Kremlinology

We're going to go into detail on the programme shortly, but it's great to have you with us as always, Janine DiGiovanni.

Let's bring in Also, Doug Herbert, a student of Kremlinology since the late 80s at the University in Moscow, reporting then on the collapse of the Soviet Union from Moscow in the 90s for the New York Times, and now France 24's international affairs commentator via the Philadelphia Inquirer and CNN.

Doug, it is great to have you with us.

You're making me feel really old there, Gavin.

Yet it is still possible to deduce much of their unspoken internal logic by analyzing regime actions and viewing the world through Iran's ideological lens.

The White House is engaged in an intense game of Kremlinology, figuring out which leaders are up and down in Tehran.

Iran's decimated inner circle faces internal divisions, which almost certainly are compounded by the uncertainty of Mojtaba Khamenei status, Some Western observers have characterized the regime's condition as leaderless anger, incapable of making peace.

However, the simplest explanation is that U.S.-Israeli decapitation strikes shifted Iran's political center of gravity towards the military hardliners around Mojtaba Khamenei, who are responsible for fighting the war and who favor more aggressive tactics, without Ali Khamenei's natural caution as a buffer.

That it is precisely the dick side of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian system will continue.

Western Sovietologists often exaggerate the role of individuals in the post-totalitarian system and overlook the fact that the ruling figures, despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system's own internal laws they themselves can never and never do reflect upon.

In any case, experience has taught us again and again that this automatism is far more powerful than the will of any individual, and should someone possess a more independent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymous mask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchy at all.

And when the individual finally gains a place there and tries to make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who will follow.

And so, but you had a lot of these old cold warriors.

And so you had kind of these Sovietologists who are now becoming Islam experts.

And I think a lot of times they were not fully understanding what was happening.

Um, they were kind of using that sort of frame and that frame ended up, um, I think with these two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps even continuing until today, we're really not able to fundamentally understand, um, you

So I'm not sure how much of an operational plan there would be behind that kind of thing.

I'm speaking not here as a sort of Kremlinologist.

In terms of sort of how conflict in space would roll out kinetically, you would assume that there would be some non-kinetic shaping operations first, both from electronic warfare that we discussed earlier, jamming things both from the ground and orbit to orbit.

Um, and then also we would expect some, some hacking, which, uh, you know, we didn't talk about much earlier because it doesn't have a very strong deterrence value because it's quite hard to sort of, you know, parade your cyber capabilities and show them off on state television.

Well, I don't think we ever really knew about what was going on there.

I mean, I remember, for example, in from back from my army days, there was a time, this was back in the m- shall we say, late '60s, where there was a special Soviet studies department in, uh, Camberley, basically trying to analyze what was going on in terms of Kremlinology, and they even came up with this ridiculous theory, the Esau-Jacob theory of Russian leaders, that the hairy ones like sort of Stalin and Brezhnev were the reactionaries, and the sort of Slavophil anti-Westerners.

But the smooth bald ones like sort of Lenin and Khrushchev and so forth were more likely to be able to do business with.

[laughs]

Ukraine policy.

I mean, you, you and I have been covering, Mike has been covering executive branch for such a, a long period of time, and, and the Kremlinology of the executive branch.

Of course, these days, the word Kremlinology [chuckles] in many ways is more applicable.

Who's leading Ukraine policy these days beyond the President? And if T- Trump were really determined to cut off all help to Ukraine, would he get pushback from anywhere in the national security establishment? I'm not talking about the Hill.

I'll ask you about that later.