Why Trump and Putin need one another
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Donald Trump thinks Putin is a “genius”. The former President of the United States thinks that declaring two regions of Ukraine “independent” and then occupying them with a “peacekeeping force” is such a “smart” and “savvy” move that “we could use that on our southern border”. Evidently Trump’s view of dictators is simple: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
The political divide between Democrats and Republicans, once regularly bridged on defence and security issues, is now oceanic. If Trump is returned to the White House in 2024, we can forget about sanctions to deter Russian aggression; even NATO, as we have known it, may soon be a thing of the past.
We have taken a strong US military presence in the European defence architecture for granted for too long. Joe Biden may be the last Commander in Chief of his kind: a centrist Democrat with Atlanticist instincts who believes in a unique American responsibility for global security, not limited to direct threats to the US. During the Ukrainian crisis he has moved an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, several squadrons of nuclear-capable aircraft to Ramstein, the US base in Germany, plus thousands of troops to strengthen ground forces in Eastern and Central Europe.
Biden has not hesitated to arm and train the Ukrainian armed forces; Britain is the only other NATO ally to have done the same. Those who criticise such a strategy as harking back to the Cold War — including Trump’s isolationist wing of the Republican Party, appeasement-minded West Europeans and, of course, Putin himself — forget the most important fact about deterrence in that era: it worked.
The trouble is that public support in the US for a hardline policy on Russia may no longer be there. Years of being told that the only serious threat comes from China has resulted in a political culture that is inclined to turn a blind eye to Putin’s provocations or even to indulge him. It isn’t just a problem of ignorance — the fact that few Americans can place Ukraine on a map, perhaps even including some members of Congress, is nothing new.
But Trump’s “America first” doctrine has morphed into a view of foreign policy that is either exclusively focused on the Pacific on the Right or dangerously pacific on the Left. US defence budgets have declined to less than half of their Cold War levels in relation to GDP, even more so as a proportion of government spending.
It is true that there are still Republican hawks in the Senate and on the Right in the US media. What we do not hear, however, is the voice that was once so influential during the Reagan and both Bush administrations: the voice of the neoconservatives. These were the “liberals mugged by reality” (in the famous phrase of Irving Kristol, who coined the term “neoconservative”). Their instincts were (and are) moderate on some of the touchstone issues in US elections, such as immigration and abortion. But on foreign and defence policy the “neocons” were uncompromising.
The defence of the West requires the active promotion of freedom and democracy, because liberal democracies do not attack us, while authoritarian regimes of various stripes have done in the past and may do so again. Hence preserving the independence of Ukraine, say, is now a vital national interest of the US, just as that of Taiwan or Israel have been. “Neocons” were demonised over the invasion of Iraq, but they were only one element in the consensus that supported the war in its early, victorious phase. Today, neoconservatives still point to the fact that Iraq has had five relatively free elections since 2003. The removal of Saddam did not bring peace but it did remove a dangerous dictator from the Middle East calculus. Democracies, however imperfect, are indeed less likely to attack their neighbours.
The US badly needs to revisit some of these debates. The crisis over Ukraine should prompt a soul-searching in Washington no less than in London, Paris and Berlin. One aide memoire that might concentrate minds is this week’s highly revealing video of Putin “consulting” his National Security Council in the Kremlin, demanding that they rubber-stamp his decision to recognise the “independence” of Donetsk and Luhansk.
One clip from this broadcast has gone viral: the moment when the autocrat humiliated the head of the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service. For failing to offer wholehearted support for the policy Sergei Naryshkin received a public rebuke. Terrified, he inadvertently blurted out the real agenda, i.e. annexation. “We’re not talking about that now,” Putin snarled. After being made to pledge his support for the independence policy, Naryshkin was told: “Good. You can sit down now.”
His chances of survival in Putin’s Kremlin are about as good as those of Liz Cheney in the Republican Party. The House Representative for Wyoming, once seen as a presidential hopeful but now demonised by most of her colleagues in Congress, was the only Republican to immediately distance herself from Trump’s comments on Putin. His “adulation” of the Russian President, she tweeted, “aids our enemies”. “Trump’s interests don’t seem to align with the interests of the United States of America.” Liz Cheney is right, of course. The twin spectacles of Putin and Trump ought to be a wake-up call for the West. If we fail to stand up to the autocrat in Moscow, then the arch-appeaser will return to Washington. Trump and Putin need one another.
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