A Symposium on Tucker Carlson's Controversial Interview With Vladimir Putin
Our writers weigh in...
Editor’s note: In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s controversial and wave making interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin we have asked our writers to briefly weigh in on the implications of the historic encounter. Below are four of their responses.
A Message the American People Need to Hear
By James Carden
Despite the torrent of rhetorical abuse (”useful idiot”) coming from the usual suspects, Tucker Carlson performed a public service by interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin because it allowed the American people to consider the so-called ‘Operative in the Kremlin’ for themselves. The Russian president eschewed the temptation to launch a “charm offensive” and engaged in an extended defense of his view (shared, incidentally, by a man who was once a great hero to the neoconservatives, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) of Ukrainian nationhood and the causes of the current war.
And about that: Throughout, Mr. Putin displayed the countenance of a leader who was winning his fight. Putin made it very clear that in his view the West, including Washington and its European vassals, made a grave mistake in pursuing its project of NATO expansion to include Ukraine. But the war, as Putin rightly pointed out, has had other ramifications for the world: Chinese ascendency, de-dollarization, and the rejection on the part of much of the non-Western world for diktats coming out of Washington.
The message Putin delivered, whether one likes him or not, is one the American people need to hear because as Carlson pointed out, we are the ones, after all, paying for the war. Yet the idea that American dollars combined with Ukrainian bodies would defeat the Russians was always fatuous. The task now at hand is to find a way out.
Tucker's Wayward Interview Shows the Limits of Russian Rapprochement with American Conservatism
By Daniel DeCarlo
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin may have made headlines this week and caused a stir amongst many of the usual suspects in Washington, but it's largely been for the wrong reasons.
As soon as news broke that Carlson had decided to make the trip to Moscow, establishment mouthpieces immediately worked to cast the trip as yet another example of the inherently treasonous and anti-American nature of post-Trump conservatism, of which Tucker is one of the most eloquent and high-profile exponents.
Of course, the strange part of this rather bizarre narrative is that, if anything, Carlson’s interview with Putin actually served to show just how incompatible American conservatism is with Russia and its interests and values.
Nowhere in the two-hour marathon was this illustrated anywhere more clearly than during Carlson’s back and forth with Putin over the issue of China.
Carlson brought up the classic conservative canard, a favorite of deluded American conservatives, that China is somehow angling to dominate Russia (or, in one popular version, even to invade and annex Russian territory!) as a voracious colonial entity. Thus, Carlson asked, would Russia not simply be trading one colonial overlord for another if it chose to partner with China going forward?
Putin’s answer amounted to a thorough debunking of Carlson’s entire premise, but the fact that the former Fox host felt the need to ask the question at all is significant in itself and highlights why any alliance between American conservatives and Russia is likely foreordained to be a stillborn one.
The financial and ideological forces behind Carlson’s populist right coalition have a significant and longstanding interest in pursuing a policy of confrontation, and ultimately armed conflict, with China. In particular, companies like Anduril and Palantir (the latter of which is already heavily involved in war profiteering in Ukraine)—which are heavily enmeshed in the wider Thiel network, far and away the most influential single force on America’s new right and also ferociously anti-Chinese—will exert a large amount of leverage over elected Republicans and their allied media personalities in the years to come.
If Russia, as is likely to happen, continues to deepen its alliance with China and the rest of the BRICS coalition, a shift in perception among America’s populist right will almost certainly occur.
Thus, it will be wise to expect the current rapprochement between Russia and America’s new pro-Trump populists to begin to wind down, especially if the war in Ukraine ceases to be a convenient cudgel with which to beat Joe Biden and the enduring conservative fantasy of using an alliance with Russia as a strategic lever against their hated Chinese foes begins to brush up against the unforgiving contours of reality.
This will be particularly true if and when the war drums in the waters surrounding Taiwan begin to truly beat in earnest.
In such a case, it would not be surprising at all to find Tucker and his new right coalition suddenly beginning to sound an awful lot like the very Bush-era neocons they fought so hard to replace.
The Putin Interview: Russia, Gnosticism & the Irreducibility of the World to the American Experience.
