Putin's Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

12/16/2016
Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine
AP/GettyImages/PoliticoIllustration
THEFRIDAYCOVER
PutinsRevenge
Humiliatedbythe1990s,RussiasstrongmanisdeterminedtowinColdWar2.0.
Hemaybesucceeding.
ByMICHAELCROWLEY|December16,2016
wenty years before Vladimir Putin began his ingenious campaign to influence the
U.S. presidential election, his predecessor as Russias president stood on a dark
street near the White House. In his underpants. Looking for a pizza.
It was September 1994, and Boris Yeltsin was in Washington for a state visit with his new
friend, President Bill Clinton. The Soviet Union had collapsed just three years earlier, and a
relationship was blossoming between the U.S. and Russia, one that held the promise of
burying decades of hostility. Russias abrupt transition from communist dictatorship was
chaotic, but a fragile democratic process and nascent capitalism were taking hold. U.S.
officials entertained visions of a Western-friendly Russia as a partner in a stable and secure
Europe. To that end, Clinton and Yeltsin had built an alliance on the shared goal of
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/russia-putin-hack-dnc-clinton-election-2016-cold-war-214532
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preventing a revanchist security state from taking power in Moscow and returning the U.S.
and Russia to a Cold War state of hostility. During one early visit to Moscow, Clinton told a
young audience to choose hope over fear" and "find a new definition of Russias
greatness."
Rarely had an American and a Russian leader been so chummy. Clinton and Yeltsin were
buddies, two lovable rascals with big appetites. But something else was different as well:
For the first time in decades, Russia was the obvious number two in the relationship.
Stripped of its Iron Curtain puppet states, its economy in tatters and its military breaking
down, Russia was a shrinking, messy place. And its president was becoming an
embarrassment. A presumed alcoholic, Yeltsin would often lose his balance in public,
sending aides scurrying to prop him back up. In one slurred telephone conversation with
Clinton, the Russian proposed that the men hold a secret meeting on a submarine.
But nothing could top that fall night in 1994. While staying at Blair Housethe guest
residence for visiting foreign dignitaries across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House
Yeltsin slipped past his security, stumbled down the stairs and stepped onto the street.
Pizza! Pizza! he blurted at the Secret Service agents who intercepted him. (There are two
versions of the story: In one that Clinton himself told to a biographer, Yeltsin is on the
street; in another, he's stopped before he makes it out the door.)
The next day, Clinton and Yeltsin had a long and friendly meeting. Their fates were
connected: Clinton wanted a friendly and stable Russia as a foreign policy success story.
Yeltsin needed American money to avoid a total economic collapse. When Clinton raised
plans to expand the NATO alliance into eastern Europe, Yeltsin didnt object. The men even
agreed that Russia itself might one day join NATOa concept that seems downright
ludicrous today, as Putin threatens the alliance with nuclear exercises. At a press
conference afterwards, the two men clowned around. Yeltsin was in an antic state that one
White House aide dubbed high jabberwocky, while Clinton himself doubled over with
laughter at his Russian friends playfulness.
Looking back today, the scene is infused with almost unbelievable optimism: the idea that
the U.S. and Russia could be military allies, with one helping the other to grow an open and
truly democratic society.
But for one man in Russia, it symbolized a profound humiliation. Vladimir Putin was then a
minor public official, serving as a deputy city functionary in St. Petersburg after ending his
career as a KGB agent, withdrawn from East Germany after its communist government fell.
The notion that the Soviet state in which hed been raised and trained, whose demise he
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once called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century, had become a client state
with a leader who was a source of Western amusement was stinging. It was a sting he never
forgot, and when Putin met with Russian troops shortly after he took power on the first day
of the new millennium, January 1, 2000, he told them their mission included restoring
Russias honor and dignity.
He sees the 1990s as one long period of humiliationdomestically and internationally,
says James Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University
and a former top Russia official on Clintons national security staff. From Putins
standpoint, the Bill and Boris show was basically Boris saying yes to everything Bill
wantedand that was the U.S. basically defining the order of the world and what Russias
place in it could be, and that Russia was too weak to do anything but go along.
Yeltsins drunkenness symbolized the self-loathing shambles to which the former
superpower had been reduced. Russia was a defeated nation. It had lost the Cold War, and
along with it millions of square miles of territory, as imperial possessions dating to the
czarist era declared their independence. The countrys economy collapsed, impoverishing
most everyone except the insiders who looted public assets. Alcoholism and prostitution
boomed. Life expectancy shrank.
Meanwhile, Americas influence only grew.Bill Clinton began an eastward expansion of
NATO and bombed the former Yugoslavia. American economic experts flew to Moscow to
provide advice on democracy and economics, pressing for shock therapy in the Russian
economy that delivered painful jolts but little gain. Clinton even did his best to influence
Russian politics, throwing his support to a deeply unpopular Yeltsin, who used his ties to
the U.S.and its economic aidto narrowly escape political defeat in 1996.
