Crypto Pirates and the Speed of Destruction: 6 Questions with Keir Giles in a UK Pub
In my second meeting with the famed Russia watcher, he offers a post-mortem on how ‘collective amnesia’ in the US led to the Trump-Musk duopoly and why Ukraine must still defeat Russia.
***Please take out a membership to support the light of truth.***
I last met with Keir Giles in the Fox & Hounds Pub in Northamptonshire in July, when he told me Trump was going to win. I worked as hard as I could to push for a pro-democracy outcome, but it wasn’t to be.
In July, he spoke of our collective amnesia — the shock that “people have already forgotten Trump was actively working for Russia in his first term” and the double shock that a convicted fraudster could be president:
“I think the collective amnesia that has gripped the United States is partly wishing the problem away. But pretending that it can't possibly be that bad, because if you don't pretend that what you have to deal with — the reality — that means either taking a stand against it or knuckling under and going with the new regime.
“It's been a source of mild surprise to much of the rest of the world that those very few criteria for who can stand to be President of the United States doesn't, for example, include you shouldn't be a convicted fraudster. And the extent to which the the constitutional integrity of the United States relies completely on people respecting the Constitution, as opposed to trying to circumvent it has been shown to be a massive vulnerability because if you have somebody elected to the presidency with not only a criminal past, but also criminal intent, and they have the blessing of a subverted Supreme Court to go ahead, there's really very little to stop them taking the whole country down the track that they want to go, unlike the previous term where democratic checks and balances were still strong.”—Keir Giles for Bette Dangerous, July 10, 2024
So when I met today again with Giles, the senior consulting fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and the author of Russia’s War On Everybody, Who Will Defend Europe, and the NATO Handbook on Russian Information Warfare, it was for a post-mortem over fish and chips.
I asked him the following six questions…
Crypto Pirates and the Speed of Destruction: 6 Questions with Keir Giles
Heidi: How come back in July you knew America was going to fall to… I’m at a loss to what we should even call it…
Keir: We're having conversations now with Americans, technical conversations, about whether what is happening is a coup or is it simply state capture, and the fact that the choices are between those two is an indication of just how dramatic the events have been.
As for whether they could be foreseen, it was just a case of looking at what Trump had already made plain with his ambition and extrapolating forward to how he might want to achieve it. So none of this ought to have been as much of a surprise as it has come to be… the extent to which the Trump-Musk duopoly has been so blatantly and illegally installed at such an early stage, with no pretense whatsoever at observing the Constitution or the laws of the country, that — and the extent to which the resistance to it has already been neutralized — is possibly the most surprising aspect of this.
Heidi: The muted response from Americans has been absolutely devastating to me. And it kind of shows how information warfare works, in a way, because there's this feeling by the majority who didn't want this, that they can't do anything about it. And this was going to be my last question, but I'll ask you now: if you could wave a magic wand and lead people to do something, where would they start?
Keir: I don't think you can entirely blame information warfare for the passivity with which not just the politicians, but also law enforcement and the general public are meeting this. I think it is also a byproduct of the fact that what is going on is for most people incomprehensible, even if they are aware of the full extent of the way institutions have been captured.
This is something which is beyond people's experience and probably beyond their imagining. So we should not be surprised with the speed at which the slash and burn tactics have been applied. No coherent response to it has yet been evident. And of course, that is part of the part of the plan — move fast enough that a resistance cannot be mounted and you will achieve your objectives before there is the possibility of actually rescuing any of the institutions that they’re destroying.
Heidi: Recently, I wrote a report showing how nearly two dozen countries have been targeted by Russia, very much the same way America has. We've talked about the long screwdriver before, and what do you think went wrong in Americans not even being aware that they are basically, in part, fulfilling Putin’s dream to see America in this much chaos and pain?
Keir: The inherent weakness is not just a weakness of Americans, but particularly the American information ecosystem as the active exploitation of it by foreign powers. Because let's not forget that domestic political actors have learned from Russia's demonstrated techniques in order to support the information environment and to engage in image transfer… to engage in completely upending people's understanding of what is happening in the world and where it is actually going to lead.
And with the inability of media and of the guardians of media to defend the concept of objective truth and objective fact, you have a situation now where it is surprising that ordinary American citizens are not aware, do not understand, not only what is being concealed from them, but also what is being done in plain sight.
