Skittish Western elites who fretted that Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin would be a propaganda coup for the Russian leader need not have worried. It is hard to believe that Putin did himself any favors with that long interrogation.
His main audience was the American people, whom he no doubt quickly put to sleep with his grumpy, half-hour lesson in Russian history. Carlson tried to lead him out of the weeds from time to time, but Putin was having none of it. If there were any ordinary Americans left watching after the KGB schoolmaster’s dull disquisition, they were left with 90 more minutes of Putin saying important things, but things we have mostly heard before.
Verdict: the two-hour Tucker Carlson interview was mostly a wasted opportunity for Vladimir Putin.
And yet, it was at the same time a significant global political happening—one full of lessons for our frightening moment.
Consider that the Putin interview dropped on the same day that the Special Counsel in the Biden records case concluded in his report that Biden had willfully removed classified materials from the White House, and illegally shared secret information with his biographer. But, said the Special Counsel, in five hours of interview last year, Biden could not remember when he had been vice president, nor could he remember within several years when his son Beau had died.
Result: the Special Counsel said he would not recommend charges in the case because no jury would convict an elderly man so mentally lost. In other words, the President of the United States is so far gone into dementia that jury members would not be able to accept that Biden knew what he was doing when he took the documents.
Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, who is ten years younger than Biden, he is vigorous, sharp, and combative. He gave his American interlocutor a coherent lesson on the past thousand years of Russian history, and hesitated only to tell the Yank to hush, and let him finish. Meanwhile, in Washington yesterday, Joe Biden confused President Sisi of Egypt with the leader of Mexico.
Toggling back and forth online from the Carlson interview to the Biden press conference, staged to address the humiliating Special Counsel’s report, was like moving out on a frail, narrow footbridge over a chasm. It is truly terrifying to consider that the feeble, senile old man desperately trying to rebut charges of dementia is what the U.S. sends to “battle” against a man like Putin.
Even worse, nobody doubts that Putin, for better or for worse, governs Russia. Who is governing America from the White House? Because it is not Joe Biden, that’s for sure.
Strangely enough, a viral tweet going around America last night put Putin’s history lesson in an instructive context, one that, on reflection, makes his irritable discourse genuinely revealing about how the world stumbled into the most dangerous moment of superpower conflict since the Cuban missile crisis. Bear with me, as this may seem like a transgression.
Sunny Hostin is a light-skinned black woman who co-hosts The View, a daily female-oriented chat show popular with American women. She has long advocated for ‘reparations’—sums of money to be paid to black Americans as recompense for their ancestors’ slavery. Hostin recently appeared on a different program that traces the genealogies of well-known people. That show discovered that Hostin is descended in part from Spanish colonial slave owners.
Presumably Hostin could do her bit for reparations by moving cash from her left pocket to her right one. But seriously, the right lesson to draw is that history is complex and tragic—that history is not a just-so story that we tell to justify what we want to do in the moment.
That is not the lesson Sunny Hostin drew. On Thursday she told the View audience that she still believes in reparations, and that people who call her hypocritical need to shut up. American to her fingertips, Hostin believes historical facts and narratives should not bind her thinking or behavior. She believes in the everlasting now.
What does this episode with a shallow American celebrity have to do with the Putin interview? Answer: it sheds important light on why Putin’s perseveration on the history lesson matters in ways Americans are incapable of grasping, because it is not in their nature.
It is hard for many Europeans to understand, but Americans scarcely know what happened in our country more than five minutes ago. And we only seem to care about it insofar as we can cite history as a reason to justify whatever it is that we want to do now. This is why Americans are living through the catastrophic, indeed totalitarian, leftist stripping of significant historical figures from public life—taking down their monuments, expelling a considered, nuanced treatment of them from history books—without protest. Too few Americans understand why this matters, and why they should care.
