 Hello and welcome to News Clicks International Roundup. U.S. President Donald Trump is in the middle of a visit to Europe and Russia, and as usual has been creating a lot of chaos with the statements. On Monday, he said to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. But ahead of that, 12 Russian intelligence officers have been indicted in the United States for attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections. To talk more about this, we have with us Praveer Prakash, hello Praveer. Praveer, let's start with the indictments in the meeting of Trump and Putin on Monday. So what do you make of this latest step in what's been a long probe, and what impact will it have on the discussions? It's an interesting question, particularly as we know that people have argued this probe itself is motivated, it's meant to embarrass Trump's presidency and prevent any kind of re-approach upon between the United States and Russia. It's a continuation of the policy by which the United States has effectively tried to isolate Russia, starting with Ukraine, the Crimean issue and so on. Now if we take that as the background, then of course this is a further attempt to drive a wedge between Putin and Trump, and also makes Trump's ability to negotiate any kind of understanding with Russia, or try to lower, shall we say, the rhetoric on West Asia, on Iran, on issues of Israel, and of course issues of, shall we say, the Baltic states as well as Ukraine and other countries. So I think that is a background that it does, it could be argued there is a deep state attempt to destabilize Trump's attempt to reach to any normalization with Putin. That's one part of it. Let's look at the other part, which I think is also quite interesting, the argument that Russia was trying to hack the US elections. Now if we take hacking of elections, meaning trying to change elections of another country, then the United States is the biggest serial offender on that count, and probably no country, including UK, Germany, France, can also say the US didn't try to influence their elections. Adversarial terms, elections to various third world countries, they were in fact regime change operations, tried with attempts to change elections. We know that the US is trying to intervene in elections starting from Iran's Mossadegh election. We have also this intervention in different ways in Congo, which are the more blatant ones. The world knows about, we have a coups and attempted regime changes in Syria starting from the 50s. So this is a very long standing tradition of the United States, that they actually do destabilize elections, forget everything else, Merkel's cell phone was tapped. Now that's very recent, not too far back. So US obviously imposes or expects different standards from what it behaves. So it's according to it, it's perfectly natural for it to try to hegemonize world's politics by influencing other people's elections. But any intervention with US elections, assuming that Russia is really involved, would be considered a hostile act and also almost an act of war. So this is the, shall we say, the standards we see that US and the US public, its media and its government and all the agencies seem to believe in, that US should be sacrosanct and while US should have the full right to interfere in anybody else's politics. Coming to the actual issue, the DNC hack, which is really the start of all of this and the argument that elections were attempted to be influenced by various Facebook posts and other stuff. Now as of date, we have yet to see any evidence that there was any change in the US elections due to this. In fact, the deputy attorney general in this particular indictment speaking after that has said that no Americans are involved, there is no payments that have been made to Americans, there isn't to be any conspiracy and also says that no change in the US elections took place, no voting change occurred. So if we take all of this, then what are we really discussing? DNC was hacked, servers were hacked, clearly. FBI did not do a forensic analysis of the attack. So we are only relying on a company, which I think is called CrowdStrike, which is run by the ex-Uranian, Ukrainian national. And maybe it's an Ukrainian attempt to change the US election results and its relationship with Russia, we don't know. But they are the ones who pronounce Russian hack, they are the ones who claim that there are all kinds of fingerprints of Russia and that's a story which has been lifted lock, stock and barrel by everybody, including for what we can see these indictments. It also says that the DNC hack results went to organization one, which in this case is WikiLeaks, according to this. And we know though it's not, it's not been shall be officially announced that there is a grand jury indictment of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is going to be dragged into this issue and that's why the naming of organization one. You know, if we look at whatever details we have of the DNC hack, one thing is very clear, the DNC servers were very poorly protected. It would be very surprising if a number of intelligence agencies, including that friendly to the United States, had not really looked into the DNC server, given the level of shall we say ignorance the Democratic Party had about its security. So why would then, why would Russia live only unique fingerprints and nobody's fingerprints is there on that server, is also for professional shall we say security experts, it's very difficult to believe. If you take the common belief in the communities, security communities that that was almost an open server to which anybody could hack into finding unique signatures of only Russians and nobody else is a preposterous argument. Did the Russians give this documents to WikiLeaks? Open question, we will, we are unlikely to hear anybody say yes to that question. And it is very unlikely that even if the Russians