In the fall of 2012, I was in Moscow, at the embassy of a small Middle Eastern country. I was writing an article for The New York Times Magazine about an oligarch in Baku who wanted to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. I had been told the ambassador and the oligarch had met in the ‘90s at a cocktail party in London and were friends, sort of. The ambassador served sugar cookies and very strong coffee in miniature porcelain cups, which is what they serve when you interview ambassadors, from the Middle East and elsewhere. He had a kindly gaze and gravelly baritone. He was well tailored. Naturally, he spoke with an Oxbridge lilt. He seemed more like a caricature of an ambassador than an ambassador. He asked me who was going to win the election in America. I told him I had no idea. It was raining in Moscow, and the price of a barrel of oil was still north of $100. For 10 or 15 minutes, the ambassador spouted platitudes about the new global order, Obama, Putin, the Turks, the Azeris, a pipeline, someone he’d met at Davos, his favorite soccer team. He quoted Metternich at least once. Finally, he said, May we transition to—how do you say?—deep background?, which seemed a funny way of saying, Can I be honest with you? I nodded, and he said, About America, I want to say something: Every four or eight years, you elect a new president, and the president is like a virgin who must be educated in, you can say, the world. We like America because you are friendly and believe in nice things, but the Russians understand how the world works. View more The caricature of the artless American, like that of the ambassador, has its basis in truth. The first three American presidents of the post-Cold War era were propelled by a sometimes unsophisticated vision of how the world ought to be; they made deals or assumptions they shouldn’t have, but they also tinkered and toiled behind the scenes. They trusted, and they verified. On balance, they were not as adept at handling the Russians as their predecessors were with the Soviets, but they were not a disaster. Now, with the election of Donald Trump, the tone has shifted, and the basic assumptions—about the competence of our elected officials and the things they might say to their counterparts in Moscow—feel misplaced. Who invites Russian officials into the Oval Office and accidentally discloses top-secret Israeli intelligence? Who engages in a tête-à-tête with the Russian president without his own interpreter, without someone to make sure America is not getting played? Suddenly, the caricature feels less like a perversion or elongation of the truth than a terrifying new reality. The guilelessness of the Trump campaign has already yielded enough scandals to keep the intelligence community busy for years. Take, for example, Donald Trump Jr.’s June 9 meeting at Trump Tower, which has all the trappings of an intelligence operation. There was, alongside Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, a Russian lawyer, who was said to have compromising information about Hillary Clinton but allegedly only wanted to talk about the Magnitsky Act and the issue of Russian adoption. There was an alleged ex-Soviet spy, Rinat Akhmetshin, who works as a Russian-American lobbyist, and, representing the Russian oligarch who orchestrated the meeting, Irakly Kaveladze, who has been accused by congressional investigators of a scheme to launder $1.4 billion of Russian and Eastern European money through U.S. banks. (Kaveladze, who said he attended to serve as a translator, has denied allegations of any wrongdoing.) Trump Jr. has said that “no details or supporting information” about Clinton were ever actually offered, and that the lawyer “had no meaningful information.” Video: The Trump Administration’s Ties to Russia It’s hardly the spycraft of le Carré, or even of Clancy. Even so, the Russians must have been astounded at the ham-fisted ways in which the Trump campaign sought to leverage its relationship with Moscow, and the clumsy attempts to cover its tracks afterward—all of which has made it virtually impossible for the White House, as Trump has conceded, to actually build stronger ties with Russia. Trump has said of the alleged interference in the 2016 election that if Putin “did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it.” It’s hard to say the same of the Trumps, for whom former C.I.A. director John Brennan’s warning that “frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late” may yet serve a fitting epitaph.

One wonders: are they really that dumb? Are they really so easily manipulated? Perhaps more important, are the Russians really so much better at espionage and counterintelligence that they could successfully infiltrate a presidential campaign, meddle in an American election, and hope to get away with it? I once asked the late spymaster Tennent Bagley about the relative sophistication of Russia’s intelligence services. We were in Bagley’s study, in his apartment, in Brussels, surrounded by photographs of his father and brothers—all of them former admirals. In the ‘60s, Bagley ran counterintelligence for the C.I.A. against the Soviets. He was smart, discerning, principled; he spoke many languages; he read widely. He was best known for his involvement in the Yuri Nosenko affair. Nosenko had been a K.G.B. agent who, in early 1964, with Bagley’s help, had defected to the West. But Bagley soon came to the conclusion that Nosenko was not a genuine defector but a double agent who had burrowed his way into the C.I.A. and was funneling sensitive information back to Moscow. We’ll probably never know, nor agree on what we do know. Nosenko spent three-and-a-half years in solitary confinement at a C.I.A. training site near Williamsburg, Virginia, and was subsequently cleared of any allegations of spying for the Russians. He lived the rest of his life “somewhere in the South,” as the newspaper obits put it, and died in 2008 at the age of 80. Bagley died in 2014. He was haunted, until the end, by Nosenko and, really, by Nosenko’s capacity to persuade so many Americans at the highest levels of government to trust him. When I asked Bagley what would have happened had the proverbial tables been turned, he laughed. Everyone knew the answer. Any American suspected by the Soviets of being a mole would have been shot or exiled or locked in a Siberian hole. Just to be safe. The Russians would not have been bothered by things like justice or the truth. They would never have trusted, and this would have made them worse human beings and better spies. This was characterological. It was central to the Russian condition. It was not a result of Sovietism but an enabler of it. It was born of a peasant-like distrust, violence, rot, a bloody, sweaty, mud- and manure-splattered wariness. The Americans were not made this way. They could study the ways of other people, but they could not be them. The best Americans, the ones who grasped the cognitive-cultural oceans separating America and Russia, entered into combat with Moscow with a great chariness. They understood that, when it came to subterfuge, they were at a disadvantage. They tried to inoculate themselves. All this seems to have been lost on Trump, his retinue of loyalists and hangers-on, and the odd assortment of tertiary characters, like Russian recruitment target Carter Page, who peopled Trump’s campaign. These are not the best Americans. They are nihilists à la Steve Bannon, “idiots” like Page, neophytes like Trump Jr., or opportunists like Manafort. They have acquired, over many months of politicking and quasi-governing, the language of the patriot without understanding what they are saying. Not only that. Their pretend patriotism, their ignorance of American history, its poetries and injustices, its constant existential confrontation with itself, leaves them especially susceptible to the allure of the authoritarian. There is a logic and clarity to the authoritarian, with his shiny toys and Potemkin bullet trains and airport terminals. The authoritarian knows how to put on a good show, and these people love to be dazzled. They are vulnerable to Putin because they admire him while not understanding where he comes from nor who he is. They have no idea whom they are doing combat with. They do not even know that they are engaged in battle, and that the battle is already won.