Latest news with #Putinism
Atlantic
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What Exactly Is Required to Preserve Our Democracy?
Since The Atlantic first released the podcast Autocracy in America last fall, Donald Trump was elected president again. Staff writer Anne Applebaum describes how Trump's return to the White House fits into the changing geopolitical landscape as she hands the show over to its new host: Garry Kasparov. The former world chess champion and lifelong democracy activist will guide a series of conversations about society's complacency with liberal values and how this carelessness has fueled a democratic retreat—and a new belligerence among dictators. The following is a transcript of the episode: [ Music ] Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I'm Anne Applebaum. Last summer, I made the first series of this podcast together with my friend and colleague Peter Pomerantsev. We were not trying to predict the future. Instead, we looked at some of the ways in which the United States had already adopted practices common in the autocratic world. Jefferson Cowie: My nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it's marching under the banner of freedom. Applebaum: We talked about the use of violence and intimidation in politics. Stephen Richer: It's a little bit like the Eye of Sauron. With that—when it's turned on you, you feel it. You get a lot of ugliness directed your way. Applebaum: About the abuse of courts and about kleptocracy. Sheldon Whitehouse: This is a new beast that is stalking America's political landscape. Applebaum: About older American traditions of state capture. Richard White: He would choose all the boards and commissions. He packed the courts. And, once you have the courts and the legislature—and you've already got the executive—you have all three branches of government. [ Music out ] Applebaum: Now, in Donald Trump's second presidency, all of those autocratic behaviors are being accelerated, amplified, even promoted by the federal government. He's fired civil servants. CNN Newsclip: Breaking overnight. First, paid leave. Then, buyouts. Now, firings. Applebaum: He seeks to replace them with loyalists and seeks to intimidate enemies and political rivals. Laura Barron Lopez: He wants loyalty across the board with little to no resistance. That is his top goal. Applebaum: Above all, Trump has adopted the practices of kleptocracy on a scale no previous American president ever imagined. Scott Galloway: I think we've essentially become a kleptocracy that would make [Vladimir] Putin blush. Applebaum: But while brand new in the history of America, Trump's actions are very familiar to those who have studied the rise of autocracy in other places. Garry Kasparov, who has not merely studied the rise of Putinism in Russia, but lived through it and fought against it, is now joining Autocracy in America to host our new season. Some of you will know Garry as a former world chess champion—indeed, one of the greatest chess players who ever lived. But Garry also has a long record opposing the rise of Putinism, well before it was fashionable. So at a moment when Western companies were still piling into Russia, when democratic leaders allowed Russia to host the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, Garry told a really different story. I looked up something that I wrote about him in 2007. And I found this quote; this is something he wrote in The Wall Street Journal. He said, 'Russia is in a moment of crisis, and every decent person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship.' [ Music ] Applebaum: As I noted at the time, this was a pretty lonely view. It was not shared in London, where I lived at the time, and there wasn't even that much reaction in Russia. Although an angry fan did hit him over the head with a chessboard. And Garry, who's now with us, said, 'I'm lucky the national sport of the Soviet Union is chess, not baseball.' [ Music out ] Applebaum: Garry, welcome. Garry Kasparov: Thank you very much, Anne, for reminding me about this very precarious moment. Because this angry fan was of course on the Kremlin's payroll. Since the moment when he hit me with the chessboard, immediately it appeared online. So, the videos were made from two different angles. So somebody was waiting for the moment. I guess they wanted me just to get crazy and just to hit him and to ask my bodyguard to attack him. But I decided to keep my calm, which was not easy. But again, thank God it was not a baseball bat. So I'm really, you know, really happy just to continue the program. And I think it's probably worth, you know, just reminding the audience that, you know, first time we met and worked together it was 10 years ago, and it was not in America, but in Canada. We joined forces at a debate. The Munk Debates. It's a probably largest public debate in Canada, Oxford-style. So we faced 3,000 people, and the opposition was Stephen Cohen, pro-Putin, U.S. scholar, very famous, and Vladimir Pozner, who has been working for Soviet propaganda since, I think, 1961—before we were born. And we had to deal with a very, very, difficult task, because the house motion was: The West should engage, not isolate, Russia. Applebaum: Yeah, yeah. It was Be it resolved that the West should engage and not isolate Russia, which of course was what the Canadian audience wanted. Kasparov: Exactly. It was one year after Crimea's annexation and the beginning of the war in Ukraine. But still, the mood of the audience was not in our favor. But we proved to be a very good team, and we won, which I think was quite a shock for our opponents—and for many in the audience, because again, it was Canada. So that was the beginning of our cooperation. But I'm just wondering: Could you, in your worst nightmares, imagine that 10 years since this debate in Canada, we would be talking about the real threat to America shifting sides, and no longer being a beacon of hope, the guardian of democracy, but becoming a potential ally for 'Autocracy Inc.' worldwide? Applebaum: I have to say that I did not imagine it. I mean, it's funny. Roundabout 2014, 2015—that was when I started following the rise of Russian propaganda and influence campaigns, mostly in Europe. I saw them in Poland; I saw them in the Czech Republic; I saw them in Hungary. And I even wrote something about it at the time, and I remember talking to people about it in Washington. And people said, Well, this is all very terrible, you know, for Slovenia, and we feel really bad. But it, again, it felt like a very distant problem. And really, just a year or two later, in 2016, we saw the Russian influence campaign being conducted in the United States. And since then, the gradual accumulation of, as I said, these authoritarian practices and behavior in American politics. And we are now at a point where it doesn't sound crazy to talk about the Putinization of America. Or the rise of Russian-style kleptocracy in America. So it's been a really extraordinary decade. I mean, it's really been one in which the United States has gone from one polar opposite. From a symbol of, it's not just … democracy might even be the wrong word. It's about the rule of law. It's about transparency; it's about accountability. It's about Americans believing in freedom, and Americans having allies and being part of this network of other rule-of-law