By Matthew J. Dal Santo
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin was fascinating, meaningful, and important. Indeed, in a sense, I thought it was revelatory of the deeper logic and meaning of the events—the Ukraine War—that the interview was called to discuss. Famously, notoriously, the interview began with a 30-minute-long lecture by Putin on Russian history, from Kievan Rus’ to the present. Through this, Carlson appeared to me to be completely at sea. At a loss. A man looking for a foothold of relevance he couldn’t find in the building swell of information that was being presented to him. “What is the point of this information? All these distant dates? All these obscure names?” Yaroslav the Wise. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Union of Brest.
At first, I was inclined to agree with him. Wasn’t Putin ineptly squandering a unique opportunity to speak to Western publics predisposed to hear him out by alienating them with trivia? Wouldn’t he just get to the point and tell us what the war, from Russia’s point of view, is really about and what we can do to bring it to an end? But as the lecture continued and Carlson looked more and more perplexed, it occurred to me that precisely this sea of apparently irrelevant historical detail was the point—and so was the reaction it had perfectly elicited.
“If you Americans want to dabble in this part of the world, which has been our people’s home longer than you have been on the other side of the Atlantic, if you want to interfere in its politics, change the course of its history and development, to rearrange its borders, and upend the relations between its peoples, then you have both to know about it and be willing to know about it. Both the fact that you don’t know this already and the fact that this lecture now bores you is the measure of how unserious you as Americans are,” it seemed to me Putin was saying. “This may be boring. This may be demanding. Arduous. But you have to do this—immerse yourself in a region, its significant dates, its narratives, its myths, its meanings—if you are truly interested in it and its own genuine good (which must be realized in and through what is here and of this place already)—and not, as in fact seems to be the case, only in yourselves, in your myths, your ‘truths’.”
And to the extent that Carlson and Americans did experience this as an effort they were not prepared to make—and, more than that, as an effort they could not make because they did not possess the education that might have given them the required knowledge and skills—Putin’s message through this ostensibly “pointless” soliloquy was eloquently made: this lack of interest in the very particularity of the world that America likes to style itself as saving is America’s original error and the ultimate cause of the war, whose origins and reasons Americans profess to be so mystified by.
In short, the world is not reducible to the American experience of it, and not to see this, to be blinded to this blinding fact, is to stand utterly and unimpeachably convicted as to the overwhelmingly—indeed, the purely—ideological character of American foreign policy, which promotes “democracy," “freedom," and “human rights” not as elements of rational, responsible, and limited responses to the task of securing better government in different parts of the world but as a magical formula, an incantation, a gnosis, as contemptuous of material reality in all its historicity and maddening local particularity as the irrational, esoteric religions of old. And as in those religious systems, America’s magical formula is not to be probed, examined, or adapted to local needs, circumstances, and sensibilities (and all these by local peoples themselves at a pace that respects the deeper rhythms of local history) but merely received and installed at once because they are received precisely from America, where, luckily enough for Americans, the original cosmogonic event of modern “democracy” (i.e., the ideology known as democracy) took place by the design, apparently, of a hidden, “higher” God, not himself involved in the messy stuff of history. (Truly, the explanatory tools, i.e., what passes for modern “political science” that we in the West have developed for understanding the world we act in and the likely consequences of our actions, are grossly inadequate.)
It was certainly also for this reason—for the sustained critique of the extreme, ideological quality of modern American foreign policy and the profoundly gnostic character of modern Western civilization—that, beginning with the opening presidential soliloquy, that the interview afforded a respite from the suffocatingly-ideologically driven quality of prevailing Western modes of public speech and engagement: the constant harangue, the emotively-laden accusations, the pursuit of a merely verbal or rhetorical victory over an interlocutor conceived primarily as an opponent. The constant, endless bullying to abide by this account of the facts, to accept this view of reality, which common sense on its own could never submit to but which must be believed because the ideology demands it.
On the contrary, once Carlson had recovered (at least in part; he never quite found a footing but always seemed to be reeling, uncharacteristically unsure), a conversation ensued that was quite unlike the kind of interview modern Western audiences are used to: one based on a common, shared reason. Again and again, Putin, rather than allowing Carlson to edge him towards offering the “proofs” (so-called) of the undemocratic or unfree character of life under the American regime (in the United States: Carlson’s true axe to grind, it seems), instead offered subjects of discussion that he invited Carlson to treat not as a rhetorical football but as the object of mutual rational examination. And one remembered that this was what public speech could also be: an exercise in shared rationality.
