The first below is a speech given at Hillsdale College by Christopher
Caldwell, Senior Editor of The Weekly Standard, who looks at Putin from
the perspective of Russians.  The second is by Wall Street Journal
columnist Holman Jenkins, who explains the geopolitical reasons why past
administrations tolerated Putin.

Regards,
Mencken's Ghost

  How to Think About Vladimir Putin

Imprimis, Hillsdale College

March 2017 • Volume 46, Number 3
<https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/think-vladimir-putin/> • Christopher
Caldwell <https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/author/christophercaldwell/>

*Christopher Caldwell*
Senior Editor, /The Weekly Standard/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at /The Weekly Standard/. A
graduate of Harvard College, his essays, columns, and reviews appear in
the /Claremont Review of Books/, the /Wall Street Journal/, the /New
York Times Book Review/, the /Spectator/ (London), /Financial Times/,
and numerous other publications. He is the author of /Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West/, and is at work
on a book about post-1960s America.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2017,
at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona./

Vladimir Putin is a powerful ideological symbol and a highly effective
ideological litmus test. He is a hero to populist conservatives around
the world and anathema to progressives. I don't want to compare him to
our own president, but if you know enough about what a given American
thinks of Putin, you can probably tell what he thinks of Donald Trump.

Let me stress at the outset that this is not going to be a talk
about /what/ to think about Putin, which is something you are all
capable of making up your minds on, but rather /how/ to think about him.
And on this, there is one basic truth to remember, although it is often
forgotten. Our globalist leaders may have deprecated sovereignty since
the end of the Cold War, but that does not mean it has ceased for an
instant to be the primary subject of politics.

Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not
a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the
United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is
the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily
powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated,
robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country's
prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks
to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia's sovereignty in
particular as a threat.

By American standards, Putin's respect for the democratic process has
been fitful at best. He has cracked down on peaceful demonstrations.
Political opponents have been arrested and jailed throughout his rule.
Some have even been murdered—Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Chechnya
correspondent shot in her apartment building in Moscow in 2006;
Alexander Litvinenko, the spy poisoned with polonium-210 in London
months later; the activist Boris Nemtsov, shot on a bridge in Moscow in
early 2015. While the evidence connecting Putin's own circle to the
killings is circumstantial, it merits scrutiny.

Yet if we were to use /traditional/ measures for understanding leaders,
which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin
would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world
stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey.

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was
defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new
kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the
Americans. Putin changed that. In the first decade of this century, he
did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a
crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and
purpose. He disciplined his country's plutocrats. He restored its
military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept
for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up
by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with
having saved his country.

Why are American intellectuals such ideologues when they talk about the
"international system"? Probably because American intellectuals devised
that system, and because they assume there can never be legitimate
historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They
denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin.
They assume he rose out of the KGB with the sole purpose of embodying an
evil for our righteous leaders to stamp out.

Putin did not come out of nowhere. Russian people not only tolerate him,
they revere him. You can get a better idea of why he has ruled for 17
years if you remember that, within a few years of Communism's fall,
average life expectancy in Russia had fallen below that of Bangladesh.
That is an ignominy that falls on Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin's reckless
opportunism made him an indispensable foe of Communism in the late
1980s. But it made him an inadequate founding father for a modern state.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose writings about Communism give him some
claim to be considered the greatest man of the twentieth century,
believed the post-Communist leaders had made the country even worse. In
the year 2000 Solzhenitsyn wrote: "As a result of the Yeltsin era, all
the fundamental sectors of our political, economic, cultural, and moral
life have been destroyed or looted. Will we continue looting and
destroying Russia until nothing is left?" That was the year Putin came
to power. He was the answer to Solzhenitsyn's question.

There are two things Putin did that cemented the loyalty of Solzhenitsyn
and other Russians—he restrained the billionaires who were looting the
country, and he restored Russia's standing abroad. Let us take them in turn.

Russia retains elements of a kleptocracy based on oligarchic control of
natural resources. But we must remember that Putin inherited that
kleptocracy. He did not found it. The transfer of Russia's natural
resources into the hands of KGB-connected Communists, who called
themselves businessmen, was a tragic moment for Russia. It was also a
shameful one for the West. Western political scientists provided the
theft with ideological cover, presenting it as a "transition to
capitalism." Western corporations, including banks, provided the financing.

