US politics
America’s informal empire – what really went wrong in the Middle East
In this edited excerpt from the introduction to What Really Went Wrong, Fawaz A Gerges argues that US interventionism during the Cold War – especially in Iran and Egypt – steered the Middle East away from democracy towards authoritarianism, shaping the region’s political and economic landscape for decades to come.
At the end of the colonial era after World War Two, the Middle East was on the cusp of a new awakening. Imperial Britain, France, and Italy were discredited and exhausted. Hope filled the air in newly independent countries around the world. Like people across the decolonised Global South, Middle Easterners had great expectations and the material and spiritual energy needed to seize their destiny and modernise their societies. Few could have imagined events unfolding as disastrously as they did. Yet by the late 1950s, the Middle East had descended into geostrategic rivalries, authoritarianism and civil strife.
What clouded this promising horizon? Digging deep into the historical record, What Really Went Wrong critically examines flashpoints like the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953 and the US confrontation with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s. My argument is that such flashpoints sowed the seeds of subsequent discontent, hubris and conflict. I zero in on these historical ruptures to reconstruct a radically different story of what went wrong in the region, thus correcting the dominant narrative. My goal is to engender a debate about the past that can make us see the present differently.
What Really Went Wrong critically examines flashpoints like the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953 and the US confrontation with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s.
I argue that the defeat and marginalisation of secular-leaning nationalist visions in Iran and Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s allowed for Sunni and Shia pan-Islamism to gain momentum throughout the Middle East and beyond. Because of bad decisions made in the White House, power passed from popular leaders and sincere patriots to unpopular and subservient rulers, and the sympathy of the people was hijacked by Islamist leaders and movements. The consequences of events in both Iran and Egypt still haunt the Middle East today.
The dawn of US interventionism
The book’s core concern is with the legacy and impact of US foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War on political and economic development in the Middle East. It focuses on two major pieces of the puzzle: momentous events in Iran and Egypt in which America played a decisive role. Examining these, it shows how Anglo-American interventions in the internal affairs of the Middle East from the early 1950s (till the present) stunted political development and social change there and led the region down the wrong path to authoritarianism and militarism. The Middle East was reimagined as a Cold War chessboard, which left a legacy marked by dependencies, weak political institutions, low levels of civil and human rights protection, lopsided economic growth and political systems prone to authoritarianism. This is the antithesis of often-stated Western values rooted in democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
An informal empire emerges
Developing countries emerged into independence from a history that left its mark on their future. It was difficult enough for countries emerging from colonialism to build sound institutions, gain public trust and extend state authority, and America’s imperial ambitions and actions during and after the Cold War made this all the more difficult, if not impossible. With the foundations of imperialism far from completely dismantled, old structures persisted under new names. In some cases, it was more than just structures that perpetuated dependence. It was the very leaders and their descendants who were co-opted into a neocolonial reality. Anyone challenging that order was swiftly marked as an enemy of democracy and free markets.
With the foundations of imperialism far from completely dismantled, old structures persisted under new names.
Within living memory, the peoples of the Middle East viewed the US with awe and optimism. Unlike its European allies, America had never ruled over Muslim lands and appeared to have no imperial ambitions. Instead, Americans had built hospitals and major universities in the region. Washington could have built relations on the basis of mutual interests and respect, not dependency and domination. When the US signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia to begin oil exploration in 1933, the people of the region saw it as an opportunity to decrease their dependence on the “imperial colossus,” Great Britain. But from the Middle East to Africa and Asia, newly decolonised countries discovered that formal independence did not translate into full sovereignty. A creeping form of colonialism kept tying these countries to their old European masters and the new American power.
As the historian Rashid Khalidi noted, the US was following in the footprints of European colonialism. In his book Imperialism and the Developing World, Atul Kohli compares British imperialism during 19th century with America’s informal empire in the 20th. It might not have been formally called colonialism, but the effects were the same: Washington – often backed by London – pursued its interests at the cost of the right to self-determination and sovereignty of other peoples and countries.
Cold War divisions, US opportunism
Setting up defence pacts in the Middle East in the early 1950s to encircle Russia’s southern flank, Eisenhower’s Cold Warriors pressured friends and foes to join in America’s network of alliances against Soviet communism. Newly decolonised states like Iraq, Egypt, Iran (which was not formally colonised), and Pakistan had to choose between jumping on Uncle Sam’s informal empire bandwagon or being trampled under its wheels.
The Truman and Eisenhower administrations laid the foundation of an imperial foreign policy which was hardened by the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. The US provided arms, aid and security protection to the shah and to Israeli and Saudi leaders during the Cold War. This led to economic growth, but as Kohli notes, it was not evenly distributed throughout the region. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, US imperial foreign policy persisted with George W. Bush, who waged a global war on terror that saw the US invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US foreign policy establishment saw the world through imperial lenses that divided everything into binary terms – black and white, good and evil. In their eyes, the existential struggle against Soviet communism justified violence, collective punishment and all other means to achieve their ideological ends. In June 1961, then-CIA director Allen Dulles, declared that the destruction of the “system of colonialism” was the first step to defeat the “Free World.”
While establishing this foreign policy strategy, the US […] was also building the postwar international financial and trading and security institutions that allowed its competitive corporations to outperform others.
While establishing this foreign policy strategy, the US – as the dominant capitalistic superpower – was also building the postwar international financial and trading and security institutions that allowed its competitive corporations to outperform others. This global system of open, imperial economies disproportionately steered the fruits of the world’s economic growth to the citizens of the West, particularly Americans. Kohli argues that the US sought to tame sovereign and effective state power in the newly decolonised world. Regime change, covert and overt military interventions, sanctions to create open economies and acquiescent governments were all among the weapons of the informal Cold War imperialism, all wielded with the soundtrack of piercing alarm about the spectre of a Soviet communist threat.
