Well-informed
American friends once told me that a campaign that highlighted “getting along”
with Russia and heaped praises on a Russian leader would be impossible in the
United States. There is no constituency that wants it, I was told, and there
are lots of constituencies that do not want it: Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian
communities; former Cold Warriors among the punditry; and all kinds of people
influenced by the bad press Russia habitually gets.
Russia becoming an issue on any
major U.S. politician’s agenda would be highly unlikely, I was told many times.
U.S. overall trade turnover with Russia ($21 billion in 2015) was thirty
times less than that with
China and three times less than that
with Saudi
Arabia. This is why Russia-related rhetoric is cheap and politicians can
afford to be scathing without the fear of undermining any serious interests. As
well, other foreign and domestic issues normally overshadow Russia for those
competing for the White House.
The conventional wisdom about the
role of Russia in American political campaigns now seems to be obsolete.
The Republican candidate Donald
Trump has shattered the Republican orthodoxy on Russia, promising to get along
with Moscow and heaping praise on Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russia
looms increasingly large in this year’s presidential campaign not just as a
foreign policy theme but as a feared puppet master behind Trump and as an
alleged perpetrator of the DNC computer network hack and other attempts to
meddle with the American political process.
A conspiracy-toned discussion of
an alleged connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin, Russia’s center of
power, has quickly become mainstream. Andrew Rosenthal inquired
in his New York Times column whether Trump is obsessed with Putin and Russia. Paul
Krugman, a left-wing economist and a New York Times columnist,
called Trump a “Siberian
candidate.” Hillary Clinton is running against Vladimir Putin, declared
Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for the Atlantic. Franklin Foer’s piece about Trump and his
manager Paul Manafort’s and foreign policy adviser Carter Page’s dealings with
Russian and Russian-speaking businessmen is headlined “Putin’s
Puppet.”
All of this sounds endlessly
ironic to a Russian who for years has been watching Russian political managers
manipulate a threat of foreign intervention to put all independent players
under effective control. The Russian opposition has long been demonized as
“U.S. stooges.” The Russian state has initiated legislation that allows it to
label any NGO using foreign funding a “foreign agent.” Moscow put a cap on
foreign ownership of media companies, arguing that foreign publishers
essentially represent foreign interests and influence Russian politics.
Denouncing Putin’s opponents, independent politicians, and even provocative
singers and artists as the puppets of some hostile external force has been a
daily routine for the Russian state-run media for many years now.
An additional layer of irony comes
from the fact that Putin, at least publicly, has shown little interest in
Trump. Putin has called Trump “colorful” (which Trump, using his “truthful
hyperbole,” blew up into “genius”) and welcomed Trump’s
plan to restore Russian-American relations, that’s basically it. Hillary
Clinton, on the other hand, has been a subject of the Kremlin’s passion and
anger. “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a
signal,” Putin once said. As pointed out by Steven Lee Myers and Neil MacFarquhar
in a
recent piece for the New York Times, Putin went on to “accuse [Clinton]
of engaging in ‘active work,’ an old term of art for covert KGB operations.”
When she compared Russia’s intervention in Ukraine to Hitler’s moves in the
1930s, Putin said she had “never been too graceful with her statements.”
The June hacker attack on the DNC
servers looks like something that could be traced to the perpetrators, thus
proving or refuting the Russian connection. On Monday the Federal Bureau of
Investigation said it was looking
into the hacker attack, the first acknowledgment from the agency that it is
probing the incident. Some commentators suggest that if Russia was behind the
attack and did help leak the emails it was to get back at Clinton rather than
to help Trump directly. It could be an attempt to “stir the pot,” as Russia has
done with the support of insurgent parties in Europe, said
Matthew Rojansky, the director of the Kennan Institute, when interviewed
by the New York Times. Mr.
Putin, Rojansky said, had to be aware that direct intervention could well
backfire with American voters, especially those in swing states like Ohio and
Pennsylvania with roots in Poland, Ukraine, or the Baltics.
The Russian political elite may
indeed favor Trump, but this does not strike me as necessarily obvious. Trump
may prove too disruptive even by Russian standards: his policies, if applied as
advertised, may lead to regional conflicts and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, which is not in Russia’s national interest, Vladimir Frolov, an astute
commentator on Russian foreign policy, wrote
recently.
What Moscow has already achieved
is that it has made everybody believe that Putin supports Trump. This alone has
proved sufficient to sow the dragon’s teeth of suspicion and distrust on the
American political field. The words “puppet,” “agent,” and “stooge” dot the
pages of the American press, mostly the liberal press. I don’t know whether the
Kremlin even has a favorite in the U.S. elections, but I do know what Russia’s
ruling politicians love to watch. They love seeing others get caught in what
one might call a “Russian trap”: when others are caught doing the very thing
they accuse Moscow of doing. They enjoy watching those who accuse Moscow of
calling its opponents “foreign agents” do the same to their own political
opponents. The same is true for accusations of corruption or the use of doping
in sports. This proves Moscow’s political creed beautifully: everyone is just
like us, everything else is pretense.
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