Today, as the U.S. grapples with a Russia with resurgent global ambitions, with a Kremlin
that hacks our emails, manipulates our newsand, according to the CIA, actively worked to
elect Donald Trumpits important to realize that for Putin, its not just a constant move
for advantage. Yes, Putin is pressing Russias current interests. But in scheming to defeat
Hillary Clinton, and by subjecting American democracy itself to Russian influence, he is
also closing a loop opened in part by the Clintons 20 years ago. Putin cant undo Russias
Cold War defeat by America. But he can avenge it. And in Donald Trumpthe man who
defeated Hillary Clinton and seems ready to deal with Putin on terms that few other
American politicians would countenancehe hopes he has found a willing partner.
Says Strobe Talbott, a Russia specialist who served as deputy secretary of state under Bill
Clinton: He basically wants to make Russia great again.
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***
Yeltsinsramshacklerulelasted until the end of the 1990sa period in which Russia
both endured a massive financial crisis and saw the rise of a dominant new class of
oligarchs who had plundered the nations assets. (They included many of Putins friends,
and, some allege, the future president himself.) Americas experience stood in acute
contrast. During the '90s the U.S. enjoyed an economic boom, while emerging as the
worlds lone superpower after two successful NATO interventions in the Balkans, which left
Washington enchanted with its own military might.
On New Years Eve 1999, Yeltsinbattered by booze, multiple heart attacks and semi-open
rebellion by a Russian military furious over NATOs muscle-flexingabruptly resigned. He
appointed Putin, who had served until the previous August as head of the KGBs successor
organization, to succeed him as president. Bolstered by his lead role in a popular
crackdown on alleged terrorists in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Putin was narrowly
elected the following March.
Putin didnt challenge the U.S. right away. In 2000 Russia was too weak for a return to
confrontation, its military still a hollow shell, and distracted by the brutal Chechnya
campaign. In fact he and George W. Bush got off to a chummy start, with the president
famously declaring after their first meeting in June 2001 that he looked into Putins eyes
and was able to get a sense of his soul. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Putin was
the first world leader to call George W. Bush, with whom he hoped to partner against
Islamic terrorismPutins label for what others called a Chechen independence movement.
The Bush-Putin relationship deteriorated for many reasons. But one of them, ironically,
was a charge of election interference. Putin was furious when Washington backed a
popular, pro-Western movement challenging the outcome of Ukraines 2004 presidential
election. He lashed out at what he called U.S. interference in a former Soviet republic that
had long been a possession of the Russian empire. The U.S. was pursuing a dictatorship of
international affairs, Putin said, disguised with beautiful pseudo-democratic
phraseology.
Putin saw another kind of political agenda in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, with
which he did battle over a territorial dispute in August 2008. In a television interview he
implied that the Bush administration had goaded Georgias Western-friendly government
into a fight.
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The suspicion would arise that someone in the United States created this conflict on
purpose to stir up the situation and to create an advantage for one of the candidates in the
competitive race for the presidency in the United States, Putin told CNN at the time. They
needed a small victorious war.
Some Russia experts and U.S. officials call Putins increasingly public grievances about
America a contrivance a narrative to support what the Russian-born journalist Arkady
Ostrovsky, in his recent book TheInventionofRussia, calls Putins restoration ideology.
By this line of thinking, Putin has sold nationalism and militarism to his public to cover for
a weak economy highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of its oil exports. It was this
atmosphere of hostility that a newly elected Barack Obama sought to cool with his Russia
reset, a mission led by his secretary of state: Hillary Clinton. Whatever Clinton thought
she might accomplish, she couldnt have imagined what it would eventually mean for her
own political future.
***
Joining her husband for his first state visit to Russia in January 1994, Hillary Clinton had a
bumpy flight into Moscow. As her motorcade hurtled into the city, Clinton felt queasy, and
searched in vain for an improvised barf bag in her limousine. No dice. I bent my head
over, she later recalled in her memoir LivingHistory, and threw up on the floor.
On a personal level, though, Clinton got off on the right foot. She, too, bonded with Yeltsin
who, somewhat oddly, told her at one dinner that he kept a photo of the first lady in his
office that he looked at every day. During her years in the Senate, Clintonpreoccupied
like most of Washington by Iraq and terrorismspent little time thinking about Russia.
During one 2008 primary debate with Obama she struggled to pronounce the name of the
countrys new president, Dmitry Medvedev, adding an embarrassed whatever afterwards.