The “Free World” fallacy
The project was not without opposition, however. Nationalist forces resisted the new imperialism, and US leaders escalated their military efforts to defeat indigenous opposition. With its thinly veiled imperialism, insubstantial justification for using military force and vague claims about impending threats to the “homeland”, the US began to lose credibility. Washington’s shortsighted views ultimately backfired, undermining security globally and forestalling good governance in the Middle East and beyond.
This imperial vision had ramifications for the West’s self-appointed role as the leader of the free world and defender of human rights, going well beyond reputation.
This imperial vision had ramifications for the West’s self-appointed role as the leader of the free world and defender of human rights, going well beyond reputation. Mistrust in the international liberal order has weakened international institutions and eroded deference to norms such as respect for human rights. What unfolds in Guantánamo Bay or Gaza, Palestine does more than hurt the individuals unjustly subject to illegal torture or civilians slaughtered by the thousands; it raises the global public’s tolerance for such abhorrent acts by having them unfold in the heart of the democratic West.
Understanding what happened in the Middle East
The book does not argue that democracy was bound to flourish in the Middle East if the US had not subverted the nascent democratic and anticolonial movements. Rather, America’s military intervention, its backing of authoritarian, reactionary regimes and neglect of local concerns, and its imperial ambitions created conditions that undermined the lengthy, turbulent processes that constitutionalism, inclusive economic progress, and democratisation require. The political scientist Lisa Anderson notes that “it is usually decades, if not centuries, of slow, subtle, and often violent change” that create the conditions for meaningful state sovereignty.
Though the experiences of the Middle East are not wholly unique, some characteristics are specific to the region, such as its contiguity to Europe and its vast quantities of petroleum, strategic waterways and markets which have proved irresistible to Western powers. Western powers have thus persistently intervened in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern countries as they have not in other parts of the world. This “oil curse” has triggered a similar geostrategic curse in the Middle East, pitting external and local powers against each other in a struggle for competitive advantage and influence. As the book explores, this convergence of curses has had far-reaching and lasting political and economic consequences for Middle Eastern states.
The book eschews historical determinism and offers a robust reconstruction of the international relations of the Middle East as well as social and political developments in the region. It also encourages us to reimagine the present in light of revisiting the past. In so doing, we can begin to see lost opportunities and new possibilities for healing and reconciliation.
Note: This excerpt from the introduction to What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East by Fawaz A Gerges is copyrighted to Yale University Press and the author, and is reproduced here with their permission.
This book extract gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Read an interview with Fawaz A Gerges, “What really went wrong in the Middle East” from March 2024 for LSE Research for the World.
Watch Fawaz A Gerges interviewed by Christiane Amanpour about the US’s role in the Israel-Gaza war from December 2023 and by Fareed Zakaria about the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East from January 2024, both on CNN.
Main image: Secretary Dean Acheson (right) confers with Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran (left) at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., 1951. Credit: The Harry S. Truman library.
Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – review
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn dissects intellectual battles within Cold War liberalism through six key figures: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Teasing out their complex relationships with Enlightenment ideals, historicism, Freudianism and decolonisation, Moyn’s masterful group biography sheds light on the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare, writes Atreyee Majumder.
In his most recent book, Samuel Moyn provides a set of intertwined intellectual profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, especially post-WWII era: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Before I read Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, I had never come across the term Cold War liberalism. As Moyn clarifies, the term was coined in the 1960s by enemies of liberal ideas (presumably from within the Free World) emerging at the time, blaming “domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes”. Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Interestingly, all the scholars in Moyn’s study except for Karl Popper are Jewish intellectuals of the post-Holocaust era or are children of American Jewish immigrants. An Austrian émigré in England, Popper was born Jewish but later converted to Lutheranism. Moyn takes great care not to reduce their loyalty to a certain iteration of liberalism to their religious identity (111). He employs an interesting writing strategy whereby he establishes a grapevine of conversations among these six figures and their various compatriot liberals. For instance, Shklar appears as a sharp critic of Hannah Arendt in Chapter five, while Berlin provides a corrective to Shklar’s rejection and blaming of Rousseau for sowing the roots of the red spectre with which the free world was confronted with in the twentieth century.
The first two chapters elaborate on Shklar and Berlin who have divergent attitudes towards the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Rousseau. Both are critical of the Enlightenment to the extent that they find themselves amplifying liberalism’s state-limiting function over its dimension of emphasising creative agency of the individual. They differ on the extent to which the Enlightenment could be held responsible for the rise of the Red Scare. It is in the Karl Popper chapter (Chapter Three) that the plot thickens, as Popper rejects “historicism” by way of rejecting Hegel and his infusion of the idea of progress with Christian “inevitabilism” (77, 80). As Moyn narrates, Popper held that history, if embraced, would mean the inevitable progress as argued for Hegel and later, in Marx’s terms, would lead to a communist version of progress that would usurp liberalism’s dominance. This anxiety made Popper reject the category of history itself. In fact, Jacob Talmon, the “slavish follower” of Popper, described “the idolization of history” as a “nineteenth century novelty” (80).
It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west
The book reaches a crescendo in the last two chapters on Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, respectively. It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west; those that claimed the word ”freedom” for colonised populations. As a reader from the postcolony, I found it instructive to read Moyn’s discussion of Arendt’s ambivalence about reconciling her liberalism with the growing liberalisms of the former colonies. In an insightful section at the end of the Arendt chapter (137-8), Moyn discusses how nationalisms of these fledgling nations were objects of suspicion for Arendt and the Cold War liberals while they were eager to embrace the cause of Israel’s nationalism. In the final chapter we witness Lionel Trilling’s strange embrace of Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Trilling wanted to render a reformed liberalism – one that wasn’t so naïve and shocked at crisis or evil in the world. Moyn writes of Trilling’s use of Freud in working out his own theory of liberty and liberalism (152):
“…..Freudianism affected the theory of liberty. It turns out that people are constrained in the control they can win from the passions, and therefore in the freedom they should have in their self-making. They must use what autonomy they can gain in pitiless struggle with their own proclivities in the service of self-control.”
