Is Putin playing offense or defense?

By Chuck Stephens

TUCKER Carlson has a way of challenging prevailing perceptions.  His interview with Vladimir Putin has done it again.  Like last year, when Carlson aired some footage from the Capitol on January 6.  That was astounding and his recent extravaganza with Putin could be another game-changer.

Boris Johnson was quick to respond that what Putin told Carlson was “right out of Hitler’s playbook”.

This puzzled me, because I am not sure which of the two – Boris Johnson or Tucker Carlson – is further to the right.  On the political spectrum, they are both slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.

So why this sharp disagreement?  Why are Europeans threatening to sanction Tucker Carlson, and why are Democrats in the USA saying that he should be charged under the Espionage Act?

Personally I think that interview allowed Putin to plead that he is not the hunter – he is the hunted.

Historians in Europe were quick to dispute Putin’s version of events.  But really, going back to the ninth century, can we ever determine whose version of events is the correct one?  Different people interpret history differently.  Ask the indigenous peoples of America, they will tell you a different narrative from the descendants of settlers.  African Americans say that children should be taught that America began not in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but in 1619 when the first slaves were brought to North American shores.  They had been previously imported to the Caribbean and South America, but this was the real start-date for America.

So history can be interpreted variously.  Do Putin’s views really amount to revisionism?

I think what put the likes of Boris Johnson off is that the so-called aggressor was saying that aggression was never Russia’s purpose.  He was not acting like Hitler in the belief that Germans were a super-race, riding on a wave of social Darwinism that was quite the rage a hundred years ago.  Believing that his own blue-eyed, fair haired race would prevail in a thousand-year Reich.

Putin stated that he has no intentions to invade Poland or the Baltic states – unless of course they invade Russia first.  Yes, that does sound a bit like Hitler.  But Hitler was on a roll less than a decade after coming to power.  He was an unknown quantity who could keep people guessing about his real intentions.  And he had the momentum of bitterness pushing him forward because of the impact that reparations from World War I had had on Germany’s economy.

Putin, by contrast, has been around for decades and seems quite predictable.  His argument was that relative to deep Russian history (over a thousand years in the making), Ukraine cannot boast a long legacy.  His version of events is that it was Lenin who hurried into setting up Soviet states after the Bolshevik revolution.  In much the same haphazard and top-down way that the colonial powers had set borders in Africa.  They often had little relevance to realities on the ground.

I lived for a short time in Sudan, actually in South Sudan at the time of its independence.  Why was Sudan so divided that a civil war erupted?  Not just because the north was Arab and the south African.  But because during the colonial era, no one really claimed it.  Because of the vast Sudd (a swamp that is bigger than England), the colonial powers carved out countries around it.  Belgian colonies to the south, French colonies to the west, British to the south-east (Uganda) and north (Egypt).  The space we call Sudan was never “chosen”, it was “the remnant”.  Ethiopia remain independent throughout, it has never been colonized.  Sort of.  But Sudan was just vacant space.  This is my version of events.

This is the picture that Putin painted of Ukrainian history – a large space between Asia and Europe that ebbed and flowed with empires.  Poland ruled much of it for a time.  Lithuania also conquered it.  (This seems incongruous given the relative size of Lithuania and the Ukraine today!)  Putin describes a road trip that he himself took in the 1980s in Ukraine.  He noticed people in the far west dressed differently and found that they were ethnic Hungarians.  Their country and Romania had lost territory when Lenin imposed borders.  So Ukraine is a conglomerate of different languages and cultures.

According to Putin (I have no way of verifying this) the very word “Ukranian” means people of the periphery.  Not core Russians but those on the outskirts, the edges.

I think that the tectonic plates shifted during this historic interview.  Europeans are a bit paranoid given the history of Hitler’s aggression.  But America is far away and has to carry more than its fair share of the war funding.  Putin describes Ukraine as a de facto American colony.  He has Alaska on his right flank and now the Ukraine on his left.  So he must think defensively.  He is not an aggressor.

How is Nato expansion any different from the Cuban missile crisis?  When the Soviet Union wanted to plant missiles in the USA’s back year, President Kennedy took exception.  They were invading his space, his hemisphere.  This caused some months of scary brinkmanship.  In the deep background, Kennedy quietly got a message to Khrushchev through diplomatic channels:  “We are like two men pulling on a rope.  The knot is too tight.  Let’s go and pull on another rope.”  It worked.