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The New York Times’ Peter Baker was worried.
It was November 2010, and Tea Party Republicans had just taken over the U.S. House, and Baker warned that this could undo President Barack Obama’s “central foreign policy achievement, his new partnership with Russia.”
Baker praised Obama’s “reset” with Russia for “forging a friendlier relationship with the Kremlin after years of tension.”
The “years of tension,” were the presidency of George W. Bush. Bush, though, early in his administration, sounded a lot like Obama.
“I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
And of course, Donald Trump has been warm toward Putin off and on for a decade. Most recently, Trump gushed about how Putin agreed with his claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump.
For more than 20 years, American presidents have been wooed, tricked, and flattered by Putin. The news media occasionally make it a Trump thing, or posit conspiracy theories about Kompromat or collusion. The truth is simpler and more dangerous: America has a Putin problem.
The problem is that Putin has figured expertly how to manipulate our presidents. It’s not genius-level psychology, but it is impressive and consistent.
Putin and Trump
Donald Trump has shown fondness for Putin for at least a decade.
“He is a great guy…. He is a terrific person,” Trump said of Putin in 2019. Trump has called him a “strong leader” and a “genius.” He met with Putin six times in his first term, and gave him a red-carpet, smiling handshake in Alaska recently.
Trump seemed to believe that Putin would accept a peace with Ukraine on reasonable, even “generous” terms.
In his first months in office, Trump indirectly defended Putin’s murderous and oppressive rule, by asking TV host Sean Hannity, “What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”
Many hawks and all sorts of Democrats have criticized Trump’s approach to Russia, particularly its ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
Trump’s harshest critics posited that Trump liked Putin because Putin and Trump worked together to “hack” the 2016 election for Trump — a theory for which Democrats found no evidence after years of investigation. The other popular theory in the liberal media was that Putin, a former KGB agent, held blackmail material (kompromat as the Russians out it) on Trump. The most popular version of this theory involved a supposed “pee tape.”
Years of investigation by Congress, the FBI, and special prosecutors found nothing of the sort, and so a better explanation is needed of Trump’s warmth towards Putin.
Such an explanation has been at hand since at least 2017, and it has two parts — neither of which is as salacious as the old MSNBC theories, but neither of which is flattering of Trump.
First, Trump has a deep fondness for strongmen. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is notorious for human rights abuses, and yet Trump invited him to the White House and gushed about the “great relationship” between the two men.
Trump explicitly praised Duterte’s harsh tactics: “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” Trump told Duterte in a phone call. “What a great job you are doing. I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
Likewise Trump gave “very high marks” to Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan and called China’s Xi Xinping “a friend of mine. We’re friends.”
It’s unsurprising that a man who admires Xi, Duterte, and Erdogan is also warm to Putin.
But there’s another reason Trump likes Putin: Putin knows how to flatter Trump.
When Putin dismissed talk of collusion in 2016 election he made a point of saying Trump was a good enough politician to win on his own — and to praise Trump’s political skills and insights.
And in Alaska this summer, Putin reportedly hit Trump’s sweet spot — the 2020 election — telling Trump (according to Trump) “you won that election by so much.”
As Trump recounted the conversation: “And if you would have won, we wouldn’t have had a war. You’d have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead. And he said: ‘You lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election.’”
Praising Trump and confirming his repeated claims is not genius-level manipulation, but it seems to have worked.
Putin knows how to play Trump. But then again, he knew how to play Obama, too.
Obama, Bush, and Putin
One couldn’t flatter Obama as blatantly as Putin flattered Trump. More subtlety was needed.
Obama saw himself as a supreme technocratic wonk—someone who relied on The Science and data to implement smart solutions.
His economic policy involved the state partnering with the big businesses he saw as most cutting-edge in win-win collaborations.
Obama’s foreign policy also rested on “smart power,” Obama’s faith in his own intelligence, and his rejection of older ways of doing things. That is why he simply needed to “reset” relationships between the U.S. and Russia.
One of Obama’s first foreign policy moves was to cozy up to Russia by pulling back missile defense plans in Eastern Europe. “Obama has been seeking a stronger relationship with Russia,” CNN reported at the time, and missile defense was a sore point.
So Obama, on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland, announced he would scrap the U.S.’s plans to put missile defense systems in Poland. “Shortly after the pullback on the shield program was announced,” Reuters reported, “Russia’s government said Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would meet several U.S. executives on Friday from firms including General Electric.”
Corporatism. Reset. Cleverness. Obama saw himself as moving chess pieces of diplomacy and industry masterfully around the map of Europe.
In the 2012 election, Obama attacked and mocked Mitt Romney for naming Russia as America’s chief geopolitical rival. Obama also pledged Russian leadership he would have “more flexibility” as a lame duck — thus not accountable to voters — to negotiate a missile deal.
The common thread was Russia getting what it wanted while Obama got to see himself as a chessmaster.
With George W. Bush, Putin played not to his intellect but to his heart. Bush is a born-again Christian and a recovered alcoholic. Forgiveness, redemption, and second chances were central to his self-understanding.
So it’s no surprise that Bush declared that he could tell that deep inside, Putin was a “good man.” Bush claimed to be able to see his soul.
TRUMP HAS NO BUSINESS TAKING A STAKE IN INTEL
It was Christian rhetoric, and in all likelihood Putin played into this tendency of Bush.
These days, of course, the news media sees Putin as something of a devil — thanks to his friendship with Trump. The real problem, though, is not that Putin like Trump. It’s that Putin has figured out how to manipulate every two-term U.S. president this century, and our country is too partisan to detect the pattern.