Vladimir Putin has the United States right where he wants us.
Putin, who learned his brutal craft as a top KGB operative in East Germany before reunification, long ago identified Donald Trump as an easy mark. You don’t have to believe the conspiracy notions that Putin has something on our American authoritarian to see — if you care to see — that the one-time Russian spy has orchestrated Trump as well as Dmitri Shostakovich ever orchestrated a symphony.
Putin helped elect Trump the first time, assistance that Trump gladly accepted, constituting an act of betrayal of democracy rivaling any other in American history. The Russia hoax, as Trump likes to say, wasn’t.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 2020 — confirming the essential findings of special counsel Robert Mueller — that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” all designed to boost Trump. While much of that Senate report remains secret, it contains clear and compelling evidence of Russian interference then and now. Of course, the beneficiary of Russian help has repeatedly sided with Putin against the evidence of American intelligence agencies, while his then-attorney general, William Barr, wildly mischaracterized Mueller’s report.
“It’s Russia, Russia, Russia all over again,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin last year. “But they don’t look at China and they don’t look at Iran. They look at Russia. I don’t know what it is with poor Russia.”
Poor Russia.
Remember, before it recedes further in the avalanche of Trumpian disinformation and lies, the Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said during an infamous news conference where he sided with a dictator against his own government.
“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” the late Republican Sen. John McCain said at the time. Never before, until last week.
“You’ve got to be more thankful because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards,” Trump ranted at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. “With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.”
That meeting will be recorded as the moment the United States of America joined the enemies of democracy; a reality confirmed by the Kremlin.
“The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “This largely aligns with our vision.”
“Even though anyone with eyes could see this coming, Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow,” writes the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. “We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.”
The online site Political Wire tallied the Putinization of America:
“The last two weeks alone offer a damning case study:
“The U.S. voted with Russia and other authoritarian-leaning nations to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s ‘aggression’ in Ukraine.
“Trump openly called for elections in Ukraine — despite the ongoing war — and he floated the idea that Zelenskyy might need to be replaced.
“After already slow-walking military aid, Trump outright suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine.
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive cyber and information operations against Russia.
“The White House directed the Treasury and State Departments to identify Russian sanctions that could be lifted under the guise of ‘improving relations.’
“And that’s just the last two weeks.”
And what concessions has Trump demanded of Putin?
The international affairs think tank Chatham House says zero: “In sum, Putin has ceded nothing — territory, claims on territory or force posture. He has denied everything, and been blamed for nothing.”
The real issue here is not the disgustingly boorish Oval Office behavior of Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and certainly not the pushback provided by Zelenskyy, but rather what national security interest is being served by the U.S. joining the bad guys.
Some Americans, particularly among Trump supporters, may be unaware that something very similar to Trump’s capitulation to Putin happened in the run-up to World War II.
Adolf Hitler, like Putin today an equivalent 1930s threat to Europe and the United States, demanded in 1938 a sizeable chunk of neighboring Czechoslovakia. With bluster and threats of military attack, Britain and France bargained away the area known as the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia with an ethic Germany population. The “negotiations” with Hitler took place in Munich without Czech participation — the same formula Trump is pursuing with Putin.
Returning from Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time,” believing that sacrificing a country in the heart of Europe was an easy price to pay to placate a brutal dictator. Less than six months later — March 15, 1939 — Hitler occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia, confident that European democracies would not stop him. Six months later — Sept. 1, 1939 — World War II began when German invaded another neighbor, Poland.
Historical analogies are never perfect, but the symmetry of Britain and France coddling Hitler and Trump empowering Putin is impossible to miss, unless you want to miss it.
Trump says he wants to end the war. Doesn’t everyone? But to what end? Handing Putin a territorial victory after his war crimes? Emboldening China to attack Taiwan? Force longtime European allies who can no longer trust the U.S. to develop their own nuclear deterrent?
As former U.S ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul correctly says: “We need to focus on what America’s national security interests are. And our interests are to be with our European allies. This is catastrophic. What we’re doing by alienating our allies, because as Churchill once said, there’s nothing worse than going to war than going alone. And if we are not with our allies in the long run, it has dire consequences for us, not just in Ukraine. But in Asia as well.”
As Winston Churchill said after Munich, with words that chill the spine yet: “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
