Putin's shell game

In foreign affairs, our new president-elect seems to be utterly certain of at least one important factor - Donald Trump knows Russia. Especially, he believes he knows Vladimir Putin. They have communicated across dozens of cultures, countries, oceans, rivers and mountain ranges, and maybe psychically too, and perhaps through their tweets, and found each other not wanting.

In essence, they posture like two strongmen flexing their muscles in the mirror of the universe to show who's "boss," in New Yorkese or, "vozhd," as they popularly called Stalin in Russian. One can imagine Juan Peron stirring the masses in Argentina in the 1940s, or Generalissimo Francisco Franco inspiring his loyal Catholics before World War II, or even Comandante Fidel Castro entrancing "la masa" in the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana.

Caudillos all, at least in mind and imagination!

Please understand, we're not in the slightest comparing the American and the Russian to the worst of the strongmen of history, but one can compare them to the sort of strongman's club that others have formed in the past, believing they could rule the world together. An "axis" they called it in the 1940s.

The problem with strongmen and their "clubs" is that they are very good at talking and not very good (at all!) at actually DOING good, practical things.

The further problem here is that, based on most of his discourses about Mother Russia and Putin, The Donald has a vision of Russia and its dominant personality that bears scrutiny. At the moment, one can only conclude that The Donald sees Gospodin Putin as an admirable, strong leader and Russia as an assertive, successful nation.

One has to wonder: How long will it take the president-elect to realize how far that is from the truth, and how much damage will be done in the meanwhile?

Although he cossets mystery, Russian President Putin is about as mysterious as a pair of brass knuckles from the old Capone gang in Chicago. He IS a superior example, for sure, but an example of the old KGB men taught how to send innocent men and women to Siberia to die in the snow-covered mines. He takes his shirt off to impress us with his unforgettable manly chest, thumps it as he rides bareback across the tundra, and yes, praises Mr. Trump - but not because he admires him.

Perhaps the best analysis of where we are came in a blog by the reliably accurate Paul Goble, long the leading Soviet/Russian analyst for Radio Free Europe. Putin, he writes, "is not backing Donald Trump because they are soul mates, but rather as a means to a much larger end: the weakening of the U.S. and the destruction of key institutions of Western integration like NATO."

But, he warns: "As has been so often the case, Putin may overplay his hand and produce exactly the opposite of what he intends. Invading Ukraine led to the strengthening of NATO, not its disintegration; but he can be countered if and only if the goals he has are clearly understood and not obscured by the mistaken idea that he cares about personal ties as much as do many in the West."

In fact, the dirty little secret about Putin and his Russia today is that, contrary to how many in the West see that vast, melancholy land as a "power" to deal with, Russia is very close to being a failed state. All the indicators put our bare-chested Vladimir at the head of an increasingly Third Worldish nation, if it even can be said to be a nation anymore, with only 130 million people, many dying young from alcoholism and poverty, in that yet unstructured wilderness.

There is no space here to note all the indicators of negative change within Russia, but they were summed up by the excellent Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council, who wrote recently: "Russia may be making big moves on the world stage, but after two years of U.S. and European sanctions over Ukraine ... the country's fiscal forecast is bleak - and getting bleaker still. In fact, 2017 could turn out to be a disastrous year for Vladimir Putin's government, unless it fundamentally changes political course."

But there's the problem: Putin can't change course. In order for Russia to prosper, it would have to adopt some version of a market economy and control the vicious oligarchs who run the largest enterprises. He would have to become a working member of international organizations. But if he did those things, he would no longer be the shirtless wonder of the steppes, no longer the new tsar practicing how to put one over on the world, starting with Donald J. Trump.

If Putin can, for instance, get the new American president to lift some of the Western sanctions imposed over his invasion of Eastern Ukraine or convince him to renege on NATO promises and leave beleaguered Baltic states like Estonia unprotected from Moscow, he may be able to maintain the fiction prevalent in many, especially conservative, circles that Russia is a power to be reckoned with again.

The way The Donald deals with The Vladimir may well be an early indicator about his coming presidency.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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