Joe Biden v. Vladimir Putin: This week’s dismal propaganda war had no winners

At one level in Tucker Carlson’s 127-minute “interview” with Vladimir Putin final week — which was extra like a tendentious, digressive historical past lecture, sometimes interrupted by a dim however obsequious schoolboy — Carlson made the Russian president chuckle. It was a creaky, troubling sound, one thing just like the door of an vintage iron protected being swung forwards and backwards. One can solely think about how a lot Kremlin insiders hate that sound.

Carlson had requested why Putin didn’t attempt to rating a “propaganda victory” by revealing info which may implicate the CIA within the still-mysterious Nord Stream pipeline bombing of September 2022. 

Putin laughed. Creak, creak, squeak. “Within the conflict of propaganda, it is vitally troublesome to defeat the US,” he responded, “as a result of the US controls all of the world’s media and the European media.” 

Nicely, OK. Let’s begin with the apparent irony: Putin isn’t any slouch within the propaganda wars himself, and is properly conscious of his fame within the West as a grasp manipulator. Why was he speaking to, or fairly at, Tucker Carlson within the first place? 

We’ll get again to that. However there’s a second layer of irony, which even Putin couldn’t have anticipated. His Carlson dialog was launched on-line instantly reverse Joe Biden’s unexpectedly organized White Home press convention on Thursday night. The distinction might hardly have been extra putting, or more strange.

It’s each unfair and unreasonable, little doubt, to attract a direct comparability between the 2 presidents’ media occasions, which befell in dramatically totally different circumstances and for various causes. However politics, whether or not world or nationwide, has nothing to do with what’s honest or affordable and every part to do with look and notion. 

If Putin was the winner of this week’s propaganda battle, that was largely by default. As standard, Biden’s efficiency each demanded and deserved our compassion and empathy, at the same time as we devoutly wished he had been another person, or elsewhere.

The president addressed the cameras for about 5 minutes, fueled by tangible human emotion and reportedly with no Teleprompter, earlier than taking just a few questions from reporters. All the things he mentioned and did in that temporary look, as much as and together with his now-infamous confusion of Mexico with Egypt, is defensible or no less than explicable when seen by the distortion lens of American partisan politics. Commentators on MSNBC and elsewhere within the liberal-inflected media demonstrated that to the perfect of their capacity over the following day or two. 

But when we might, simply as a thought experiment, push ourselves away from that warped perspective, and ignore the orange-hued hobgoblin whose infinite marketing campaign speeches are laden with far worse misstatements, to not point out ludicrous delusions and outright fabrications — properly, no, I notice we are able to’t try this. Donald Trump has reworked and stupefied American public discourse way more profoundly than he might ever have imagined was potential, and evidently we’ll stay mesmerized by him till he’s useless or all of us are, and maybe after that. (Will the MAGA motion have him stuffed and mounted, like Lenin, or carry him round on a plywood platform, like a medieval saint?)

But when we pretended, only for a minute, to note that there are a number of billion individuals on the earth who view the US from outdoors with a combination of terror, surprise and sheer mystification, we’d additionally discover that what they noticed within the White Home on Thursday was the octogenarian chief of essentially the most highly effective navy energy in historical past, confronted with a report (from his personal authorities!) that described him as an “aged man with a poor reminiscence” who suffers from “diminished colleges,” responding in an offended, mumbled monotone that was troublesome to comply with even in the event you knew what he was speaking about and featured a spectacular mistake that he by no means seen or corrected. 

What-about that each one you want: Trump’s evident derangement is infinitely extra harmful, Biden has a lifelong speech obstacle that may result in verbal tics and mangled diction, his Mexico-Egypt transposition is totally typical of the “gaffes” heard all through his public life. All of that’s true, or no less than believable. But when we are able to draw back, as soon as once more, from “What does this imply for the Democrats?” and the ghoulish social media gloating of Particular person 1 and his many followers, and regard this pseudo-event from the angle of Tanzania or Indonesia or Mars, I feel the decision is evident.

It was a disaster. A whole and whole insert-a-profane-gerund catastrophe. Not only a political catastrophe, though in all probability that too. Extra of a world WTF: How in all of the names of God in all of the world’s religions did that man find yourself as essentially the most highly effective particular person on the planet, to not point out the supposed defender of so-called democracy towards an insultingly idiotic fascist renaissance? 

To say that Putin seemed good by comparability isn’t even damning with faint reward. I wouldn’t argue that he seemed good in any respect. However within the face of Western media accounts which have depicted the Russian president as paranoid and remoted, he made an effort to look statesmanlike and properly knowledgeable. His historical past classes had been tendentious and extremely selective, however his information and dates had been largely correct. He appeared to view Carlson, understandably sufficient, with the perspective of a mildly bored spider who isn’t certain whether or not the small insect being wrapped in its net is even price consuming.

Let’s return to his creaky chuckle and his reply concerning the dangers of combating a propaganda conflict with America. Putin is nowhere close to being a deep thinker or an mental (International Minister Sergey Lavrov is the brains of that operation), however as an intelligence skilled he’s expert at throwing shade, clouding the difficulty and twisting the knife.

