In this statement, “unwitting” is the key word. Unlike some of Trump’s advisors and campaign team members, it is hard to imagine the Republican party nominee himself to have been recruited to work for Putin – or for anyone else for that matter. The same character flaws which Donald Trump has demonstrated on the campaign trail and which have prompted many people, including, unprecedentedly, the sitting US president, to declare him unfit for presidency – namely, boundless narcissism, lack of discipline and discretion, inability to listen to advice and so on – make him unfit to be a secret agent of any kind.
Vladimir Putin, a professional recruiter of spies and traitors, probably would have jumped on a chance to turn a nominee of a major US political party for real. Trump as a Russian agent would have been an even greater coup for Putin’s old Lubyanka outfit than the recruitment of Kim Philby, a high-level NKVD mole in UK intelligence.
Alas, it is not to be. The most convincing proof that Putin hasn’t yet actually recruited Trump is that we don’t know anything about it. Surely Trump would have bragged about it at one of his rallies, to the cheers of the flag-waving America-firsters among his fans.
If truth be told, there is no concrete evidence of a Trump-Putin connection. The point is that none is needed. Hitler was not Mussolini’s agent in any practical sense, but the two were birds of a feather. Mussolini initially thought that Hitler was a buffoon and started to take him seriously only after the Nazis scored a stunning victory in the 1930 election, garnering over 6 million votes and winning 107 seats in the Reichstag, Il Duce then tried to take Hitler under his wing – which obviously was a doomed project. But even though the two fascist dictators didn’t get along personally, they quickly found common ground and joined forces to back fellow-fascist Francisco Franco in Spain.
Trump and Putin come from markedly different backgrounds but they resemble each other in style and substance – as well as in their gut-level aversion to democratic politics and democratic politicians. Both are willfully ignorant and their management style is intuitive and impulsive. Neither likes to listen to advice and, when he makes an inevitable mistake, to admit it. They don’t correct their errors – they double up on them instead.
Trump is an expansive extrovert while Putin is much more reserved and secretive, but both are monumentally narcissistic, with a strong exhibitionist streak. They are not ideologically motivated – they lack education and knowledge to develop a consistent ideology – but they are instinctively populist, anti-liberal and autocratic. They show utter disrespect for laws, including their countries’ Constitutions. They only difference is that Putin rides roughshod over his country’s in practice while Trump only promises to do so if elected.
Mussolini was far from happy to see Hitler come to power in a larger, more powerful Germany. True, in the ensuing years Hitler repeatedly bailed Mussolini out after Italy’s military misadventures, including the ill-conceived invasion of Greece. Germany had to rescue the Italians in early 1941, which was one of the factors delaying the invasion of the Soviet Union by a crucial few weeks.
Putin has expressed his support for Trump, his surrogates have been openly rooting for him to win and Kremlin-linked hackers were allegedly responsible for breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s email servers. Trump’s clowning on the political stage has already paid great dividends to Putin – it has created turmoil in the United States, caused consternation among America’s allies and did reputational damage to Washington around the world.
However, if Trump actually wins, Putin may end up with a bad case of buyer’s remorse. It’s one thing for him to fete and patronize Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and quite another to have someone like Trump gain power in the United States. Trump may be a dirty old man like the other two, but he would then be leading a country whose power is far greater than Russia’s.. Contrary to what some analysts have been saying about the trained KGB operative Putin and neophyte Trump, America’s economic and military dominance mean that from the onset Putin will be a junior partner in this relationship.
There are other substantial risk in a Trump-Putin alliance. Trump is probably the only American leader who would agree to divvy up the world into Cold War-style spheres of influence – which has been Putin’s long-standing dream. Trump has already indicated that as president he would allow Russia a free hand in its ex-Soviet backyard.
Except the world has changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Both Russia and the United States increasingly look like 20th century powers. Vladimir Putin’s rule, marked by a massive pilfering and squandering of Russia’s resources and dismantling of social institutions, civil society, education, healthcare, etc., has put paid on any possibility of Russia’s future resurgence as a great power. The election of Donald Trump will probably mark the end of America’s political dominance, as well. The world now has a new and up-and-coming great powers, most notably China and India, which will not be happy by this kind of sweetheart arrangement between Moscow and Washington.
Back in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon used the China card to pressure the Soviet Union to allow the United States to hightail it out of Vietnam without losing face. Moscow was the main partner back then, while Nixon’s trip to Beijing a diversionary maneuver meant to blackmail Soviet leaders to come to the table. It is very different now – and a Putin-Trump alliance may find itself confronted by a resurgent and newly confident Beijing. For Putin, this may turn out to be too high a price to pay for having a mercurial, volatile and highly unpredictable buddy in the White House.
