What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?
By Jonathan Mahler
April 12, 2025
The New York Times
In 1989, shortly before the fall of communism, Boris Yeltsin — the reformer who
would soon become the first freely elected president of post-Soviet Russia —
visited a supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was overwhelmed by the dizzying
array of meats and vegetables on offer. “What have we done to our poor people?”
he later asked an associate traveling with him. The story became instant fodder for
the crusade to convert Russia to capitalism.
Now jump ahead to last year, when the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson
provided a mirror image of Yeltsin’s supermarket visit, only this time the
supermarket was in Moscow. Carlson was in Russia to conduct a sympathetic
interview with President Vladimir Putin. While he was there, he went grocery
shopping and professed to be similarly overwhelmed by the range of options and
affordable prices. The superpowers had traded places. It was America that now
apparently needed to be converted — to Putinism. “Coming to a Russian grocery
store — ‘the heart of evil’ — and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will
radicalize you against our leaders,” Carlson said after passing through the checkout
line. “That’s how I feel anyway — radicalized.”
President Trump, it seems, has also been radicalized. During his first term, he
made no shortage of startlingly pro-Putin comments, and even sided with Russia’s
president against his own intelligence agencies. But in the first few months of his
second term, Trump has gone much further, overturning decades of American
policy toward an adversary virtually overnight. He has claimed that Ukraine was
responsible for its own invasion by Russia and berated Ukraine’s president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, during a televised meeting in the Oval Office. His
administration also joined North Korea and several other autocratic governments
in refusing to endorse a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for the
attack. And he has filled his cabinet with like-minded officials, including his director
of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been described as a “comrade” by
Russian state TV.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of this pivot, as Sasha Havlicek,
the chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonpartisan think tank
that analyzes global extremism and disinformation, points out. “If, in fact, we are
witnessing a total ideological shift of America away from its post-World War II role
as guarantor of the international order and an alignment with Putin and other
authoritarian nationalists against the old allies that constituted the liberal world order,”
she says, “there couldn’t be anything more dramatic than that.”
Russia has long served as much more than a geopolitical rival for America. It has
been an ideological other, a foil that enabled the United States to affirm its own,
diametrically different values. In the words of the historian David S. Foglesong,
Russia is America’s “imaginary twin” or “dark double,” the sister superpower that
the United States is forever either demonizing or trying to remake in its own
image. Or at least it was. Trump’s policies and rhetoric seem aimed at nothing less
than turning America’s dark double into its kindred soul.
Some administration officials and their allies have characterized this as a strategy
— a “reverse Kissinger.” Rather than trying to undermine Russia by making peace
with China, the argument goes, Trump is trying to isolate China — an even more
daunting rival — by building closer ties to Russia. It’s the America First version of
realpolitik. As Vice President JD Vance has said, it would be “ridiculous” for the
United States “to push Russia into the hands of the Chinese.”
Others see it as primarily personal. Trump has never made a secret of his affinity
for Putin, and the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian meddling in the
2016 presidential election only brought the two leaders closer together. “Let me tell
you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said during his meeting in
the Oval Office with Zelensky. Putin has worked the personal angle. Last month, he
told Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, that he went to his local church to pray
for Trump when he was shot last summer and gave Witkoff a portrait of the
American president that he had commissioned. Witkoff, in turn, eagerly shared
these stories in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
Seen through a different lens, though, the reorienting of America’s relationship
with its imaginary twin is not about geopolitical maneuvering or the president’s
personal proclivities. It’s about the improbable triumph of a set of ideas — political
and cultural — that have been bubbling up on the American right for years.
‘The Focus of Evil in the Modern World’
Before Trump’s recent reset, the dark-double framework defined the Russia-U.S.
relationship going back to the last decades of the 19th century, when the United
States first took up the cause of trying to redeem Russia. In the summer of 1882, an
American journalist named James Buel traveled across the country and returned
with an account of a “barbarous” nation that desperately needed to be freed from
tsarist oppression — “whether with bayonet or psalm-book,” he wrote.
