The NYTimes has called Trump "Putin's lackey" -here is an article from 2014 that shows just how toxic "media malpractice"
is alarmist, and the demonization is a threat to Trump's ability to find detente with Putin:
http://www.newsweek.com/american-who-dared-make-putins-case-231388
Others have gone further. They have praised Putin’s robust actions and his fierce defense of the Russian national interest. Conservative icon Pat Buchanan recently wondered if comparing Putin to Hitler goes a straw too far, and unsurprisingly defended Putin’s anti-gay policies.
American Conservative writer Rod Dreher agrees with Buchanan, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani praised Putin as “what you call a leader.” Even Sarah Palin, with her famous view of the Russian mainland from her Alaskan kitchen window, seems to have considered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine an inevitability back in 2008.
But while their opinions have gone largely unremarked, Cohen has been widely derided as a Putin apologist. Yet former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, of all people, has backed him up.
Cohen says he is the real American patriot and those who are pressing President Barack Obama and the European Union to counter the Russians in Crimea are a danger to our national security.
Cohen is one of the foremost Russia scholars in the U.S.. He advised President George H.W. Bush on the USSR, has taught Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, has written eight books on modern Russian history, and has published columns in the Washington Post, Reuters, and elsewhere.
What do you think of those who have called you a Putin apologist?
My answer to the name-calling is two-fold. The reality is, among the people who attack me, I am the only American patriot. I’m a patriot of American national security. Before this began, Putin was the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security. To quote a line I wrote many years ago, “American national security still runs through Moscow.”
The discouraging thing is we were beginning to see that in Syria in August, when Putin literally saved Obama’s presidency. When Obama was trapped and he didn’t want to attack, he couldn’t get the support of his own party, he couldn’t get Congress. Putin delivered Assad and the chemical weapons.
Putin and [Russian foreign minister] Lavrov had been in the shadows pushing Iran to open a conversation with the United States, because Obama’s been under pressure to attack Iran too. Not to mention the fact that Russia facilitates the supply of about 60 percent of the material going to NATO and American forces fighting in Afghanistan.
The trouble is, when it comes to Russia, if you say what you think you’ve got to be prepared for people to call you names. Or as they usually put it in most of the mail I get, “How much is the Kremlin paying you?” Not enough, believe me.
Have you been called a Putin apologist before?
I’ve been through this before because I’m old and this happened during the last Cold War. Back then the argument was how best to approach the Soviet Union. Should we work toward “détente,” as it was called, and what that meant was creating areas of cooperation that would buffer the conflicts in a way that nobody would resort to nuclear weapons.
Passions ran very high and in those days they basically red-baited us. So they’d say you were pro-communist, or pro-Soviet, or pro-Kremlin, or apologist. But the difference was that on our side there was an organization called the American Committee on East West Accord. It was kind of a lobby group that formed to talk to congressmen and presidents and op-ed editors.
There was Donald Kendall of Pepsi Co., and Tom Watson who was head of IBM at the time, and [the architect of America’s post-World War Two Soviet containment policy] George Kennan, who was alive and very active. So there were a lot of very eminent and conservative people involved.
It wasn’t a clear sort of left/right conservative/liberal divide, so if they were going to call me [anti-American] then were they going to call the head of IBM that too?
I began warning everyone in 1990, in the 90swhen Clinton began to move NATO towards Russia, that this was going to lead to exactly what it’s led to.
I’ve been writing about this not only in the Nation but in the Washington Post, and in my books, that if we keep this up, we’re like a Western Pac-man heading East, gobbling up all the way until w e hit Russia’s border.
We hit Russia’s borders under Bush because the Baltic republics became NATO members. Then we had this episode in Georgia in 2008 because we crossed Russia’s red line in Georgia. We’ve crossed it in Ukraine.
I don’t understand why people don’t see this. That if you send, over a 20-year period, a military alliance which has it’s political components -- includes missile defense, includes NGOs that get money from governments but are deeply involved in politics in Russia, includes the idea of revolutions on their borders -- then eventually you’re going to come up against a red line that, unlike Obama, they’re going to act on.