In this sense, and to the extent that Carlson was never quite able to meet Putin’s invitation with the same attitude of apparently disinterested reason, the interview was also a clash of epistemologies: between a view of knowledge and how it is obtained and communicated which alternately foregrounds politics and approaches words as being of essentially rhetorical because mind never meets the world as it is but only the phenomenon it subjectively experiences with its interests, its agenda to pursue, on the one hand, and, on the other, a view of knowledge and how it is obtained and communicated which alternately foregrounds philosophy and approaches words as somehow still truly anchored in an order of being that is shared because truly given. And can’t the origins of the war itself be understood, as I have argued before, as ultimately lying in precisely such an epistemological inequivalence between a still residually Christian-Platonic Russia and a Kantian West?
On this point, the other striking thing about the interview was how little Putin played to Carlson’s primary audience: aggrieved conservatives. This is important because there is a theory abroad that behind the right-wing or populist movements of Europe and America stands Putin: these movements have no self-sustaining momentum or genuine sources of grievance of their own. But if this is so, then, conspicuously, Putin did not use this opportunity to speak to the movements he has allegedly summoned into being about the things that animate them most. No lamenting of the moral and spiritual decline of the West, its sexual confusion and depravity, the loss of national identities and sovereignty under the pressure of immigration and multiculturalism, no extolling of Russia as the last bastion of traditional Christianity, patriotism, and conservative values. Instead, Putin spoke mostly as either a boring technocrat (as when he quoted GDP growth figures or percentage values of Russian trade by currency) or as, let’s use the term, a statesman rationally observing global trends and prudently positioning his country to derive as much benefit from what it cannot change (rather than, again, railing like a gnostic of old against reality).
Similarly, Putin repeatedly refused to be drawn on details of conversations with past US presidents or other countries’ heads of state. Not an outlaw burning all his bridges with his current adversaries, Putin was a responsible statesman and a reliable potential partner for delicate diplomacy, which would require respect for age-old conventions of discretion and confidentiality. Or so, at least, would Putin have had us see him. Indeed, in these parts of the conversation, where Putin discussed conversations held 15 or 20 years ago with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, one realized just how long Putin had been around and how many US presidents he had seen come and go in his time. In a way that recalled the late Queen Elizabeth II, he became a kind of repository and guardian of our common historical memory. Once again, while insisting on the particularity of Russia, he was also trying to establish what it was (in addition to shared human reason) that we have in common.
Finally, there was the closing reference to the Russian soul. The unity of Russians and Ukrainians, despite misguided attempts to divide them in the name of “the ideology”, are one people. Unity between them would be restored, Putin confidently predicted, because they were “one soul," a real community of historical and, indeed, spiritual destiny, of which, Putin said, the Orthodox Church was the keeper. Perhaps the remark was contrived, and Putin didn’t mean it. But it still struck me as powerful and moving. First, because of how wildly unlikely that prediction seems capable of vindication today, to make it was to drop the pose of the disinterested observer of global trends and go out on a limb. Second, because no Western leader would dream of referring to a national soul as something that actually existed nor to a historical church as its guardian and keeper. Even if Putin doesn’t mean this sincerely, the mere fact that he can speak this way shows to what extent Russia and the West are different: both societies may in principle be equally "secular,” but Russia’s and Russia’s alone retain a real sense of the religious. Of the sacred. And my suspicion is that, when all is said and done, Ukraine is closer to Russia on this than to ourselves, and, therefore, no matter how unlikely that prediction seems today, I think that on this point Putin will stand vindicated. They have lived through so much together—so much of that “boring” but profoundly significant and defining history with which the interview began—and they know each other so well and so intuitively that the deficiencies and illusions of the ideology will eventually be laid bare before Ukrainians, and when they are, Ukrainians will return to their brother Russians and together thumb their noses at the West.
Does Putin’s New ‘Bourgeois’ Russia Have a Future?
By Paul Grenier
As of this writing, two days after Tucker Carlson’s talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the interview has racked up nearly 200 million views on Twitter alone. On a good night, MSNBC and CNN don’t even get 2 million views.
