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Putin’s dark hand
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Russian government wanted to help his
dad.) Putin was the source, a number of
former Trump aides believe, of the U.S.
president’s intense conviction that Ukraine
was in cahoots with his political opponents.
In the opinion of Russia expert Fiona Hill,
Putin’s government engineered the “rabbit
hole” from which Christopher Steele pulled
out his famous dossier; the substantial
doubt thrown over that document allows
Putin to shrug and smirk now: Who, me?
The strongman from St. Petersburg pops up
like Zelig across the broken landscape of
U.S. politics.
I
T’S IRONIC THAT Americans of all politi-
cal stripes have contributed to Putin’s
success—by failing to understand what
he wants and why he wants it. His goals
are not the goals of the former Soviet
Union. During the Cold War, the Kremlin
pursued the spread of communist ideol-
ogy. Putin is nonideological, according to
former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael
McFaul, now of Stanford University and a
Post contributing columnist. “I see him as
impulsive, emotional, opportunistic. Putin
sees himself as the last great nationalist,
anti-globalist leader.”
Putin’s rise through the chaos of the post-
Soviet period had left him convinced that
Western-style capitalism, unrestrained by
a centralized controlling authority, was
incompatible with Russian greatness. Since
then, Putin has transformed
the anarchic plunder of the
1990s into a centralized
structure of state-approved
oligarchs, with himself at
the top of the pyramid.
Many Russian observers
believe there was a window
when Putin might have
become a potential part-
ner of the West. Indeed,
around the time he became
president, there was some
discussion of Russia joining
NATO someday, as several
former Soviet satellites had
already done. President
George W. Bush famously
declared of his first meeting
with Putin: “I looked into
his eyes and saw his soul.”
Putin did not exercise his
veto in the U.N. Security
Council when Bush sought approval of the
2003 Iraq invasion to unseat the dictator
Saddam Hussein.
But Putin’s attitude changed as the West
expanded its influence. Later that year,
the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia
toppled the government of former Soviet
foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze
and replaced him with the pro-Western
Mikheil Saakashvili. Other “color revolu-
tions” erupted in former satellite states
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. In 2004, NATO
expanded to Russia’s doorstep, adding three
former Soviet republics as members: Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia.
This steady advance hardened Putin’s
worldview, and his wariness of the United
States “went off the rails,” according to
McFaul. The former intelligence officer
believed that his old nemesis the CIA was
behind the color revolutions, and that
ultimately the United States would seek a
regime change in Russia itself.
All survivors of the late Soviet era learned
the lesson that Russia cannot compete
with the West by conventional means.
Large and powerful in terms of geography,
culture, and nuclear weapons, Russia has
never approached its economic potential.
This sprawling, beautiful country has
known power but has never known real
prosperity—even the czars built châteaus
in the French style from wood painted to
Russia’s president has invited Americans to join him in undermining U.S. democracy with doubt and suspicion,
said David Von Drehle in The Washington Post. Will we play his game?
Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of periods of chaos to cement his power.
T
HE PRESIDENT OF the
United States fires his
director of national
intelligence after aides brief
a congressional committee
on new Russian efforts to
interfere in the 2020 election.
His acting replacement is a
man whose main qualification
appears to be his skepticism
that Russia is meddling in our
politics at all. Meanwhile, intel-
ligence officials tell Sen. Bernie
Sanders, the leading candidate
to unseat the president, that
Russian bots have infiltrated
his online army to sow discord
in the Democratic Party. They
say the goal is to help Sanders,
but Sanders thinks it is a leak
designed to hurt him.
Not sure what to believe?
Bingo. This fever of mistrust is
the desired symptom of a powerful virus—
a confidence-sapping worm of mutual
suspicion—that Russia has planted in the
operating system of American democracy. At
little cost and with surprising ease, Vladimir
Putin and his government have exploited
partisanship and social media to serve
Russia’s long-term goal of weakening the
West by encouraging disorder and disunity.
Already, eight months before Election Day,
the virus is spreading virtually unchecked,
because the very existence of a Russian
chaos project has itself become a partisan
wedge. Democrats see Putin’s hand in nearly
every news cycle, while Republicans increas-
ingly scoff that the whole thing is, to quote
the president, a witch hunt.
Millions of us are unsure whether elections
will be free and fair, whether the news we
consume is real or fake, whether our foreign
policy serves national or personal interests.
This is a massive victory for America’s
enemies.
Putin has watered this invasive species for
much of the past decade. Seizing opportuni-
ties on the lawless frontiers of social media,
the Russian leader has stoked division,
spread disinformation, fanned conspiracy
theories, and generally mind-gamed the
American system. Putin’s crown prosecu-
tor was the purported source of Kremlin
assistance dangled before the eager eyes of
Trump’s inner circle. (“I love it,” Donald
Trump Jr. exclaimed when told that the
greg delong
(Greg DeLong)
#1