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism […] could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism, Moyn speculates, could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold; Moyn writes that “he rationalized out of it a new liberalism” (153) – a kind of “survivalist” one. Trilling’s move for a reformed and less idealistic liberalism marked liberalism’s slow shift towards the right.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare. Moyn also makes clear that these figures are not particularly worried about the institutional arrangement that will bring about such actualisation of freedoms and hence, their version of liberalism. Moyn often uses the term neoliberal and I understand that his usage is quite different from the commonplace social science use of that word – which is a political form accompanying the condition of late capitalism. Hence, I would have liked Moyn to delineate his specific use of the term. Moyn does discuss, especially, in the chapter on Hannah Arendt (Chapter Five), the discomfiture of the Cold War liberals with the rise of new nations across the globe, claiming for themselves the political and social goods of liberalism through their own interpretation of what these might entail. He especially mentions, David Scott’s indictment of Arendt for her erasure of Haiti (138). A blind spot about the rest of the world seems to have existed among the Cold War liberals, which Moyn could have explored further. Finally, I was curious about whether Western Marxism – of the Althusser variety (I believe many of them are writing at the same time as Althusser in the 1960s) – were at all in the conversations that the Cold War liberals engaged in. If so, how would they respond to the Althusserian idea that “freedom” as ideology that hides actual class relations in the name of a pleasurable political ideal which thereafter encodes their worlds of desire? Nonetheless, Liberalism Against Itself is an illuminating and, at times, counterintuitive account of the intellectual wars internal to liberal establishment while it was under attack during the Cold War.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: DidemA on Shutterstock.
Stephanie Kelton on the economy
This YouTube video by the Belgian economist, Joeri Schasfoort, which was conducted in February 2024 at the Warwick Economic Summit held at Warwick University, is really excellent. It forms part of of a series of discussions labelled Money & Macro Talks. He correctly calls the episode with Stephanie Kelton an in-depth discussion. The interview technique... Read more
‘Trump’s Second Presidential Run and the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse Have a Lot In Common’
Many of us will have seen the horrifying footage of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbour last week, after a huge container ship, the Dali, rammed into one of its supporting pillars, apparently after losing power on board.
One of the most shocking aspects of the disaster, in which six construction workers lost their lives, was how quickly most of the bridge fell, even though only one element of the structure suffered a direct impact. It was a reminder that even the sturdiest-looking construction has its weak points.
The disaster was a perfect metaphor for the kind of crisis we may be facing in Europe if Donald Trump is re-elected as US President in November.
He is the large container ship threatening to ram into the foundation of European security established after the Second World War – the NATO alliance. Trump was reportedly only narrowly dissuaded from pulling out of NATO during his first term in office. During the current presidential campaign, he has again hinted at his unhappiness with the organisation – and raised doubts about whether he would be willing to come to the defence of those members who, in his view, do not contribute enough to its funding.
President Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin at the 2019 G20 Japan Summit. Photo: Shealah Craighead/UPI
Recognising the danger a second Trump presidency may present to NATO, the usually divided US Congress came together in late 2023 to pass legislation preventing any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without the approval of the Senate or an Act of Congress.
But the damage may already have been done.
Trump does not actually need to withdraw the US from NATO to cause it fundamental harm. Through his words alone, he has already weakened the alliance by undermining its very cornerstone – the notion that an attack on one is an attack on all – represented by the Article V commitment that all members will come to the aid of any country which is under attack.
NATO, which depends on the US for most of its funding and the vast majority of its military capability, is nothing without US leadership.
Perhaps Trump does not mean it in practice. Perhaps, faced with a real invasion of a NATO member, Trump will command the US military into action. But perhaps not.
In this uncertain environment, Vladimir Putin might be tempted to test the limits, not just by doubling-down on his aggression against Ukraine and neighbouring states such as Georgia and Moldova, but even by moving against a vulnerable NATO member such as one of the Baltic countries. Would Trump come to the aid of Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia? I’d like to believe so, especially since NATO has deliberately stationed multinational forces in each country, as well as Poland, to act as a tripwire. But I am no longer so sure – and it is precisely this element of doubt which creates risk.
Perhaps an even stronger metaphor arising from the bridge disaster concerns the vulnerability of Western democracies to critical collapse. Speaking about why the bridge fell down, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “a bridge like this one, completed in the 1970s, was simply not made to withstand a direct impact on a critical support pier from a vessel that weighs about 200 million pounds – orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships that were in service in that region at the time that the bridge was first built”.
By the same token, most Western democratic systems were designed in a different era and may not forever be able to withstand today’s assaults upon them – whether by hostile foreign actors seeking to sow chaos through spreading misinformation or buying influence through corrupt means, or by homegrown populist leaders, stoking up divisive cultural wars, or undermining vital institutions, such as an independent judiciary, strong media, and neutral civil service, for their own nefarious ends.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2021. Photo: Jeffrey Kahan/Alamy
Ultimately, democracy, like the NATO alliance, relies upon trust – in NATO’s case, that every member will uphold its commitment to come to each other’s rescue in their moment of need; in democracy’s case, that leaders will not exploit loopholes in their systems, but always act with integrity, and adhere not just to the letter of the law, but its spirit also.
Public trust is eroded, and our entire democratic system weakened, when any one party or faction starts to chip away at those unwritten norms and values.
Engineers are already discussing how to rebuild the Francis Scott Key bridge so that if one part of it ever again suffers major damage, it will not trigger the collapse of its entire span. They call this “building redundancy” – the practice of adding back-up systems or components to ensure that a system or structure can continue to operate in the event of a failure. This will also include installing stronger barriers around each pillar to buffer ships (called 'dolphins’) away from ramming into them in the first place.
We need to do the same both for NATO and our democracies.
NATO needs to build more redundancy into its system, with every member state increasing their own military capabilities and military contributions to the alliance so that it is not so dependent on America.
Western democracies need to build redundancy by building more guardrails into their systems, including through tightening their financial controls, making stronger efforts to combat disinformation and the misuse of artificial intelligence, protecting free speech and civic activism, and shoring up the independence of the media, judiciary, and civil service.