Ukraine has always been the brass ring for these people. That’s what they wanted and they went a bridge too far in Ukraine. Any Russian leader who has legitimacy at home would have had to do some version of what Putin is now doing. They’d push back.
So for saying this, I’m called a Putin apologist. These people have no understanding. They don’t care about real national security.
So I’m the patriot. I’m the one who cares about American national security. And all they’re doing is the old kind of [Joseph] McCarthy-ite red baiting.
You mention that Obama should have demonstrated his “gratitude to Putin” by going to the Olympics. Why?
That wasn’t my main point, but that was just like my mother taught me: When someone does something nice for you, don’t spit in their face. Has everybody forgotten 9/11 and Boston?
I wrote that Obama should have gone to Sochi for one day, stood alongside Putin when terrorists were threatening to blow up the Olympics, to show that on international terrorism they stand shoulder to shoulder. That would have been fantastic leadership but [Obama] wound himself into a pretzel on this gay issue and he couldn’t do it.
And so now I’m accused of being against gays . If I say we need a united front against international terrorism which is savaging Russia and has hit us twice, most recently in Boston, they just say, “He’s against gays”. What kind of discourse is this? These people are irresponsible. They are unpatriotic because it’s un-American to call people names like that. That kind of talk is bad for American national security.
If they really disagree with me, let them publish something that says Cohen is wrong about this and he’s wrong about that and here is the way you should look at it. That’s absolutely fine. Maybe I am wrong. But I’d like to hear why.
And if they think it was a wise policy to push NATO all the way from Berlin -- breaking a promise we made to Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch to the East -- pushing it all the way to the Russian border, then let them explain why it’s a wise policy. They won’t tell you the truth because the true mode of describing this, in so far as they think about it, is they want to strip Russia of every national security asset it has.
Ukraine is the prize, but they’ve gone too far and now we’re in a horribly dangerous situation. Horribly dangerous. Certainly the worst of your lifetime. And if you have any kids and you have grandkids, they’re going to live with the outcome of what we’re witnessing today. And it’s the fault of the White House and the Congress and the EU.
Putin didn’t bring this on. He didn’t want it. It was the last thing he wanted. But now he’s reacting. I wasn’t alone, but I’m just speaking for myself. I warned them this would happen, but they don’t listen.
They have ideologues in positions of foreign policy making like [former U.S. ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul. He’s an ideologist, he’s not a diplomat. If you’re going to appoint people like this to be your primary policy makers and advise the President ...
You know what Hillary Clinton said today? She equated Putin with Hitler.
And she wants to be President of the United States. She’s going to have some nice conversations with him if she gets elected.
But how can you negotiate with Hitler? When Mrs. Clinton said that she disqualified herself from the Presidency. Then she goes on and says but of course we’ve got to de-escalate and negotiate. Well, then don’t call him Hitler. If you can’t connect those dots you don’t want to be President.
Even Obama said that Putin was like some spoiled kid slouching around the classroom. It’s undignified for the President of the United States to speak like that.
I don’t recall when we had Soviet leaders that anybody spoke like that about. We didn’t like Brezhnev because we didn’t like his political system, but it wasn’t personal. Nixon got along just fine with Brezhnev. They liked each other.
[Putin], by the way, is the most consequential -- consequential doesn’t mean good or bad -- most consequential leader of the 21st century. He’s been in power 14 years. He towers over everybody else. The only other leader who might be in his company is Merkel.
The last three American presidents have been foreign policy failures, war-makers. You’d think there’s a little bit of envy in here that he’s been so successful in representing the interests of his nation and our presidents have screwed it up. One failed war after another.
That’s what the Russians think, by the way. I was there in December and I was asked, why, why are they going on about Putin? Are they jealous? And I had to stop and think. I don’t know. Maybe they are.
But here’s the point: In a democracy you get out of terrible crises through discourse. There’s no discourse in this country. All you’ve got are these people saying that Putin’s delusional. I mean, this is the new thing? He’s delusional?