countries in the world. And we've gone from that to being a really rogue power which seeks to break up all of our alliances and maybe instead do deals with dictatorships. You know, you, as I said at the beginning, you were an early observer of the changes in Russia that created the system that we saw today. Tell me: When you look at the first months of the second Trump administration, do you see something similar? What's setting off alarm bells in your head? Kasparov: The similarities are really frightening. It's a creation of classical oligarchy. And I think many Americans, they get confused, because they believe that any rich person who is buying influence is an oligarch. But by my classification, when you look at Putin's Russia, you should disregard the simple spread of this word for any rich man. [John D.] Rockefeller, [Andrew] Carnegie, in the past, J. P. Morgan. Or now we just have [Jeff] Bezos, [Mark] Zuckerberg. I still wouldn't call them oligarchs, because—while they are buying influence, clearly, so that's what happens in any representative democracy—they are not involved in the decision-making process. What we saw with [Elon] Musk and Trump, it's basically creating money and power. It's like in the same hands. That's what Putin did. So it's a gradual merge, or synergy, between those who control money and those directly making decisions. It's not about trying to find, you know, buying favors from Democrats or Republicans. It's basically sticking to one group of people that are under your control and making decisions. Also, Trump's statements—to my trained ear, it's loud and clear. He disregarded the Democratic opposition, basically saying, I can rule only relying on Republican votes. That's a proclamation of a one-party system. We can definitely give Trump credit for being very consistent. He has been pushing through his agenda, ignoring the laws of the land, and always, you know, just trying to bully people. That's also a typical sign of this early oligarchy where, you know, you don't have resources to go against everybody, but you pick a few best targets, and you go after them. And the rest have no choice but to obey. Unless they want to feel the power of the dictator's wrath. Applebaum: Yeah, and then I was going to say in the case of Putin's Russia, it was even more brutal. So if you kill one journalist, then all the other journalists are afraid. Kasparov: Yeah, exactly. You kill one journalist; you start closing TV stations. And then you go after the richest man in the country. So you basically confiscate his company, put him in jail. And the rest recognize that it's time to play by the new rules. So again, Trump is facing much tougher challenge, because American democracy has 250 years, even if we do not count the colonial years, that also had the rule of law as a basis for society. Russia, it's never experienced the long period of law and order, in its normal, democratic terms. But still, you know, certain things are just, you know, just have to ring the bell. It's an alarm. When they say, Oh, it's urgent, there's a mandate. The president had a mandate we have to push through. And if the judiciary is standing in the way, to hell with them. So the moment you hear urgency that should go over or should trump—pun intended—should trump the rule of law, that's another sign that they are aiming at the very center of America's democracy. It's a separation of powers. Applebaum: Yeah, it's exactly what Putin does. I mean, Putin—because of the war, it's an emergency. Therefore he has special powers. Kasparov: But it was always emergency. It was always emergency. In 2004 after this, the tragedy in Beslan when the terrorists, you know, took over the school, and then Putin used it immediately to gain more power by canceling the direct elections of the governors. So that's—again, it's every crisis, is always used to enlarge the portfolio of an autocrat. And, again, Trump is facing much more formidable opposition. But he's trying, I mean, we can't deny that he's trying. And, unlike his first presidency, it seems that, again, it says Trump already, succeeded in creating a … I wouldn't say political class, but it's a cluster in American politics that is just, you know, following him, obediently. Without any questions. Repeating even the most outrageous lies and statements, that even by the first Trump administration would be unheard. Applebaum: You know, this is the thing that surprises Europeans the most. Europeans—who've been dealing with Americans for years and years in security contexts, economic contexts, business, and so on—[are] discovering that there is this group of Americans who are sycophants. Because nobody ever thought of Americans being like that. But it turns out that you can win them over, or can bully them in such a way that they do exactly as you say. They provide a kind of echo chamber—even to lies. I mean, it's funny, talking about lies. What's also surprising to me is the way in which the Trump administration, Trump himself, use lies in the way that dictators use them. In other words, Trump isn't trying to—for example, as the Soviet Union once did, he's not trying to create a full story about reality. That, if we all work together and cooperate, then eventually we're going to build communism. Kasparov: No narrative. No fixed narrative. Applebaum: Exactly. Instead, the idea is just to lie constantly, all the time, about almost everything—whether it's the price of eggs or the price of gas, or what he said to Putin yesterday. Or, you know, whatever it is, he's lying. And this has another effect. I mean, what it does is: It makes people doubt whether anything is true. I mean, how are you supposed to know what's true if the president lies all the time? And that is, of course, exactly the same tactic that Putin used in Russia. I mean, if you lie or your propagandists lie nonstop, then the reaction of the public is to say, Right, you know, politics is a dirty game. I have no idea what's true or what's not true. I better just stay home. Kasparov: Absolutely. You know, a constant lie becomes a very important test for loyalty. Because you want to make sure that your sycophants—your administration, your appointees—they follow you without asking questions. And you want to test them, so they have to repeat the same lies. They have to defend these lies. And they know Trump was lying, And they still had no choice, either. Okay. They have a choice. Either you leave, or you keep lying. And so far, I didn't see anyone leaving. So it seems that, again, Trump still has his hold over a new American bureaucracy, that is just, again, willing to do whatever. Just to stay in power. [ Music ] Applebaum: More on that, after the break. [ Midroll ] Applebaum: You know, there's something you wrote in The Atlantic this spring, and you were calling on the opposition to Trump to defend the value system that has made America great. You know this question of values underlines, I know, a lot of what you wanna tackle in this season of the show. Say more about it. What's this value system that you, as an outsider, identify with America? Kasparov: I think now we just have to identify—that's the threat to American democracy. And I believe it's an existential threat. And that means, to defend it, we have to abandon some conflicts that separated American society. It's normal. We have many issues