Bret Stephens
Feb 25, 2025
The New York Times
Havel would have understood the deeper reasons. In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel explained the ways in which communist regimes like the one in Czechoslovakia maintained control. It wasn’t simply, or even primarily, through the threat of force. Rather, it happened through the construction of a “panorama” of mutually reinforcing slogans that most people found relatively easy to go along with, even if, at some level, they knew they were based on outrageous distortions and obvious lies.
Putin spent the first part of his career as a low-level enforcer of that system. He’s spent 25 years in power perfecting it from the top, creating a world in which his dictatorship is “sovereign democracy,” political opposition is “terrorism,” the Jewish president of Ukraine is “a neo-Nazi” and the biggest war in Europe in 80 years is just a “special military operation,” undertaken as a defensive measure against an aggressive NATO. At nearly every turn, he’s been able to get away with it, often with the reluctant acquiescence of Western leaders, from George W. Bush to Angela Merkel, who looked away from his misdeeds for the sake of diplomatic comity. But he’s never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump.
By participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn’t setting itself up as some sort of even-handed broker to end the war. It is turning the United States into an accessory to Russia’s crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated. Unlike Nixon, who moved China toward our corner, at least for 30 years, Trump is moving America toward Russia’s corner, while betraying an ally and breaking the Atlantic alliance. At this point, Tucker Carlson, Putin’s preferred poodle, may as well be secretary of state.
In his essay, Havel movingly described the ways in which tyrannies are brought down: when a handful of brave souls decide to “live within the truth,” which gives their “freedom a concrete significance.” Their early acts of truth-telling — like refusing to participate in sham elections or other regime fictions — will exact an initial price as the government amps up its means of repression. But over time the regime’s panorama of lies will gradually, then suddenly, fall apart. It’s exactly what happened just 11 years after Havel foresaw it, with the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall.
This administration, like its predecessor, had the opportunity, through an easy U.N. vote, to live within the truth when it came to Russia and its malevolence. Instead of working to deconstruct Putin’s panorama of lies, it opted to keep it in place, to reinforce it, to build on it. It’s a choice that will haunt, and shame, America for years.