No. The people who are delusional are the people who says he’s Hitler. If he’s Hitler then it’s Munich. And if it’s Munich then we’ve got to go to war tomorrow, right? Can they think one foot in front of the other? No.
They’re in the grip of this crazy syndrome that Putin’s the most evil guy we’ve ever seen when all he’s done really to offend them is get Russia back on its feet.
We loved Yeltsin because he was drunk and he said yes to everything. And then you get a sober guy and he’s going to defend Russia’s interest whether they’re right or wrong as he sees it. That’s what national leaders are supposed to do. And diplomats are supposed to sit down and sort this out.
You say this is Putin defending national interests, whether they be right or wrong. Does that preclude action on the part of the U.S. if the U.S. determines them to be wrong?
That we debate. But here’s how I open the question: Does Russia have any legitimate national interests at all on its borders? Because the tacit assumption is that it has none, not even in Crimea. Now, if that’s the position you begin with, it’s a nonstarter, because every state, even little states, put particularly great states, have those interests.
So I use this analogy, but it’s not perfect: Let’s say tomorrow that suddenly Russian power -- political, economic -- shows up in Canada, on our border, and in Mexico. Do we just say then, Oh, every people has the right to decide it’s own future? Do we say that?
And if we say that Russia should get out of Crimea, which is preposterous, what about Guantanamo? It’s a complete double standard. Whether they think this way because they’re stupid, because they’re deceitful, or because they’re just confused, I don’t know.
My main point is that we, not Putin, have managed to move the divide of the new Cold War from Berlin, where it was semi-safe, right to Russia’s borders. Maybe it’s not an iron curtain, but divided Berlin was the divide for 45 years. Now we’ve moved it right plunk to a divided Ukraine. And Ukraine was divided by God and history, not by Putin.
But do you think there’s absolutely reason to say it was wrong of Russia to intervene militarily in Ukraine?
We don’t know that Putin went into Crimea. We literally don’t know. We’re talking about “facts” that are coming out of Kiev, which is a mass of disinformation.
is alarmist, and the demonization is a threat to Trump's ability to find detente with Putin:
http://www.newsweek.com/american-who-dared-make-putins-case-231388
Others have gone further. They have praised Putin’s robust actions and his fierce defense of the Russian national interest. Conservative icon Pat Buchanan recently wondered if comparing Putin to Hitler goes a straw too far, and unsurprisingly defended Putin’s anti-gay policies.
American Conservative writer Rod Dreher agrees with Buchanan, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani praised Putin as “what you call a leader.” Even Sarah Palin, with her famous view of the Russian mainland from her Alaskan kitchen window, seems to have considered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine an inevitability back in 2008.
But while their opinions have gone largely unremarked, Cohen has been widely derided as a Putin apologist. Yet former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, of all people, has backed him up.
Cohen says he is the real American patriot and those who are pressing President Barack Obama and the European Union to counter the Russians in Crimea are a danger to our national security.
Cohen is one of the foremost Russia scholars in the U.S.. He advised President George H.W. Bush on the USSR, has taught Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, has written eight books on modern Russian history, and has published columns in the Washington Post, Reuters, and elsewhere.
What do you think of those who have called you a Putin apologist?
My answer to the name-calling is two-fold. The reality is, among the people who attack me, I am the only American patriot. I’m a patriot of American national security. Before this began, Putin was the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security. To quote a line I wrote many years ago, “American national security still runs through Moscow.”
The discouraging thing is we were beginning to see that in Syria in August, when Putin literally saved Obama’s presidency. When Obama was trapped and he didn’t want to attack, he couldn’t get the support of his own party, he couldn’t get Congress. Putin delivered Assad and the chemical weapons.
Putin and [Russian foreign minister] Lavrov had been in the shadows pushing Iran to open a conversation with the United States, because Obama’s been under pressure to attack Iran too. Not to mention the fact that Russia facilitates the supply of about 60 percent of the material going to NATO and American forces fighting in Afghanistan.
