Redbrickbear said:
[The Tucker Interview
Here's my take in The European Conservative.
It didn't amount to much, did it? This is not Carlson's fault; Putin blustered and rambled. I believe he failed significantly by spending the first half hour giving a history lesson. It's not that history is unimportant here. In fact, it's hugely important, as Americans fail to understand. The error Putin made was not understanding his communication purpose here. That is, if his goal was to appeal to ordinary Americans and it was then he should have spoken more precisely.
Nevertheless, it was significant that this aired, because it is important to understand how our enemies see themselves. This is why I watched Russian propaganda in the early days of the war, until it was removed from European channels. Of course it was propaganda but so too is what the US government and its allies were putting out. That is, if we define "propaganda" as the selective marshaling of facts into a narrative meant to justify a government's action. That's what governments do!
The most valuable thing from the interview, it seems to me, is the way it revealed to American viewers how important history is to Putin's thinking. This is something I've generally observed since I moved to Europe. Americans are profoundly disconnected from history. Most peoples in the world do not share this relationship to the past. We Americans err, and err consequentially, by assuming that everybody else in the world holds their past lightly, if at all. Only Americans could have been convinced by government propaganda that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the deep tribal and religious divisions in Iraqi society were not a real issue when it came to establishing liberal democracy there, and that anybody who said otherwise was a racist who didn't want Arabs to have nice things.
What did you think of the interview? To me, the most significant moment came when Putin said, addressing a hypothetical American, What are you doing over here, making war where you don't belong? Don't you have enough problems at home, with your open border, and your overwhelming debt?
One more thing: CNN is calling the interview a "propaganda victory" for Putin. Absurd. Every interview with a political leader, especially during wartime, is "propaganda". Do they really think their fawning coverage of Volodomyr Zelensky isn't propaganda? I don't fault Zelensky for this, nor do I fault to a point CNN. It is the journalist's responsibility to sit down and interview these figures. If they are any good, they will ask important questions. And, subsequent journalism will help readers and viewers sort out truth from fiction in what the leader said. There is this bizarre, willful naivete that has taken over American journalism, which says that views from the leaders of whom we approve, and whose causes we favor, is "real," but the views of our enemies and their spokesmen are "propaganda." This is how we surrender thinking to those who do not have our best interests at heart.] -Rod Dreher
A few thoughts on the Tucker-Putin interview:
Having watched the interview last night, I've been very interested in seeing the reaction here on this site. A lot of people have focused on 'Putin as an autistic history nerd' (good memes here), while others have stuck to variations on 'look how his history is a lie and bizarre and strange' or 'he whiffed the PR opportunity and didn't give MAGA anything.'
Ok. The former is funny, the middle is standard signaling and positioning, and the latter is US politics brain. Fine! But there's really tremendous data in here if we want to look seriously. Some points below.
First, the most important thing is indeed the half-hour history lesson. Not only did Putin start with this, and refuse to be interrupted, he even made a big show of gifting documents supporting his arguments to Tucker. What this tells us is that the history component to the Russo-Ukrainian War is not just a point of legitimation or a general casus belli, but the motivating factor for VVP personally. That's really big!
I've argued for a year now that we should understand the proximate cause of the war to be Vladimir Putin's deepening historical obsessions, his sense of personal grievance, and the unique isolation that allowed this to fester in the runup to 2022. You can find an article making that case here: ridl.io/putin-s-agency…. If you've taken my undergraduate course on Russian Politics, it's there as well. This interview is strong supporting data for that framing. Note how often Putin dismisses NATO expansion as the reason for action, as well as how much he does not care about Ukrainian democracy qua democracy. He doesn't even think it is a democracy (note the coup discussions).
Rather, he's clearly motivated - then and now - by historical concerns most of all. And this is important, which some observers may not quite get. He was not always like this! That is, the long rants about history that justify political action have become more and more common in the last ten years, and especially the last four or five. Which fits a model of growing obsession - which, incidentally, also aligns well with Putin's post-2012 sense that only he can stably rule Russia, and that he wants to bequeath a legacy. Tucker wasn't able to get an answer to the core question - why 2022 and not earlier - but this is good material for a obsession interpretation.