Let me stress the point. The oligarchs who turned Russia into an armed
plutocracy within half a decade of the downfall in 1991 of Communism
called themselves capitalists. But they were mostly men who had been
groomed as the next generation of Communist /nomenklatura/­—people like
Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They were
the people who understood the scope and nature of state assets, and they
controlled the privatization programs. They had access to Western
financing and they were willing to use violence and intimidation. So
they took power just as they had planned to back when they were in
Communist cadre school—but now as owners, not as bureaucrats. Since the
state had owned /everything/under Communism, this was quite a payout.
Yeltsin's reign was built on these billionaires' fortunes, and vice-versa.

Khodorkovsky has recently become a symbol of Putin's misrule, because
Putin jailed him for ten years. Khodorkovsky's trial certainly didn't
meet Western standards. But Khodorkovsky's was among the most obscene
privatizations of all. In his recent biography of Putin, Steven Lee
Myers, the former Moscow correspondent for the /New York Times/,
calculates that Khodorkovsky and fellow investors paid $150 million in
the 1990s for the main production unit of the oil company Yukos, which
came to be valued at about $20 billion by 2004. In other words, they
acquired a share of the essential commodity of Russia—its oil—for less
than one percent of its value. Putin came to call these people
"state-appointed billionaires." He saw them as a conduit for looting
Russia, and sought to restore to the country what had been stolen from
it. He also saw that Russia needed to reclaim control of its vast
reserves of oil and gas, on which much of Europe depended, because that
was the only geopolitical lever it had left.

The other thing Putin did was restore the country's position abroad. He
arrived in power a decade after his country had suffered a Vietnam-like
defeat in Afghanistan. Following that defeat, it had failed to halt a
bloody Islamist uprising in Chechnya. And worst of all, it had been
humiliated by the United States and NATO in the Serbian war of 1999,
when the Clinton administration backed a nationalist and Islamist
independence movement in Kosovo. This was the last war in which the
United States would fight on the same side as Osama Bin Laden, and the
U.S. used the opportunity to show Russia its lowly place in the
international order, treating it as a nuisance and an afterthought.
Putin became president a half a year after Yeltsin was maneuvered into
allowing the dismemberment of Russia's ally, Serbia, and as he entered
office Putin said: "We will not tolerate any humiliation to the national
pride of Russians, or any threat to the integrity of the country."

The degradation of Russia's position represented by the Serbian War is
what Putin was alluding to when he famously described the collapse of
the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the
century." This statement is often misunderstood or mischaracterized: he
did not mean by it any desire to return to Communism. But when Putin
said he'd restore Russia's strength, he meant it. He beat back the
military advance of Islamist armies in Chechnya and Dagestan, and he
took a hard line on terrorism—including a decision not to negotiate with
hostage-takers, even in secret.

One theme runs through Russian foreign policy, and has for much of its
history. There is no country, with the exception of Israel, that has a
more dangerous frontier with the Islamic world. You would think that
this would be the primary lens through which to view Russian conduct—a
good place for the West to begin in trying to explain Russian behavior
that, at first glance, does not have an obvious rationale. Yet agitation
against Putin in the West has not focused on that at all. It has not
focused on Russia's intervention against ISIS in the war in Syria, or
even on Russia's harboring Edward Snowden, the fugitive leaker of U.S.
intelligence secrets.

The two episodes of concerted outrage about Putin among Western
progressives have both involved issues trivial to the world, but vital
to the world of progressivism. The first came in 2014, when the Winter
Olympics, which were to be held in Sochi, presented an opportunity to
damage Russia economically. Most world leaders attended the games
happily, from Mark Rutte (Netherlands) and Enrico Letta (Italy) to Xi
Jinping (China) and Shinzo Abe (Japan). But three leaders—David Cameron
of Britain, François Hollande of France, and Barack Obama of the United
States—sent progressives in their respective countries into a frenzy
over a short list of /domestic/ causes. First, there was the jailed oil
tycoon, Khodorkovsky; Putin released him before the Olympics began.
Second, there were the young women who called themselves Pussy Riot,
performance artists who were jailed for violating Russia's blasphemy
laws when they disrupted a religious service with obscene chants about
God (translations were almost never shown on Western television); Putin
also released them prior to the Olympics. Third, there was Russia's
Article 6.21, which was oddly described in the American press as a law
against "so-called gay propaganda." A more accurate translation of what
the law forbids is promoting "non-traditional sexual relations to
children." Now, some Americans might wish that Russia took religion or
homosexuality less seriously and still be struck by the fact that these
are very local issues. There is something unbalanced about turning them
into diplomatic incidents and issuing all kinds of threats because of them.