In the UK’s case, we also need to install our own version of dolphins – by adopting a written constitution, with much stronger guidelines on ethical behaviour in office, and stronger penalties for transgressions, as a way to deter such violations in the first place.
Alexandra Hall writes an exclusive column, 'An Englishwoman Abroad’, for the monthly Byline Times print edition. Subscribe now
‘The Joe Biden Impeachment Hearing Says Everything About Republicans and Nothing About the President’
When former US President Donald Trump was impeached, for the first time, the cry from the (far) right was that this was all an act of political theatre. This, of course, was not true, but it may be that Republicans in Congress have come to believe their own lies and see impeachment as simply a political tool to tarnish an opponent. What they have overlooked is that like any other kind of trial against an accused person, getting to conviction requires evidence. The testimony of Lev Parnas at the impeachment hearing related to President Joe Biden on Wednesday brutally exposed the fact that the Republicans leading this charge have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter.
That the bombshell testimony from Parnas has exposed the GOP scam is all the more ironic for the fact that he, a former associate of disgraced former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had been on the side of those who were responsible for fabricating the whole story in the first place.
The concocted tale revolves around an energy company in Ukraine called Burisma. In short, Hunter Biden had served on its Board while his father was the Vice President and point man for the Obama White House. Ukraine was already at war at that time after Russia created the hot war in the Donbas as well as illegally seizing Crimea in 2014. Biden’s remit related to those hostilities.
The allegations against the Bidens were that they had each received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, and got the then Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, fired for sniffing around Burisma too closely. The big problem here is that not a single part of that story is true. The bigger problem is that, according to Parnas, Fox News host Sean Hannity and several members of Congress were engaged in “knowingly” pushing disinformation from Russia.
It is with alarming regularity that the acts of the Republican Party and the Russian state align. The Russians have several motivations behind their troublemaking. Most glaringly, it would be thrilled by a Trump presidency because another tenure in the White House will certainly lead to chaos in the United States at a time when Russia is involved in a full-scale war against Ukraine. A war that saw 31 missiles fired at the capital city of Kyiv just the night before last. Another reason is that this story deepens the belief that Ukraine is a thoroughly corrupt country, one of the chief issues put forward by those who argue against the provision of further military aid.
The story of Burisma first entered the American body politic in 2020, as I wrote for Byline Times back then it was an attempt to distract from the facts of what Trump was then being impeached for. This is a disinformation tactic called ‘whataboutism’, there’s an allegation from one side, and so the other side screams “what about….?” Whataboutism is one of the standard tools of Russian dis- and misinformation operations, frequently employed by their armies of online trolls and useful idiots, and now the GOP.
The impeachment of Trump and the attempt to find grounds for the impeachment of President Biden could not be more different. The former was based on the “prefect phone call” between the Presidents of the US and Ukraine, in which Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package unless President Volodymyr Zelensky did him “a favour” by announcing an investigation into his political rival. The latter was based on Russian lies readily taken up and believed to be fact by large numbers of people in the US, both in and out of political circles.
As an outsider, and as a person directly affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is astonishing that there are so many American minds polluted by Russian propaganda. Some are genuinely duped, others are engaging in and embracing it for reasons of political expediency. Whatever the reason behind it, toeing the Russian line is something that would have horrified the old school of the Republican Party, who realised full well the danger that Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, represented.
Trump was impeached because he attempted to use a package of weapons destined for an ally at war with an adversary as a tool of leverage for his personal political benefit. As Parnas testified, he was instructed by the personal lawyer to Trump, Giuliani, to deliver a message that “unless Zelensky announced an investigation into the Bidens by Monday, that there would be no cooperation, no aid to Ukraine from the United States.” This was a President who not only believed that manipulating the assets of the nation for his personal benefit was perfectly fine, but who also, being unable to deny the charge because there were witnesses to this crime, insisted instead that the call was “perfect”.
Had the Republicans followed the evidence at that first impeachment (or for that matter at the second one) the inescapable conclusion would have been that Trump was guilty as charged and ruling such, the world would not be facing the theoretical possibility of this man, a convicted fraudster and rapist, reassuming the role of the most powerful man in the world.
The evidence in the hearings trying to establish grounds to impeach President Biden is just not there on the other hand. Again, according to Parnas, “I found precisely zero evidence of the Bidens corruption in Ukraine. No credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity, not the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA. No respected Ukrainian official has ever said that the Bidens did anything criminal in Ukraine.” And “the only information ever pushed on the Bidens on Ukraine has come from one source and one source only, Russia and Russian agents.”
There was no $5 million bribe. Shokin, the Prosecutor General, was not fired because he was getting too close to finding wrongdoing in his investigation of Burisma, because he was not in fact investigating Burisma. Shokin was fired because he was acorrupt man who would look the other way for the right price. His belated dismissal was greeted with applause by Ambassadors to Ukraine from a great number of countries when it happened.
As for the underlying (Russian/GOP) message that Ukraine is a fundamentally corrupt country and therefore undeserving of US aid, the clear Russian goal is to leave Ukraine defenceless so that they can prosecute their war even more ruthlessly. But the fact is that a decade ago millions of brave Ukrainians across the country decided to stand up to the corrupt rule of the Yanukovych regime, and much has changed since then in terms of anti-corruption developments in the country.
At the insistence of civil society, under the watchful eye of allies such as the United States and the European Union, a great number of anti-corruption programs have been successfully implemented. Ukraine, as a nation that fights corruption, has created a new national police force from scratch and developed an award-winning app through which pretty much all government services are delivered, efficiently and transparently. In fact, just one month before the beginning of the big war, as it is called here, I wrote for Byline Times that it is precisely because Ukraine is a model for fighting corruption (and a democracy) that war was inevitably coming.
Trump appears to have been shown in court to be a liar…
The Lincoln Project is admittedly a Republican group that opposes Trump, but it does seem rather difficult to see where Trump goes from here. He has been shown to lie about his wealth – he originally suggested he had $400million in liquid assets – yet nobody will support his $500m surety… It rather goes to... Read more
Does American Reluctance to Aid Ukraine Foreshadow a New Isolationism?
