Putin’s False Choice
This morning, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reiterated that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. His testimony, and that of other senior leaders in the intelligence community, confirms the FBI and CIA’s conclusive assessments that Russia pursued such intervention in order to secure a Trump victory. In the past few weeks, the Obama administration had already struck back via new sanctions on Russian intelligence services and the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence operatives.
One wouldn’t know, then, that as the beginning of a new administration looms ever closer in the United States, Washington may well be poised to have closer ties with Moscow.
Rather than supporting his predecessor for defending the integrity of U.S. elections and our national security, Trump called Putin a “very smart” man for not expelling any American diplomats in response. He has continued to dismiss the intelligence community’s findings regarding the hacking by declaring that computers are no longer safe in any way and that the country needs to move on from the election in general.
To a certain extent, this contrast in policy is a result of interpersonal dynamics; it has become clear that as long as Putin compliments him, Trump says that he will return the favor. The stakes of such a game, however, are much higher than the President-Elect realizes. In truth, an entire worldview is being called to question for the coming years: Russia has been no friend to the United States in the past and present, yet Trump has proven willing time and again to ignore many of the differences in policies and values on which the historic rivalry is predicated.
Following World War II, the United States led the way by building and cultivating a series of overlapping international institutions designed to decrease the risk of great power conflict. The Cold War soon emerged due to a direct clash of ideas about security, prosperity, and the international community. The U.S. viewed a united front of countries as the best way out of a devastating time of death, starvation, and unemployment, but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics maintained its isolationist and authoritarian ways. To be sure, the U.S. faced hard choices and made some truly bad ones in the late 20th century. Nonetheless, we operated diametrically opposed to and offered an unequivocally better path forward than Moscow.
The Cold War ended, but our differences in visions of what the world should look like have persisted today; we need look no further than Russia’s violent intervention in the Syrian conflict to crush civil society resisting its loyal client dictator, flood refugees into an ill-prepared Europe, and undermine the values America aspires to support. These actions in Syria are meant to advance a specific binary worldview between the known evils of strongmen or the violent chaos of extremism — a worldview that just so happens to make Russia the stronger and safer of two evils while crowding out American democracy entirely. Putin has pushed this vision with a single-minded ferocity and monstrous disregard for civilian life: Under the guise of ‘fighting extremism,’ Russia has dropped incendiary weapons on both civilian hospitals and the White Helmets while doing little or nothing to combat ISIL.
What’s most unsettling is that this false dichotomy — brutal, cruel “strength” or untamed barbarism — is being accepted by the President-Elect and his incoming team. Candidate Trump repeatedly argued that Russia was a friend in the fight against ISIL. His pick for National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, was a paid contributor to Russia Today who sat smiling next to Putin at a gala. And his nominee for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the would-be diplomat charged with upholding American values around the world, has already argued for repealing the sanctions designed to support our European allies and oppose Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. All this positivism towards a historic enemy and naiveté about their good intentions in the world, while in the meantime, photos showing a Russian Special Forces soldier wearing a Hezbollah patch in Syria surfaced just last week.
American leadership on the world stage depends upon the ability to face multiple threats at any given moment and to act in defense of democracy and, most basically, human life. Like many in the Truman community, I served in Iraq and Afghanistan; I understand the urgency of fighting pressing threats as well as the need to understand the catalysts and the stakes prior to moving in. As a result, it is blatantly apparent to me how equally unprepared Trump is to simultaneously fight extremism in the Middle East while holding fast against the vision of the world that Putin and his cronies continue to support.
This idea enforced by Putin and Assad that dictatorship stands as the only option instead of extremism violates the great strides that countries across the world have made in regard to security and prosperity. The “leader of the free world” is not a moniker to be taken lightly; indeed, it will soon be Trump’s job to not just uphold but build upon those gains. Will we find ourselves in a country that cannot count on its President to stand for the ideas that generations of Americans have fought and died for? I hope not. But the incoming administration’s entanglements with Russia are a dark warning sign.
The advance of peace and democracy around the world since 1945 that so many of us now take for granted did not happen by accident; it was a direct result of the grace and sacrifice of those who came before us. In order to defend our intrinsic belief in America as a force of good in the world and to then act on that belief, we must put aside partisan preferences and reject Putin’s dark vision of a world in which dictatorship stands as the only form of government.
Large in scope as it is, this work to defeat autocracy in all its forms and to hold accountable a sympathetic President-Elect clearly begins at home — and it begins now.
Michael Breen is the president and CEO of the Truman National Security Project. He served as a U.S. Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a co-founder and board member of the International Refugee Assistance Project.
