How well thought-out do you think this strategy was here?

At first they were using Trump mostly as an icebreaker. They expected Hillary to win and wanted to discredit her completely. Trump was the perfect vehicle for discrediting not only Hillary but the entire electoral system. Putin’s great advantage is that, unlike Soviet propagandists, he is not selling an ideology. I call him the merchant of doubt. His message is, We are shit, you are shit, and all of this is bullshit. What democracy? Trump was the ideal agent of chaos.

Trump kept saying that the election will be rigged. This was the Kremlin line. I think their main script was that Hillary would win in a close battle and #ElectionIsRigged would be a hashtag that would discredit her. She would be paralyzed. She’d be facing a Republican congress, which would immediately begin impeachment proceedings.

And then they saw that they had a shot at the jackpot. In its last stages, the campaign changed. They started using WikiLeaks when they sensed that they had a chance of getting Trump into office.

At the same time, Putin held his annual Valdai Club meeting for foreign experts on Russia, and that year it was designed to build bridges with the Hillary Clinton Administration they were anticipating.

Some things take time, even in a dictatorship. Valdai was planned ahead of time. And I’m not saying they had any certainty. Hillary was their main expectation. But they saw that they had a chance. They are card sharks. They stow an ace up their sleeve and keep playing the game.

Later, they thought that they may be able to pull off something even bigger. If you analyze what was happening between November and January, during the transition period, you will see that they were getting ready for a grandiose project. Henry Kissinger played a role. I think he was selling the Trump Administration on the idea of a mirror of 1972, except, instead of a Sino-U.S. alliance against the U.S.S.R., this would be a Russian-American alliance against China. This explains the Taiwan phone call. [In December, 2016, Trump spoke on the telephone with Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen, breaking decades of protocol and earning a rebuke from China.]

But it all went off the rails on December 29th, when Mike Flynn called the Russian Embassy. Flynn is a few weeks away from becoming the national-security adviser. And still he calls the Russian Ambassador. He calls to say, “Don’t do anything in response to the sanctions the United States has just imposed.” [The Russian foreign minister, Sergei] Lavrov has already announced that Russia will match the sanctions, Cold War–style: the U.S. has expelled thirty-five people and taken away two buildings, and we are going to do the exact same thing. And then Putin, effectively renouncing Lavrov, says, “You know what, we are starting a new life. We are not expelling anyone, and we are inviting American diplomats’ children to our New Year’s celebrations.”

A dictator can’t afford to look weak. He can act this way only if he is absolutely certain that Flynn is speaking for Trump. This means they trusted Flynn absolutely. The were sure that they were going to win in this situation.

Are you perhaps overestimating their intelligence? You are assuming that they had good reasons for trusting Flynn.

Let’s not underestimate Putin. He follows K.G.B. logic. Remember, when several countries expelled Russian diplomats, Putin went tit for tat. I think he even expelled a Hungarian. And yet he didn’t respond to the Americans that time. He was expecting to win big.

My conclusions come from looking at Kissinger’s trip to Moscow and, from what I see, his long-standing connections to Gazprom. It was obvious that China was being distanced and Trump was ready to give himself over to Putin. They were readying the ground for denouncing NATO Article 5. This is the picture I get when I add it all up.

So why did it go off the rails?

I think it was the F.B.I. They knocked Flynn out, and then it wasn’t going to work. [On January 12, 2017, the Washington Post reported that Flynn had called the Russian Ambassador. The report was apparently based on an intelligence leak—the F.B.I. had been listening in on Flynn’s conversations with the Ambassador.] It turned out that the American political system has a certain reserve of stability; ironically, this stability is currently guaranteed by the intelligence services and the Pentagon. While the Republican Party has given itself over to Trump, the institutions that were always suspected of dictatorial tendencies are the ones resisting dictatorship. I think that at that stage they opted for all-out sabotage.

And that was about the time when you decided to step in.

I realized that we had to set some of our disagreements aside, because the very framework in which we could have these disagreements was under threat. I recently read Churchill’s book about the interwar period, “The Gathering Storm.” He talks about how the Western world stood by and watched as the forces that led to the catastrophe grew in Germany, but also in the U.S.S.R. and Japan and Italy—they kept thinking that it would just dissipate.

How useful do you find comparisons to the nineteen-thirties?

Why wouldn’t they be useful? Historical comparisons are always contingent and can be slippery, but they are necessary because they enable us to understand the nature of mistakes. Everybody says, “How can you compare Putin to Hitler?” But which Hitler? The Hitler of 1936? Sure you can.

What are the similarities?

Hitler was a respectable politician in 1936. Attempts to boycott the Olympic Games in Berlin had failed. Everyone came. It’s important to remember that Hitler had not always been as he was in 1941. Any dictatorship, including the Stalinist one, is formed over time. It’s not a military coup. It’s a gradual press.

In 1935, when Hitler decided to take over the Saar Basin—perhaps if France had sent a military division there, things could have gone differently. A dictator never asks, “Why?” He asks, “Why not?” Putin is also annexing territories gradually. He tests the waters. He didn’t venture into Syria right away. The chemical attack in 2013 was a sort of test. It showed that he can intervene there.

Ukraine was also a test. [Immediately following the Olympic Games in Sochi, in February, 2014, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, occupying the Crimean Peninsula and establishing a puppet separatist regime in the eastern part of Ukraine.] That went over just fine. Putin’s dictatorship is different from twentieth-century dictatorships in that it is driven primarily by money. It’s not imperialism in its purest form. He doesn’t have the desire to attack and conquer everyone. He has no ideology. He sows chaos: break up NATO, break up the European Union, create chaos in America. In the end, he is concerned only with maintaining his own power, and his own power depends on demonstrating his might and uniqueness to his own guys, his own henchmen and cronies.

What do you think of comparisons between Trump and Putin?

Their backgrounds are different. Putin is not a public person; he is a K.G.B. agent. He is underhanded in everything he does. Trump acts openly and brazenly. Sure, he has to disguise things, but he does that by piling on lies and fake information. I think Trump envies Putin his ability to do things that Trump can’t do by definition. Putin doesn’t have to be concerned with the media or with parliament. Trump resents wasting his precious time on speaking to the press. And then he has to push things through, lobby for them—all that takes time. I think the way Trump acts around dictators comes from his feelings of a sort of inferiority: he’d like to be like them, but he can’t. If he is reëlected, it will be a tragedy—nothing will rein him in.