While President Biden and many in Congress support continued aid to Ukraine in their fight against Russia, American public opinion on this issue has, like so much else in the United States, become polarized along Democratic/Republican lines. At the moment, Republican opposition in the House of Representatives is holding up American military aid to Ukraine. President Biden has managed to send $300 million in emergency aid to Ukraine funded from cost savings from earlier aid packages. According to Politico, “The Pentagon has been unable to send additional weapons to Kyiv since December, when it ran out of money to replenish its stocks.”
This trend, of course, will directly impact the battle going on in Ukraine. It can also shed light on America’s feelings about NATO and international engagement in general. The question that arises from the polling data is: if the United States is reluctant to provide military aid to Ukraine how willing would it be to defend NATO allies from Russian attack?
Polling conducted by the AP-NORC in late February of this year, found American public opinion split with 37% saying that the US is providing too much assistance to Ukraine while 33% say the US is spending the right amount and 27% say the US is not providing enough assistance. Resistance to providing American aid to Ukraine is driven by Republican opposition. Fully 55% of Republicans say that America is spending too much on aid to Ukraine. Only 17% of Democrats say the US is spending too much on aid to Ukraine.
It would be a mistake to see Republican reluctance to support aid to Ukraine as a single issue. Rather, it can be seen to reflect a larger tend towards a GOP reluctance to respond to Russian aggression. The same February 2024 polling from the AP showed that only a modest 52% of Republicans support defending NATO allies as opposed to 67% of Democrats.
Former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has commented that he would not support NATO allies if they did not spend enough on their defence budgets. Though many Republicans may not agree with Trump’s harsh tone, current polling data indicates that many in his own party would be reluctant to defend NATO. Significantly 28% of Republicans in the AP-NORC polling say they would oppose supporting NATO allies in the event of a Russian attack.
Gallup polling also found mixed sentiments on NATO. While a 47% plurality backed American involvement in NATO, 16% argue that the US should decrease its support for NATO while 12% want the US to pull out of NATO entirely.
It is tempting to blame American reluctance to defend NATO allies on Trumpism. Certainly, Trump is a major factor here. However, it is also helpful to take a step back and view this moment in American foreign policy in context. Today, America’s role on the international stage is something that many take for granted. It was not always this way to put it mildly.
America was a reluctant partner to the Allied effort in World War I. Indeed, Democratic presidential candidate incumbent President Wilson successfully ran for re-election in 1916 on the slogan of “he kept us out of war.” Following World War I, America retreated from the world’s stage.
Isolationism was a powerful force in American politics in the 1930s and early 1940s, when the slogan that Donald Trump employed in the 2016 presidential campaign “America First” was widely used. Though the phrase first appeared in President Wilson’s 1916 re-election campaign, it truly came to national prominence when the name was adopted by the America First Committee, established in 1940, which lobbied to keep America out of any foreign wars. The Committee argued that no foreign power could defeat the United States and furthermore that a Nazi victory over Great Britain would not negatively impact the United States.
Support for the Committee was strong at the grassroots level and in the halls of Congress. At the height of its power, the Committee had 800,000 members and was backed by both Republicans and Democrats. Its most prominent champion was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic and regarded by many as a Nazi sympathiser.
The German victories in the spring of 1940 did not put a dent in American isolationism. Only Franklin Roosevelt’s superb political and communications skills allowed the US to support Britain in 1940 and 1941. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 to catapult the United States into World War II.
American support of isolationism this time round is less widespread, being based primarily in one political party. This is good news for those who want America to continue to play a role on the global stage. However, given the nature of the American political system, a committed majority in either house of Congress can effectively check a President’s foreign policy initiatives.
So, while the current polling does not necessarily foreshadow a return to American isolationism, it does, along with a reading of American history, strongly suggest that America’s role on the international stage is not guaranteed.
What Do the 2024 ‘Super Tuesday’ Exit Polls Tell Us About Trump’s Chances in November?
The number of states across the United States holding primaries on the first Tuesday in March have earned the name “Super Tuesday” for this stop on the electoral calendar. The results on Super Tuesday have traditionally propelled a candidate towards their party’s nomination. The big Democratic winner on Super Tuesday 2020 was Joe Biden, who won decisively over his challenger Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. Biden’s dramatic win was best summed up by CNN analyst Van Jones when he said that because of his performance on Super Tuesday, Biden went from being “a joke to a juggernaut.”
The big Republican winner of Super Tuesday this year is former President Donald Trump who won everywhere except in the liberal state of Vermont. Trump defeated former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley by 50 percentage points or more in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. As a result of her poor showing in the Super Tuesday states, Haley ended her campaign. Furthermore, Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, announced his support for Trump. McConnell had been critical of Trump in the past for his actions in the insurrection at the US Capitol in January 2021. McConnell’s swift endorsement of Trump after Super Tuesday indicates that Trump’s dominance of the Republican party is absolute.
So, now the rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is on.
One of the more interesting aspects of politics on both sides of the Atlantic are exit polls. These are the questions that pollsters put to those who have just voted about what factors went into their decision-making process and what issues are important to them. CNN conducted Super Tuesday exit polling in the states of California, North Carolina, and Virginia. The mix of states gives us a balanced view as California is a solidly Democratic state, North Carolina is a swing state and Virginia leans towards the Democrats. Given the fact that Democrats dominate California, it makes sense to focus this analysis on North Carolina and Virginia as they are both competitive states.
In North Carolina, fully 63% of GOP primary voters feel that Trump would be fit for the presidency even if he is convicted of a crime. 55% of GOP voters in Democratic-leaning Virginia believe the same.
When asked if they were part of the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement, the code word for Trumpism, 57% of voters in Virginia say they are not part of the MAGA movement as do 52% of those in North Carolina.