To cope with this failure at narrative control, U.S. talking heads and pundits have declared that Putin’s answers were “crazed” and nothing but “lies and propaganda,” usually with only the most perfunctory effort at indicating which statements were the ‘lies.'
A favorite attack tactic has been to qualify Putin’s thirty-minute-long answer about Russian history as a ‘crazy rant.’ But the ordinary public didn’t view it that way. Responding to the interview, a popular comment on Twitter (with 41,000 upvotes) said: “Vladimir Putin just spent 30 minutes going over the last 1,000 years of history of Russia and Ukraine in detail without notes. Joe Biden can't remember when his son died. God help us all." Judging by the comments taken as a whole, ordinary American viewers came away from the interview seeing the Russian president as'sharp as a tack,’ and rational—not ‘crazed’ at all.
For someone who reads actual history books as opposed to listening to MSNBC, Putin’s long lesson was not in any way surprising. His retelling of Russia’s origins in Kievan Rus, the pushing and pulling between Muscovite Russia and Poland over territories now in Western Ukraine, the 1654 appeal by the Cossack Hetman Khmelnitsky to the Russian tsar for protection against Poland, etc., etc.—all this is pretty standard stuff that you can find in any competent U.S. college history book on Russia. It is hardly ‘lies and propaganda,’ even if Putin’s retelling of it was framed in such a way as to emphasize the unity of the Slavic peoples and to elide Muscovite or Czarist heavy-handedness.
Clearly, Carlson was expecting something completely different. He would have been happy to get an ‘elevator speech’ about Russian history that lasted the promised thirty seconds and then a list of grievances. In the event, Putin’s list of grievances was rather abbreviated. He focused on the West’s failure, starting already in the early 1990s, to incorporate Russia into a shared security system, even though the desire for such a system had been expressed already by Gorbachev, then Yeltsin, and then again by Putin himself.
As Richard Sakwa has repeatedly explained, most recently in his book The Lost Peace, this is exactly what happened—it is not a lie nor is it propaganda to point this out. If anything, Putin soft-peddled Russia’s security dilemma, confronting, as it did, the unlimited expansion of a hostile military alliance not shy about going on the offense (Yugoslavia), led by a US bent on hegemony (Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.); and by 2014, Russia was facing this same aggressive force, its missiles already in close strike range in Poland and Romania, intent on further expanding its military reach to all of Ukraine and, concomitantly, to Russia’s warm water ports in Crimea.
A full history, had it been told, would have included Russia’s heroic defense of those same Crimean ports, first against England, France, and Turkey in 1854–1856 (with some 100,000 Russian casualties) and then again against Hitler’s juggernaut (with approximately 250,000 Russian casualties at Sevastopol alone). Why the hell would Russia surrender Crimea, of all places, to the U.S. without a fight? And what right did the U.S. have to attempt to seize it in the first place? America’s neocons, of course, never ask such questions. The United States’ expansion is its own justification, and the rewriting of history to promote that expansion is also, for them, fully justified and for the same reason.
In general, though not in all specifics, Putin got his history right and, if anything, soft-peddled it. He made no mention of the sniper massacres during the Maidan, an event that Ivan Katchanovski has by now, through meticulous documentation, shown to have been perpetrated by the coup plotters, not by the Yanukovich government. Nor did Putin mention the brutal massacre—the intentional burning alive—of peaceful Russians in Odessa by far-right Ukrainian nationalists shortly after the US-backed coup d’etat in 2014. These things have been repeated so often in the Russian media at this point that, I dare say, Putin is tired of talking about them.
Putin did get his history badly wrong on a matter of considerable importance, and it is something of a head-scratcher why he said what he said. I am referring to his interpretation of Hitler’s attack on Poland as being, allegedly, caused by Poland’s intransigence about granting Hitler the Danzig corridor. This is an embarrassing mistake. A review of Hitler’s internal communications with his generals, which are easily available in the archives, makes clear that there was no circumstance whatsoever, other than its prior capitulation, that could have prevented Hitler from invading Poland.
