Misery loves company. Under Vladimir Putin, Russian democracy has become a miserable fig leaf for kleptocratic and authoritarian rule. Putin has been highly successful in his search for company, helping to spawn mini-me regimes across much of the world. But even he must find it hard to fathom just how far the United States has moved towards him. The public spectacle of Donald Trump's obsequiousness in Helsinki on Monday must have been, for Putin, like being in fantasy version of The Jungle Book in which Trump's monkey king serenades him with I Wanna Be Like You.
Well, the dirty family secret is well and truly out now
In June 2016, the day after news broke that Russian military intelligence had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, Paul Ryan, speaker of the US House of Representatives and effective leader of the Republican Party, discussed Russia with his party’s members of congress. The House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was recorded saying: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
Mafia-like omerta
Dana Rohrabacher is a notoriously pro-Putin California Republican who was revealed this week as the congressman cited by the FBI as a contact of the alleged Russian agent Maria Butina. Donald Trump was then the party's most likely candidate for president. Ryan responded, not by denying what McCarthy had said or expressing alarm at the prospect of a US president under the influence of a hostile foreign power, but by urging a vow of mafia-like omerta: "No leaks...This is how we know we're a real family here."
Well, the dirty family secret is well and truly out now. Trump’s stunning servility as he stood beside Putin in Helsinki effectively confirmed that the president of the United States does and says pretty much what the president of Russia wants him to do, even if that means undermining his own security services. The implications of this – and of the Republican Party’s decision to allow a man suspected of treason to take power – are very far reaching. But from Putin’s point of view, the opportunity to lord it over Trump is a double coup. It is both an exquisite moment of national revenge and, for a man steeped in the KGB, one of the greatest intelligence operations of all time.
Great humiliation
Putin may be the ultimate beneficiary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he also experienced it as a great humiliation. He called it "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" and it is easy to understand why. Brought up on the belief that world domination was a zero-sum game being played out between two equal superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, he lived through the sudden collapse of those pretensions. There was indeed one winner of the cold war, and it was the US. The Soviet empire shrunk to be just Russia, its economy collapsed and it became, under Boris Yeltsin, an object of international pity. It was also subjected to economic "shock therapy" at the behest of the US and its western allies with the result that its public assets were grabbed by the most ruthless oligarchs. Putin emerged from this chaos as the strong man who could bring order and restore pride.
The order he has brought may be a stasis of repression, corruption, massive inequality and economic stagnation. But the pride part has been stunningly vindicated. It is not so long ago that Russians would have felt the smart of watching their buffoonish, bloated leader, Yeltsin, being patronised and played by American presidents who left no doubt about who was really in charge. Now, Putin patronises and plays a buffoonish American president while he, too, leaves no doubt about who is really in charge. Trump's squirming attempts on his return to the US to plead a childish excuse that he forgot the difference between "would" and "wouldn't" can only have added to Putin's pleasure at watching the US brought so low. It is the greatest revenge drama since Hamlet.
Thrilling
And for a career intelligence officer such as Putin, it must be even more thrilling to know that this has been achieved through an intelligence-led campaign. The only operation in history that seems comparable in its success and its geopolitical implications is the Soviets’ stealing of US nuclear secrets in the 1950s. That created (paradoxically) a kind of stability – the crazy equilibrium of mutually assured destruction. But Putin’s operation has created the most profound instability. In its broadest reach, which includes Brexit and interference in the democratic process throughout most of Europe, it has undermined almost all of Russia’s rivals, paralysing Britain, plunging the US into political chaos, and threatening the European Union, Nato and the international trade regime.
And it has all been so cheap and so easy. The Republicans played along, selling their patriotism for short-term political advantage. The internet and the culpable negligence of its dominant players such as Facebook, Twitter and Google provided the perfect tools both for the stealing and dissemination of secret material and for incendiary campaigns of mass disinformation. Far-right parties, and some on the far left, have been willing collaborators, either hoping to emulate Putin's nationalist authoritarianism or naively believing that any enemy of the western Establishment must be a friend of progress. In the greatest irony, libertarians like Julian Assange have been enthusiastic tools of a brutally repressive regime.
Sexual conduct
And Trump himself was an easy target. His sexual conduct would have made it easy to find him in compromising positions. The financial dealings that allowed him to pose as a multibillionaire were equally compromised.In the 1990s, there were just two tower blocks in New York where apartments and office units could be bought anonymously. One of them was Trump Tower and it was a honey pot for a Russian mafia looking to transform dirty roubles into clean dollars. Putin and his circle were (and are) top dogs in this kleptocratic oligarchy – there can be little doubt that they know a great deal about Trump’s real finances. A Trump presidency may always have been a long shot but the stake that Putin had to put up was tiny compared to the jackpot he has scooped.
The US has been weakened but Russia, in truth, is no stronger
Yet if Putin’s triumph is facile, it is also bleak. It is a scorched-earth victory without a real victor. The US has been weakened but Russia, in truth, is no stronger. Other than revenge, it has gained nothing. Putin’s great conquest is not a positive, productive accomplishment. It is a merely a triumph of contagion. It spreads Russia’s political sickness to Europe and the United States. The conditions that make Russia so miserable – elections that can’t be trusted, news that is composed of “alternative facts”, rule by a self-aggrandising oligarchy, media that are either compliant or excoriated as “enemies of the people”, a politics of toxic self-pity – are being successfully injected into the West.
‘Contagion’
As the historian of modern Europe Timothy Snyder puts it in his important recent book, The Road to Unfreedom: "This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia's problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalisation of Russia's syndromes by way of contagion." Misery loves company – Putin's plan will be fulfilled when he has dragged everyone else down into the hole of mafia statehood that he has dug for his own country. Trump is taking the US rapidly down into it. If Europe is not to follow, it will have to wake up to the political epidemic that Putin has started.