Isn’t Vladimir Putin doing the same thing—putting history to use to justify his attack on Ukraine? Yes, but there’s a difference. Russia really does have this incredibly long, dense, and difficult history with the territory we now call Ukraine. One does not have to accept Putin’s conclusion at the end of the story—therefore, Russia had to invade—or accept his version of historical events to grasp that history matters to him in ways that many Americans will fail to appreciate.
Let’s look at it from a different way. When I first lived in Hungary in 2021, I was surprised, and even shocked, by how much the Treaty of Trianon, which settled Hungary’s accounts from World War I, affected the way contemporary Hungarians thought about geopolitics—this, a century after the fact!
Struggling to understand this, I asked a new Hungarian friend, a man who had lived many years in America, why this matters so much to contemporary Hungarians. Yes, it was certainly a tragedy, but that was then and this is now. Right?
“Let me put it to you like this,” said the Hungarian. “If I want to go visit the graves of my grandparents, I have to go to another country.”
That man opened a conceptual doorway for me into how personal history is for Hungarians—and not only for Hungarians, but most peoples of what we Americans consider to be the Old World. Half the time I wish we Americans had such a strong historical consciousness, and the rest of the time I’m grateful that our ancestors migrated away from lands whose peoples were shackled and dragged down by the weight of history.
Coming back to Putin, I don’t know enough about Russian history to discern truth from lies in his discourse. It’s no doubt the case that he, too, is using the historical record selectively, to justify what he wants to do—with far more consequence than the estrogenated woke noodling of a celebrity TV host.
Nevertheless, if Putin’s turgid history lecture causes at least some Americans to grasp the weight and shape of history in Russian thinking about this war, it will have done a service. It is an undeniable fact that the Russian nation began just as Putin said it did: in 988, with the acceptance in Kyiv of Christianity by its ruler, Prince Vladimir. Not in Moscow, but in Kyiv. Everything more or less follows from that.
This does not give Russia the right to rule Ukraine, of course, but it obviates the absurd story many pro-Ukraine Americans tell themselves about freedom and national determination. Recall, we Americans are the kind of people who were led to believe by the George W. Bush administration that inside the hearts of every Iraqi was an American liberal democrat waiting to be liberated. We were also told that Americans who warned that Iraq’s religious and tribal divisions would make democracy impossible were racists who didn’t want Arabs to have nice things.
The main reason I have opposed NATO efforts in Ukraine is not out of love for the Russians and support for their war, but because even a relatively ignorant American like me understands that as a matter of history and geography, Russia can and must care far, far more about the geopolitical status of Ukraine than the United States ever could. Balance of power politics in the real world is not a game of Risk.
“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt, more than $33 trillion,” said Putin. “You have nothing better to do so you should fight in Ukraine?”
He’s right about that. All Putin’s self-serving blather about “de-Nazification,” and his revolting claim that Stalin treated Poland honorably during the Second World War—that’s beside the most important point of all, which was: You Americans don’t belong here. It is not in your interest.
Putin did signal his intention to negotiate an end to the war, and unequivocally denied having any expansionist intentions on other European countries. All to the good. To his great credit, Carlson asked Putin to release the captive Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to his (Carlson’s) custody, so he could take him home to America. To his disgrace, Putin declined.
All in all, the interview was a triumph for Carlson, who had the audacity to go to Moscow and commit journalism, flying in the face of Western media consensus—one that exists beyond the Russia-Ukraine War—that the kinds of stories that one should cover are those that confirm the narrative offered by the managerial liberal state.
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.
The interview was a fumble for Putin. He had a golden opportunity to make a clear case to the people of the U.S. and Europe—a case that they rarely hear in their media—that NATO’s meddling in Ukraine from 2008 on set the stage for this war. It’s an argument that readers of Professor John Mearsheimer know well, but that has been largely suppressed by Western media. For whatever reason, Putin buried that message under a mass of verbiage as endless as the Kazakh steppe.
Even poor old Joe Biden, on whatever planet he was on last evening when the interview aired, must know to his relief that Vladimir Putin took a shot—and missed.
The ‘View’ From Vladimir Putin’s Seat
In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives an interview to U.S. talk show host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow on February 6, 2024.