The idea that many Americans are cheering on the imposition of taxes on importers, believing that this will actually harm the United States’ trading partners more than it will harm US consumers, is another example of the failure of the defenders of independent, objective fact to overcome the campaign of misdirection that has been directed at people.
Heidi: You used the term in our earlier conversation — crypto piracy. I think people don't understand what's happening financially. Can you just give them a little bit of a explainer on that?
Keir: Piracy — it's hard to find a more apt word to describe the process by which the minions of an unelected official have boarded and seized US institutions, including the one which is in charge of payments from the government, the organization that is politically neutral for very good reason, because it implements the directives of a democratically elected government.
And now it has been entirely subverted by individuals who have no role or status in government, have not been elected, have not even been appointed, but are, in a very real sense, pirates. They are the 21st century buccaneers who have seized the treasure chest for themselves, and we do not yet know to what purpose they are going to use it.
Heidi: I have ideas on that... You just wrote your latest book, Who Will Defend Europe: An Awakened Russia and a Sleeping Continent… who will defend Europe in this current situation?
Keir: Well, the answer to that remains unchanged, because, as I said, the direction of travel of the United States was very clear, and so anybody that was paying attention knew perfectly well that it was down to Europe to defend itself.
And that's not a problem that arrived with Trump, because the United States has been saying very clearly for several years now, to anybody that is actually willing to listen, that Europe was dropping down its list of strategic challenges in the world, and was by no means still the most urgent or the most immediate or even the most realistic.
But for as long as Western European denialism persists because Western Europe is not willing to spend on its own defense, the pretense that the United States was still fully engaged was strong. Now, of course, it is harder for that pretense to be maintained, particularly if you have the United States — rather than being the core of alliance solidarity within NATO — now being its most disruptive element.
It's an overnight transition from Canada and Denmark seeing the United States as their strongest ally to suddenly and immediately being their most serious problem.
And this, of course, will be further encouragement to Russia, because if you accept that Russia's core aim is to disrupt NATO unity in order that it can deal with the countries of its former empire one by one… the disruption of NATO in order that an alliance does not stand against its ambition for reconquering its former empire, then anything which divides and disrupts that alliance unity is welcoming to Russia and encouragement to it to make its next move.
So here, too, the playbook of Trump and Musk is entirely important. If you imagine for a moment that you had been set the task in Moscow of eliminating the United States as the strongest obstacle to Russia expanding its power and as the core of an alliance which stood together against Russia. And then imagine how you would go about that when handed the rules of power to do so. Would you have done anything differently to what Trump and Musk have done in the first two weeks since inauguration? I would have to say, No.
Heidi: Yesterday, I saw a spider that got caught in its own web, and I was thinking, how do we neutralize Putin? How can it be done? Is it done internally? Can it be done externally? Can it be done by Ukraine? What could America have done? I'm just sort of throwing it out there, because I'm desperate for an answer.
Keir: The only way in which Russia's domestic politics will change is as a result of a strategic failure, and that can be brought about by a certain defeat of Russia's attempted conquest of Ukraine.
Because it is only that kind of strategic setback, that kind of strategic defeat, which changes the course of direction of post-imperial powers like Russia, as we've seen repeatedly, with so many different examples over history — the British, the French, the Portuguese, even the Swedes. It takes a limitation being set and a realization that they cannot project and exert power in the way that they could previously to start a process of reassessment among not just the leadership, but among society as a whole, of what their place in the world is and whether they are still the power that has an empire.
That process hasn't started with Russia yet, because all of Russia's post-colonial wars have so far been successful. A failure in Ukraine would break the trend and would also lead to the very first faltering steps towards a new Russia that is capable of living in peace with its neighbors.
Unfortunately, that chance, that opportunity, was missed because of the conviction within the United States leadership that it was more dangerous to defeat Russia than to allow Russia's neighbors to be slowly but surely destroyed.
Heidi: Damn, Keir. Thank you for that clarity. Slava Ukraini.🇺🇦✊🏼
****
****
Related:
****
Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.
I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships to keep the light on.
Thank you in advance for considering the following:
Share my reporting with allies
Buying my ebooks
A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹
More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
🤍
Begin each day with a grateful heart.
🤍
Whoh! =/ Thanks for sharing this Heidi, great conversation =] I hate that so much of our capitol is wasted on military crap but then when it could actually make a huge difference its not used to effect real positive changes What a fucking scam! At least we have you, your awesome =]