In the decades after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when Russia became the Soviet
Union, it morphed into a different, more menacing other — “not just despotic but
diabolical,” as Foglesong writes in his book “The American Mission and ‘The Evil
Empire’” (2007). The Bolshevik ideology of global revolution represented the
ultimate threat to the United States, spurring the paranoia that fueled Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts. The specter of nuclear warfare only intensified the panic over the Red Menace — or, as President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union in 1983, “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
The collapse of the Soviet state over the next decade brought a fresh campaign to
Americanize Russia by cajoling it to build its post-Communist future around the
beacons of democracy and capitalism. Things didn’t work out as either Russia or
the United States hoped. By the end of the 20th century, Russia’s G.D.P. had
collapsed, its new stock market had crashed, it had defaulted on its foreign loans
and a former K.G.B. spy — Putin — had become president.
After his re-election as president in 2012, Putin took Russia in a new direction. He
adopted a crusade of his own against Western “decadence” and “the destruction of
traditional values,” beginning with a ban on L.G.B.T.Q. “propaganda,” part of an
effort to win over conservative Russians who had been disillusioned by their
country’s post-Soviet turn toward the West. The familiar pattern seemed destined
to repeat itself, and for a while it did. The United States had a new foil, and it was
an old foil. Asserting America’s moral superiority in response to Putin’s crackdown
on gay rights, President Obama included three retired gay athletes in the official
American delegation to the Olympic Games in Sochi in 2013.
Putin has since done just about everything in his power to reinforce Russia’s
identity as America’s spiritual adversary, even describing the West as “satanic.”
Harking back to the Cold War, he embarked on a global campaign to upend the
United States-led international order, creating troll farms that flooded the internet
with social media posts designed to spread misinformation and sow discord. At the
same time, he reasserted Russia’s imperial ambitions, first annexing Crimea in
2014 and then invading the rest of Ukraine.
And yet with Trump now back in the White House, the cycle of history may finally
have been broken.
An Alliance Against Liberalism
Whether he knew it or not when he began his campaign to defend traditional
values in 2012, Putin was aligning himself with a small cadre of conservatives
inside the United States who shared his disdain for modern liberalism. That
common cause would become a genuine alliance.
Its roots can be traced back to 1995 — before Putin was even president — when two
Russian sociologists, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, summoned Allan C.
Carlson, an academic and the president of a conservative think tank in Illinois, to
Moscow. Carlson had published a book in defense of traditional families, “Family
Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.” Antonov and Medkov were worried about the population decline in Russia, and were convinced that the solution was contained between the book’s covers. Out of this meeting sprang a new organization, the World Congress of Families, whose aim was to foster a global network of like-minded conservatives to fight feminism, homosexuality and abortion.
In America, this fight had a prominent spokesman: Patrick J. Buchanan, a veteran
of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and a Republican presidential candidate in
1992, 1996 and 2000. Buchanan represented the paleoconservative wing of the
party, which was articulating a very different vision of the post-Cold War world
from that of its neoconservative rivals.
As Buchanan saw it, the great struggle of the 21st century wasn’t a geopolitical
battle between East and West, or freedom and oppression. It was a cultural battle
between traditionalists and the secular, multicultural, global elite. In this context,
America’s crusade to spread democracy was bound to lead it astray. “If
communism was the god that failed the Lost Generation,” he wrote in the early
’90s, “democracy, as ideal form of government, panacea for mankind’s ills, hope of
the world, may prove the Golden Calf of this generation.”
Buchanan had a following, but he was very much on the margins of a party
dominated by neocons, who saw America’s victory in the Cold War as the decisive
triumph of liberal democracy. The post-Cold War world order appeared to be set;
history had ended. The attacks of Sept. 11, and the overwhelming bipartisan
support for America’s military response to them, only reaffirmed the urgency and
righteousness of the cause.
In 2013, Buchanan turned his gaze toward Russia. He had recently published his
best-selling book “Suicide of a Superpower,” bemoaning what he saw as America’s
ongoing social, moral and cultural disintegration. It was an apocalyptic warning
about the country’s declining birthrates, the diminishing influence of Christianity,
the vanishing nuclear family and what Buchanan called “third world” immigration.
