RS: Yeah, in a sense it's not, though. In a sense, if you think of the U.S. as an imperial power that has adopted the conceit that we represent the major civilizing force in the world, and the center of democracy and freedom, and we have pretty much a monopoly on any good ideas, and so forth -- and can do no wrong -- that would be a pretty good summary of the dominant mindset at this point. It is consistent with the period you studied, McCarthyism. And the contradiction of the original Cold War, not the current Cold War with Russia, is it was based on an obvious, fraudulent notion that communism was internationalist rather than nationalist. Now, you've written some very important books about that, Stephen Cohen. And the irony is, the Sino-Soviet dispute was a reality before the Chinese communists even came into power; Yugoslavia had broken away, there weren't any two communist governments in the world that really were on friendly terms. And yet, the idea that somehow as you point out, even being an ex-communist, the hold is so powerful, it's like belonging to some weird religious sect. Now, the basic question I want to ask you as a professional, as a leading academic, how do your colleagues, how do the experts consistently get this wrong? How did they not know that Russian communism, like Chinese communism, like Vietnamese communism, was an intensely nationalist phenomenon?
SC: Well, I was lucky. I grew up in Kentucky; I went to Indiana University, and at Indiana I met a man whom I think was certainly the greatest Russia expert -- Russianist, generally -- of his generation, Robert C. Tucker. And Bob, my mentor and then my friend at Princeton for many years, always saw Russian communism in Russia's own tradition, and as a form of Russian nationalism. So he was never taken in by this sense that Russian communism had this appetite to control the world. It had an appetite to make Russia great again, so to speak; that was its mission, certainly after Lenin. Because after Stalin destroyed essentially the founding fathers of the Bolshevik revolution, it wascommunism, Russian communism, which was kind of a misnomerwas transformed into a new ideology. And state nationalismthat's the important point, state nationalismwas at the pivot. And that is a very long Russian tradition. So now let's flash to Putin. He's hated in this country as was no communist leader in my lifetime. After Stalin, certainly. And I think the poisons of anti-Putinism has become merged with the loathing for Trump into some kind of toxic phenomenon that is crippling American diplomacy, certainly Trump himself, and is a grave danger, and is not going to end with Trump. I mean, we're going to have to figure a way to overcome it.
But Putin comes to power in nineteen-ninety, ah, in 2000, excuse me, basically the head of a ruined Russia; the decade after the end of the Soviet Union was ruination in Russia. So Putin's first mission is to pull Russia back together. And you could argue he did so in too many authoritarian ways; historians will have to sort that out. But for Putin, the restoration of Russia as a stable, prosperous order at home and a great world power abroad, that was his historic mission, written on the wind, so to speak. It could be no other way. If his name wasn't Putin, the mission would have been the same. What happened at this moment is that in our elites, who make our foreign policies and run our media, after the weak, needy, alcoholic Yeltsin who governed Russia, semi-governed, president of Russia during the 1990s, they had gotten used to a subservient Russia. At most, a junior partner of the United States. So if we bombed Serbia, as Clinton did in 1999, Russia's traditional little allyso what. Russia grumped, but it couldn't do anything about it. And if we expanded NATO from Berlin all the way to Russia's borders, as has now happened, even though we promised the last Soviet leader we would never do that -- we have the documents, that's not an urban legend, it was all clear -- Russia could do nothing about it. And suddenly comes Putin, who says enough is enough. And he says something very simple, publicly at international security conferences, when Senator McCain and others were there. He said the era of the one-way road is over. You will now deal with Russia as you do with all other great powers. We will make concessions and you will make concessions. It will be a two-way road.
And the hating on Putin, I think, grows out of the assumption -- you allude to it, Bob -- that after the end of the Soviet Union, one country would decide the so-called world order. Liberalit wasn't liberal, it wasn't much of an order, and it wasn't world. But we said this is an order, and it's our order, and then Putin says no, there are a lot of countries that have a right to say how the world is structured, and Russia's one of them. That was such a shock, such a disappointment. I can give you one example, and I'll quit. Nicholas Kristof, an influential columnist for the New York Times, wrote very early on, I think within 18 months to two years after Putin came to power, that he was gravely disappointed because -- now listen to what he wrote -- Putin did not turn out to be a sober Yeltsin. That is, Yeltsin had limited utility because he was drunk and sick. What they wanted was Yeltsinism without Yeltsin, with a sober leader. And Putin was anything but that. And since then, the sense that America doesn't have a free hand any longer -- and it's not just Russia, it's China, it's the BRICs nations, and many others -- but I don't think our establishment has ever gotten used to this reality. And a lot of the catastrophes we see, including the wars, is a kind of Don Quixote tilting at these windmills with war, because the world's not conforming to what Washington thinks it ought to be. Nor will it ever, any longer.
RS: [omission for station break] We're back with Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen, and we're talking about the "War With Russia?" with a question mark, Stephen Cohen's book. There is nothing controversial in your book, with all due respect. And yet you're being attacked all over the place. Why? Because to use Al Gore's phrase, you're dealing with an inconvenient truth. And the inconvenient truth, as I see it, is it's convenient for the Democrats to blame Putin for their failure in the elections. So the inconvenient truth is Hillary lost the election because she was a lousy candidate and represented conservative politics at a time when populism was what the country needed, and Bernie Sanders was defeated. We've also got a case now of Trumpwashing. Whatever the U.S. has done, the torture of prisoners, the invasion of countries irrationally, anything -- we have Trumpwashing. You know, you mention Trump, everything else goes. So I want to turn to Katrina here, because it seems to me the left is at the weakest position that it's been in my lifetime. And I've been around a long time. We don't have a peace movement. So if Trump does something sensible, like trying to negotiate with North Korea instead of invading, and doing it in a country that we also leveled, like we leveled Vietnam, and he's there, we don't see Trump as a peacemaker, we don't -- you can't even read a straight news story on AP or anywhere else without every other paragraph contradicting whatever the president said.
KVH: So, let me take issue with you, though. I don't think the progressive left is at its weakest moment in terms of bold domestic issues. You know, the Green New Deal, $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all was just introduced in the House today. I do think Congress, there are some good people like Representative Ro Khanna of California, who has, for the first time since 1973 there's been an invocation of the War Powers Act around Yemen. And I think that's important, that Congress find some way to reassert its role in matters of war and peace. I do think that there is the beginning of an understanding that we need to build -- maybe it's transpartisan, but a transpartisan foreign policy of restraint and realism. And there are people who are beginning to work on that. It is a minority position, and sadly the leading candidates I admire at the moment, [Elizabeth] Warren and Bernie Sanders, have to some extent bought into this new Cold War. Bernie Sanders talks about an axis of authoritarianism.
No one is for authoritarianism, but the way he's defining it is in sync with the foolhardy national defense strategy, which has, as you know in the last months, decided America's main enemies are Russia and China. Not the global War on Terror, which had never been a war. So there's a lot of work to be done, Bob, but I do think that this election, 2020, you're going to see people moving ideas forward on the foreign policy front that will not be Trumpian, but will be first principle of restraint, realism, anti-intervention, not policing the world, and understanding that endless war is a disaster. By the way, how do you democratize our foreign policy and reduce a crazily bloated defense budget if you're on a Cold War footing? I would like to ask the candidates that question.
RS: You don't, and that's my whole point.
KVH: But I do think there's an enormous energy and climate crisis. And Jerry Brown, who's now chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former governor of California, I think is committed, as are others working with him, to fuse that energy, which is very much a generational energy, to build it out into a peace and justice movement as well. And I think that would be -- anti-nuke, anti-nuke, anti-climate crisis. I think there's possibility in that.
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