Tucker Carlson went & interviewed Putin in Moscow; he has since been posting about Moscow. So now a number of American friends ask me about Putin, his invasion of the Ukraine, the American problem with formulating & prosecuting foreign policy, & whether Tucker is sane.
As to the last, let me be brief. I haven’t listened to the interview. I read something by Putin every couple of years, because he is intelligent & rather dangerous; but I don’t see the interest in this sort of TV show interview; I’m sure it was fine, but who is going to listen to Putin talk endlessly about Russian history? Media figures who have never showed any courage or resource have recently been complaining that Tucker was soft on a tyrant, which is a pretty crazy thing to say; Putin then complained that the interview was too soft, which makes Tucker seem smart, not giving Putin a chance to go on attack all the time… It’s these attacks & criticisms (in the past published in places like the New York Times, before those august organs of opinion were repristinated in the Trump years) that have made Putin interesting to people in the West (especially on the online right) who have noticed that our democracies promote or tolerate incorrigible halfwits & zombies. A natural reaction against such corrupt elites as we deal with has led people to give too much credit to Putin, since he’s honestly despotic & therefore seems more patriotic than our elites. I dislike it, but I would not object strongly if it was not also a misunderstanding. Putin satisfies both sides in the American quarrel by becoming a fantasy. I cannot off the top of my head point to intelligent opinions on any side.
I’ll take the other three points in order. In regard to Putin, Let me recommend this brief overview I wrote of Russia since the Soviet collapse. I will emphasize here that from the ordinary point of view of democratic life, which is prosperity rather than democracy, it seems like Putin is the best thing to have happened to Russia in a century. Unlike every previous ruler, most of whom were tyrants & rather ferocious, Putin has overseen peaceful recovery from the catastrophe of the ‘90s. The achievement seems a mere nothing compared to Western prosperity, but it’s all the peace Russia has known since 1917. Contempt for that achievement or for Putin strikes me as more than a little mad.
In regard to the war, I wrote an op-ed for Asia Times, courtesy of my friend David Goldman, in which I call for peace. An armistice, negotiations about giving up Eastern Ukraine & the Crimea to Russia, Russian pledges for peace & American pledges not to expand NATO into the Ukraine. More or less a ratification of the realities, based on the understanding that the war is costly, deadly, & now fruitless. Remember that the Ukraine is a much smaller country than Russia, much closer to Russia than to America, & in no position to make demands. Moralism cannot change any of that; moralism plus war has not succeeded either.
In regard, finally, to foreign policy: Two years of war have not achieved anything important for America, not even clarity about what’s at stake. We’ve gone from war propaganda to silence, apparently careless that a third year of war is coming. Of course, we pay a price for all this. American decisions about the war caused an energy crisis in the West, inflation, & much misery besides. There’s every reason to believe that nothing has changed when it comes to these basic needs & Germany just wants to get back to business with Russia, since its economy cannot work without cheap gas. (Strangely, the Biden administration has recently decided not to sell Germans gas, apparently out of piety for the climate. Madness is rife in our times.) American incompetence is a dangerous example to give the world, not conducive to respect, to say the least. Every time our elites make some kind of speech or take some kind of action that betrays madness, the international arrangements on which peace relies weaken. Further, the Congress is divided on the war issue, not just among the Democrat war party & the divided Republican party, but also between the Senate run by the war party & the House run by Republicans who might not want war, so money for the Ukraine is being held up. America is a country divided, another dangerous lesson to teach the world. So the war depends on the elections, with an upcoming campaign & ongoing attempts to condemn to prison the former & possibly future president. Clearly, American elites have learned nothing from the catastrophes of the 21st c. & the American people are still helpless to control the more outlandish behavior of the elites. What foreign policy could be formulated or carried into effect on such a basis?
Sadly, we are going to need to fund Ukraine for another round, and then work to achieve peace along the lines you mention. Returning Luhansk and the southern two-thirds of Donetsk (the more Russian, more populous, and more economically important part), as well as Crimea. These are the front lines anyway. But this would mean Russia returns their occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhia. Ukraine becomes a new Finland, with Western arms. It would also be good to clean out the mess in Transnistria if we could. There are also the issues of reparations, war crimes, etc.
The loss of life is appalling and there are grim lessons about modern ground warfare that will require deep thought in the West.