The second campaign against Putin has been the attempt by the outgoing
Obama administration to cast doubt on the legitimacy of last November's
presidential election by implying that the Russian government somehow
"hacked" it. This is an extraordinary episode in the history of
manufacturing opinion. I certainly will not claim any independent
expertise in cyber-espionage. But anyone who has read the public
documentation on which the claims rest will find only speculation,
arguments from authority, and attempts to make repetition do the work of
logic.

In mid-December, the /New York Times/ ran an article entitled "How
Moscow Aimed a Perfect Weapon at the U.S. Election." Most of the
assertions in the piece came from unnamed administration sources and
employees of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democrats
to investigate a hacked computer at the Democratic National Committee.
They quote those who served on the DNC's secret anti-hacking committee,
including the party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the party
lawyer, Michael Sussmann. Then a National Intelligence Council report
that the government released in January showed the heart of the case:
more than half of the report was devoted to complaints about the bias of
RT, the Russian government's international television network.

Again, we do not know what the intelligence agencies know. But there is
no publicly available evidence to justify Arizona Senator John McCain's
calling what the Russians did "an act of war." If there were, the
discussion of the evidence would have continued into the Trump
administration, rather than simply evaporating once it ceased to be
useful as a political tool.

There were two other imaginary Putin scandals that proved to be nothing.
In November, the /Washington Post /ran a blacklist of news organizations
that had published "fake news" in the service of Putin, but the list
turned out to have been compiled largely by a fly-by-night political
activist group called PropOrNot, which had placed certain outlets on the
list only because their views coincided with those of RT on given
issues. Then in December, the Obama administration claimed to have found
Russian computer code it melodramatically called "Grizzly Steppe" in the
Vermont electrical grid. This made front-page headlines. But it was a
mistake. The so-called Russian code could be bought commercially, and it
was found, according to one journalist, "in a single laptop that /was
not connected to the electric grid/."

Democrats have gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit Putin. Why?
There really is such a thing as a /Zeitgeist/ or spirit of the times. A
given issue will become a passion for all mankind, and certain men will
stand as symbols of it. Half a century ago, for instance,
the /Zeitgeist/ was about colonial liberation. Think of Martin Luther
King, traveling to Norway to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, stopping on
the way in London to give a talk about South African apartheid. What did
that have to do with him? Practically: Nothing. Symbolically:
Everything. It was an opportunity to talk about the moral question of
the day.

We have a different /Zeitgeist/ today. Today it is sovereignty and
self-determination that are driving passions in the West. The reason for
this has a great deal to do with the way the Cold War conflict between
the United States and Russia ended. In the 1980s, the two countries were
great powers, yes; but at the same time they were constrained. The
alliances they led were fractious. After the fall of the Berlin Wall,
their fates diverged. The United States was offered the chance to lay
out the rules of the world system, and accepted the offer with a
vengeance. Russia was offered the role of submitting to that system.

Just how irreconcilable those roles are is seen in Russia's conflict
with Ukraine two years ago. According to the official United States
account, Russia invaded its neighbor after a glorious revolution threw
out a plutocracy. Russia then annexed Ukrainian naval bases in the
Crimea. According to the Russian view, Ukraine's democratically elected
government was overthrown by an armed uprising backed by the United
States. To prevent a hostile NATO from establishing its own naval base
in the Black Sea, by this account, Russia /had/ to take Crimea, which in
any case is historically Russian territory. Both of these accounts are
perfectly correct. It is just that one word can mean something different
to Americans than it does to Russians. For instance, we say the Russians
don't believe in democracy. But as the great journalist and historian
Walter Laqueur put it, "Most Russians have come to believe that
democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000, and
they do not want any more of it."

The point with which I would like to conclude is this: we will get
nowhere if we assume that Putin sees the world as we do. One of the more
independent thinkers about Russia in Washington, D.C., is the Reaganite
California congressman Dana Rohrabacher. I recall seeing him scolded at
a dinner in Washington a few years ago. A fellow guest told him he
should be ashamed, because Reagan would have idealistically stood up to
Putin on human rights. Rohrabacher disagreed. Reagan's gift  as a
foreign policy thinker, he said, was not his idealism. It was his
ability to set priorities, to see what constituted the biggest threat.
Today's biggest threat to the U.S. isn't Vladimir Putin.

So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he
has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist
conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the
one person who says he won't submit to the world that surrounds him. You
didn't have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his
excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.

In the same way, Putin's conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some
of Russia's enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not
delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will
consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don't like it, you will have
some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty
in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our
times. As our last election shows, that's true even here.

