Putin on the Hot Seat

I took some time this weekend to watch the Tucker Carlson interview of Russian President (dictator) Vladimir Putin.  While I’ve never been much of a Tucker fan, I was incredibly intrigued to hear what Putin might have to say about the war in Ukraine and his views on Russia’s relationship with the West.  Whatever you may think of Tucker, this was an important and very worthwhile interview.  Putin is the single most dangerous person on planet Earth.  As such, isn’t it far better to know what he’s thinking than not?

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For what it’s worth, I’m not one of those who think that Tucker got completely outclassed or somehow presented as Putin’s lap dog. Imagine how it would feel to be sitting across the table from Putin—an individual who has displayed a reckless disregard for international law and human rights. You’re deep in Russian territory and, to make this all worthwhile, you have to ask him a bunch of challenging questions. You cannot just let him steamroll you with propaganda. Let me tell you, as someone who has been doing a lot of interviews lately, that would be pretty intense. 

Given the circumstances, I think Tucker handled himself pretty well. He asked a lot of tough questions, even challenging Putin in some unexpected areas. To me the most surprising and interesting moment of the whole interview was when Tucker asked Putin how he could consider himself a Christian leader and yet be so willing to engage in violence. Of course, Putin had to answer that with a non-sequitur, rambling answer. Tucker also displayed some unexpected courage, asking Putin why he won’t just pick up the phone and call President Biden, trying to nail Putin down to a commitment to agree to a negotiated peace, and lobbying pretty strongly for the release of imprisoned Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich. Granted in some of Tucker’s post-interview commentary, he comes across as a bit of a Putin apologist, which I don’t agree with, but he did a good job with the interview itself. All told, I think we walked away with a better understanding of Putin and that’s worth something.

Putin proved to be a rather wily and difficult interviewee—at times engaging in loosely related narrative historical diatribe rather than answering a very direct question and at other times sounding a bit like Sam Bankman-Fried on the stand answering different questions than the one that was asked, filibustering, and maybe even just making things up. Should we have expected anything different? 

Whatever we may think of Putin, we would be foolish to think he’s someone to be trifled with. This is an individual who came out of nowhere, rising from relative obscurity in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia to become the absolute master of one of the largest, most powerful countries in the world. He’s been in control of Russia for decades now and obviously has no plans of ever giving it up. He’s one of the richest people in the world and happens to command a potentially world-ending nuclear arsenal and the loyalties of many Russian citizens. As demonstrated in this interview, he’s a serious, sophisticated individual with a deep historical understanding and a clear point of view—one that happens to be diametrically opposed to our values. 

I didn’t walk away from the interview thinking that Putin was someone dead set on world domination or anything like that. He’s too smart to go the way of Hitler. I don’t think he wants nuclear war either because who wants that? I did get the feeling though that he wants to stay alive and stay in power and is basically willing to do anything to do so. 

The war in Ukraine, which if we can trust the numbers, has been decisively more brutal than anything anyone expected, is tragic on so many levels but none more so than this—it’s an unnecessary war, one that is about one man’s political calculation rather than historical necessity. Human life should never be so flippantly wasted. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that God or the Universe or whatever power you may believe in, has a way of punishing such hubris.

Anyway, here are some of my other takeaways from the interview:

• Putin still very much sees the world through a Cold War lens. He’s a former KGB officer so this should probably come as no surprise. Clearly for Putin, the US is still the ultimate enemy. 

•  Putin views this conflict in a much different light than the commonly accepted narrative in the West. For Putin this war began in 2014 with coup d’état in Ukraine, which, in his view, was obviously a product of American interference. The latest offensive, which began with Russian invasion a few years, is really just a new phase of an ongoing struggle rather than the start of something new.

• Putin understands clearly the strategic historical significance of Ukraine to Russia’s survival on the geopolitical scene and is not willing to tolerate US-led meddling in the region. Ukraine is important for many reasons—it’s the breadbasket of Europe, for one, and has a bunch of strategic natural resources, like uranium. But ultimately this about Ukraine’s vast distances and its geographic position between the traditional European powers and Russia. These distances have served Russia well throughout history and played a huge role in helping defeat would-be conquerors like Napoleon and Hitler. When you consider this perspective, it becomes pretty obvious why a NATO-controlled or even heavily influenced Ukraine is simply not an option for him. 

• Putin is clearly a genius at propaganda. His whole discussion of his goal to de-nazify Ukraine was masterful. First of all, it’s something you cannot really argue about on the merits because it’s based on things like rumor, conspiracy theory and disinformation. You also cannot argue against it because who wants Nazism! It’s an ingeniously imagined threat because the Nazis are the ultimate bad guys, especially for the Russians, who suffered brutally at their hands.

• It was super interesting to hear Putin’s perspective about the US. Here in America, we take pride in believing that we are the good guys on the global scene, but do we really have clean hands? Maybe we do in a relative sense—i.e. compared to someone like Putin we are pretty good—but let’s be honest with ourselves for a second. What mistakes have we made? Where have we overreached in the pursuit of power? It’s not all that hard to imagine why people in other countries might have a very different perspective on America.

I walked away from this interview with questions. What have we really been up to in Ukraine over these past few decades? Why? And just what is our policy in Ukraine today? What should it be? How far are we prepared to go? To this day, I’ve yet to hear an American President get up and articulate a clear vision for what we should be doing in Ukraine and how we should be dealing with Russia. These are questions that we need to reckon with as we consider what to do next. 

For what it’s worth, I also walked away from the interview with a little optimism, for I sensed some vulnerability in Putin. It wasn’t quite fear or intimidation or anything like that—Putin is too in control for that—but behind the bravado and matter-of-fact blustering, I got the sense that he is a man on the edge. Why is he meeting with Tucker in the first place, right? What’s his goal here? These are questions worth asking. 

I think he’s desperate to negotiate.  Putin may be the most dangerous man on Earth but that also makes him the most vulnerable.  He knows this.  With as many enemies as he’s made over the years, he’s basically someone who cannot retire from public life.  Like Stalin or Mao, his life plan is to die in power.  The alternative is assassination or, worse, some publicly humiliating trial / jail sentence.  After years of careful geopolitical maneuvering, Putin may have just finally overplayed his hand.  He certainly underestimated the resolve of both Ukraine and the West.  Perhaps time is short for him.   

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