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By Tim Whewell
Donald Trump’s willingness to build better relations with Russia is threatening to turn US foreign policy on its head. His openness towards Vladimir Putin has dismayed most of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. But it’s now shared by some European politicians, not all of them far-right extremists, in France, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. They can’t all be Kremlin agents – so what’s the new pull of Putin for some in the West?
The two politicians, one American, one Russian, put down their drinks and clasped hands across the pub table. Then they both pushed. But there was no real contest.
The arm-wrestling match was over in a second and the winner was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, a man who’d built up his strength through years of judo training. Few outside Russia had ever heard of him. But five years later he would become its president.
US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher still laughs when he recalls his brief duel with Vladimir Putin in 1995, when the Russian came over in an official delegation. He hasn’t met Mr Putin since. But for many years he’s been the most consistent voice for détente on Capitol Hill, often effectively in a minority of one.
“I don’t see Putin as a good guy, I see him as a bad guy. But every bad guy in the world isn’t our enemy that we have to find ways of thwarting and beating up,” Congressman Rohrabacher says.
“There are a lot of areas where this would be a better world if we were working together, rather than this constant barrage of hostility aimed at anything the Russians are trying to do.”
Mr Rohrabacher doesn’t condone Russian hacking during the US election campaign or the Kremlin’s military incursions into Ukraine. But he believes Russia is the victim of Western double standards.
And that view is shared by some Western experts on Russia, though the vast majority stress how aggressive the country has become under President Putin.
Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, in the UK, is in the minority camp. “We are living in a huge echo chamber which only listens to itself,” he says. “The key meme is ‘Russian aggression’ and it’s repeated ad nauseam instead of thinking.
“When we have national interests, that’s good. But when Russia tries to defend its interests, it’s illegitimate, it’s aggressive, and it’s dangerous for the rest of the world.”
Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and military support of separatists in eastern Ukraine is widely taken as evidence that Mr Putin seeks to extend his country’s borders.
But Prof Sakwa sees the Ukrainian crisis as a symptom of the failure after the Cold War to establish a new international security system that would have included Russia.
Meanwhile Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University, argues that the “vilification” of President Putin in the West stems originally from disappointment that the Russian leader turned his back on some of the Western-inspired reforms of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin: reforms that many Russians blame for the lawlessness and falling living standards of that period.
“Putin is a European man trying to rule a country that is only partially European,” Cohen says. “But we demand that the whole world be on our historical clock.”
Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and military support of separatists in eastern Ukraine is widely taken as evidence that Mr Putin seeks to extend his country’s borders.
But Prof Sakwa sees the Ukrainian crisis as a symptom of the failure after the Cold War to establish a new international security system that would have included Russia.
Meanwhile Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University, argues that the “vilification” of President Putin in the West stems originally from disappointment that the Russian leader turned his back on some of the Western-inspired reforms of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin: reforms that many Russians blame for the lawlessness and falling living standards of that period.
“Putin is a European man trying to rule a country that is only partially European,” Cohen says. “But we demand that the whole world be on our historical clock.”
Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea and military support of separatists in eastern Ukraine is widely taken as evidence that Mr Putin seeks to extend his country’s borders.
But Prof Sakwa sees the Ukrainian crisis as a symptom of the failure after the Cold War to establish a new international security system that would have included Russia.
Meanwhile Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at New York University, argues that the “vilification” of President Putin in the West stems originally from disappointment that the Russian leader turned his back on some of the Western-inspired reforms of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin: reforms that many Russians blame for the lawlessness and falling living standards of that period.
“Putin is a European man trying to rule a country that is only partially European,” Cohen says. “But we demand that the whole world be on our historical clock.”