Stephen Kotkin
72 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬
Rachel Maddow, who have stoked liberals’ desire for the Trump-Russia
story to be the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular po-
litical scandal in U.S. history.
Among the more comical fulminations has been the claim that the
Russians further polarized Americans. In reality, during the 2016
campaign, U.S. citizens created and shared far more divisive material
online than the Russians ever could—and American journalists lucra-
tively disseminated even more. Likewise, the indignant posturing
about just how unprecedented it was for a hostile foreign power to
interfere so brazenly in another country’s election conveniently ig-
nores countless other instances o countries doing just that. The ¶³
did it to the United States during the Cold War. The British did it to
the United States even earlier, in 1939, even accessing sensitive poll-
ing data. And the United States has done it all over the world. Great
powers meddle in other countries because they can, and they will do
so unless and until they pay a heavy price for it.
The phantasm o an all-powerful, all-controlling, irredeemably evil
Kremlin has diverted too much attention from Americans’ own fail-
ings, and their duties to rectify them. Today in Russia, conspiracy
theories still abound about how the ¬ brought down the Soviet
Union and how Gorbachev was in reality an unwitting (or perhaps a
witting) agent o the Americans. Never mind that Gorbachev was a
proud product o the Soviet system. Gorbachev’s reformed commu-
nism, too, was utterly homegrown. Acknowledging all o that, instead
oÊ latching on to a canard about Gorbachev, would have compelled
Russian society to come to grips more fully with the internal factors
that caused the Soviet system’s implosion. Likewise, in the United
States, the obsession with Russian interference and the madcap specu-
lation that Trump is a Kremlin asset have helped occlude many o the
domestic problems that made Trump’s homegrown victory possible.
Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters have spun a conspiracy theory al-
leging that the investigation oÊ Trump’s campaign was a sinister plot
hatched within the μ. The rival tales—Trump as a Russian asset,
the μ as the deep state—uncannily mirror each other, and continue
to shape politics. It is as i Mueller never wrote his report.EXPECTATIONS GAME
Leadership no longer gets enough attention from historians. Too few in
the Ãeld seek to better understand when and how individuals Ãnd ways