Photo by Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP
Skittish Western elites who fretted that Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin would be a propaganda coup for the Russian leader need not have worried. It is hard to believe that Putin did himself any favors with that long interrogation.
His main audience was the American people, whom he no doubt quickly put to sleep with his grumpy, half-hour lesson in Russian history. Carlson tried to lead him out of the weeds from time to time, but Putin was having none of it. If there were any ordinary Americans left watching after the KGB schoolmaster’s dull disquisition, they were left with 90 more minutes of Putin saying important things, but things we have mostly heard before.
Verdict: the two-hour Tucker Carlson interview was mostly a wasted opportunity for Vladimir Putin.
And yet, it was at the same time a significant global political happening—one full of lessons for our frightening moment.
Consider that the Putin interview dropped on the same day that the Special Counsel in the Biden records case concluded in his report that Biden had willfully removed classified materials from the White House, and illegally shared secret information with his biographer. But, said the Special Counsel, in five hours of interview last year, Biden could not remember when he had been vice president, nor could he remember within several years when his son Beau had died.
Result: the Special Counsel said he would not recommend charges in the case because no jury would convict an elderly man so mentally lost. In other words, the President of the United States is so far gone into dementia that jury members would not be able to accept that Biden knew what he was doing when he took the documents.
Whatever you think of Vladimir Putin, who is ten years younger than Biden, he is vigorous, sharp, and combative. He gave his American interlocutor a coherent lesson on the past thousand years of Russian history, and hesitated only to tell the Yank to hush, and let him finish. Meanwhile, in Washington yesterday, Joe Biden confused President Sisi of Egypt with the leader of Mexico.
Toggling back and forth online from the Carlson interview to the Biden press conference, staged to address the humiliating Special Counsel’s report, was like moving out on a frail, narrow footbridge over a chasm. It is truly terrifying to consider that the feeble, senile old man desperately trying to rebut charges of dementia is what the U.S. sends to “battle” against a man like Putin.
Even worse, nobody doubts that Putin, for better or for worse, governs Russia. Who is governing America from the White House? Because it is not Joe Biden, that’s for sure.
Strangely enough, a viral tweet going around America last night put Putin’s history lesson in an instructive context, one that, on reflection, makes his irritable discourse genuinely revealing about how the world stumbled into the most dangerous moment of superpower conflict since the Cuban missile crisis. Bear with me, as this may seem like a transgression.
Sunny Hostin is a light-skinned black woman who co-hosts The View, a daily female-oriented chat show popular with American women. She has long advocated for ‘reparations’—sums of money to be paid to black Americans as recompense for their ancestors’ slavery. Hostin recently appeared on a different program that traces the genealogies of well-known people. That show discovered that Hostin is descended in part from Spanish colonial slave owners.
Presumably Hostin could do her bit for reparations by moving cash from her left pocket to her right one. But seriously, the right lesson to draw is that history is complex and tragic—that history is not a just-so story that we tell to justify what we want to do in the moment.
That is not the lesson Sunny Hostin drew. On Thursday she told the View audience that she still believes in reparations, and that people who call her hypocritical need to shut up. American to her fingertips, Hostin believes historical facts and narratives should not bind her thinking or behavior. She believes in the everlasting now.
What does this episode with a shallow American celebrity have to do with the Putin interview? Answer: it sheds important light on why Putin’s perseveration on the history lesson matters in ways Americans are incapable of grasping, because it is not in their nature.
It is hard for many Europeans to understand, but Americans scarcely know what happened in our country more than five minutes ago. And we only seem to care about it insofar as we can cite history as a reason to justify whatever it is that we want to do now. This is why Americans are living through the catastrophic, indeed totalitarian, leftist stripping of significant historical figures from public life—taking down their monuments, expelling a considered, nuanced treatment of them from history books—without protest. Too few Americans understand why this matters, and why they should care.