The renowned American author and journalist William Shirer, who was reporting from Germany at the time, noted in his WWII diaries (The Nightmare Years: 1930–1940) that Hitler told his generals: “Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all; it is a question of expanding our living space to the East... Poland will be attacked at the first opportunity." Was Putin just taking an opportunity to belittle Poland, whose mercenaries in Ukraine have undoubtedly killed many Russian troops? Who knows.
Putin would have been better served by pointing out the West’s missed opportunity to prevent the Second World War altogether, had England not scuttled the USSR’s repeated efforts to form a security pact against Hitler. As William Shirer recounts in detail, the Soviets did make such efforts. Prior to Chamberlain’s stab in the back at Munich, the USSR had even formed a security agreement with France to defend Czechoslovakia. Joining action by England, France, Russia, and Poland could have defeated Hitler if not for Chamberlain’s foolish agreement. Poland’s leaders did indeed appease the Germans on the Czechoslovak question, Shirer further notes, which was extraordinarily shortsighted of them as it left them surrounded on three sides and nearly defenseless (The Nightmare Years, 369). Then, starting in March 1939, after Czechoslovakia had already been fully absorbed by the Germans, Soviet foreign minister Pavel Litvinov repeatedly and insistently attempted to get England and France to agree to form a triple pact with Russia against Hitler.
The English prime minister refused to take the proposal seriously, and yet, as Shirer documents, Lloyd George and Churchill took it entirely seriously, and they publicly castigated Chamberlain in the House of Commons in May 1939 for failing to quickly accept the Soviet offer. From their realist point of view, the offer made eminent sense, since only the Soviet army was in any position to put a halt to Hitler if he continued his aggressions. But Chamberlain used every trick in the book to drag the discussions out until the exasperated Soviets, left hung out to dry and all on their own in the face of the enormous German threat, finally cut a deal with the devil, to everyone in the West’s surprise.
At one point in the interview, President Putin expressed his sense of bewilderment that the West continued to treat Russia, in effect, as an enemy—he was referring to the five waves of NATO expansion eastward—despite the absence of an ideological confrontation.
"We were saying, please don't. We are as bourgeois as you are now. We are a market economy, and there is no Communist Party power. Let's negotiate." Putin remarked during the interview.
This raises a question of an entirely different order, of a philosophical order. If what Putin is saying here is accurate—that Russia is now a bourgeois society, oriented to security and material comforts, and so forth—then why does it fight so hard to preserve its own sovereignty? Richard Sakwa observed that Russia has “refused to join the political West as a subordinate,” something that, depending on how the war in Ukraine turns out, may still “prove to be a mistake of historic proportions."
Presumably someone such as Valery Garbuzov, the former USA Canada Institute director at the Russian Academy of Sciences, already regards such resistance as exactly that—a mistake—and would prefer Sakwa’s bargain.
Still and all, if Russia has indeed become a bourgeois nation, why, in fact, should it refuse this deal, which is perhaps less painful than the alternative? It seems to me that Putin’s statement “We are bourgeois now” lets slip a real dilemma, or at any rate, a real question that has not yet been adequately answered, despite the Russian leader’s regular references to family, traditional values, and Christian civilization.
In fact, it raises several questions. Is the ‘bourgeois’ political type, in truth, a source of peace? If so, why does one get the impression that the United States is on the path toward civil war and the situation is not much calmer in many European nations?
Second, if Russia is today, in fact, insisting on its own sovereignty and is prepared to suffer considerable pain in the process (at present count, allegedly something on the order of 50,000 KIA), then clearly it is already, in practice, no longer only “a bourgeois” nation, ordered, as all bourgeois cultures are, to try to live as long and comfortable a life as possible. But then, what is Russia, and where is it headed? What are its ruling ideals?
Fortunately, Russia’s tradition of thoughtfulness about matters of culture, history, and philosophy still lives, and there is a growing literature of efforts to answer that question, efforts that Landmarks has been able to at least partly capture in, most recently, the writings of Boris Mezhuev, Victor Taki, Rustem Vakhitov, Alexei Chadaev, and Yuri Pushchaev
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Good observations, Paul. I have a feeling that being only "bourgeois" is not going to work for Russia. Hard as they try. Plus, it will be a wrong moment to do so. The era of "bourgeois" is over. As usual, Russians get their landmarks wrong.