War.23
Supporting NATO Expansion
Just as the British press whipped up fear about Russian aggression on the eve of the Crimean War, the “Newspaper of Record” is creating a new Red Scare by echoing U.S. government officials warning about the “re-Sovietization” of Central Asia and Russia’s “resurrection [under Putin] as a global disrupter.”24 Strong offense has been taken at Russia’s “furious” opposition to NATO’s expansion on its borders, despite the fact that Russia had been promised NATO would not expand there. In early 2017, the Times editorial board critiqued President Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis for calling NATO “obsolete” and suggesting the United States might not support NATO members that have not met their financial obligations at a “time the Western alliance was again facing an assertive and aggressive Russia,” an “especially worrisome” trend “given Mr. Trump’s possible links to Moscow.” In the Times version of history, these are “fraught times for the Western alliance, which even after the Cold War remains a critical unifying bond among the democracies of North America and Europe and whose members have worked together to confront terrorism in Afghanistan and promote stability in several Middle Eastern countries.”25
Russian Interference in the Presidential Election
The official indictment against Putin holds that he ordered an “influence campaign aimed at the U.S. election,” with the goal of “undermining faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrating Hillary Clinton, and harming her electability and potential presidency.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), representing seventeen intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined with “high confidence” that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked documents to WikiLeaks that showed efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders and exposed some of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street high-rollers. DNI James Clapper testified that “Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 campaign went beyond hacking, and included disinformation and the dissemination of fake news often promoted on social media,” with Putin being said to have “personally directed” the operation.26
Like the good soldiers they are, the Times commentators reported the allegations as fact when conclusive evidence was lacking. Columnist Charles M. Blow asserted that Russian hacking made it “more … clear that … Trump’s victory [is] tainted beyond redemption.” He wrote: “A hostile power stole confidential correspondence from American citizens … and funneled that stolen material to a willing conspirator, Julian Assange [WikiLeaks founder].” Then the hostile foreign action “had its desired result.” Blow later characterized Putin “as the man whose thumb was all over the scale that delivered Trump’s victory,” and likened Trump’s effort to set up a cybersecurity working group with the Russians to “inviting the burglar to help you design your alarm system.”27
Thomas L. Friedman said we did not “take seriously from the very beginning [that] Russia hacked our election. That was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.… This goes to the very core of our democracy.”28 For Nicholas Kristof, the truth was absolutely clear: while some foreign leaders want to steal billions of dollars, Putin “may have wanted to steal something even more valuable: an American presidential election.” The fundamental issue is that a “foreign dictatorship [apparently made an effort] to disrupt an American presidential election.” Kristof ended on a small note of caution, however, since the “intelligence community’ is sometimes an oxymoron,” pointing to the alleged Russian “yellow rain” chemical warfare in Southeast Asia decades ago, saying that it may have actually been excrement.29
Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder wrote baselessly in the Times that Putin is a “fascist,” influenced by Ivan Ilyin, “a prophet of Russian fascism.” He has “consciously worked to hollow out the idea of democracy in [his] own country [and] also [seeks] to discredit democracy” in the United States [by meddling in the election].30 Nobel Economics Laureate Paul Krugman agrees, asserting that the “post-election CIA declaration that Russia had intervened on behalf of the Trump campaign was a confirmation, not a revelation (although we’ve now learned that Mr. Putin was personally involved in the effort).” Precisely how Putin was involved, however, he does not say. Krugman reveals his support for Hillary Clinton when he writes that the hacked emails “mostly revealed nothing more than the fact that the Democrats are people,” when in reality they revealed unethical plans to influence the primary outcome, something from which the Russian hacking charge helped divert attention.31
“The Kind of Person Sister Mary Ingrid Warned Us About”
According to a June 2017 Pew Research Center poll, 87 percent of Russians have confidence in Putin and think their country has gained stature on the world stage. Some 58 percent of Russians also said they were satisfied with their country’s direction.32 The New York Times, however, has depicted Putin as a threat to global stability and “The New Tsar,” to quote the title of a book by Steven Lee Myers, and by implication an embodiment of the backward traits of Russian society long held in the American imagination.33
The prize for the most juvenile commentary goes to Gail Collins, who informed Times readers that during the Cold War her Catholic schooling prepared her “to die for our faith in the event of a Communist takeover; things [now] were getting scary again as Putin invaded Ukraine, bombed the hell out of Aleppo [and] tried to interfere with our election. He’s just the kind of person that Sister Mary Ingrid warned us about.”34
This imbecilic chattering and levying of accusations without proof are from a columnist for the most prestigious paper in the country. To put this in historical perspective, one simply needs to recall the propaganda that drenched the media, including the Times, prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 about the evil incarnate Saddam Hussein.35 It’s as if he has been reincarnated in the body of Vladimir Putin. There are no nuances and subtleties, no historical context in the pages of the Times that can help us intelligently explain Putin’s appeal among Russians or how the United States bears considerable responsibility for rising hostilities and can hence play a critical role in defusing them.
Roger Cohen characteristically called Putin a “pure Soviet product [who] traffics in lies,” such as “the supposed Western encirclement of Russia.” It is “inevitable, given what he represents, that Trump looks to Putin.” Paul Krugman reminds readers that Putin is “an ex-KGB man—which is to say, he spent his formative years as a professional thug.” In another column, he writes that Russia has very little to offer anyone except those rightists who find “macho posturing and ruthlessness attractive.”36 Krugman treats Barack Obama respectfully by contrast, even though Obama ordered the deaths of thousands in the drone war.
Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under Obama, blames Putin for increased U.S.-Russian tension, writing that “this new era crept up on us, because we did not fully win the Cold War.… But the collapse of the Soviet order did not lead smoothly to a transition to democracy and markets inside Russia”—a telling juxtaposition clearly not intended. An autocrat at heart, Putin “needed an enemy—the United States—to strengthen his legitimacy.” His “propagandists rolled out clips on American imperialism, immoral practices and alleged plans to overthrow the Putin government,” with the “shrill anti-Americanism reaching fever pitch” during the annexation of Crimea. Putin “embraces confrontation with the West, [and] no longer feels constrained by international laws and norms.” Just like the Cold War, an “ideological struggle between autocracy and democracy has returned to Europe,” and democracies “need to recognize … Putin’s rule for what it is—autocracy [with which] there can be no compromise.”37
Failing to give adequate context for Putin’s