Some pollsters argue that asking voters about their allegiance to the MAGA movement is a way of measuring their likelihood of voting for Trump. I disagree here. While there are voters who understand the MAGA acronym, most voters do not. A more predictive question is to ask if Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. This question goes to the heart of Trump’s campaign far more than asking about the MAGA acronym. In North Carolina, fully 63% of GOP voters feel that Biden did not win legitimately in 2020 while 50% of Virginia GOP voters hold this view.
Social issues in America also play a role here. Since the US Supreme Court ruled in the Dobbs case in June of 2022 overturning Roe vs. Wade, reproductive rights have been once again thrust into the political debate. Abortion opponents in recent months have been pushing for a national ban on abortions. In Virginia, 54% of GOP voters oppose such a ban while in North Carolina 52% of GOP voters support a national ban on abortions.
Were there any bright spots for Haley on Super Tuesday? She did win the state of Vermont and did better than average with college educated GOP voters (39% in North Carolina and 50% in Virginia) and with GOP voters who describe themselves as moderates (57% in North Carolina and 62% in Virginia). These achievements are meaningless. The bottom line is that Donald Trump trounced Nikki Haley and his control of the Republican party is unchallenged.
Some Washington observers have looked at the Super Tuesday results and concluded that they represent major problems for Donald Trump. Their logic is that if Trump loses 20% of the GOP vote in a swing state such as North Carolina, then it is an enormous potential win for the Biden team. This point of view assumes that the 20% of the electorate who voted for Haley will cross the aisle to vote for Biden. The exit polling data does to some extent support this argument, as 58% of Haley voters in North Carolina say they would not vote Republican regardless of who the nominee is.
President Biden has already begun to reach out to Haley voters. Right now, they may be susceptible to persuasion efforts. The abortion issue is likely to be his best way to reach these voters. Unfortunately, for the Biden team, a long and polarizing general election lies ahead. Come November, I believe few Haley voters will be willing to vote Democratic. That is the bad news for the Democrats. The good news for the Democrats is that the election is likely to be so close that it will not take many disaffected Haley voters to tip the scales in Biden’s favour.
‘A Nationalist Uprising’: Islamophobia and the Bannonisation of British Politics
For how much longer is the former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica going to be allowed to subvert our politics and stoke division in our communities?
Sharing a platform with Liz Truss at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last week, and talking about the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Steve Bannon described Tommy Robinson as a “hero” and Truss – the shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history – appeared to agree with him. “That is correct,” she said.
This is not the first time Bannon has praised the founder of the English Defence League, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Four years ago, while Robinson was serving a 13-month prison sentence for contempt of court, Bannon called him “the backbone” of the UK. But it is the first time such a senior Conservative has endorsed him.
Deputy Conservative Prime Minister Oliver Dowden attempted to make excuses for Truss this weekend, saying she might not have heard Bannon correctly. But even if Truss, who is still a Conservative MP, didn’t understand she was supporting a multiply-convicted British criminal and subversive activist, she should have known that she was sharing a stage with a multiply-convicted American criminal and subversive activist – Steve Bannon himself.
Bannon, as Grant Stern first revealed in this newspaper five years ago, was investigated and indicted for fraudulently using funds raised for his ‘Build the Wall’ US-Mexico barrier project in 2020. Outgoing President Donald Trump granted a last-minute pardon for his federal offences in 2021, but Bannon still faces state-level charges in a trial in New York later this year. He was also found guilty of two charges of criminal contempt for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
This is where Bannon’s role in both American and US democracy really matters: his vociferous attempts to destroy it on both sides of the Atlantic.
At CPAC, sharing a stage with right-wing activist Jack Posobiec, Bannon agreed that he wanted to “overthrow” democracy because they “didn’t get all the way on January 6”.
Bannon also revealed that he has similar designs on the UK. He urged Truss to join forces with the Reform Party, headed by Richard Tice, and told a Mirror reporter that his old friend Nigel Farage would be installed as prime minister as a part of a “nationalist uprising”.
While this intervention may have taken some by surprise, it is merely the culmination of over a decade during which Bannon has attempted to subvert British politics. Given that history, what can we expect next?
‘My Weapons’
A large part of Steve Bannon’s impact on politics on both sides of the Atlantic is his use of social media and digital campaigning to change the culture of debate – the very frame of reference and facts we use to debate politics. He has referred to this ‘information warfare’ as “flooding the zone with shit”, and the combination of disinformation and digital targeting as “his weapons”.
Cultivating these tactics goes back to 2013, when Bannon allied with the billionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer to run the Breitbart publications and co-found the now-defunct data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica involved in the great Facebook hack and micro-targeting scandal. The company was a spin-off of a strategic military outfit, SCL, which was used to deradicalise civilians and insurgents in combat zones.
The British element in Bannon’s campaign can be traced to his long friendship with Farage – although the ‘Cambridge’ in Cambridge Analytica has more specific roots.
In 2013, Bannon attended the 10th anniversary conference of the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF) at Churchill College, Cambridge University, just as he was setting up his new company.
Churchill College, Cambridge, December 2013. The YBF 10th anniversary conference with (left to right) Raheem Kassam, Steve Bannon and Harry Cole. Photo: Facebook
An offshoot of the Young America’s Foundation, the YBF was founded by lawyer Donal Blaney (currently in a legal dispute with this newspaper acting on behalf of GB News presenter Dan Wootton). Both the YBF, and its American counterpart, appear to have been funded by the Mercer Family – which also backed Cambridge Analytica and Bannon’s Breitbart.
By this point, the YBF had become a centre of right-wing US-style Republican thinking and antipathy towards the EU. Its co-founder was (the now ennobled) Daniel Hannan, a leading Brexiter and Conservative MEP. On its advisory board was Matthew Elliott, who helped set up the Tufton Street network of opaquely funded libertarian think tanks, and was the chief executive of the official Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit Referendum (he has also been elevated to the House of Lords).
Speakers at the YBF’s 10th anniversary event included Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes site; and Douglas Murray who spoke on jihad, Islamism, Israel, and the ‘War on Terror’. Bannon shared a platform with Harry Cole, then head of news at Guido Fawkes, and Raheem Kassam to discuss digital campaigning. Kassam went on to both edit the London edition of Breitbart and act as Farage’s aide for the next few years (he went on to co-host Bannon’s War Room podcast).
