(This is the second of two parts. To read part one, click here.)
Donald Trump has gone further than any other major American political figure in more than 70 years in taking an accommodating view of Russia that ignores its military seizures of neighboring territory and its authoritarian nature at home.
Then, Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-starred former Vice President Henry Wallace declared in 1946 that the United States should abandon Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe to Soviet occupation, as places far away and of little interest to Americans.
Now, having questioned the value of and American commitment to NATO, this year’s Republican presidential candidate has assured Americans that he can “get along very well” with Vladimir Putin. Calling the Russian president a “stronger . . . better leader than our own,” Trump has conspicuously said nothing about Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian Crimea, its proxy occupation of Eastern Ukraine and parts of Georgia – or the Kremlin’s suppression of most of Russia’s independent media, its rigged elections and its long chain of unsolved murders of leading journalists and opposition politicians.
Triggering yet another storm of controversy, Trump, during a long-rambling news conference on July 27, invited Russian spy agencies suspected of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers to share any emails they might have stolen, or may yet steal, from Hillary Clinton. Then, amid rumblings that he might have violated federal law by inviting an external threat to U.S. national security, Trump declared it all a joke.
More than a joke – more than his own and his family’s self-acknowledged interests in working with Russian oligarchs to make money – Trump’s comfort with Russia’s world view reflects that of key advisers to his campaign, who have their own personal and business ties to Moscow and can be expected to reinforce their candidate’s accommodating stance.
Campaign manager Paul Manafort was a key adviser to Putin’s closest political ally in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, coaching him from 2005 to victory as president in 2010 while developing his own business relations with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs. Manafort’s gig ended as Yanukovich fled to exile in Russia in 2014 amid massive protests against his plan to integrate Ukraine’s economy with Russia’s.
Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its proxy seizure of eastern Ukraine followed as Putin claimed he was protecting ethnic Russians from American-sponsored “fascism.”
Trump’s Russia adviser is Carter Page, a one-time staffer in the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch and a consultant to Gazprom, Russia’s gigantic state-owned energy company.
Virtually unknown in the U.S. foreign policy community, Page appears as deeply sympathetic to Russian points of view as he is critical of the U.S and NATO.
In a July 21, 2014 article in Global Policy Journal, for instance, Page lamented that, when Saddam Hussein’s army was ejected from Kuwait by the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, “Kuwait never had a referendum regarding a potential association with Iraq, as was seen in the dramatic and democratic victory in Crimea on March 16, 2014.”
No serious U.S. policy analyst believes the Russian-orchestrated “referendum” in Crimea was remotely democratic. Nor is it easy to imagine that Kuwaitis in 1990, amid epidemic Iraqi rapes, executions and looting, might have preferred to push the pause button for a referendum before the U.S and its allies intervened.
In a lecture in July to academics and journalists at Moscow’s World Trade Center, Page called for “non-interference,” “tolerance” and “respect” for Russia while condemning what he called Western “hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change,” thus embracing an old Soviet propaganda line carried over in today’s state-controlled media that implies a moral equivalence between imperfect Western democracies and Russia.
Trump’s most surprising foreign policy adviser is Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who delivered a passionate endorsement at the Republican convention, and was reportedly on his short list for vice president.
Head of the Defense Intelligence Agency until his premature retirement in 2014, Flynn stunned the U.S. intelligence community when he appeared the following December at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow for a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of RT (previously called Russia Today), the Kremlin-financed global television channel that Secretary of State John Kerry has called a “propaganda bullhorn” for Putin that’s available in selected U.S. markets on Time-Warner and Comcast cable.
Flynn, who sat two places from Putin, has become a contributor to RT, arguing for a quasi-alliance with Russia to jointly combat terrorism.
In Soviet times, Leninists had a smirking term for well-intentioned foreigners who served as propagandists for Moscow’s cause without fully realizing, or believing, they were its apologists: polezni duraki, “useful fools.”
Then there’s the question of who hacked thousands of Democratic National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks for worldwide distribution. (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, is also a regular online contributor to RT.)
U.S. intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity firms have reportedly reached an overwhelming consensus, based on distinctive digital fingerprints left by the hackers, that the theft was carried out not merely by Russians, but by Moscow’s GRU military intelligence agency and the FSB (formerly the KGB.)
A bald-faced lie, Flynn tweeted on July 24, when media first reported evidence of Russian involvement, seemingly to benefit Trump.
“The corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything to get #NeverHillary into power. This is a new low,” Flynn declared, adding an anti-Semitic retweet that he quickly snatched back: “The USSR is to blame! . . . Not anymore Jews, not anymore.”
Would Putin dare put his thumb on the scale of an American presidential election? Why not?
Russia meddles regularly in European politics, feeding millions of euros into the campaign accounts of far-right political parties, including France’s Front National, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, acknowledged in 2014 receiving the euro equivalent of a $10 million “loan” from the Russian-owned First Czech-Russian Bank.
Moreover, Putin has made his contempt for Clinton clear after she questioned the fairness of Russian elections. Payback, perhaps.
The apparent absence of any similar hack – by Russians or anyone else – of the Republican National Committee or the Trump campaign leaves little doubt as to whom the DNC intrusion was meant to benefit.
About 95 days remain until the 2016 election. Polls are showing a tight race. The U.S. could yet elect a Henry Wallace clone on steroids.
(Robert Gillette of Ossipee is a former Moscow and East European correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and served as director of broadcasting at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and Prague.)