https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/11/examining-the-controversy-surrounding-tucker-carlsons-interview-with-putin/
I wonder if there is a central clearing office that issues regular updates about what nasty dictators one is allowed to engage with and which ones, for this week anyway, one must avoid.
It was okay for Gavin Newsom to remove the feces and the homeless from the streets of San Francisco in order to fête Xi Jinping. Likewise, it was just fine for CNN and the BBC to interview the leader of Hamas. And of course CNN’s Erin Burnett was on the case with Volodymyr Zelensky in her 2023 interview with the former comedian and crossdressing performance artist (though the soundtrack to this version of Burnett’s love fest is—special).
It was okay to interview or publish Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban. It was even okay, once upon a time, for journalists—well, some journalists—to interview Vladimir Putin.
But just let Tucker Carlson travel to Moscow to interview the Russian dictator, and pow!, the media and its minders go nuts. I watched the entire 2-hour-long interview and the 2-part, 10-minute post-mortem Tucker conducted in an ante-room of the Kremlin and then back at his hotel. I thought both were fascinating.
That does not, by the way—do I really have to say this?—mean that I am “soft on Putin.” Having published books highly critical of him at Encounter Books—including a scathing anatomy of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by plutonium—I am under no illusions about Putin’s brutality.
That said, I believe Donald Trump was right when he said, “It would be a good thing, not a bad thing,” if the United States were to get along with Russia. I have explained why I think so several times, for example, here.
Ever since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, hysteria has ruled. I’ve written about that too, for example, here.
A leitmotif in Putin’s remarks to Tucker in that marathon interview was, as he saw it, the serial betrayal of Russia by the West. There was a moment, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when it seemed as though Russia would be welcomed into the family of the West. You’ll find the word “thaw” featured prominently in lots of stories from the period. And later: Remember Hillary Clinton presenting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with her famous “reset button” in 2009? But that was then. In 2014, Russia reabsorbed Crimea (which in truth never left the Russian sphere of influence), and then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the reset was definitively reset.
Data point: NATO was formed after World War II to counter Soviet aggression towards the West. Many commentators, including Irving Kristol, wondered why, with the demise of the Soviet Union, NATO continued to exist. I think that is a good question. But it has continued to exist and, in fact, has greatly expanded. NATO originally had 12 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1990, Western leaders gave assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand further east. But today, NATO has 31 member states, including several that border Russia. The prospect of Ukraine’s joining NATO is intolerable and is one thing that sparked the current conflagration in Ukraine. Look at a map, and you will understand why.
The world seems to be divided in two. There are some who believe that Putin is a dangerous, Hitler-like dictator bent on reassembling the Soviet Union, if not, indeed, conquering all of Europe. In the course of his interview with Tucker, Putin several times insisted that he had no revanchist goals and, in response to a direct question from Tucker, said that he was open to a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