Also present was the then executive director of the YBF, Matthew Richardson, who was also reported to be Mercer’s legal representative in the UK at the time. He went on to become the secretary of Farage’s UKIP and signed a deal with Bannon in the run-up to the EU Referendum so that Cambridge Analytica could process UKIP data for the targeting of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, fronted by Farage. (Richardson now works with Rebekah Mercer and helped set up their social media site, Parler).
Email released by former Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser on the UKIP data handed over to Leave EU's Andy Wigmore by former YBF Chief Executive Matthew Richardson.
The YBF would be closed two years later, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying around the suicide of the young activist Elliott Johnson.
Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t last much longer. According to its former head of research, Chris Wylie, the company set up a temporary office in the English university town around the time of the YBF conference at Churchill College. Soon, it was working with Cambridge academics to establish a research project to psychologically profile voters – which would end up illegally harvesting the personal data (and even personal messages) of up to 87 million Facebook users to be used for political targeting.
Though many argue about the impact of psychometric targeting and online messaging, both the Brexit and Trump votes were swung by small margins. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix boasted that digital targeting was the key to the success in both results. Though it did not use Cambridge Analytica directly, the Vote Leave campaign used the company’s Canadian offshoot, AIQ, and its Project Ripon database to target swing voters with billions of online ads – often unlawfully paid for – in the last days before the EU Referendum.
When Carole Cadwalladr revealed the Facebook hack and Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit and Trump in the Observer in 2018, it wiped billions off the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, and Cambridge Analytica was closed and its offices raided by law enforcement.
But Steve Bannon had already left Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica by then – and had even bigger fish to fry.
Russia and Islamophobia
Like his friend, Nigel Farage, Bannon is keen to talk of the need to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian’ culture (as if that had not been one of pogroms and the Holocaust), while marginalising or monstering the third branch of the three great Abrahamic religions: Islam.
His embracing of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy – that Europe is being overrun by Muslim ‘invaders’ – has infected the worldview of many right-wing parties across the continent. This includes elements of the UK’s Conservative Party, which have been unafraid to advance these fearmongering narratives.
The latest example is the former Conservative vice-chair Lee Anderson’s recent comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan handing the city to “Islamists”, echoed by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in the wake of public protests in London over the Israel-Hamas War.
Activating xenophobia, particularly around Islam, was one of the key themes used by both leave campaigns during the EU Referendum in 2016 when, triggered by Russian military activity in war-torn Syria, hundreds of thousands of refugees started fleeing to Europe. Then Prime Minister David Cameron accused Vladimir Putin of deliberately “weaponising” refugees to destabilise Europe.
Farage’s Leave.EU campaign used its notorious ‘Breaking Point’ poster to spread fear about ‘invading’ Muslim migrants, while recycling Russian fake news about Muslim violence in its online ads. Meanwhile, the Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, wasn’t much better, falsely suggesting that 80 million Turks were about to swamp Britain and the EU.
Johnson also deployed Islamophobic tropes to set the tone for his ousting of Theresa May and taking over the leadership of the Conservatives in the summer of 2019 – inspired by Steve Bannon.
Appointed Foreign Secretary after failing to beat May for the leadership, Johnson first struck up a personal relationship with Bannon in late 2016, when Trump’s campaign manager was made his head of staff in the White House. In early 2017, Johnson’s Foreign Office invited Cambridge Analytica executives to election briefings on its use of data in Trump’s successful campaign.
Both men were reported to have been in regular contact throughout the next two years, during which Bannon also advised Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
When Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in 2018, Bannon claimed to have consulted him on moves to oust Theresa May. One of Johnson’s first was to write a Telegraph column comparing Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letter-boxes” – a provocation very much in line with Bannon’s Breitbart strategy of sectarian division to activate a hard-right racist base.
Around the time he was commending Tommy Robinson as the “backbone” of Britain, Bannon also claimed that Johnson would be “a great prime minister”.
Soon, Johnson picked up another one of Bannon’s favourite Breitbart themes saying, in a rare intervention in Parliament in 2019, that there was “a plot by the deep state to frustrate Brexit”. The ‘deep state’ catch-all conspiracy also chimes with the ‘Great Replacement’ – that elites are deliberately using migration as a weapon (it was echoed by Liz Truss in her appearance at CPAC last week).
But working in the shadows behind all of this is a genuine deep state – one which has weaponised migrants to fuel fear and division: the security system of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
During both the Brexit Referendum and Trump’s election campaign, Russian intelligence agencies were funding and promoting the same causes as Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that there was an element of collusion between them.
Cambridge Analytica had many links to the Russian state-controlled Lukoil company. It worked extensively with St Petersburg University, around the corner from the notorious Internet Research Agency, owned by the late oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which spent $50 million targeting US and UK voters. One of Cambridge Analytica’s consultants, Sam Patten, set up a company with a Russian intelligence agent. And crucial voter data on US swing states was passed on to the GRU, the same Russian military intelligence agency that supported Prigozhin.
Though Cambridge Analytica has now been shut down, and Prigozhin died in a plane crash after defying Putin last year, there is little doubt that these propaganda practices and Russian support for them live on in new forms.
Though Putin’s imperial expansionist intent has been revealed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he is now able to weaponise the conflict in Gaza for much the same purposes as he did with Syria – to promote xenophobia and the recurrent racist trope of the ‘Muslim hordes’ taking over Europe.
Unlike Syria a decade ago, there is no direct evidence of Russian involvement in Hamas’ horrific assault on Israel on 7 October last year – though the Kremlin does have close ties with Hamas’ main backers in Iran. But there is little doubt that the distraction from his invasion of Ukraine suits Putin’s purposes.
Given Bannon’s reliance on figures like Tommy Robinson, and the use of hate and Islamophobia to achieve a desired ‘nationalist uprising’, it should be no surprise, even if it is a shock, that unscrupulous senior Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss will go along with him not only to promote Trump in the forthcoming US elections, but also again to stoke division and mistrust in Britain.