The primary a part of Putin’s assertion, in bigger historic phrases, is just about true: He’s little doubt higher knowledgeable than most Individuals concerning the ideological significance of U.S. “tender energy.” However the second half, about American management of the media, is about midway between cranky conspiracy principle and acerbic Noam Chomsky commentary: Sure, the Western press has a built-in bias towards liberal democracy and market capitalism. Breaking information! 

Putin deployed that rhetorical method repeatedly with Carlson: He begins with a premise that’s roughly true, or no less than has some foundation in actuality, then leaps ahead to more and more contentious and illogical conclusions. 

Ukrainian nationality is a contemporary invention, the Russian chief argued in his prolonged opening monologue — which he advised Carlson could be “30 seconds or a minute” and went on for almost half an hour — and the present-day Ukrainian state was constructed from territory that at varied instances belonged to the Russian Empire, the dominion of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and who is aware of what else. Positive! That’s all true, but it surely doesn’t comply with that fashionable Ukraine has no proper to exist, or that Russia is justified in clawing a lot of that territory again by power.

Somebody brighter than Tucker Carlson may need noticed that all fashionable nation-states, just about, are synthetic constructions. Nothing resembling present-tense Germany or Italy may very well be discovered on maps of Europe earlier than the center of the nineteenth century, and 200-odd years after the creation of the UK, the connection between its constituent nations stays unsettled. One of many primary premises of post-Enlightenment world politics is that when a big majority of the individuals in a given territory determine that they’re a nation, because the Ukrainians have clearly carried out, the world is meant to take them significantly: “When in the middle of human occasions,” and all that.

Equally, Putin made the acquainted case that the U.S. and NATO broke a post-Chilly Battle promise to not broaden the Western navy alliance into the previous Soviet bloc, not to mention all the way in which to Russia’s western border. He’s positively obtained a degree, though the fine-grained particulars are contentious and the precise historical past is extra difficult than that. Subsequent comes the argument that the 2014 Maidan “revolution” that overthrew the pro-Russian authorities of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych — who was corrupt and incompetent however had roughly been legitimately elected — was really a CIA-sponsored coup. I don’t suppose that has a yes-or-no reply. It is extra like a “both-and”: Ukrainian nationalists turned decisively towards Yanukovych and Russian affect, and the U.S. not-so-covertly helped power him out.

Even when we give Putin the W on that one, for argument’s sake, that’s when he runs out of rope. His following declare is that the U.S. and NATO engineered a civil conflict between authorities forces and pro-Russian militias in jap Ukraine, and that his “particular navy operation” of 2022 — to the remainder of the world, an unprovoked invasion — was merely an effort to settle that battle. To offer Carlson minimal credit score, he retains asking what potential menace Putin perceived in Ukraine that justified two years of grueling warfare, however doesn’t seem to note how completely that query has been bulldozed beneath a construction of midway believable, irrelevant or completely specious claims.

---

Desire a each day wrap-up of all of the information and commentary Salon has to supply? Subscribe to our morning publication, Crash Course.

---

As many different commentators have noticed, Carlson performed his useful-idiot position faithfully: He by no means talked about Russian conflict crimes, the suppression of inner dissent or the more and more vicious crackdown on LGBTQ individuals and civil liberties extra usually. However he was totally unsuccessful at baiting Putin into endorsing Donald Trump — the Russian chief talked about Trump simply as soon as, in passing — or into proclaiming some alliance with right-wing Christians within the West. Putin’s obscure remarks about faith had been artfully boring and fully unspecific, and to Carlson’s ears may need sounded alarmingly like Western ethical relativism. (There is a good motive for that: Lower than half the Russian inhabitants identifies as Orthodox Christian, and almost 40 p.c profess no specific faith.)

All this confirms my sense that the bigger viewers Putin appears towards is world, and that opposite to the fantasies of a few of his American or European fanboys, he has no real interest in being recognized because the chief of a white supremacist, Christian-centric marketing campaign of reconquest. Russia’s most essential precise or potential allies are the opposite BRICS international locations — Brazil, India, China and South Africa — not Steve Bannon or Mike Johnson or the fractious white nationalists of Western Europe. Unsurprisingly, Carlson hadn’t carried out his homework: Russian nationalism is constructed on the idea of a hybrid “Eurasian” identification — as explored in a latest New York Overview article by Gary Saul Morson — which definitely has components of racism however is totally distinct from Euro-American notions of “whiteness.”

Individuals largely haven’t seen, or haven’t needed to note, that the majority growing nations within the World South have remained on the sidelines of the Ukraine battle, at greatest, and have turned decisively towards U.S. coverage within the Center East since Israel’s Gaza invasion. Vladimir Putin is aware of these realities, and believes he can exploit the intractable qualities demonstrated by Russia over the centuries — endurance, stubbornness and a exceptional tolerance for pointless struggling — to show them to his benefit. Joe Biden, as we have now currently witnessed, remains to be struggling to return to grips with these information.

Would Putin want Trump to Biden? Certainly, however I’m undecided it issues to him as a lot because the hypnotized American political courses imagine. He advised Carlson that the persona of particular person leaders isn’t essential, and that the large historic query about the US is whether or not its imperial decline comes all of the sudden and painfully, or extra step by step over an extended time period. He prevented saying whether or not he’d get pleasure from a kind of choices greater than the opposite, graciously observing that it wasn’t as much as him.