False Friend

Since the election, some of the left’s rhetoric declaring Trump the Kremlin’s “Manchurian candidate” has bordered on unhinged, while many of the president-elect’s defenders have argued the benefits of rapport with the Putin regime. But whatever the facts may be about the Kremlin connection, Trump’s stance on Russia is a genuine cause for concern—as is the drift in the pro-Trump quarters of the right toward rose-colored perceptions of Putin.

An Economist/YouGov poll released in December found that 37 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Putin, up from just 10 percent in July 2014. There has been some debate about whether this is a real shift; another recent poll, by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, shows no real change in Republicans’ feelings toward Russia since 2014 (from 33 to 35 percent favorable) but a sharp drop in Democrats’ pro-Russian views (from 36 to 28 percent). Yet, speaking to rank-and-file Trump supporters online, it is easy to believe that the pro-Putin sentiment is real: Many praise Putin as a strong leader and a potential ally against radical Islamism.

Trump himself, of course, is notorious for speaking warmly of Putin—”a leader, far more than our president has been a leader”—and downplaying his crimes. “Our country does plenty of killing also,” was his response in late 2015 to the observation that Putin is regularly accused of ordering the murders of journalists and political opponents. Some prominent pro-Trump conservatives have joined the bandwagon as well.

After Trump came under fire for praising Putin’s leadership in September, a number of radio talk show hosts and other pundits spoke up on his behalf. Hugh Hewitt explained that although Putin may be “an evil man,” he has “served his country’s national interest better” than Obama has. Dinesh D’Souza tweeted, “What [Trump] admires about Putin is the way Putin—unlike someone else we know—LOVES his country & FIGHTS for its interests.” On the Breit-bart News Daily radio show, retired Navy SEAL and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince described Putin as a “large and in charge” leader who had “at least tried to direct the country”—and with whom we can work against “a common enemy .  .  . Islamic fascism.”

Among the more radical segments of Trump’s base, the sympathy for Putin-ism is far more overt and unhedged by disclaimers. In December, Paul Joseph Watson of the conspiracy-peddling Infowars site and the affiliated Alex Jones radio show (which has had Trump as a guest and has a large following among his fans) touted Russia’s virtues in a Facebook post he shared on Twitter under the sarcastic heading “Russia is TERRIBLE.” Watson’s Russia is a country that “protects its own culture,” doesn’t “bow to radical Islam,” “looks out for the economic interests of its population,” and “wants to work with leaders of other world powers, not go to war with them.”

To be fair, the Putin love-in on the right did not start with Trump. For well over a decade, there has been a contingent of paleoconservative/libertarian Friends of Vladimir, from veteran culture warrior Patrick Buchanan to former congressman Ron Paul. Sometimes, these contrarian views were motivated by dislike of U.S. interventionism, which these critics saw Russia containing; sometimes, by cultural traditionalism, with post-Soviet, Putin-era Russia idealized as a champion of Christianity and morality against the secularized liberal West.

Trump’s ascent unquestionably made mainstream a more positive view of Putin in conservative ranks. Meanwhile, the rise of the Islamic State and Putin’s self-positioning as its nemesis has led to talk of Russia as a valuable partner in combating jihadism, a notion shared by Trump’s incoming national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn and senior adviser Stephen Bannon (both of whom, it should be noted, have also been highly critical of the Putin regime).

Yet both the pro-Putin sympathies and the more limited hopes for an anti-Islamist alliance are profoundly misguided. The idea that Putin is fighting for Russia’s interests presumes that it’s in Russia’s interest to be ruled by an authoritarian regime that has squelched the country’s nascent civil society, eliminated all viable opposition to one-party rule, and tightened the corrupt state’s grip on the economy while empowering a crony capitalist clique. Even the economic betterment that many Russians have achieved in the Putin years was due primarily to high oil prices, while market-oriented economic reforms have stalled or reversed. As Max Boot has pointed out in the Los Angeles Times, both Russia’s GDP and Russians’ incomes have been suffering a sharp decline; the GDP drop from 2013 to 2015 was a staggering 40 percent.

Nor is Putin a champion of religion, unless “religion” means a Russian Orthodox church hierarchy subservient to the state and ruled mainly by former KGB stooges. Orthodox clerics who have spoken out against the church leadership’s cozy relationship with the Kremlin or urged a full accounting of its Soviet-era service to the atheistic regime have been muzzled and defrocked. And Putin-era regulations have hobbled minority faiths. Last fall, American Baptist preacher Donald Ossewaarde, who had lived and worked in the Russian town of Oryol, was convicted of violating regulations on evangelism by hosting a prayer and Bible study group in his home and promoting it with flyers.

The praise for Putin’s toughness toward radical Islam is even more incongruous, given Russia’s role as Iran’s chief ally and enabler. The actual record of Russia’s military intervention in Syria leaves little doubt that Putin’s interest is in propping up Bashar al-Assad, not fighting ISIS. It is also worth noting that Russia is home to the only actual sharia state in Europe: Chechnya, whose president, close Putin associate Ramzan Kadyrov—granted virtually unlimited power in exchange for loyalty to the Kremlin—has imposed Islamic dress codes and publicly condoned polygamy, honor killings, and murder of blasphemers.

Proponents of conservative-style détente often point out that modern-day Russia is not the Soviet Union, armed with an ideology that regards the capitalist West as the enemy. True. Yet especially in the last decade, Putin has actively sought to bolster his rule by giving it an ideological foundation explicitly hostile to free societies. This pseudo-conservative ideology positions Russia as the vanguard of what one might call an “illiberal international”: opposition to European- and American-style liberal democracy rooted in individual rights and limited government.

For all the flaws of the modern West, the free world is still worth defending. Partnership with a dictator whose agenda is to make the world safe for autocracy is bad not only from a moral standpoint but from a geopolitically realist one. Some have cited the West’s alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler as a model for present policies. But that alliance, formed in a far more desperate situation than the one we face today, was followed by the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, the Cold War, and decades of global U.S.-Soviet hostilities whose consequences survive today and include international terrorism. What disastrous legacy will friendship with Putin’s Russia leave decades from now?

Cathy Young is a columnist for Newsday and a contributing editor to Reason.