Dear CCI Friends,
“WHO PUTIN IS NOT” is a long and painstaking article but well worth the time invested to better understand him as an individual, since much of our U.S. foreign policy today is tied up with this subject.
Study it to comprehend what America’s top historian on all matters “Russian” has to say about Vladimir V. Putin.
Let us know whether this analysis makes sense to you or not. And remember to copy it to as many of your friends and colleagues as possible. We certainly need more “light” on this subject across our nation.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
The Nation
September 20, 2018
Who Putin Is Not
Falsely demonizing Russia’s leader has made the new Cold War even more dangerous.
(Audio from the John Batchelor show is available here.)
Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.) This post is different. The conversation was based on Cohen’s article below, completed the day of the broadcast.
“Putin is an evil man, and he is intent on evil deeds.” —Senator John McCain
“[Putin] was a KGB agent. By definition, he doesn’t have a soul.” “If this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 1930s.” —2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton
The specter of an evil-doing Vladimir Putin has loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Henry Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia’s leader since 2000: “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one.”
But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by the demonizing of Putin—a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia’s latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints in the early 2000s to US-Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations. Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator John McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous Cold War: “Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik…. His world is a brutish, cynical place…. We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin’s world from befalling more of humanity.”