It turns out that insulting the president’s wife is a bad idea.
Just after Donald Trump’s November victory, Russian state media broadcast racy photos from Melania Trump’s modeling career while the presenters stifled giggles. This was not well calculated to win over the Slovenian-American, who naturally sympathizes with Ukraine. As her husband remarked last month, “I go home and tell the first lady, ‘I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She says, ‘Oh really? Another [Ukrainian] city was just hit.'” Trump brought to the Alaska summit a letter from Melania to Vladimir Putin essentially asking him to stop kidnapping and butchering Ukrainian children.
This reveals how badly Putin has squandered the opportunities made available to him in January. Trump is not the Russian stooge that some of the more feverish swamp dwellers imagine him to be, but he clearly wanted to reach an accommodation with Putin. The Russian dictator is happy to flatter Trump personally, but his desire to humiliate the country that Trump leads won out. Russia is suffering because of it.
Although Trump realizes that Ukraine is important for the United States—during last year’s congressional debate over Ukraine aid, he wrote, “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!”—his support for the embattled nation has clear limits. He wanted to end the war without prolonged negotiations, switch American assistance from aid to weapons sales, and avoid stationing American forces in Ukraine. Since entering office, he has extended his hand to Putin again and again. Each time, Putin has ostentatiously ignored the gesture while his cronies thumb their noses. Trump is now posting photos of himself staring down Russia’s leader à la Richard Nixon.
This seems like a spectacular own goal by the Kremlin, particularly since Trump has offered “a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED.” But Putin doesn’t mock the first lady and troll the Americans because he is stupid or uniquely obstinate. He is trying to ward off the three ghosts that haunted Russia before his rise to power.
The first is the specter of Russian impotence. From the moment Alexander I chased Napoleon out of Moscow until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia had an immense impact on global affairs. But when the USSR broke up, Russia’s influence plummeted. American alliances now extend to areas in Central and Eastern Europe that the Russians exploited and pillaged for centuries.
Putin promised to make Russia strong and respected again, and he thinks he can only get there by standing up to the United States. He got red-carpet treatment in Alaska. But the week before, Trump welcomed to the White House the presidents of two former Soviet republics, Armenia and Azerbaijan, to sign a peace agreement he brokered. Putin can’t stop Trump from making big moves in Russia’s backyard.
The second ghost is Russian ultranationalism. Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin had to fend off challenges from saber-rattling maniacs like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose party won the most votes in Russia’s first post-Soviet election on a platform of invading Russia’s neighbors and launching Russia’s nukes. Western journalists sometimes imagine that Putin is most worried about the relatively few anti-authoritarian Russians with whom they sympathize. That is not the case.
Putin gave the ultranationalists lots of ammo with this war. The summer before he attacked Kiev, he published a very long article arguing that the Ukrainians are really Russians. He then claimed that neo-Nazis control Ukraine and that America is a hotbed of “Satanism.” Letting a satanic cabal rule breakaway provinces and supposedly menace other parts of the Russian heartland would be a failure of massive proportions.
He seems to think that Trump will eventually lose interest in Ukraine, so he can outlast the Americans. At least one mid-tier administration official is walking back Trump’s hazy offers of security guarantees for Ukraine, which will likely harden Russia’s negotiating position. But the Europeans are stepping up and encouraging Trump to try hard for peace.
The Kremlin is still not negotiating seriously though, so the White House is threatening to unleash the third ghost: hyperinflation. Russian standards of living plummeted and inflation soared to 2,300 percent in the 1990s. Thanks to Putin’s war, Russia’s economy is not looking good: Economic officials publicly warn that a recession is imminent. By going after Russia’s oil customers such as India, Trump is hitting Putin in the wallet.
This may not be enough: The imminent demise of Russia’s economy has been predicted before. America’s society is deeply divided, its enemies are relentless, its allies are now rearming, and its spat with India is creating other strategic headaches. But those problems pale in comparison with the ones Putin inherited and worsened.
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