Chapter titles included “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian
America.”
Against this backdrop, Buchanan saw Putin as an inspiration. While Obama
condemned the Russian president as an enemy of American values, Buchanan
embraced him as one of his own. “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he wrote
in 2013 in The American Conservative. “In the culture war for mankind’s future, is
he one of us?” When Russia annexed Crimea the following year, Buchanan
characterized the invasion as part of Putin’s divine plan to establish Moscow as
“the Godly City of today and command post of the counter reformation against the
new paganism.”
Mainstream conservatives distanced themselves from Buchanan — and Putin —
but the ground was shifting beneath them. A backlash was brewing on the right
against immigration and progressive social change, as well as America’s
misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American project to export liberal
democracy. A new generation of nativist, reactionary thinkers gravitated toward
Putin’s Russia as an ally in their culture war to turn America instead toward an
antiglobalist nationalism. Putin’s critiques of Europe’s liberal immigration policies
and his talk of rebuilding a Russia with citizens who felt “a spiritual connection to
our Motherland” resonated. “In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is
recognizably European,” the right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter said
in 2017.
During Trump’s first term, many of the ideas that Coulter and her fellow
reactionaries were expressing began migrating toward the Republican Party’s
power center. This new, more favorable vision of Russia was developing its own
intellectual architecture, one that married isolationism, nationalism and
traditionalism with a growing appreciation for autocratic strongmen who were
bending their countries to their will.
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has cracked down on
immigration and put in place policies to raise birthrates, has been the most widely
and openly admired of these European strongmen. But Putin, too, has his admirers,
and they are no longer just fringe characters.
In 2017, Christopher Caldwell, now a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a
think tank closely aligned with the Trump movement, paved the way with an
address at the conservative Christian Hillsdale College titled “How to Think About
Vladimir Putin.” He praised Putin’s refusal to accept a “subservient role in an
American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders,”
and described him as “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.”
Soft Power Pays Hard Dividends
Putin originally embraced the conservative side of the culture war for domestic
reasons. It was a way to reassure Russians that he was attuned to their concerns
about a rapidly changing world, and to provide a new binding ideology for
generations weaned on communism. But this morphed into what Mikhail Zygar, an
exiled Russian journalist, has called “a form of statecraft” — a means by which to
build support on America’s far right and, in so doing, undermine its politics from
within.
Putin’s rhetoric and policies are designed, in part, for American consumption. “He
is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist
International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the 20th
century,” Zygar wrote last year in Foreign Affairs.
The strategy seems to have worked out better than even Putin could have
imagined. In the many years since Buchanan first praised the Russian president,
his fans have moved from the margins of conservative media to the center of White
House decision-making. The soft power is paying hard dividends as American
foreign policy bends in Russia’s direction.
As ambitious as it is, though, the Trump administration’s Russia reset may have its
limits. According to a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March, only 7 percent of
American voters have a favorable opinion of Putin, while 81 percent have an
unfavorable opinion of him. Similarly, 55 percent of American voters disapprove of
Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine, and only 38 percent approve of it. Trump
and his cabinet may look at today’s Russia and see a kindred soul. But most of
America still sees a dark double.
The right-wing politicians and pundits who view Russia as an ally appear to be a
disproportionately powerful minority driving an agenda that is out of step with
most of the public they represent. As radical as this particular agenda may seem,
the broader phenomenon is one that the United States has seen before. “America’s
foreign policy is conducted by elites,” says Jacob Heilbrunn, the author of the 2024
book “America Last,” a history of America’s modern romance with foreign
dictators. “You’ve just got a new one that has come into power now.”
The reorientation of America’s Russia policy, then, may say less about the
persuasiveness of a set of beliefs than it does about the takeover of the Republican
Party by a group of ideologues who have been welcomed in from the fringe. In this
sense, they are no different from the neoconservatives and globalists who drew
Buchanan’s wrath 20 years ago by committing the United States to unpopular wars
in the name of ideology.