did give it, they would have given the documents to Julian Assange without, you know, hiding that they are doing it. A lot of arguments have been given, the Russians acted because they left signatures. Now we are in the possession of NSA and CIA tools regarding hacking. One of the set of tools that is there is to how to leave forged signatures, by which you can create signatures of other known Russian hackers, Finnish hackers, German hackers, so you can spoof your signature. That's also given, is also available in this tool. So given this murky picture to say the Russian hacked is probably very difficult to establish and I don't think any of these indictments are going to come to court and it will be meaningful. And it's interesting that the companies which were earlier indicted, this is the second set of indictments which have been handed down, they were expected not to contest it and we thought that nothing would come out of it. One of the Russian companies has hired lawyers to ask for discovery, show us the documents. And at the moment the Buller's investigation team, investigating or inditing team has not far furnished the documents. It's really interesting to see what's going to come out of it but I find that the biggest fraud is not the indictments. I think that the biggest fraud of the people is the belief that while the United States has the impunity to intervene in any elections, forget elections, even military interventions like in Syria, like in Iraq, like in Libya, like in various other countries without the official sanction of the United Nations Security Council, which is the only international law which can allow it to intervene in other countries, that it is talking about elections being hacked, which means it could be propaganda, it could be various other things, which most countries would accept is quasi-legitimate if other countries do try to change the elections in another country which is not favorable to it. I think this is the biggest fraud, that there is something called election hacking, which Russia does and while US only does benign, shall we say, benedictions. So do you think this would specifically have any impact on the discussions per se in terms of any pressure being applied on Putin or is Putin likely to just dismiss the whole issue as he's done before? I think Putin is going to say, hey, I'm not responsible for what is happening in your country, that's your problem as President Trump. The question is, will Trump be in a position to negotiate too much without seeming to have given in to Putin and therefore the charge that Putin, he's put in some baby or he's put in stool? And I think that's really the attempt that others are making, that attempt to circumscribe Trump's ability to reach any kind of normalization of relationship with Russia and that's really the bigger game plan, make it impossible to have the real approach. In which case the war industry is happy, various other bodies are happy and it's interesting or it's very strange in another way of looking at it, that the Democratic Party has emerged now as a major war party. So it's still the major hawk, sir, as much in the Democratic Party also makes sense, right? This was not what could have been seen in the 60s, where the Republicans were the hawkish party and continued with the Star Wars scenario, Ronald Reagan wanting Star Wars and so on. So this was the normal way of looking at war and shall we say not so rabid war. The Democrats were relatively more restrained on war than the Republicans were. But now we see strangely enough with Trump probably trying to have a more shall we say US first could also be the more isolationist agenda that therefore the Democrats want this globalizing agenda and the globalization agenda seems to include war at all costs. So war has now become a part of the globalizing agenda and Trump who's otherwise much more right wing, white supremacists, some of his best friends shall we say if he's not one himself, that all of this is also anti-globalization in some ways and therefore then he doesn't seem to be as much as eager to get into war. Though we have Iran, we have Israel, Palestine issue in which Trump is as much of a hawk if not more of a hawk than the Democrats. So we have this mix of shall we say hawk on some issues trying to reach an accommodation on some issues while Democrats seem to be very much anti any approachment to Russia and continuing to work on a policy of isolation with Russia which is what Obama did. But at the same time on say issues like Iran they were probably not as hawkish and certainly on the question of Israel. They while supporting what Israel did, let's put it this way, Barack Obama was no great friend of Netanyahu though he also ended up by supporting Israel right through. So actually since we talked about globalization war being a part of that perspective Trump also attended the NATO meet where he created a lot of chaos and incidentally the interesting thing was that it was through basically demanding that all the other countries stick to their 2% of GDP targets for NATO and then increase it to 4% too. But at the same time it basically created huge rifts in the organization per se. So how do we see the future of an organization like NATO at a time when isolationist say right wing governments are rising across Europe and there's a policy of every country looking after their interests first as opposed to earlier a phase of more collaboration in the field of defense. You know here is Trump's schizophrenia if you will that on one hand he says that he would like to have some agreement with Russia and the other hand he's telling in the NATO discussion that Germany is surrendering to Russia and we are protecting Europe against Russia. So it's not clear in this discussion that he is able to reconcile his two completely different positions but that's the advantage Trump has he's not trying to give you any coherent position