You’d think no one had tried to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin before. Every time President-elect Trump sides with Moscow’s hard man, his supporters rush to tell us that the Cold War is over, that successive Western leaders have encircled and humiliated Russia, that we should be working together against Islamist terrorism and so on. Putin’s admirers in Europe, including Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen, take the same line.
In fact, every American president who’s dealt with Putin began by seeking better relations. At their first meeting in 2001, George W. Bush “looked the man in the eye, and found him to be very straightforward.” By the end of his time in office, in August 2008, President Bush was flying American-equipped Georgian soldiers back from Afghanistan to resist Putin’s invasion of their country.
Nine months later, Hillary Clinton presented her opposite number with a button that was supposed to say “reset” in Russian, but in fact said “overload.” President Obama canceled the European missile defense shield, horrifying the Czech and Polish governments who, for the sake of their alliance with America, had agreed to host the installations despite domestic opposition. Soon afterward, he reversed the sanctions against Russia’s state-run arms export agency, which had been selling weapons to Iran.
Once again, Putin pocketed the concessions and then, when he felt like it, helped himself to a slice of another neighboring state, this time Ukraine.
When he got away with that too, he decided to press Hillary’s “overload” button and authorized an unprecedented intervention in an American presidential election. Incredibly, that, too, seems to be paying off.
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But remember that Putin’s interests and Russia’s are not the same. Although Putin is an autocrat, his regime depends on a broad measure of public support. That support depends, in turn, on a siege mentality.
Shakespeare’s Henry IV gives his son some deathbed advice: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” It worked for Henry V, and it is working for Putin. If you’re an authoritarian tough guy, you want your electorate to be in a semi-constant state of anxiety and patriotism. German historians had a name for the phenomenon: “Primat der Innenpolitik,” meaning that foreign policy is driven by domestic considerations.
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There is no point in trying to draw such a regime into the comity of nations. Foreign aggression is not an accidental side-effect of Putinism; it is its essence. When you’re up against states like that, as Donald Rumsfeld used to say, “weakness is provocative.”
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Another first-rate Hannan column, complete with (utterly apt) Shakespeare quotation. https://t.co/BrBniU7OMe
— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) January 9, 2017
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