Second, another element that came out strongly was Putin's sense of personal insult and snubbing. He is butthurt by his world leader colleagues. We have dozens of minutes of him talking about the Bushes, about documents signed by the French and Germans, about negotiations generally - all of which end with Russia not getting what was promised or it expected. That could be read simply as justification for Russia's actions (i.e., the hypocrisy of the West) but what is mostly communicated, verbally and through body language, is that Putin himself feels slighted, and that he does not understand why others do not see the world, and the consequences of events, as clearly as he does. This is also quite interesting.
There is very little reason to believe this interview is anything less than the sincere views of Putin himself, as a smarter-than-average Russian boomer who is trying to explain why he's right, why he's been aggrieved, and why the other sides are just so stupid and shortsighted. He's booming really hard, it's very evident. He's not sharing everything, but he's telling you that he's not sharing everything with a knowing, paternalistic smile while he says it. And he really wants to get it through your thick skull what actually matters. Rurik, Yaroslav the Wise, 1654, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the Soviet Union and the border changes, leaders just not being reasonable, etc etc.
Third, I don't think we can understand this interview as some sort of functionalist strategic communication exercise at all. VVP clearly did not care to talk about US political issues, he did not "throw red meat to MAGA" or whatever, he did not rise to the bait several times to get on a cleaner messaging narrative that would sell with an international audience of illiberal or West-skeptical types. At all! It was the above, which means this interview was about what Vladimir Putin himself thought rather than what he thought would sell best. That's incredibly unusual for an interview like this.
We didn't get anything about cancel culture, or gender ideology, or Biden being senile, or the US being this evil tentacled hegemon that threatens global peace. He was actually incredibly circumspect on that sort of thing. Much more so than in other venues in the recent past. This was Putin as pedagogue-in-chief, trying to educate Tucker not only about history, but also about how the world actually works. Look to the wandering discussion on the Orange Revolution, Yanukovych, the various negotiations, for that. The personal resentment comes out here in a distinct way, as disappointment and confusion as to why other international partners just don't get it the way VVP does.
Truly, the most framed or set-up part of this interview was the point about the spring 2022 negotiations (note his arg that instead of the Battle of Kyiv being lost, it was a part of a negotiation that got cut short by Johnson's intervention - an interesting assertion). And Tucker got him to talk about future potential negotiations as well. That was also enlightening, as it reiterated Putin's world-weary points that the other side doesn't get it and is stubborn, and that there is a 'reasonable' way out if only leaders would be clear-eyed.
This is important to keep in mind, especially as Putin seems quite confident the war is going well enough that he can just wait for negotiations to inevitably appear. Also note his regular recourse to proceduralism - negotiations are detailed, complicated, have many moving parts. The bureaucratic KGB and legal background always shines through with Putin at the end of the day.
Finally, as I've noted, this interview was pretty strange. Tucker tried to move things in a way that fit his own views (NATO expansion, the 'who runs the US' question, demonic forces on earth (?)), which was pretty cringe. But he actually did a decent job overall (sorry!). He asked about Gershkovich and pushed fairly hard all things considered, he got steamrolled by VVP but managed to barely hold on given the very meandering discussion (Putin's framing of 2004 and 2013-14 is genuinely difficult to understand if you don't already know the events quite well), he didn't crash the interview so bad that it ended early, he figured out he had a unique opportunity to let Putin talk, and in doing so he provided us a unique window into VVP.
It turns out that Putin says the same thing to Tucker as he does to Ru journos, with even more Putinsplaining. Which is illuminating! The history thing is the real deal, as is his belief that negotiations (in Russia's favor and in accordance with Putin's own sense of what is reasonable) are possible. Both of these things are really important for us to get at analytically.
I'm still thinking about this, but those are some topline takeaways as I process it this morning.
i.e. Putin is a history (especially Russian Power & Might History) obsessed authoritarian throwing a tantrum because he feels snubbed by the other global powers and he's going to take what he wants or die trying. Basically what several of us have been saying all along.
Mr. Treehorn treats objects like women, man.
