeter. They’re supposed to be doing like 70,000 a month, but it turned out they can only do 40,000 a month, which is, you know, it works out to about a half a million a year. Well, Russia’s doing like I think on the order of a million a month just by itself.

So you can’t find a single weapon system in the west where they are able to do robust production, mass production to scale up, to feed, provide if you will, a rate of replacement that might be expected in a modern combat environment. Whereas Russia has demonstrated, it has done that in case after case with tanks, with artillery shells, with artillery barrels, with drones, with combat aircraft, Oreshnik missiles, hypersonic missiles.

We can go back to April and maybe in June of 2022. There was an article at least once a week, once every other day about how Russia is running out of missiles. “Oh, any day now, Scander Kenshaw, they’re going to be exhausted. They’re out.” Instead they’re building them at mass rates.

So this is, this is where the west is in a self denial and delusional about its capabilities to quote, “supply Ukraine.” It does not have the ability to supply and sustain modern combat in Ukraine.

The Coming Ukrainian Collapse

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, this is the delusional part. I think that’s a very good description because it seems as if we exhausted ourselves completely in the war on Russia. We exhausted ourselves also in the Middle East now and then at this point in time. We are also now having not just exhausted ourselves militarily but also economically and in terms of political legitimacy.

And at this point we’re now turning on each other it seems that is with tariffs and trade wars, there’s no real loyalty among each other anymore. And still with all of this going on, there’s still talk about the need to confront China. It’s just there’s only doubling down it seems. There’s no reversal.

It’s hard for me to see how any of this can play out properly, which kind of makes me concerned. What’s going to happen? Sorry, I’ll make that my last question. What is going to happen in Ukraine when it begins to fall apart?

Because we do see that the front lines are cracking and it’s been for a while, but the Russians keep intensifying its attacks, it intensifies territorial conquest, it intensifies the troops it kills and surrounds and takes within prison. We see the desertions on the Ukrainian side intensifying and there’s nothing we can do to turn the tide here.

So what will happen when Ukraine begins to collapse not just militarily, but now we also see cracks in the political cohesion. It doesn’t seem like we’re prepared to scale this back, but we can’t join the war either. We don’t have proper armies anymore. We gave away our equipment as well. So what do you see happening?

Two Scenarios for Ukraine’s Future

LARRY JOHNSON: So the one thing I’m sure that will happen is there will be a surge in Ukrainian refugees going into Poland, going into Romania, into the neighboring states. There’ll be fleeing to get across the border because the Russians are coming.

I fully anticipate that Russia will take control of Kyiv, that they will take control of Odessa, that they won’t stop until Transnistria is under their control as well. And whether that happens this year or next year, but that’s where it’s ultimately going to end up.

At that point there, you know, we got to look at two different scenarios and sort of, I’ll do the two extremes. The, the preferred outcome is the west admits, “Okay, yeah, we were wrong. Let’s negotiate with Russia on the, what they call the, the root causes,” which is about NATO and go back to looking at a security agreement that Putin proposed to Joe Biden in December of 2021 that was ultimately rejected by that idiot Anthony Blinken.

But they come to some sort of agreement where there’s a negotiated settlement, everybody goes back into their corners, new elections will be set for Ukraine, but Russia is going to play a significant role in because they don’t want some other new Bandera government coming in that’s going to be funding terrorism and guerrilla warfare inside Russia.

The more alarming possibility is if we follow on with the rhetoric coming out of Germany, in particular with Merz and then with this strange looking German general, you got Freudig, I’m not quite sure what his name is, but… And then lace on top of that, the comments of the, the European Command commander, General Donahue the other day talking about attacking Russia.

So you could see military attacks on Russian assets in the Baltic, possibility of NATO attack into Kaliningrad and, or the insertion of NATO troops into Ukraine, at which point they’re going to become Russia has made it clear that any attack, particularly with long range missiles into Russia by NATO forces will then lead to retaliation inside those NATO countries.

So anything out of Germany, France or the UK they’ll get a visit, I’m sure, from Mr. Oreshnik. The one hypersonic, intermediate range ballistic… It’s intermediate range hypersonic missile. It’s not ballistic, it’s hypersonic. Which means it’s terrible maneuverable and there’s nothing, there’s no defense, air defense system in the world that can stop it.

So I hope for the diplomatic outcome, but I fear we’ll be looking at something more, closer to the military.

Germany’s Dangerous Role

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, this is a strange part, that if NATO gets involved directly now in shooting war with Russia, it’s actually the Germans who might take us there. This is, you know, something that would have seemed very unlikely only a few years ago.

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah.

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: So… Yeah. Well, thank you again for your insights on this.

LARRY JOHNSON: You know what the problem here, Glenn, is? Nobody takes your courses and listens to you. If only they’d study history, they might learn something.

The Predictable Path to Conflict

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: I’ve seen this movie before, more than once. You can see how it’s going to play out. And it was also unnecessary. Again, I keep reminding people that the main foreign policy of Russia after the Cold War was to integrate into the political west, that its main security concern has been what has been the opposite.

That is the efforts to develop or construct a Europe without Russia, which unavoidably became a Europe against Russia. The idea that we could just keep the largest country in Europe outside of Europe by reviving the Cold War military bloc and the whole Cold War logic, zero sum structure, everything with security. It’s… It should have been very, very predictable.

I remember when I wrote my PhD thesis about this over a decade ago, he was told that, “No, no, no, NATO’s not zero sum. Russia has zero sum mentality. It’s not that we’re expanding on their borders. It’s not that we’re putting missiles there. It’s just that Russia sees this as a threat, but this is just in their heads.” It’s quite amazing how we ended up here.

Russia’s Post-Soviet Transformation and Western Miscalculations

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, you know, and when you look back, particularly in the 1990s, it’d be one thing if with the collapse of the Soviet Union, you had a strong man take over in Russia, who was calling for building up the military, who was calling for aggressive military actions against neighboring countries, and who was threatening the world. But that’s not what happened.

It was just the opposite of Russia saying, “Hey, will you be my friend?” And every effort, they got played for the fool. Until the time when they finally put Putin in place to say, “Hey, you got to stop the bleeding here, buddy.”

And yet, even from the time Putin came in, again, Putin did not embark on, you know, providing color revolutions in other countries. You know, a Russian version. And the failure to acknowledge that Russia was no longer a communist state as an authoritarian state. Oh, for crap’s sake.

And yet all of this was used to bolster a western narrative that fed into creating a reason for attacking Russia and breaking it up. And unfortunately the west made a bad bet. They forgot that Russia was completely self sufficient and natural resources. And you know what? You can cut them off but you can’t cut them up. So nobody learned the lesson of history.

The Irony of Election Interference Accusations

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: No, certainly not. And again, while we accused, while we engaged in interference in elections with color revolution after color revolution, it ended up with Russiagate blaming them for the interference in election. You could make this up, but we have this strange mentality now in Europe.

If you bring this up then it means you’re taking the Russian side. But no one can explain to me why any of this enhanced our security. Why? Because it’s allegedly pro Russian somehow that this was good for the western security. I mean it’s very simple minded tribal mentality going on here now.

LARRY JOHNSON: But yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

PROF. GLENN DIESEN: So thanks again for your time and I always appreciate your view and things.

LARRY JOHNSON: I appreciate the invite and always look forward to chatting with you. Thanks Glenn.

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