where we can, you know, argue, we can disagree. But the key is that we always relied on the framework created by the Founding Fathers that allowed us to debate these issues. One day, you know, we win. One day we lose. But again, it was a healthy process. And sometimes, you know, maybe just, too hot, you know, the arguments just were fierce, but it was just—it was a debate. So it seems now that this framework is in great danger. Now it's time to get together to fight for these constitutional values. That's something that made America America. And recognizing that Trump's actions, though they look very spontaneous and sporadic, they are aimed at this very system. To make sure that the balance that has been working for two and a half centuries—the balance between the executive, legislation, and judiciary—this balance will be tilted forever in favor of the executive. And not just executive as an office, but just executive as one person. Again, here is Trump, very consistent, demanding that the president has all powers and anything that stands in his way, even if it's guaranteed by Constitution, should be removed—because it prevents him from executing his mandate. Which is, again: It's a funny trick, because at the end of the day, Trump acquired his powers going through the system that created this mandate. And now—trying to use this mandate acquired within the system—he's trying to destroy the system and to make sure that he and his cronies, his successors, could rule the country without any restrictions that have been provided by this very constitutional framework that made him win in the first place. Applebaum: So the values are separation of powers, really, and the rule of law? Kasparov: Absolutely. This is the rule of law, separation of powers, and recognizing that there's always a balance that keeps very complicated American system, Republican system—Republicans will all, of course—to function and to be so successful. Because there are always forces and counterforces. So whether it's the federal level, state level, whether it's judiciary, legislation, so it's the, [any attempt to spread unanimity. So that's what is a real existential threat to American republic. Just, yeah. Quite ironic—it's next year, will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And if you just read through the Declaration of Independence, almost every claim there—all the grievances of the colonies, again, King George and British monarchy—have been simply resurrected in Trump's behavior. Applebaum: It is funny, actually: I reread the Declaration of Independence, too, recently, and there's even something about tariffs. There's something about sending people abroad to be imprisoned. Kasparov: Absolutely. It's so many elements of the Declaration of Independence, and of course the Constitution. So, I think by fighting such a powerful enemy—because again, we know that, again, Trump is not accidental. And that's one of the ideas of the second season, is to talk to different people. From different fields—Americans and Europeans—and to give our audience an idea, somehow, why Trump was inevitable. I mean, what's happened? What are the events that helped Trump to become almost invincible in American politics? And what are the other trends in global politics, in geopolitics, that made this overall climate so friendly not just to Trump, but to many other would-be autocrats, right-wing populists, across other democracies? Yeah; it's very important to see this big picture. Because to fight Trump is not, you know, just simply to go, Trump is bad. It's very important to show why it's bad. Applebaum: You know, it's interesting. In the first season of this podcast, one of our episodes was about American alliances. And it's actually one of my arguments that I've been making for a long time—that American democracy has also succeeded in the past because of who America's allies were. That it was very important, not just for our foreign policy, that we were very close to the European democracies or the Asian democracies. That that also reinforced our domestic politics. In other words, you know, that it matters who your country's friends are. And so, I suppose, maybe one of the things you'll explore is: Does it matter if America's friends are the German far right and the Romanian far right and autocracies in the Middle East? Kasparov: Yes. But it's like chicken and egg. So it's whether these alliances embolden Trump or, you know, that America's change from within help Trump to build these alliances. So think it will be wrong to actually oppose Trump without understanding all these underlying currents—you know, all the factors that made Trump and Trump's phenomena, both domestically and internationally, such a powerful threat. Not just to American democracy, but to democracy worldwide. And of course, Putin, as we know, he's very happy to support whoever. So he's happy with Marine le Pen in France, but he's also happy with [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon, who's far left. Of course, AfD for Germany [the far-right party Alternative for Germany] is his biggest bet in German politics. But, Russia was not shy of supporting Die Linke and the new newly built [Bündnis] Sahra Wagenknecht. Also, far-left groups. So, for me, it indicates the collapse of the traditional left-right balance that has been, you know, in place for probably nearly a century. And I will talk about it throughout the new series. But: Do you think, Anne, it's a legitimate, you know, issue, just to recognize why this right, left—or center, right-center, left—equilibrium that served us for so long is no longer, you know, protecting us against the rise of authoritarianism? Applebaum: Yeah. No, I think it's indicative of something even bigger—which is that politics, which for such a long time was about policy. In other words, what was the, what were the center left and the center right fighting about? They were fighting about the size of the state and whether taxes should be high or low, and whether we should have state health care or private health care. And those were the subjects of politics and the subjects of political debate. And what's happened over the last decade—partly thanks to the change in the nature of online information, partly thanks to the way that social media has reordered our conversation and made it more emotional and angry and divisive—those things aren't central to politics anymore. And instead, politics is about these very existential issues. Cultural ideas, national identity, other kinds of identity. Issues where there's much less area for compromise, and where there's much less that the different various parties can do together. I mean, so if you have an argument about taxes, you can find a compromise between the center left and the center right. If your argument is Who are Americans? And should people of only one skin color get to be Americans? And, if people come from another country, and they don't come through the border in the right way, they should be expelled, or not expelled? I mean, those are much more existential issues, and there's very little area of compromise. You also have the rise of political movements that challenge the system itself. And this is, of course, something that I think happened over the last four years, after January the 6th. Really, all of the extremists in America—and this happened in other countries, too, for different reasons—gathered around Trump. So, people who believed that there shouldn't be democracy in America, there should be a kind of CEO who runs politics—that was a kind of tech-authoritarian idea. People who believe that America shouldn't be a secular state; it should be a religious state. That's the Christian-nationalist idea. And a series of people who were on the extremes of politics were drawn to him. And drawn into really the center of political life. And they have now redefined political debate. And, as I said, political debate is not anymore about practical policies that people can understand. Instead, it's about these central, you know: Should Harvard exist? Or Do we want science? And it changed the nature of debate altogether. And of course, one of the things that has been very slow to happen is that the center—meaning the center left and the center right—failed for a long time to understand that the rules of debate had changed. So they went on squabbling with one another. You can actually see it right now in Germany, in the German coalition, which is the center-right/center-left coalition. They went on squabbling about the things that divided them, failing to see that there was a threat from people who wanted to change the nature of the system altogether. So what we really have now is a pretty existential argument between liberal democracy, small- l liberal, small- d democracy, and an authoritarian system run by an executive who is not controlled by the rule of law. That's actually the real debate we have right now. But, it's taken a long time for the rest of the political world to understand that and catch up with it, and to understand that in order to defeat the appeal of the autocratic world, we need different kinds of coalitions. Kasparov: But that also includes international coalitions. Because, you know, we use the word existential regularly, but the most existential battle between the force of tyranny and freedom now is happening in Ukraine. Literally the battlefield where the force of autocracy—Autocracy Inc., led by Putin's dictatorship—launched the most blatant invasion of the country. And it's much bigger than just an attempt to redraw the borders. It's a challenge, open challenge, to the existing world order—probably, it's no longer existing; it's collapsing. The liberal world order that we used to live in for decades. And the outcome of this battle, the outcome of this existential, mortal combat, will probably, most likely, will decide the future of humanity and future of freedom worldwide for decades to come. And, it's not surprising that the war in Ukraine also divides political forces here. And it's not, it's no longer, right and left. You can find people on both sides defending Ukraine. And unfortunately, you can find people on both sides—mostly, of course, on the right now—who are trying to undermine the Ukrainian heroic struggle for freedom and sovereignty. And to argue that it's no longer our business to be involved. Applebaum: Yeah; I mean, what you've just described, it's one of the arguments of my book Autocracy, Inc. Which is that while we've been failing to understand the importance of these new coalitions, the autocratic world has understood it. And you now have a de facto coalition or network that's been created by Russia, by China, by theocratic Iran, by Bolivarian-socialist Venezuela. By countries actually with very different systems—some of them are one-party states, some of them are one-man dictatorships—but who've understood that it's very important for them to work together to undermine the idea of democracy. One of Putin's great realizations was that it wasn't enough to undermine the democrats he was fighting at home, and it wasn't enough to poison the political debate inside Russia with lies and alternative reality. That he had to spread that farther—that really he needed to destroy the appeal of democracy everywhere. And part of the purpose of the invasion of Ukraine was to show that there's no sense or purpose to lead to having a democratic revolution of the kind that took place in Ukraine. That democracies are doomed to failure, and that they can be defeated by a much more brutal, a much angrier, form of autocratic power. Kasparov: Yeah, absolutely. So that's why I will do my best, throughout episodes of this second season to show this connection. You have Ukraine; you have the collapse of the traditional center-right/center-left coalition. Also the rise of AI and how AI has been playing a role in this fake-news industry and with new attempts of the tech bros to take control of the political system and electoral process. So it's looking at the big picture and hearing the voices from the Baltics to the United States. So: people that are experts, who have great experience in their field, to go to the roots of this global Trump phenomena. And find, you know, just throughout this conversation, find the best way for us to get together and win the battle. [ Music ] Kasparov: And that means voices from all over the political spectrum, people who disagree about many things but have in common the desire to protect democracy. Because, again: It is an existential threat. Which requires just this total mobilization of our forces if we want to preserve what was given to us 250 years ago. Applebaum: So it sounds to me like this show is in very capable hands, which I'm delighted to hear. Tell me, what's the first conversation? Kasparov: It seems that the best one to begin with, to set the table for us about an American electorate gone amok with both apathy and partisanship. And we'll talk with an excellent pollster and someone I know for many years: Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz: All the institutions that keep America moving forward are disliked and distrusted. Kasparov: Okay. This is, it's very, very important, because you said a few times the word, the key word, in my opinion: trust. Luntz: Yes. That is—by the way, let's stop there. That is the key word. It's the No. 1 priority that Americans have: trust and truth. Applebaum: Well, thank you, Garry. I'm looking forward to hearing the second season of Autocracy in America. [ Music ] Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo and Natalie Brennan. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebaid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.
Novaya Gazeta Europe
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Novaya Gazeta Europe
The Starovoyt option. How Russia's dictatorship is making the political elite self-destruct — Novaya Gazeta Europe
Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoyt, who was sacked by Vladimir Putin on Monday, has taken his own life. It is the country's most high-profile political suicide since 1991. Kirill Martynov Editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe In the quarter century of Putinism to date, ministerial officials have usually been honourably discharged and only ended up in prison in exceptional cases, as happened with Alexey Ulyukaev and Mikhail Abyzov. Until recently, the Putin system functioned according to the 'We don't abandon our own' principle, by which he didn't mean soldiers in the trenches in the war in Ukraine, or Russian-speakers in neighbouring countries, but rather high-ranking members of his own team. A certain level of access to the Kremlin combined with loyalty meant you were untouchable, and could protect your family and capital. Even after 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the political elite preferred active or passive submission to Putin's radical course of action in the hope of preserving the rules of the game. However, any public criticism or attempts to flee the country could quickly turn a member of the political elite into a traitor in the eyes of the dictator. A system of tacit agreements meant such traitors could be destroyed, as evidenced by the cases of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergey Skripal. So even after 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the political elite preferred active or passive submission to Putin's radical course of action in the hope of preserving the rules of the game. Not a single official of Starovoyt's stature had resigned since the outbreak of the war, partly due, no doubt, to the belief that the dictator does not persecute anyone closely bound up with his system of corrupt relationships. There has been very little 'fighting corruption' within the upper echelons as that would inevitably lead to them fighting themselves. But after the corpse of sacked Minister Starovoyt was found with a gunshot wound to the head, the rest of the players in Putin's game will now have to rethink their personal prospects, regardless of whether Starovoyt shuffled off this mortal coil voluntarily or he was helped or encouraged on his way. Alexey Smirnov and Roman Starovoyt. Photo: Kursk region governor press service The ideal outcome, from a propagandist's point of view, would be to present the case as a minister losing the plot and then to say no more about it. But in Moscow drawing rooms and Signal chat threads, they will be having very different conversations. What threat was the former minister facing exactly? Why did he decide to take his own life, or was the decision made for him, and who might be next? The most plausible version of events so far is that Starovoyt felt unhappy thoughts after Alexey Smirnov, the man who succeeded him as Kursk region governor and who currently finds himself awaiting trial for embezzlement of budget funds due for the construction of fortifications, made statements implicating him in the same crime. But Starovoyt's demise casts a shadow of doubt over that security. And with that, panic will engulf the political elite. Smirnov's career as governor was short-lived. He took office in 2024, just months before Ukraine attacked the region, and was removed six months later, with the Ukrainian army still in control of the town of Sudzha and surrounding areas. Starovoyt, on the other hand, had governed the Kursk region from 2018. At that time, it was a rapidly developing agricultural region with excellent corruption potential. In 2022, the region's fate changed dramatically. Starovoyt's career became a focus of the dictator's attention, and he was appointed Transport Minister in 2024. Starovoyt could have been another Abyzov, Ulyukaev or Timur Ivanov, a lower-ranking official in the former defence minister Sergey Shoigu's circles, and been sentenced to 10 or 12 years in prison, and then, when everyone had forgotten about him, quietly been released early on parole. Roman Starovoyt. Photo: Maxim Shemetov / EPA However, he preferred to avoid the investigators — that is, if others didn't take his life for him — and remain a silent witness to the construction of non-existent fortifications along the border with Ukraine. Starovoyt has thus severed the link from Smirnov to himself and those higher than him, such as the Rotenberg brothers, his old patrons, well-known experts in acquiring budget funds for building infrastructure, and close friends of Putin. Such patrons, as well as the governors and ministers in their pockets, have always seemed completely untouchable in the Putin system. But Starovoyt's demise casts a shadow of doubt over that security. And with that, panic will engulf the political elite. If the hydra can no longer guarantee the right to life, then what have all the sacrifices the elite have made, especially over the past three years, been for? Why give up all that capital and real estate in the West if you're going to end up like Starovoyt anyway? Perhaps the war the Russian political elite has worked so hard for for the last three and a half years has finally caught up with them. The Western press, meanwhile, writes of 'sudden Russian death syndrome', in reference to dozens of high-flying managers of state-owned companies whose lives have been cut short since 2022. The latest example is the 62-year-old vice president of the world's largest pipeline operator Transneft, Andrey Badalov, who fell from the 17th floor of his apartment building on Friday. The last raft of political suicides in Russia occurred in August 1991, when Interior Minister Boris Pugo, Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev and several acolytes took their own lives after the failed putsch. After the death of Starovoyt was announced, a young Transport Ministry employee, Andrey Korneychuk, died at a meeting from a sudden heart attack. Starovoyt doesn't fit the mould of a Soviet officer dishonoured by corruption charges against him. Perhaps the war the Russian political elite has worked so hard for for the last three and a half years has finally caught up with them. In the absence of other ways out of the current geopolitical situation, Starovoyt found his own alternative.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hungary set to restrict constitutional rights in 'Easter cleanup'
Hungary's parliament on Monday is expected to approve constitutional changes further clamping down on rights for LGBTQ people and other groups, part of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's "Easter cleanup" against his domestic opponents. Since his return to power in 2010, Hungary's nationalist leader has widely restricted the rights of the LGBTQ community, the media, courts and academia. In mid-March, he referred to critics as "stink bugs", vowing that an "Easter cleanup" was coming. The constitutional amendment -- which proclaims that people can only be male or female -- to be voted on Monday echoes moves on gender by Orban's "dear friend", US President Donald Trump. The amendment also allows the "temporary" stripping of citizenship from some dual or multiple nationals, which could target billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian-American and a regular subject of populist conspiracy theories. Lawmakers are scheduled to vote shortly after 5:00 pm (1500 GMT), with Orban's Fidesz and its smaller coalition partner holding a comfortable two-thirds majority. Small liberal party Momentum has called for the parliamentary building to be blockaded, and scheduled a protest for after the vote. Thousands of people have already protested recent legislative changes to facilitate the banning of an annual Pride Parade this June. - Raft of changes - Besides the provision proclaiming that people can only be male or female, another declares that children's rights for their "proper physical, mental and moral development take precedence over all other fundamental rights," except the right to life. That provision is seen as a way to strengthen the legal foundations for the prohibition of the Pride march. Another prominent provision empowers the government to temporarily strip Hungarian citizenship from dual or multiple nationals -- even if they acquired their naionalities by birth. The governing party suggested the move is aimed at "speculators" financing "bogus NGOs, bought politicians and the so-called independent media" from abroad. A related piece of legislation -- to be voted on at a later date -- specifies that Hungarian citizenship can be suspended for a maximum of 10 years and those affected can be expelled from the country. Nationals from other EU member states would be exempt, together with a few other countries in Europe, according to the proposal. Last week, more than 30 prominent Hungarian legal experts castigated the measure as "an unprecedented construction in international law" that could be contrary to binding human rights conventions. - 'Soft Putinism' - Critics say the proposed legal changes further erode democratic rights in the central European country, moving the EU member state even closer to the kind of authoritarianism seen under Russia's President Vladimir Putin. "You could consider this soft Putinism," Szabolcs Pek, chief analyst at the think tank Iranytu Intezet, told AFP. "People are not falling out of the window, but the government is increasingly limiting the space for opposition politicians, journalists and civil society," he said. Politically, the measures are seen as an effort to shore up dwindling support for the ruling coalition, divide the opposition along ideological lines, and court the far right ahead of next spring's parliamentary election. Orban's legislative "boisterousness" is a bid to take back control of the public agenda, according to Pek. "In this respect, he has been successful, because public discourse is no longer about the failing public services or the weak economy," Pek said. Since last year, Orban has faced an unprecedented challenge from former government insider-turned-opposition leader Peter Magyar, with his TISZA party eroding Fidesz's longtime solid lead, according to several opinion polls. Pek stressed the Pride ban is a "trap" for Magyar: standing up for LGBTQ rights could lose him conservative supporters, but his current silence might drive left-wing and liberal voters to other opposition parties. ros/jza/rlp/gv
New York Times
12-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin's Russia
In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia — visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying array of meats and vegetables on offer. 'What have we done to our poor people?' he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism. Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson provided a mirror image of Yeltsin's supermarket visit, only this time the supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic interview with President Vladimir Putin. While he was there, he went grocery shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and affordable prices. The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism. 'Coming to a Russian grocery store — 'the heart of evil' — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders,' Carlson said after passing through the checkout line. 'That's how I feel anyway — radicalized.' President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia's president against his own intelligence agencies. But in the first few months of his second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russia and berated Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. His administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a 'comrade' by Russian state TV. It's almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek, the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. 'If, in fact, we are witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,' she says, 'there couldn't be anything more dramatic than that.' Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own, diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong, Russia is America's 'imaginary twin' or 'dark double,' the sister superpower that the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own image. Or at least it was. Trump's policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less than turning America's dark double into its kindred soul. Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy — a 'reverse Kissinger.' Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It's the America First version of realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be 'ridiculous' for the United States 'to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.' Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity for Putin, and the Justice Department's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together. 'Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,' Trump said during his meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky. Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he told Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America's relationship with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president's personal proclivities. It's about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years. 'The Focus of Evil in the Modern World' Before Trump's recent reset, the dark-double framework defined the Russia-U.S. relationship going back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the United States first took up the cause of trying to redeem Russia. In the summer of 1882, an American journalist named James Buel traveled across the country and returned with an account of a 'barbarous' nation that desperately needed to be freed from tsarist oppression — 'whether with bayonet or psalm-book,' he wrote. In the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Russia became the Soviet Union, it morphed into a different, more menacing other — 'not just despotic but diabolical,' as Foglesong writes in his book 'The American Mission and 'The Evil Empire'' (2007). The Bolshevik ideology of global revolution represented the ultimate threat to the United States, spurring the paranoia that fueled Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous witch hunts. The specter of nuclear warfare only intensified the panic over the Red Menace — or, as President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union in 1983, 'the focus of evil in the modern world.' The collapse of the Soviet state over the next decade brought a fresh campaign to Americanize Russia by cajoling it to build its post-Communist future around the beacons of democracy and capitalism. Things didn't work out as either Russia or the United States hoped. By the end of the 20th century, Russia's G.D.P. had collapsed, its new stock market had crashed, it had defaulted on its foreign loans and a former K.G.B. spy — Putin — had become president. After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He adopted a crusade of his own against Western 'decadence' and 'the destruction of traditional values,' beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. 'propaganda,' part of an effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their country's post-Soviet turn toward the West. The familiar pattern seemed destined to repeat itself, and for a while it did. The United States had a new foil, and it was an old foil. Asserting America's moral superiority in response to Putin's crackdown on gay rights, President Obama included three retired gay athletes in the official American delegation to the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2013. Putin has since done just about everything in his power to reinforce Russia's identity as America's spiritual adversary, even describing the West as 'satanic.' Harking back to the Cold War, he embarked on a global campaign to upend the United States-led international order, creating troll farms that flooded the internet with social media posts designed to spread misinformation and sow discord. At the same time, he reasserted Russia's imperial ambitions, first annexing Crimea in 2014 and then invading the rest of Ukraine. And yet with Trump now back in the White House, the cycle of history may finally have been broken. An Alliance Against Liberalism Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That common cause would become a genuine alliance. Its roots can be traced back to 1995 — before Putin was even president — when two Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, summoned Allan C. Carlson, an academic and the president of a conservative think tank in Illinois, to Moscow. Carlson had published a book in defense of traditional families, 'Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.' Antonov and Medkov were worried about the population decline in Russia, and were convinced that the solution was contained between the book's covers. Out of this meeting sprang a new organization, the World Congress of Families, whose aim was to foster a global network of like-minded conservatives to fight feminism, homosexuality and abortion. In America, this fight had a prominent spokesman: Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a Republican presidential candidate in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Buchanan represented the paleoconservative wing of the party, which was articulating a very different vision of the post-Cold War world from that of its neoconservative rivals. As Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn't a geopolitical battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite. In this context, America's crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. 'If communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,' he wrote in the early '90s, 'democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind's ills, hope of the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.' Buchanan had a following, but he was very much on the margins of a party dominated by neocons, who saw America's victory in the Cold War as the decisive triumph of liberal democracy. The post-Cold War world order appeared to be set; history had ended. The attacks of Sept. 11, and the overwhelming bipartisan support for America's military response to them, only reaffirmed the urgency and righteousness of the cause. In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his best-selling book 'Suicide of a Superpower,' bemoaning what he saw as America's ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning about the country's declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity, the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called 'third world' immigration. Chapter titles included 'The End of White America' and 'The Death of Christian America.' Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration. While Obama condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan embraced him as one of his own. 'Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?' he wrote in 2013 in The American Conservative. 'In the culture war for mankind's future, is he one of us?' When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan characterized the invasion as part of Putin's divine plan to establish Moscow as 'the Godly City of today and command post of the counterreformation against the new paganism.' Mainstream conservatives distanced themselves from Buchanan — and Putin — but the ground was shifting beneath them. A backlash was brewing on the right against immigration and progressive social change, as well as America's misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American project to export liberal democracy. A new generation of nativist, reactionary thinkers gravitated toward Putin's Russia as an ally in their culture war to turn America instead toward an antiglobalist nationalism. Putin's critiques of Europe's liberal immigration policies and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt 'a spiritual connection to our Motherland' resonated. 'In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European,' the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said in 2017. During Trump's first term, many of the ideas that Coulter and her fellow reactionaries were expressing began migrating toward the Republican Party's power center. This new, more favorable vision of Russia was developing its own intellectual architecture, one that married isolationism, nationalism and traditionalism with a growing appreciation for autocratic strongmen who were bending their countries to their will. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has cracked down on immigration and put in place policies to raise birthrates, has been the most widely and openly admired of these European strongmen. But Putin, too, has his admirers, and they are no longer just fringe characters. In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled 'How to Think About Vladimir Putin.' He praised Putin's refusal to accept a 'subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,' and described him as 'the pre-eminent statesman of our time.' Soft Power Pays Hard Dividends Putin originally embraced the conservative side of the culture war for domestic reasons. It was a way to reassure Russians that he was attuned to their concerns about a rapidly changing world, and to provide a new binding ideology for generations weaned on communism. But this morphed into what Mikhail Zygar, an exiled Russian journalist, has called 'a form of statecraft' — a means by which to build support on America's far right and, in so doing, undermine its politics from within. Putin's rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption. 'He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th century,' Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs. The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president, his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American foreign policy bends in Russia's direction. As ambitious as it is, though, the Trump administration's Russia reset may have its limits. According to a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March, only 7 percent of American voters have a favorable opinion of Putin, while 81 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. Similarly, 55 percent of American voters disapprove of Trump's handling of the war in Ukraine, and only 38 percent approve of it. Trump and his cabinet may look at today's Russia and see a kindred soul. But most of America still sees a dark double. The right-wing politicians and pundits who view Russia as an ally appear to be a disproportionately powerful minority driving an agenda that is out of step with most of the public they represent. As radical as this particular agenda may seem, the broader phenomenon is one that the United States has seen before. 'America's foreign policy is conducted by elites,' says Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of the 2024 book 'America Last,' a history of America's modern romance with foreign dictators. 'You've just got a new one that has come into power now.' The reorientation of America's Russia policy, then, may say less about the persuasiveness of a set of beliefs than it does about the takeover of the Republican Party by a group of ideologues who have been welcomed in from the fringe. In this sense, they are no different from the neoconservatives and globalists who drew Buchanan's wrath 20 years ago by committing the United States to unpopular wars in the name of ideology.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Tragic Success of Global Putinism
For three years, I was President Barack Obama's Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: 'He's a transactional leader.' I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin's thinking and intentions. I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He's been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don't define the whole of his project. The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire. For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin's global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States. In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia's 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite's choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin's pick, not the other way around. [Read: Putin is loving this] At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the '90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable. But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia's 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: 'Why not?' Putin answered when asked this in 2000. 'I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.' After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush's idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan. Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia's economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia's richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky's oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia's independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels. Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call 'color revolutions' brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these 'coups' in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, 'One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?' Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin's autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin's favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia's election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow's Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for 'Russia without Putin.' [Read: The Putinization of America] Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using 'fifth column' agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin's regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals. After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID's operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia's economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, 'Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.' Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War's central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states. After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West. He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia's ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania's 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country's supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election. Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church's aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, 'I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.' In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for 'protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.' At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American 'imperialism' on Russia. Putin's closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants. In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, 'The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.' In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini's Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom's Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin's government supported Farage's Brexit campaign. Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin's relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country's accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin's man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014. For the past decade, however, Putin's most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia's foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the 'globalists,' the 'neocons,' the 'gays,' and the 'woke.' Putin's ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin's direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton's campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party's presidential candidate and help the Republican Party's candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear. During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump's team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,'This is between me and my friend.' Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin's full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump's senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American 'deep state' for Trump's failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed. After a four-year interregnum, Putin's ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin's ideologues and Trump's ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other's 'strong' leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that. [Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine] Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return? After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump's concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was 'strongly considering' new sanctions and tariffs. To use Trump's favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever 'cards' played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time. Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin's dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad. Many Americans likewise reject Trump's ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country's foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump's historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear. The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin's illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace. In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary. Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO's embrace of Poland's Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now. This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon. The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin's ideology of illiberal nationalism. Article originally published at The Atlantic
