I don’t know if McCain would be talking openly about impeachment
right now. But I can promise you his head would be exploding, and I’m
pretty sure he’d be looking around for another candidate to back in
2020.
No, for Putin and his nostalgic nationalists, Trump represents a
cosmic payback 30 years in the making. From their perspective, he must
seem like the American Gorbachev, dismantling the empire all at once and
without firing a shot.
Here in the United States, a generation removed from all that Dr.
Strangelove stuff, we seem to have trouble remembering much about the
Cold War these days, except to make some throwback movies about it.
Maybe that’s because we have no great battlefields to commemorate
(aside from the entire Vietnam War), or because we’ve all moved on to
radical Muslims, or because we just don’t take a very long view of
anything.
In a Washington Post
op-ed
last week, a writer named Namrata Goswami, making an otherwise cogent
case for us to pay attention to China’s space program, dismissed the
U.S.-Soviet space race as being principally about “global prestige and
simply ticking off boxes.” Which is kind of like saying the American
Revolution was mostly about tea.
In fact, technological superiority during the Cold War — the ability
to control every conceivable frontier — seemed essential to resisting
global tyranny, even if the goal lay just out of reach. It’s easy enough
to dismiss that as propaganda now, but for decades leading up to the
Reagan era, there was very little partisan disagreement about it.
But then the crushing costs of militarizing the world began to set
in, as the great cities in both countries crumbled. And it was Mikhail
Gorbachev who stood down first, accepting the economic ruin of Communist
doctrine and yielding to democratic movements throughout the Soviet
sphere.
To us, naturally, Gorbachev was a peacemaker and a visionary —
someone who understood the futility of the cause he had inherited, and
who courageously, if cautiously, embraced American ideals of freedom and
capitalism. I think of him this way still.
To hardened Communists and Russian expansionists like Putin, however,
you can imagine he seemed like something else — namely, a capitulator
who sold out the cause of Russian greatness for a Nobel Prize.
It has fallen to Putin, in power now for 20 years, to painstakingly
reassemble an absolutist regime and a militarized bloc that creeps ever
westward. His dream is to reverse the imbalance of global power he was
handed and restore a far-reaching Russian hegemony.
And his patience has been richly rewarded in the ascendancy of President Trump.
I’ve
said before
that I don’t think Trump is some kind of Russian agent or formal
collaborator (although, I will say, I am starting to wonder if I’ve been
naive on that point). I don’t think he’s got some secret plan to build a
bunch of casinos in Moscow in exchange for, say, Alaska.
Rather, like a reverse image of Gorbachev, Trump is a political
leader who has lost faith in the efficacy of his country’s governing
philosophy.
He believes our bedrock commitment to liberty, here and around the
world, has left us weak and overextended. That we are too in thrall to a
pluralistic ideal, too entangled in global alliances and far-off
conflicts, too obsessed with free trade and open borders.
Trump
recently praised
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which is tantamount,
really, to renouncing the entire basis of the 45-year Cold War. You
can’t believe America was right to check Soviet expansionism and also
believe the incursion into Afghanistan was just fine; Jimmy Carter got
that.
Gorbachev allowed the most egregious symbol of Soviet domination, the
wall dividing Berlin, to be toppled on his watch. Trump has spoken
fondly of the Berlin Wall and held it up as a model for the one — still
unrealized — on which he has staked his presidency at this point.
Gorbachev tried to delegitimize despotism. Trump — who exalts the Saudi crown prince and favorably
compares
the Chinese ruler with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer — envies the
simplicity of dictatorship. He gives every appearance of admiring
Soviet-style absolutism as much as Gorbachev idealized American
democracy.
And just as Gorbachev’s liberalization fed the energy of pro-liberty
movements all over the world, so too does Trump purposefully fuel the
passion of nationalist uprisings in England, France and Germany. He
sympathizes with any movement that puts ethnic identity above the
building of a civil, tolerant society.
All of this fits nicely into Putin’s vision for a world where Western
alliances unravel, enabling Russia to do its level worst. Maybe his
mastery of Trump stems from something sinister, a bit of information in
some old KGB file or a business arrangement shrouded in secrecy. No
doubt the special counsel has poked around for something like that.
More likely, though, Putin recognizes Trump’s weakness for what it is
— a secular crisis of faith, much like the one that brought his country
to its knees in the 1980s. Trump doesn’t think our defense of
democratic values really works for America anymore, and in this he has
more in common with Putin than he does with his own Cabinet or his
military.
That’s probably what the interpreter’s notes from the Trump-Putin
meetings would tell us, if Trump hadn’t snatched them up and stuffed
them into his underwear, or wherever he’s hiding them now.
Trump can’t capitulate entirely by himself, however. It’s up to his
allies in Congress to decide whether they’re OK with handing victory
after victory to Putin’s neo-Soviets, to act as if America’s guiding
purpose were to stay in our lane.
I know where McCain would be on
that. But the old warrior is buried in our memory now, and so, it seems,
is the long war we fought.
_____
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