Once she took the job of secretary of state in 2009, Clinton was charged with Obamas
reset policy, which sought common ground with Russia as a step toward melting the frost
that had settled over the relationship in the late Bush era. Issues like nuclear arms control
and a stable Afghanistan could be the building blocks of a new and stronger relationship,
the thinking went. Obamas optimism was based in part on the fact that the relatively
moderate Medvedev had succeeded Putinforced by a term-limits law to surrender the
presidency. Putin, however, assumed the job of prime minister and retained far more
behind-the-scenes power than U.S. officials had anticipated.
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As secretary of state, Clinton played into Putins long-held anxieties about the U.S.all of
which were echoes of the American policies launched during her husbands presidency, and
the boozy Bill-and-Boris show of the 1990s.
One was Putins belief that America blithely staged military interventions around the world
with little regard for internationalor at least Russianopinion. Hillary Clinton had been a
supporter of the 2003 Iraq War and Obamas 2011 intervention in Libya. Putin opposed
both those campaignsand, as a paranoid autocrat, particularly resented Washingtons
record of regime-change policies. It didnt help that the Clinton name already reminded
Russian officials of the 1990s U.S.-led NATO interventions in the Balkans, which many
hardliners considered to be outrageous Western aggression against their Slavic brothers.
Related was Hillary Clintons enthusiasm for NATOs further expansion into Eastern
Europe. That process was based on the well-founded idea that Eastern Europe needed
indeed, was asking forprotection from Russia aggression. But Russias military
establishment treated it as a slow-rolling invasion of their sphere of influence.
This reaction, too, had its roots under Bill Clinton. An expanded NATO would help ensure
democracy, prosperity and stability across Europe, he believed. Moscow took a sharply
different view. After one 1994 summit at which Yeltsin gave Bill Clinton his blessing to the
addition of new NATO membersincluding Poland and Hungary, both former Soviet
satellitesa communist newspaper fumed about the capitulation of Russian policy before
NATO and the U.S. One of Yeltsins main political opponents said he had allowed his
friend Bill [to] kick him in the rear. He compared the agreement to the treatment of
Germany at Versailles after World War Ia recurring theme among Russian officials since
the Cold Wars end.
Some of Bill Clintons top advisers correctly predicted that NATO expansion would produce
a backlash in Moscow, and would create a handy narrative for would-be nationalists to
posture against the West. Clintons secretary of defense, William Perry, told POLITICO this
summer that he considered resigning over the issue out of concern for its effect on U.S.Russia relations. But Clinton pressed ahead, kicking off a process that added a dozen new
members over the next 20 years, from the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
through Eastern Europe (the Czech Republic and Romania) and into the former Yugoslavia
all places where Russia had once enjoyed uncontested influence.
As Obama kept the NATO train rolling, his secretary of state was fully on board. There can
be no question that NATO will continue to keep its doors open to new members, Clinton
said in February 2010.
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Whatever the real-world effect on Russias interests, it felt like a provocation to the
Kremlin. NATO enlargement didn't actually harm Russia. It didn't pose a security risk,
says James P. Rubin, a former spokesman in Bill Clintons State Department. It only made
Russian elites feel bad, and made them feel that their great power status was somehow
weakened.
Among those elites was Putin, for whom NATOs expansion fit with the 1990s-humiliation
narrative. In a recent interview with the filmmaker Oliver Stone, Putin acknowledged that
Russia reacts to the alliances expansion emotionally, adding that Russia is forced to take
countermeasures against it. That is, to aim our missile systems at those facilities which
we think pose a threat to us, Putin explained.
***
ForPutin, the last way Hillary Clinton stoked resentments about the end of the Cold War
might have been the most important. Clintons reset policy briefly improved relations
between Washington and Moscow. But Putin was still resentful about Bush-era U.S.
political influence in Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics. Putin saw
steadily rising American funding for civil society and democracy programs in Europe,
Central Asia and Russia itself as a form of subversion.
As secretary of state, Clinton liked to talk about those kinds of soft power programs as a
way to bolster American influence. The Kremlin also saw her as a fellow traveler of
neoconservatives, who believe that Americas has a global calling to push a foreign policy
guided by democracy and human rights promotion.
But it wasnt until December 2011 that Putin came to see Hillary Clinton as a direct threat
to his power. That was when unusually large protests appeared in the frigid streets of
Moscow. Though sparked by allegedly rigged parliamentary elections, the demonstrations
morphed into something more, with shouts of Putin is a thief! and Russia without
Putin. Putin had seen nothing like it since first coming to power more than a decade
earlier. For an autocrat and former spy who U.S. officials call both paranoid and rightfully
conscious that a sudden loss of power could land him in jail or worse, it was a dire threat.
And in Putins view, Clinton piled on. She offered supportive words about the protests,
expressing concerns about the parliamentary elections and saying the U.S. supports the
rights and aspirations of the Russian people. To Western ears, it was boilerplate prodemocracy talk, not exactly a call to arms against the government in Moscow. But Putin
treated it that way. He fumed that Clinton had sent a signal to the protesters and accused
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the U.S. of backing election observers who, he said, had a subversive agenda. We need to
safeguard ourselves from this interference in our internal affairs and defend our
sovereignty, Putin said.
