AP Photo Washington And The World Don’t Be Putin’s Useful Idiot In Donald Trump, the Kremlin sees not a fellow dealmaker, but an easy mark. Trump shouldn’t be fooled.

Leon Aron is resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

When Donald Trump looks at the man running the Kremlin, he sees a kindred spirit, a cold-blooded pragmatist who is just itching to sit across the table from the new leader of the free world and cut some deals. “I think I would get along very well with Vladimir Putin,” Trump said during the campaign, and he’s giving every indication that he meant it.

And since Trump’s stunning election victory, which electrified Russia’s political class, the country’s leaders have been signaling that the feeling is mutual. Alexei Pushkov, a deputy of the Federation Council — Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. Senate — and, until a month ago, chairman of the Duma Committee on International Affairs, tweeted on Nov. 10 that Trump “isn’t an ideologue, but a realist,” and expressed his hope that U.S.-Russia relations will blossom.


Never mind that Pushkov, before being rewarded by the Kremlin with a Duma seat in 2011, spent the previous 13 years hosting one of Russia’s most viciously anti-American and conspiratorial TV shows. It’s a new dawn, and his comments are part of a broader effort to persuade the incoming U.S. president to deal with Moscow by papering over Russia’s past and current policies — and to pave the way for a possible summit meeting shortly after Trump’s inauguration. The message: I’m a realist, you’re a realist, let’s talk.

In the Kremlin’s narrative, America’s inability to consider Russia’s national interests and traditional sensitivities— under Republican and Democratic administrations alike — is the problem. As soon as these deficiencies are corrected, presumably by Trump, Putin will deliver a more accommodating Russia, which will be ready to “work fast to repair relations with Washington,” as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov recently put it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Putin is the most ideological Russian leader since Stalin, and his foreign policy is profoundly influenced by unshakable convictions about Russia’s destiny, its relations with the West and his own historic mission.

An ardent Soviet patriot, Putin has called the end of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” — and he absolutely believes it. He has dedicated his life to correcting what he sees as a monstrously unjust turn of events, caused, in his eyes, by the West. His overarching agenda is to recover geopolitical assets lost in the Soviet collapse and to take revenge on Western powers, first and foremost the United States, for the perceived humiliation and misery that followed.

Putin’s favorite philosopher, Ivan Ilyn, whose book Наши задачи (Our Tasks) the Russian president assigned to regional governors to read during the 2014 Christmas break, believed that confrontation with the West is Russia’s fate because of the West’s relentless and perennial desire to destroy the Motherland. “Western nations don’t understand and don’t tolerate Russian identity,” Ilyin wrote. “They are going to divide the united Russian ‘broom’ into twigs to break those twigs one by one and rekindle with them the fading light of their own civilization.”

Putin views the entire post-Cold War order as profoundly inequitable, unfair to Russia and therefore “unacceptable,” as he put it in his speech during the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy. The main culprit, again, was the United States, which had “overstepped its national borders in every way.”

Seven years later, in the most important speech of his life, the March 18, 2014, address to the joint session of both houses of the Federal Assembly on the occasion of the annexation of Crimea, Putin accused the West of “ruling by the gun,” “wishing to drive Russia into a corner,” and, since at least the 18th century, constantly “deceiving” Russia and dealing “behind its back.” In the same vein, Putin saw the revolution in Ukraine as a CIA plot against Russia. In his December 2014 nationally televised news conference, he asserted that pro-Western Ukraine was “NATO’s Foreign Legion.” A year later, in the annual address to the Federal Assembly, he called Europe “neutered and barren.”

By contrast, Russia was a vibrant, multinational, and “unique” society, blessed by ethnic Russians, whose “great mission” was to “unite and bind this civilization.” As to Putin’s role in Russian history, his deputy chief of staff, undoubtedly with the boss’ permission, avowed, “If there is no Putin, there is no Russia.”

Directed from the Kremlin, the media propaganda campaign on national television has plunged Russia into anti-American hysteria and war paranoia, unseen since Stalin’s days. According to polls, most Russians believe that Russia is already engaged in a proxy war with the United States and a direct confrontation is possible, potentially resulting in World War III. But not to worry: Putin had his spokesman declare the boss “the defender of Russians wherever they live.”

As befits so grandiose a mission, during his 16 years in power, Putin has taken on a mythic public persona celebrated in the state-controlled Russian media. Scuba-diving in the Black Sea, he happens to find two sixth-century Greek amphorae. Playing hockey on his 63rd birthday last year, he scores all seven goals for his team. On a wildlife expedition in Siberia, he saves a camera crew from a tiger attack.

Americans laugh at these and other staged feats of Russian bravado, like the famous photos of a shirtless Putin on horseback. Even President Barack Obama, explaining last week why he didn’t do more to stop Kremlin-directed hacks of U.S. political institutions, mocked Russia as a sad, declining power. “They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate.”

But if this condescension was meant to assuage our fears, it has failed. There is nothing pitiful or funny about a country led by an unchallenged autocrat, in possession of more than 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons and in pursuit of a self-imposed personal historical mission to avenge perceived historical wrongs. The millions living in former Soviet states who view Russian revanchism as an existential threat — and fear the United States will abandon them — aren’t laughing.

In short, Trump should be wary of his new pal Vladimir Vladimirovich, whose determination to cement and extend the gains of the past few years is unyielding — be it in annexed Crimea and other former parts of Ukraine or the ruins of Aleppo, or in the unprecedented media and cyber attacks aimed at crippling Western democracies and scuttling the post-Cold War European security order.

Putin is not a deal maker. He is not a realist. He is a man driven by a set of beliefs he has consistently articulated for almost a decade, and a set of goals he is now poised to realize — unless Trump understands who he is up against.