If he succeeds in any way, this will foster a darker, dangerous form of right-wing Conservatism in this country – a tragic, toxic legacy for us all.
Tucker Carlson Interview: Putin Reveals Inferiority Complex as He Blames Boris Johnson for Continued War
Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin proved to be a storm in a teacup. The Russian leader used the conversation with the former Fox News host to repeat his well-known empty phrases, and yet again justify his decision to invade Ukraine. But why did the controversial American TV shock jock give Putin an outlet for his propaganda points?
Among the Russian President's rambling and fact-free talking points was the extraordinary allegation that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sabotaged a potential peace deal discussed in Istanbul in the early stages of the latest invasion.
Ever since Carlson arrived in Moscow on 1 February, and was spotted attending the Bolshoi Theater in the capital, Russian media have started hailing the American conservative pundit as a celebrity. Carlson was on the front page of Evening Moscow, the newspaper handed out for free to commuters every day on the Moscow Metro, while Russian pro-Kremlin media and Telegram channels reportedly mentioned the US journalist approximately 2,050 times over the past week.
All that, as well as Putin’s decision to speak with Carlson, clearly shows that many Russians – including the ruling elite – still have an inferiority complex in regard to the West. Although pro-Kremlin propaganda will almost certainly attempt to portray “the biggest interview of 2024” as Putin’s “brilliant victory over the West”, in reality, his reliance on endorsement by a US TV shock jock represents a serious weakness.
That, however, is unlikely to have an impact on the outcome of the upcoming Russian presidential election, scheduled for March 15-17. As Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in August 2023, the Russian presidential poll “is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy”, which means that the interview was broadcast mainly for the Western audience. But how effective was this kind of propaganda?
While Tucker Carlson undoubtedly has a serious influence on conservative Americans, his interview with Putin will not force the United States’ policy makers to change their approach regarding Russia, at least as long as Joe Biden is in office. But even if Donald Trump wins the election in November, that does not necessarily mean that Washington will fundamentally change its geopolitical course and stop supporting Ukraine, which is what many in the Kremlin reportedly hope for.
Thus, Carlson yet again echoed Moscow’s ambitions, without posing any challenging questions to Putin. He allowed the Russian leader to spend almost half an hour talking about Russian history, and about the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations. Putin essentially repeated what he wrote in his 2021 article ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, claiming that significant parts of modern Ukraine are “historic Russian lands”.
But when asked why he did not invade “historic Russian lands” when he came to power more than 20 years ago, Putin started talking about the history of the Soviet Union, and blamed his predecessor Boris Yeltsin for the collapse of the USSR. He then once again admitted that he wanted Russia to join NATO in 1999 and 2000, but the former US President Bill Clinton reportedly told him that “it was not possible”. Thus, from Putin’s perspective, Russia has the right to join NATO, but if Ukraine seeks to become a member of the US-dominated alliance, it represents a “threat for the Russian national security”.
For Putin, Ukrainian national identity is also quite “problematic”, which is why he still aims to “de-Nazify” the country. Although Carlson did not bring the heat to the Russian leader, he did ask some very specific and practical questions that Putin refused to directly answer. Instead, he used his old mantras of his Western partners “deceiving him” and “leading him by the nose”.
It was a rhetoric for his domestic audience, as Putin seems to enjoy playing the role of a naïve charlatan who constantly “gets fooled” by his Western and Ukrainian partners. Since everything about Putin is a publicity stunt, he is likely deliberately portraying himself as a “good but naïve” leader, given that significant parts of the Russian audience still buy such a narrative.
Putin also blamed the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for “sabotaging” the 2022 negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul to end the war in its early stages. But according to Putin’s ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Istanbul sought to agree on the “lease” of Crimea, while Oleksiy Arestovych, the former advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that, from Kyiv’s perspective, the negotiations were so successful that the Ukrainian delegation “opened the champagne bottle”.
Could it be that Boris Johnson actually prevented Russia from signing a de facto capitulation in Istanbul?
For Putin, however, it is Western leaders, rather than he himself, who are responsible for the war continuing. He also blames them for the Euromaidan of 2014, which resulted in the overthrow of allegedly pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Putin told Tucker that the “CIA orchestrated a coup d'etat in Kyiv”. He, however, refused to mention his role in that process, and how he, at the request of the United States, effectively betrayed Yanukovych, pressuring him not to use force against Western-backed protesters.
Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, seems to know very little about those events, or about Russian-Ukrainian relations in general. Still, he gave Putin a chance to reach a potentially sympathetic audience in the United States.
“You have issues on your border, issues with migration, issues with national debt at $33 trillion. You have nothing better to do than fight in Ukraine?”, Putin said during the interview.
It was a message to Donald Trump supporters and American isolationists, as certain factions within the Russian elite hope that, if such a political option comes to power in the United States, Washington will stop funding Ukraine and allow Putin to achieve his goals in the Eastern European country. That is why the interview might have been mutually beneficial for both Putin and Carlson.
Dozens of journalists are currently imprisoned in Russia for their work, and they are unlikely to be released anytime soon. Putin, however, hinted that he might free Evan Gershkovich, a 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who has been jailed for almost a year on espionage charges. But if he releases the American citizen Gershkovich as a “goodwill gesture”, without swapping him for any Russian spies being imprisoned in the West, he will yet again demonstrate a serious weakness that his propaganda will portray as another “geopolitical victory”.
Although many Western news outlets had requested to interview Putin, the Kremlin chose Tucker Carlson because his position, according to Peskov, “contrasts with that of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media”. It is not a secret that Putin, who does not seem capable of answering unpleasant questions, avoids debating not only with most Western reporters, but also with Russian journalists who do not agree with the official Kremlin narrative.
One thing is for sure – what Putin avoids to mention in his bureaucrat-style interviews is always more important than what he emphasizes. That is why he will remain the king of empty rhetoric, and rather boring speeches.