For all of legacy media’s efforts to discourage people from watching Tucker Carlson’s historic interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the effect was, well, the Streisand effect, creating a fever pitch of audience interest.
If subsequent commentary is any indication, however, the interview, with Putin’s lengthy monologue on history that seems arcane to Americans, his evident clarity of mind and even flashes of charm, and Carlson’s own (admitted) confusion by the direction Putin took the discussion, has raised at least as many questions as it answered.
Having now listened to the interview multiple times, here’s some background to contextualize Putin’s remarks.
1. Ignore the Experts
Western analysts of Russia — Reagan adviser Richard Pipes being a notable exception — have been spectacularly wrong for decades. Take, for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It caught the State Department, the media, and everyone else completely flat-footed.
Worse, they declared victory prematurely. Former New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief and Pulitzer Prize-winner Hedrick Smith captured the zeitgeist of the moment in his bestseller The New Russians. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was, he said, “a modern enactment of one of the archetypal stories of human existence, that of the struggle from darkness to light, from poverty toward prosperity, from dictatorship toward democracy.”
Seems laughable now, doesn’t it?
But this was a period of extraordinary, almost utopian, optimism. The Berlin Wall had come down only two years before the demise of the Soviet Union. An event, largely forgotten now,
