It’s easy to conclude that Donald Trump is merely a marionette whose strings are attached to Vladimir Putin’s longer but slimier fingers. Whether it’s because of Putin’s open flattery of Trump, or because Trump outright admires Putin’s bare-chested strongmanship, or because Russian spooks have assembled a file cabinet full of kompromat that makes whatever Trump’s hiding in his tax returns look as damning as My Little Pony fanfic in comparison, there’s no question that Trump has an uncanny penchant for saying or doing whatever Russia’s supreme leader would undoubtedly most prefer.
But what does Putin really want? Is it as simple as cultivating an unabashedly (and embarrassingly) pro-Russia America? Molly McKew, a foreign policy consultant who has advised leaders in the post-Soviet bloc, says no—that the true answer is far more complicated and far more dangerous, if such a thing can even be imagined.
McKew’s recent essay in Politico Magazine is exceptionally insightful, tying together all the threads that have come exposed over the last year. The entire piece is a must-read, and if you read only the excerpts below, you’ll be doing yourself an injustice. But the thrust of McKew’s argument should scare you:
Fourth, the diplomatic side of this non-linear war isn’t a foreign policy aimed at building a new pro-Russian bloc. Instead, it’s what the Kremlin calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, undermining the strength of Western institutions by coalescing alternate—ideally temporary and limited—centers of power. Rather than a stable world order undergirded by the U.S. and its allies, the goal is an unstable new world order of “all against all.”
Trump, therefore, is not Putin’s puppet so much as he’s Putin’s ticking time-bomb: to be set off whenever, wherever, and however Putin calculates Trump can do the most damage to the old world order and thus usher in the new one—the one, as McKew puts it, of “all against all.” If there comes a time when Trump-the-pliable-stooge is less useful to Putin than Trump-the-hand-grenade, Putin will pull the pin.
And why does Putin embrace this dark, churning chaos? Because Russia is a husk of a country, “little more than a ghastly hybrid of an overblown police state and a criminal network with an economy the size of Italy—and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal,” as McKew aptly describes it. That leaves Russia, a nation that has always harbored the grandest of imperial ambitions, with almost no path toward recovering its dreams of revanchist glory.
Except one:
When it’s us against them, they were, and are, never going to be the winner. But when it's “all against all”—a “multipolar” world with “multi-vector” policy, a state of shifting alliances and permanent instability—Russia, with a centrally controlled, tiny command structure unaccountable for its actions in any way, still has a chance for a seat at the table. They pursue the multipolar world not because it is right or just, but because it is the only world in which they can continue to matter without pushing a nuclear launch sequence.
McKew concludes with an almost scarier hope: that Trump might be “just crazy enough—enough of a outlier and a rogue—to expose what Putin’s Russia is and end the current cycle of upheaval and decline.” That’s not the type of crazy Trump is, though. He craves adulation, respect, money, power, and sexual obedience. If Putin were to one day spurn him, Trump might send out a few foaming tweets, but it’s not as though he’d suddenly embrace American values and declare a new Cold War against the forces of darkness. And who would trust him even if he claimed he would?
Putin knows all this, and if and when he chooses to detonate his personal Molotov cocktail, he’ll do so for maximum damage.