except that we look at me, look at me. You know so that's the position he's always at the center stage of outrageous statements and all of it means that Trump is always in the news and that seems to be his strategy. In the issue of NATO again if the problem really goes back a long way it's not Trump alone who is a consequence that has created this schizophrenia in US policies. US policy is supposed to be against Soviet Union. So once some Soviet Union fell the Cold War ended. NATO should have been wound up and a lot of leading geostrategic experts international relations experts said the time for NATO is over. Let's have peace agreement with Russia. Yeltsin was more of a chumcha or shall we say an underling stooge of United States that anybody ever was else was and he was willing to sell Russia completely to the Americans as long they paid him enough money and supplied him good whiskey or good other drinks that he desired could have been even vodka. So he was really drunk right through his presidency. This is all the reports that we have and he also sold off all Russia's assets and bargain basement prices to who later on emerges the oligarchs. So you had a kleptocracy at a scale we had never seen before with all of Russian assets which is attempted to be really given over to the oligarchs. Now this is the picture that was there. Why did you require the NATO? The NATO was also had promised that it will not come beyond Germany. It came right into the borders of Russia. It did not dismantle itself even after the fall of Soviet Union the so-called Cold War had ended. It became a containment of China and Russia policy and in this process it demanded that it should really have more arms. It should do various things. It should maintain its military basis. It should do various war games right at the border of Russia and also have ABM batteries in the Baltic states and impose it. Having done all of that they are the ones who are creating this shall we say warmongering policies toward Russia. And now of course Mr. Trump says well we are protecting against Russia. Now this policy was not a European Union policy. It was really a US policy which the Europeans have slavishly followed. There's no point in not pointing that out but it has been a US policy all along. So now US is saying we are still protecting you. Now you have to give us money. If we look at the scenario that there is really no major war threat from the Russians. Even Ukraine and we have discussed it earlier this is really Russia's response in trying to detach Crimea which was their military base and take it out of their sphere of influence and then bar them having access to a 2012 months port. So where you're not frozen for part of the year. So this was the scenario under which the Russians really responded the way it did. It was all provocation and all trying to encircle Russia which was the NATO policy and this NATO policy was US policy. Therefore the need for defence against Russia. But if this was not the US policy and this as I said was not a European Union policy then the question of a defence treaty against Russia did not arise. Then what was the defence treaty for? So it had really two purposes. One is policing the world. Therefore the what is called the global war on terror. That was one part of it. Other is containment of Russia and China for essentially hegemonizing the world. So that they should be know what US strategic term uses the word revisionist powers that anybody who challenges the hegemony of the United States will be a revisionist power and expecting the European to foot the bill for United States to be the global hegemon. This is really Trump's demand. While other presidents of the United States have seen that this is in US interest therefore have not insisted of so-called 4% all of these figures, fancy figures Trump is pulling out but had said okay you guys should pay at least 2% while we'll fit the bigger bill. So the question that European powers have to ask do they have an independent foreign policy? If their foreign policy is already sold to the United States then of course it's a good point that whether they can then say we don't need defencing Russia because they have then already decided their external enemies are only going to be decided by the Americans. So that's a decision they need to take. It's a much bigger decision that they need to take not about the budget. To sum up in one sentence what we now have as Trump's demand for 2% or 4% it doesn't really matter Germany's has a defense budget of 1.1% and it wants peace. So therefore the argument that the budget should be increased is an extortionist demand. We will protect you, you pay us the money through your budget. Trump is seeking for net transfers not to NATO but to United States and this is also the transfer they're seeking in their various trade deals and that also has European Union and even Canada as a target not just China. So what we are seeing now is United States and we have discussed this earlier the United States attempt to leverage its military strength into economic tribute. So the classic case of the big bully with the big stick now demanding money because that's the only currency of power that United States has left with this declining economy. And that's where this issue becomes important that US is still the pre-eminent global military power and it's bigger as we know than all the other countries put together in military terms its budget just the increase of this year's budget is more than Russia's annual military budget. So it's about 10% Russia is really 10% of the US military budget. In fact even Saudi Arabia has a bigger budget than Russia has. So these are not comparable issues at all. They're bargaining their military strength now in the tribute and that's what the demand to European Union is that pay-with tribute. Thank you very much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching US link.