A Putin revival in America
One doesn’t have to think that Trump is some kind of a Russian agent, to worry about the course he’s taking
n June 18, 2001, I attended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first meeting with the United States news media. We were seated at a large round table in the wood-panelled Kremlin Library. It was still early in Putin’s presidency, and we weren’t sure what to expect of this ex-KGB spy fresh off the famous summit meeting where the then US president George W. Bush had got “a sense of his soul” and pronounced him “trustworthy”. After we were kept waiting for what felt like hours, Putin finally arrived a little after 8pm, sat down and took questions until nearly midnight.
When it was my turn, I asked about the brutal war against separatists in the southern province of Chechnya. His long answer makes for striking reading all these years later: It combined media-bashing (we were failing to sufficiently cover atrocities committed by the separatists, he said); anti-Islamic sentiment (“What do you suggest we should do? Talk with them about biblical values?”); and the insistence that he had to attack in Chechnya to keep the rest of Russia safe. As the night went on, he proposed USRussia operations against the real threat in the world — terrorists — and proclaimed his patriotic plan to restore the country after the economic reverses of the previous decade.
Sound familiar? Putin’s slogan back in 2001 might as well have been ‘Make Russia Great Again’.
We are four weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, and Putin, in power 17 years and not going anywhere anytime soon, is everywhere in US politics.
Last week, Russian entanglements resulted in the quick dumping of the national security adviser, Michael Flynn (although Flynn was ultimately cut loose not for his apparent discussion with the Russian ambassador about lifting US sanctions, but for lying about it to the vicepresident). A day later, news emerged that associates of Trump had been in contact with Russian intelligence in the year before the election.
Trump has made clear for months that he doesn’t just admire the Russian president’s macho persona, but considers him, as he said during the campaign, more of a “leader” than former US president Barack Obama. As recently as this month, in a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox, Trump refused to condemn Putin’s government. No surprise then that Trump’s unseemly embrace of the Russian tough guy has given rise to a million conspiracy theories.
But we no longer have to speculate about conspiracies or engage in armchair psychoanalysis. Since the inauguration, we have accumulated some hard facts, too: Both Trump’s rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Putin during his first years in consolidating power. Having spent those years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent — and the rest of my career as a journalist in Washington in four previous presidencies — I can tell you the similarities are striking enough that they should not be easily dismissed.
Temper tantrums
Of course, in personality these two are very different: Trump is impulsive where Putin is controlled, with temper tantrums and public rants contrasting with the Russian’s cold calculation and memorised briefing books. But their oddly similar political views and approach to running their (very different) countries may turn out to be just as important as the Russia-related scandals now erupting around Trump. You don’t have to think he is some kind of an agent of Russia to worry about the course he’s taking America down.
Like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan today, Putin’s version of making Russia great again wasn’t particularly ideological, but its gauzy patriotic nationalism basically summed up the Putin plan for making a weakened and demoralised superpower feel better about itself. Putin considered the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, and even if Americans didn’t always understand what he was up to, he never deviated from his real goal: Consolidating authority in the Kremlin. America is not burdened with the history of tyranny and totalitarianism that haunts Russia. It has a 229-year record of success with constitutional democracy that should long outlive the Trump era. And while the trappings and powers attached to the “imperial presidency” Trump now wields have been growing ever since historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr popularised that phrase during the Nixon era, America also have robust counterbalancing institutions, like a free and independent press and a federal judiciary, that are already demonstrating a deep resistance to the kind of political steamroller techniques that Putin deployed so effectively in Russia.
Still, as I report from Washington now, it’s hard not to worry. When I moved to Moscow the year Putin became President, it was only a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Many Russians still hoped their country would become more like the western countries they had so recently been barred from even visiting. For all the popularity of Putin’s battle against what he belittled as the chaotic freedoms of the 1990s, I met many people in Russia who yearned for the time when they would take their place at the table of “normal,” stable democracies.
Who would have thought that, 17 years later, the question is not about Russia’s no-longer-existing democracy, but America’s?
Susan B. Glasser, Politico’s chief international affairs columnist, was a co-chief of the Washington Post’s Moscow bureau from 2001 to 2004 and is a co-author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution.