WaPo | President Trump’s news conference Monday in Helsinki was the most embarrassing performance by an American president I can think of. And his preposterous efforts to talk his way out of
his troubles made him seem even more absurd. But what has been obscured
by this disastrous and humiliating display is the other strain in
Trump’s Russia narrative. As he recently tweeted,
“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years
of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” This notion is now firmly lodged in
Trump’s mind and informs his view of Russia and Putin. And it is an
issue worth taking seriously.
The idea that
Washington “lost” Russia has been around since the mid-1990s. I know
because I was one of the people who made that case. In a New York Times Magazine
article in 1998, I argued that “central to any transformation of the
post-Cold-War world was the transformation of Russia. As with Germany
and Japan in 1945, an enduring peace required that Moscow be integrated
into the Western world. Otherwise a politically and economically
troubled great power . . . would remain bitter and resentful about the
post-Cold-War order.”
This never happened, I
argued, because Washington was not ambitious enough in the aid it
offered. Nor was it understanding enough of Russia’s security concerns —
in the Balkans, for example, where the United States launched military
interventions that ran roughshod over Russian sensibilities.
Perhaps most crucially, by the mid-2000s, steadily rising oil prices had resulted in a doubling of
Russia’s per capita gross domestic product, and cash was flowing into
the Kremlin’s coffers. A newly enriched Russia looked at its region with
a much more assertive and ambitious gaze. And Putin, sitting atop the
“vertical of power” he had created, began a serious effort to restore
Russian influence and undermine the West and its democratic values. What
has followed — the interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, the alliance
with President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the cyberattacks against
Western countries — has all been in service of that strategy.
So
yes, the West might have missed an opportunity to transform Russia in
the early ’90s. We will never know whether it would have been
successful. But what we do know is that there were darker forces growing
in Russia from the beginning, that those forces took over the country
almost two decades ago and that Russia has chosen to become the
principal foe of America and the American-created world order.
