War With Russia?

WAR WITH RUSSIA? FROM RUSSIA & UKRAINE TO TRUMP & RUSSIAGATE
By Stephen F. Cohen

There’s a curious way that in the most polarized political environments, such as we see in the United States today, the left and right ends of the spectrum bend towards each other to make a circle. The overlap between supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is just one notable example of this.

A lot of this, I believe, is due to the way, when politics is defined by anger and hate, the enemy of one’s enemy becomes a friend. Stephen F. Cohen exemplifies this process pretty neatly. He knows who he hates: the bipartisan U.S. national security establishment and the mainstream media. Anything that disrupts these elite establishments or discomfits their mandarins is a force to be welcomed and encouraged. And so, enter Cohen’s champion: Donald J. Trump. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

Cohen begins from a position that I find reasonable. Indeed, it mirrored my own in 2016. I agree that it was Boris Yeltsin, more than his inheritor Vladimir Putin, who set Russia off on a disastrous anti-democratic trajectory after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I also think it’s true that much of the behaviour that Putin has been accused of most vehemently by the West has been reactive in nature, responding primarily to an aggressive American foreign policy.

During the 2016 election I would even have agreed with Cohen that a less antagonistic approach toward Russia, of the kind signaled by Trump, made a lot of sense. Since then, however, it has become abundantly clear that Trump has no conception of, much less interest in, the national interest and that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Trump. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that Trump’s businesses were in debt to Russian interests and perhaps pretty heavily compromised by them as well.

About this there has been a great deal of reporting. Whole books have been written on the subject. The Mueller Report concluded that “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in a sweeping and systematic fashion.” Putin has admitted before all the world that Trump was his preferred candidate in the 2016 election. It’s long been known that the only thing that has kept Trump from further bankruptcies has been Russian money, provided in ways that make no sense to outsiders. This has given rise to much speculation about buying influence and money laundering – speculation that is entirely justified given how these operations are known to operate – but the nature of Trump’s Russian connections has, with tremendous effort and some well-documented lies, thus far remained concealed from view.

As more facts came to light, the dossier on Trump and Russia kept getting darker. But this led Cohen, in a most Trumpian fashion, to double down in his efforts as an apologist. He sees no evidence whatsoever of any kind of Russian meddling in the election. This is all a hoax and a witch hunt driven by elites, Trumpian language that he doesn’t place in quotes, adopting it wholly as his own. Furthermore, he can find no persuasive, consistent, plausible, or coherent motive for Putin to want to back Trump or to weaken the U.S., as though having an ignorant buffoon who openly admires him and wants to do business with him were not preferable to an anti-Russian hawk.

At what point do you give up? When whataboutism reaches the point of asking the media to focus on Joe Biden’s handling of the Ukraine file instead of “condemning Trump based on dubious narratives and foreign connections”? (In Cohen’s defence, this was before Trump’s cynical attempt to withhold money from Ukraine until they performed political favours for him, but still elides the crucial difference that Biden was acting in a public capacity and executing state policy, whatever you think of that policy, while Trump’s dealings were all under the table.) Or when the Steele dossier is held up as “the foundational document of the Russiagate narrative” despite this being categorically untrue at the time and more recently rejected even by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee? Cohen prefers a memo on the matter released by Devin Nunes. Any port in a storm. This is a mind not only closed but with the door locked and the windows boarded up.

In the repetition of the farthest of alt-right talking points we see the real Trump Derangement Syndrome in action: the compulsion to defend Trump at any cost to one’s own self-respect or intellectual integrity. Has any president been treated as harshly by the press as Donald Trump has? I would say probably not, but this is due to Trump being the most corrupt and dishonest president in American history. For Cohen it’s because the media and the political establishment are out to get him. This is how TDS works.

Mere hate is elevated by Cohen into forebodings of the apocalypse. Not only is the squabbling over Ukraine a new Cold War (something which is, in turn, “an elite project”), it is an even more dangerous Cold War than the first (with the attendant neo-McCarthyism worse than the first time around as well). Indeed, Cohen calculates that the Russiagate scandal is the single greatest threat facing the United States today. Not Russia, mind you, but Russiagate. That is, the hoax, the witch hunt. It comes in several notches above the proliferation of nuclear weapons (number four on the list of threats) and climate change (number five).

With such dramatic stakes there can surely be no compromise with the enemy. Sides must be taken, and there can be no going back. Cohen has taken his leap of faith, but gives us no reason to follow him through the looking-glass.

Notes:
Review first published online April 24, 2020.