New "Frontline" documentary on "Putin and the Presidents"

PBS Frontline has a new hour-long documentary called Putin and the Presidents.

As one might guess from the title, it presents the story of Vlad the Villain facing off against various American Presidents. The narrative at the end summarizes the topic this way: “Vladmir Putin, the former KGB agent, hellbent on rebuilding the Russian empire, now a dangerous pariah on the world stage, staring down yet another American President to see how far he will go.“

Eyeball to eyeball, we might say:

The most enduring phrase summing up the Cuban Missile Crisis—the climax of the Cold War and the closest the world ever came to nuclear Armageddon—belongs to Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." Thus was born the myth of calibrated brinkmanship—the belief that if you stand tough you win, and that nuclear superiority makes the difference in moments of crisis.

The fact that the event passed without a nuclear holocaust owed much more to dumb luck and calm thinking as to raging testosterone. But why detract from a favorite macho fantasy?

By the way, the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, i.e., the highest risk level that they’ve ever declared. With eyeballs that close, extra doses of testosterone is not what policymakers need most at the moment.

The documentary is informative if taken for what it is, a highbrow New Cold War narrative of the inevitable unfolding of Vlad the Invader’s evil plot to conquer everything in sight.

In usual Frontline style, it provides us with a parade of talking heads, most of which are actually worth listening to, including (alphabetically) Yevgenia Albats, Yamiche Alcindor, Peter Baker, John Beyrle, Anthopny Blinken, John Bolton, John Brennan, William Burns, James Clapper, Heather Conley, Daniel Fried, Masha Gessen, Susan Glasser, Gennady Gudkov, Stephen Hadley, Fiona Hill, David Hoffman, Julia Ioffe, Greg Miller, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Evan Osnos, Steven Piper, Eugene Robinson, William Taylor, Kori Schake, Timothy Snyder, Jake Sullivan, Strobe Talbott, William Taylor, Tomicah Tillemann, and Marie Yovanovitch.

With a couple of exceptions like Bolton and Schake, these are people who have some relevant knowledge and expertise. So the documentary does give a decent overview of the milestones that go from Putin first becoming Russian President in 2000 up to today’s Russia-Ukraine War. But we don’t really hear perspectives from generally dovish types or grumpy foreign-policy “realists” who might trouble the clean-cut Our Side (Democracies) vs. Their Side (Autocracies) narrative it presents.

Near the end, Kori Schake, the director of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, declares with a triumphal smirk that Putin “clearly miscalculated the capabilities of the Russian military, the capabilities of the Ukrainian military, the willingness of the Ukrainian people to fight for their independence. This was a miscalculation of Napoleonic magnitude.”

All of which is basically true and obvious, though I won’t bother to speculate on what she meant by “Napoleonic” other than it’s supposed to sound geopolitically savvy, or something.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of talk about “Western resolve” and the allegedly insufficient supply of it from 2000-2022. That’s why they needed to avoid dragging in any of those annoying “realists” or “restrainers” who might have suggested that expanding NATO over a period of years against very clearly expressed Russian concerns showed that Resolve in that matter was not lacking. Instead, it focuses on a story of how one Resolve-deficient President after another failed to see Putin’s obvious plans and decade or two in advance. Joe Biden is the steely and determined hero of this presentation.

Despite the questionable framing, the historical narrative is handled well in several respects. We do get some sense that the liberal-interventionist foreign policy of the Clinton Administration followed by the missionary-neocon disasters of the Cheney-Bush Administration did have some downsides for the US-Russia relationship. And we do get some sense that in 2000 up until at least 2014 (Russia’s annexation of Crimea), the possibilities for alternative developments in that relationship were more open than they later came to seem. It does give a decent sense of how feckless-at-best Trump was in his Russia policy.

It also gives the viewers a glimpse of how democracy-promotion activities may have genuinely spooked Putin with the idea that the US may have been trying to overthrow his government. Here, Putin’s rightwing-authoritarian tendencies may lead him to overestimate the threat he may have faced from that source. Although it was obviously convenient for him to blame the US, too.

The documentary deals with the “Russiagate” dispute around the 2016 election in a fairly superficial way. Good “NPR liberals” (bless their hearts!) will not find their assumption that Russian interference decided the election challenged. The Russian espionage that is well documented was serious enough. But the evidence that its election meddling decided the outcome has always been loosely-grounded speculation. (Luke Savage: “That the Russian government preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton and that Russia-connected actors engaged in digital skulduggery related to the election are not really in dispute. Much of the mainstream discussion around Russian bots, however, has been premised on unexamined assumptions about the scale and effectiveness of these efforts.”)

The Democracies-vs.-Autocracies/New Cold War framing also results in unqualified statements about how Putin has more-or-less always wanted to restore an empire that encompasses the former Soviet Union, or the pre-First World War Russian Empire. Many viewers are likely to take from this program that Putin has explicitly declared such aims. But while he clearly promotes Russian nationalism and a politicized Russian Orthodox Christianity as part of it, his public statements on it over the decade have tended to be vague on the territorial dimentions of that nationalism. And the justifications for it have also been general and have shifted over time.

It’s completely plausible and consistent with public Russian policy to assume that Russia sees the area of the former Soviet Union as its own legitimate sphere of influence. Since the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are now NATO allies, Russian expectations of influence there are presumably more modest for the foreseeable future. Some of Putin’s public statements about Greater Russia suggest that expectations are particularly strong for Belarus and Ukraine.

But as one of those annoying realists, John Mearsheimer, pointed out earlier this month, “there is no evidence that Putin was determined to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into the greater Russia," even during the current war. That doesn’t mean that the actual invasion and annexations are thereby any less serious or more legitimate. But it’s also entirely possible that Russia’s goal last year was to seize Kyiv and gain control of eastern Ukraine while leaving western Ukraine as a rump state for the immediate future. Obviously, a Russian goal to annex all of it would be a plausible assumption. But Putin’s expansionist ambitions as portrayed in this documentary are assumed to be greater than anything explicitly declared or clearly indicated by actual military or political developments.

Kori Schake's melodramatic comment that Putin “clearly miscalculated” Russia’s immediate capabilities and other things in last year’s invasion is true as far as it goes. But “threat inflation” that portrays opponents as more of an immediate danger than they actually are is also highly problematic. Without minimizing questionable judgment calls by the West in NATO expansion, it’s pretty clear that Putin’s government also inflated the potential threat it faced from Ukraine.

The Russians might have saved themselves a lot of trouble by a more sober threat assessment. But an assumption of rabid Russian territorial ambition is unfortunately reflected in Putin and the Presidents documentary.

(This post is also available on Substack with detailed footnotes.)