Some U.S. officials believed that Putinlike so many autocrats who finger foreigner
provocateurs for domestic unresthad found a handy political villain in Clinton. But
Clinton herself came to believe he was out for vengeance, as she told donors at a closeddoor event on December 15. And other Russia experts believe Putin was genuinely
infuriated.
He was incensed, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Moscow Center at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. The State Department became more sinister in the
eyes of the Russian media than the CIA was during the Cold War.
***
Putinwonthatelection, and his return to the presidency in 2012along with a political
crackdown that began around the same timetroubled U.S. officials. But the Obama
administration was slow to detect Putins new assertiveness. After Mitt Romney warned
during the 2012 presidential campaign that Russia was Americas top geopolitical foe,
Barack Obama quipped in one debate with Romney that [t]he 1980s are now calling to ask
for their foreign policy back, because the Cold Wars been over for 20 years.
But Romney was onto something. Putin hadn't given up his fight. He shifted his attention
from domestic political intrigue to exercising Russian power abroadand restoring Russia
to what he considers its rightful place on the global stage.
After another pro-Western uprising in Ukraine, Putin seized the countrys Crimean
peninsula. He supported a pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, where
combat has left nearly 10,000 people dead. And his unexpected military intervention in
Syria, Moscows longtime chief ally in the Middle East, boxed in Obama; it has recently left
him looking impotent as Russian forces join up with Syrians regime in a vicious campaign
to drive rebel forces from Aleppo.
In a March 2014 address shortly after claiming Crimea, Putin made clear that he was reestablishing Russias place in the global order. He said the world had to accept the obvious
fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs. Like other
countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and
respected. Translation: Russia would no longer be seated at the kids table while
Washington dictated world events.
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Increasingly, it has become clear that another foreign nation where Russia has exercised its
new influence is the United States itself, where Hillary Clintons campaign was beset for
months by a steady flow of stolen emailshacked, according to U.S. intelligence officials,
by agents of the Kremlin, likely at Putins personal direction.
Its impossible to measure the precise effect of the leaked emails on Clintons candidacy.
But her defeat was unquestionably a win for Putin, who will soon greet an American
president leading what could be the most Russia-friendly administration in U.S. history.
Putin sent Donald Trump his congratulations within an hour of Clintons concession. And
when word of Trumps election reached the Russian Duma, spontaneous applause broke
out in the room.
And why not? Trump has questioned NATOs value and relevance, and raised doubts about
whether he will guarantee the defense of its most vulnerable members, including the Baltic
statespositions no American president has ever so much as entertained. He has suggested
he would consider removing sanctions imposed over Ukraine and perhaps even recognize
Crimea as part of Russia, despite bipartisan revulsion at the idea in Congress.
This is not the future Bill Clinton had hoped for two decades ago. He foresaw a rejuvenated
Russiabut one that would be integrated into Europe, with a blossoming democracy, a free
market, and a contributor to stability and security there. Instead the opposite has
happened: Russia has become a repressive security state that is working to undermine
Western democracy while it rattles a nuclear saber at NATO.
For all his bare-chested-on-horseback posturing, Putins Russia is still beset by problems.
Its economy remains stunted, hobbled in part by U.S. and European sanctions over
Ukraine. Russia experts and U.S. officials say Moscow remains deeply insecure over its
place in the world. But there is also a new optimism in the Kremlin, they sayparticularly
now that America, perhaps with Russian assistance, has elected Trump.
I think Russia has bounced back since the end of the Cold War, said Trenin. Russia is a
rare major power that has bounced back after a historical defeat." Trenin wouldnt go so far
as to say that the country that lost the Cold War has now managed to win the aftermath.
But, he said: Russia is getting back on its feet as a major power.
Whatever else Trump augurs for the world, its clear what he means for Russia: His surprise
victory ended the Clintons long run at the center of American power, and his avowed
respect for the autocratic Putin marks a decisive recovery from the embarrassment and
second-tier status that has needled the Kremlin leader for two decades.
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Its hard to imagine anyone could have foreseen this reversal 15 years ago, but there were
inklings. During Bill Clintons last visit with Yeltsin, at the Russians dacha outside Moscow
in June 2000, Clinton shared his concerns about Putin, the former KGB man emerging
from the shadows. He already seemed to realize something might be slipping away.
Youve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. Im not sure Putin
has that, Clinton said, according to Talbott. Clinton added that he had been lucky to have
Yeltsin as a partner.
In the car afterward, Clinton turned to Talbott. I think were going to miss him, he said.
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Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

Putins Revenge - POLITICO Magazine

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