* * *

  We Need a 'Pentagon Papers' on Russia

    Trump and his associates are caught up in the backlash over the
    West's long tolerance of Putin.

By Holman W. Jenkins, JR.
The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2017 6:21 p.m. ET

The American media needs to get a grip. News in essence is about how
today differs from yesterday, a corollary of which is that yesterday was
different from today.

Reporters commit the fallacy of anachronism out the wazoo with their
treatment of a report that Paul Manafort, who briefly served
as Trump campaign manager, indirectly offered in 2005 to help
the Putin regime with its PR efforts in the West. I don't know Mr.
Manafort or have any need to defend him, but an implication that he was
working against U.S. interests is plausible only if you confuse 2005
with 2014, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia over its aggressive
actions in Ukraine.

Back in 2005, improving Mr. Putin's PR, in fact, was a major U.S. goal
due to the need for Russia's support of U.S. military operations in
Afghanistan.

This reliance began almost immediately, with Mr. Putin in December 2001
blessing the use of an ex-Soviet air base in Kyrgyzstan to mount attacks
on the Taliban. By 2009, ambushes and pilfering of U.S. supplies moving
through the southern route in Pakistan had become so intolerable,
President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus made a deliberate choice to
increase reliance on the northern route. Not without irony, most of the
U.S. freight for the war ended up flowing over Soviet rail lines built
to support its own Afghanistan war in the 1980s. Hundreds of U.S. troops
a week passed through Russian airspace on their way to the battle.

When President Bush traveled to Moscow in 2002 and sang Mr. Putin's
praises, he was engaged in PR for the war effort. When President Obama
was caught on a hot mike patting Dmitry Medvedev on the arm and asking
him to pass along a message of future flexibility to Boss Putin, it
wasn't because Mr. Obama mistook Mr. Putin for a champion of Obama
values. The Russians even then were prepping for America's use a former
Soviet air hub in Ulyanovsk, birthplace of Lenin.

If you wonder why the U.S. and other countries were and have remained
relatively mute on the sins of the Putin regime, Afghanistan is a decent
place to start. Watergate analogies have been bandied about lately, but
what really is needed is a Pentagon Papers scandal. We need an emptying
of the files to lay out in its full glory the history of awkward,
contradictory and humiliating straddles that Western governments have
engaged in concerning the rise of the Putin regime.

It probably is too much to expect any awareness of this history from
glib millennial reporters feasting on the Trump-Russia story. It may be
too much to expect from Jeff Bezos, saturated in Silicon Valley's ethos
that history is bunk and only tomorrow matters.

But don't news outlets like the Washington Post and the Associated Press
have editors who have some sense of what happened the day before yesterday?

Mr. Trump suffers the opposite problem. Just as his understanding of
"wiretapping" seems to date from the 1971 movie "The French Connection,"
he appears blithely, confidently at sea amid the evolving quandaries of
the U.S. relationship with Russia. A tad perverse is the hunt now for
organized "collusion," with Russia or anyone, on the part of so
disorganized a campaign. Didn't Mr. Trump, during a televised news
conference, openly invite Russia and other hackers to release Hillary
Clinton emails? Didn't he laud WikiLeaks? How much collusion do you want?

He later claimed he was joking, but he clearly reveled in the Clinton
campaign's email mugging. The problem is, so did the media—all of the
media. If your taste didn't run to revelations that Donna Brazile leaked
CNN debate questions to Mrs. Clinton, then it surely ran to the
discovery that John Podesta sneered at conservative Catholics. Those
"colluding" in the Russian goal of making U.S. democracy seem a feckless
circus would fill the Tidal Basin.

Every third time he opens his mouth, Mr. Trump says something about
Russia or Mr. Putin that he probably shouldn't. He was destined to have
a steep learning curve given his lack of experience in government. A
year from now, if he lasts that long, don't put it past him to have a
better handle on Putin than Obama or Bush did. Mr. Putin himself is the
major factor in changing the alignments to allow and require Western
governments increasingly to treat him unambiguously as leader of a
hostile power.

As for Trump "collusion," where there's smoke, there's fire, goes a
typical bit of journalistic deep thinking. But sometimes there's just a
smoke machine furiously being cranked by Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking
Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee.

In the end, Mr. Schiff will likely prove right about one thing only: his
oft-stated complaint that the Obama administration did little to deter
Mr. Putin's adventurism. Indeed, the mind slightly boggles that Russian
jets still fly unmolested over Ukraine and Syria without facing covertly
supplied U.S. man-portable missiles.

Appeared in the Mar. 25, 2017, print edition.