The trouble is, when it comes to Russia, if you say what you think you’ve got to be prepared for people to call you names. Or as they usually put it in most of the mail I get, “How much is the Kremlin paying you?” Not enough, believe me.
Have you been called a Putin apologist before?
I’ve been through this before because I’m old and this happened during the last Cold War. Back then the argument was how best to approach the Soviet Union. Should we work toward “détente,” as it was called, and what that meant was creating areas of cooperation that would buffer the conflicts in a way that nobody would resort to nuclear weapons.
Passions ran very high and in those days they basically red-baited us. So they’d say you were pro-communist, or pro-Soviet, or pro-Kremlin, or apologist. But the difference was that on our side there was an organization called the American Committee on East West Accord. It was kind of a lobby group that formed to talk to congressmen and presidents and op-ed editors.
There was Donald Kendall of Pepsi Co., and Tom Watson who was head of IBM at the time, and [the architect of America’s post-World War Two Soviet containment policy] George Kennan, who was alive and very active. So there were a lot of very eminent and conservative people involved.
It wasn’t a clear sort of left/right conservative/liberal divide, so if they were going to call me [anti-American] then were they going to call the head of IBM that too?
I began warning everyone in 1990, in the 90swhen Clinton began to move NATO towards Russia, that this was going to lead to exactly what it’s led to.
I’ve been writing about this not only in the Nation but in the Washington Post, and in my books, that if we keep this up, we’re like a Western Pac-man heading East, gobbling up all the way until w e hit Russia’s border.
We hit Russia’s borders under Bush because the Baltic republics became NATO members. Then we had this episode in Georgia in 2008 because we crossed Russia’s red line in Georgia. We’ve crossed it in Ukraine.
I don’t understand why people don’t see this. That if you send, over a 20-year period, a military alliance which has it’s political components -- includes missile defense, includes NGOs that get money from governments but are deeply involved in politics in Russia, includes the idea of revolutions on their borders -- then eventually you’re going to come up against a red line that, unlike Obama, they’re going to act on.
Ukraine has always been the brass ring for these people. That’s what they wanted and they went a bridge too far in Ukraine. Any Russian leader who has legitimacy at home would have had to do some version of what Putin is now doing. They’d push back.
So for saying this, I’m called a Putin apologist. These people have no understanding. They don’t care about real national security.
So I’m the patriot. I’m the one who cares about American national security. And all they’re doing is the old kind of [Joseph] McCarthy-ite red baiting.
You mention that Obama should have demonstrated his “gratitude to Putin” by going to the Olympics. Why?
That wasn’t my main point, but that was just like my mother taught me: When someone does something nice for you, don’t spit in their face. Has everybody forgotten 9/11 and Boston?
I wrote that Obama should have gone to Sochi for one day, stood alongside Putin when terrorists were threatening to blow up the Olympics, to show that on international terrorism they stand shoulder to shoulder. That would have been fantastic leadership but [Obama] wound himself into a pretzel on this gay issue and he couldn’t do it.
And so now I’m accused of being against gays . If I say we need a united front against international terrorism which is savaging Russia and has hit us twice, most recently in Boston, they just say, “He’s against gays”. What kind of discourse is this? These people are irresponsible. They are unpatriotic because it’s un-American to call people names like that. That kind of talk is bad for American national security.
If they really disagree with me, let them publish something that says Cohen is wrong about this and he’s wrong about that and here is the way you should look at it. That’s absolutely fine. Maybe I am wrong. But I’d like to hear why.
And if they think it was a wise policy to push NATO all the way from Berlin -- breaking a promise we made to Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch to the East -- pushing it all the way to the Russian border, then let them explain why it’s a wise policy. They won’t tell you the truth because the true mode of describing this, in so far as they think about it, is they want to strip Russia of every national security asset it has.
Ukraine is the prize, but they’ve gone too far and now we’re in a horribly dangerous situation. Horribly dangerous. Certainly the worst of your lifetime. And if you have any kids and you have grandkids, they’re going to live with the outcome of what we’re witnessing today. And it’s the fault of the White House and the Congress and the EU.