Isn’t Vladimir Putin doing the same thing—putting history to use to justify his attack on Ukraine? Yes, but there’s a difference. Russia really does have this incredibly long, dense, and difficult history with the territory we now call Ukraine. One does not have to accept Putin’s conclusion at the end of the story—therefore, Russia had to invade—or accept his version of historical events to grasp that history matters to him in ways that many Americans will fail to appreciate.
Let’s look at it from a different way. When I first lived in Hungary in 2021, I was surprised, and even shocked, by how much the Treaty of Trianon, which settled Hungary’s accounts from World War I, affected the way contemporary Hungarians thought about geopolitics—this, a century after the fact!
Struggling to understand this, I asked a new Hungarian friend, a man who had lived many years in America, why this matters so much to contemporary Hungarians. Yes, it was certainly a tragedy, but that was then and this is now. Right?
“Let me put it to you like this,” said the Hungarian. “If I want to go visit the graves of my grandparents, I have to go to another country.”
That man opened a conceptual doorway for me into how personal history is for Hungarians—and not only for Hungarians, but most peoples of what we Americans consider to be the Old World. Half the time I wish we Americans had such a strong historical consciousness, and the rest of the time I’m grateful that our ancestors migrated away from lands whose peoples were shackled and dragged down by the weight of history.
Coming back to Putin, I don’t know enough about Russian history to discern truth from lies in his discourse. It’s no doubt the case that he, too, is using the historical record selectively, to justify what he wants to do—with far more consequence than the estrogenated woke noodling of a celebrity TV host.
Nevertheless, if Putin’s turgid history lecture causes at least some Americans to grasp the weight and shape of history in Russian thinking about this war, it will have done a service. It is an undeniable fact that the Russian nation began just as Putin said it did: in 988, with the acceptance in Kyiv of Christianity by its ruler, Prince Vladimir. Not in Moscow, but in Kyiv. Everything more or less follows from that.
This does not give Russia the right to rule Ukraine, of course, but it obviates the absurd story many pro-Ukraine Americans tell themselves about freedom and national determination. Recall, we Americans are the kind of people who were led to believe by the George W. Bush administration that inside the hearts of every Iraqi was an American liberal democrat waiting to be liberated. We were also told that Americans who warned that Iraq’s religious and tribal divisions would make democracy impossible were racists who didn’t want Arabs to have nice things.
The main reason I have opposed NATO efforts in Ukraine is not out of love for the Russians and support for their war, but because even a relatively ignorant American like me understands that as a matter of history and geography, Russia can and must care far, far more about the geopolitical status of Ukraine than the United States ever could. Balance of power politics in the real world is not a game of Risk.
“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt, more than $33 trillion,” said Putin. “You have nothing better to do so you should fight in Ukraine?”
He’s right about that. All Putin’s self-serving blather about “de-Nazification,” and his revolting claim that Stalin treated Poland honorably during the Second World War—that’s beside the most important point of all, which was: You Americans don’t belong here. It is not in your interest.
Putin did signal his intention to negotiate an end to the war, and unequivocally denied having any expansionist intentions on other European countries. All to the good. To his great credit, Carlson asked Putin to release the captive Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to his (Carlson’s) custody, so he could take him home to America. To his disgrace, Putin declined.
All in all, the interview was a triumph for Carlson, who had the audacity to go to Moscow and commit journalism, flying in the face of Western media consensus—one that exists beyond the Russia-Ukraine War—that the kinds of stories that one should cover are those that confirm the narrative offered by the managerial liberal state.
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.
The interview was a fumble for Putin. He had a golden opportunity to make a clear case to the people of the U.S. and Europe—a case that they rarely hear in their media—that NATO’s meddling in Ukraine from 2008 on set the stage for this war. It’s an argument that readers of Professor John Mearsheimer know well, but that has been largely suppressed by Western media. For whatever reason, Putin buried that message under a mass of verbiage as endless as the Kazakh steppe.
Even poor old Joe Biden, on whatever planet he was on last evening when the interview aired, must know to his relief that Vladimir Putin took a shot—and missed.
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