By Cole Speidel
Why are we obsessed with President Vladimir Putin?
Even including Monday’s presidential debate, Americans are bombarded with Putin so much that he has become a cultural phenomenon, with references across popular media from TV to the Internet.
In Russia, it makes sense. But in the United States?
On Monday, Japan and China were mentioned as American economic rivals, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s and President Xi Jinping’s names went unsaid. More to the point, eight years ago, one of the candidates from Monday couldn’t even pronounce the name of the ‘interregnum’ Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.
‘But,’ you ask, ‘is this even a problem?’ Perhaps not, but if it means Western policymakers, academics, and analysts getting bogged down in the weeds of Putin’s past, personality, and connections, missing the forest of Russian politics writ large for the trees of the ‘St. Petersburg clan.’ I believe we do miss the big picture, and depending on how you answer the next question, you may, too:
Would the behavior and foreign policy of the Russian state change if Putin left power?
The 2008 Russo-Georgian War, was begun, prosecuted, and finished under the leadership of then President Dmitri Medvedev. In 2011, Medvedev (not Putin) admitted the reason for the war was that Georgia’s NATO ambitions were intolerable. But, you say, Medvedev is too close to Putin personally and professionally for this to prove the thesis.
Well, what about Boris Yeltsin?
In a harried 1993 meeting during, Yeltsin attempted to guarantee a promise from Western officials that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, a promise Russian leadership considers broken. This article[1] details this and other specific incidents of miscommunication dating back to 1990 that perhaps were the writing on the wall for our current crises. Yeltsin later trusted Putin with power, but few would argue Putin influenced Yelstin’s decisions, especially not in 1993.
And this isn’t to call Russia incorrigible. Instead, it is to say that our media’s embrace of Putin as a caricature sways low-information decision-makers who lack the training or staff to understand context and nuance. His shirtless horseback riding encourages us to poke fun at him and, by extension, Russia. His centralizing policies and KGB agent past encourage us to write off Russia as a new dictatorship, an illiberal regime, a strongman’s fiefdom. And all of this because we mistake Russia for its man at the top.
So, why don’t we look at Vladimir Putin like we do those American presidents who strengthened the presidency, even if it meant stepping on tradition or the Constitution? Consider Andrew Jackson, reviled as an ‘Emperor’ in his time for his prodigal twelve vetoes; or Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus without Congressional approbation; or FDR, scandalized for his court-packing scheme, accused of constitutional overreach because of certain New Deal programs, and whose four presidential terms broke with tradition and brought about the 22nd Amendment; or Barack Obama, whose secret drone program draws criticism from the right and left for its opaque guidelines and disputed constitutionality.
Depending on your politics, you probably hold any three of these presidents in high esteem.
Which is exactly my point.
Cole Speidel is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. He is double-majoring in Russian and International Relations.
[1] http://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-matters/
