Trump doesn’t have to be Putin’s agent
It’s quite a contrast. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won re-election with the help, in part, of a TV ad that began with the memorable line, “There’s a bear in the woods.” Without ever mentioning Soviet Russia by name, the ad played on cold war fears to suggest that only Reagan was prepared to face down the menace from the east. Back then, it was taken as read that the US Republican party would stand strong against an authoritarian, undemocratic regime in Moscow.
That’s not quite how it looks today. Serious people in the US are debating not only whether the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is an admirer and would-be ally of Vladimir Putin — extraordinary enough, given the party’s history — but whether he might, in effect, be an agent of Putin’s, a real-life version of the Manchurian Candidate.
The thought gained momentum with two events during last week’s Republican convention in Cleveland. First, Trump’s team made an exceptional intervention during the drafting of the party’s policy platform, a document which is not as binding as, say, the manifesto of a UK political party, but which has symbolic significance all the same.
Trump’s attitude was that the platform simply doesn’t matter — only on one passage did his team get heavy. They flexed their muscle to block a Republican commitment to arm Ukraine in its conflict against Russia. True, the platform retained its support for Ukraine-related sanctions on Moscow, but the weapons pledge was removed.
Later in Cleveland, Trump gave an interview that send a tremor through foreign ministries around the world. He signalled that as president he would no longer automatically honour the Nato principle that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. It would depend on whether the invaded nation was paying its dues in defence spending. As with cancelling the pledge to arm Kiev, these words can only delight Putin.
Add the resumes and client lists of two of Trump’s top aides — his campaign chairman Paul Manafort was a longtime servant of the ousted, pro-Putin leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, while Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page is deeply enmeshed with the Putin-controlled energy giant Gazprom — and you can see why the talk of a Siberian candidate has grown. To say nothing of the close financial ties, the dependence of Trump on Russian cash, expressed so candidly by Donald Trump Jr when he said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
All this was known before the leaking of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, which has destabilised Trump’s opponents and therefore helped him.
It’s a chilling notion, the Russian dictator somehow the hidden puppet master behind a US presidential candidate. But let’s say that Trump is not a secret agent of the Kremlin, but merely a fan of Putin who sees the world much the way he does. That is terrifying enough. Trump doesn’t have to be a Putin agent to be scary. It’s bad enough that he’s a Putin wannabe. A President Trump would clearly see himself as a strongman who could sit opposite his fellow strongman in the Kremlin. The two of them could then do business with each other, make “great deals,” as Trump puts it, with no regard for international law, the international system or human rights. This is the prospect that should worry Americans. Not that a candidate for the US presidency regards a brutal Russian dictator as his boss — but that he sees him as a role model.