Putin didn’t bring this on. He didn’t want it. It was the last thing he wanted. But now he’s reacting. I wasn’t alone, but I’m just speaking for myself. I warned them this would happen, but they don’t listen.
They have ideologues in positions of foreign policy making like [former U.S. ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul. He’s an ideologist, he’s not a diplomat. If you’re going to appoint people like this to be your primary policy makers and advise the President ...
You know what Hillary Clinton said today? She equated Putin with Hitler.
And she wants to be President of the United States. She’s going to have some nice conversations with him if she gets elected.
But how can you negotiate with Hitler? When Mrs. Clinton said that she disqualified herself from the Presidency. Then she goes on and says but of course we’ve got to de-escalate and negotiate. Well, then don’t call him Hitler. If you can’t connect those dots you don’t want to be President.
Even Obama said that Putin was like some spoiled kid slouching around the classroom. It’s undignified for the President of the United States to speak like that.
I don’t recall when we had Soviet leaders that anybody spoke like that about. We didn’t like Brezhnev because we didn’t like his political system, but it wasn’t personal. Nixon got along just fine with Brezhnev. They liked each other.
[Putin], by the way, is the most consequential -- consequential doesn’t mean good or bad -- most consequential leader of the 21st century. He’s been in power 14 years. He towers over everybody else. The only other leader who might be in his company is Merkel.
The last three American presidents have been foreign policy failures, war-makers. You’d think there’s a little bit of envy in here that he’s been so successful in representing the interests of his nation and our presidents have screwed it up. One failed war after another.
That’s what the Russians think, by the way. I was there in December and I was asked, why, why are they going on about Putin? Are they jealous? And I had to stop and think. I don’t know. Maybe they are.
But here’s the point: In a democracy you get out of terrible crises through discourse. There’s no discourse in this country. All you’ve got are these people saying that Putin’s delusional. I mean, this is the new thing? He’s delusional?
No. The people who are delusional are the people who says he’s Hitler. If he’s Hitler then it’s Munich. And if it’s Munich then we’ve got to go to war tomorrow, right? Can they think one foot in front of the other? No.
They’re in the grip of this crazy syndrome that Putin’s the most evil guy we’ve ever seen when all he’s done really to offend them is get Russia back on its feet.
We loved Yeltsin because he was drunk and he said yes to everything. And then you get a sober guy and he’s going to defend Russia’s interest whether they’re right or wrong as he sees it. That’s what national leaders are supposed to do. And diplomats are supposed to sit down and sort this out.
You say this is Putin defending national interests, whether they be right or wrong. Does that preclude action on the part of the U.S. if the U.S. determines them to be wrong?
That we debate. But here’s how I open the question: Does Russia have any legitimate national interests at all on its borders? Because the tacit assumption is that it has none, not even in Crimea. Now, if that’s the position you begin with, it’s a nonstarter, because every state, even little states, put particularly great states, have those interests.
So I use this analogy, but it’s not perfect: Let’s say tomorrow that suddenly Russian power -- political, economic -- shows up in Canada, on our border, and in Mexico. Do we just say then, Oh, every people has the right to decide it’s own future? Do we say that?
And if we say that Russia should get out of Crimea, which is preposterous, what about Guantanamo? It’s a complete double standard. Whether they think this way because they’re stupid, because they’re deceitful, or because they’re just confused, I don’t know.
My main point is that we, not Putin, have managed to move the divide of the new Cold War from Berlin, where it was semi-safe, right to Russia’s borders. Maybe it’s not an iron curtain, but divided Berlin was the divide for 45 years. Now we’ve moved it right plunk to a divided Ukraine. And Ukraine was divided by God and history, not by Putin.
But do you think there’s absolutely reason to say it was wrong of Russia to intervene militarily in Ukraine?
We don’t know that Putin went into Crimea. We literally don’t know. We’re talking about “facts” that are coming out of Kiev, which is a mass of disinformation.
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