‘Putin and the Presidents’ Review: A Ruse by a Russian Tyrant
A ‘Frontline’ presentation on PBS examines the relationship between Vladimir Putin and the five American presidents who have dealt with and often misjudged him.
A primer on Vladimir Putin and a chronicle of diplomatic miscalculation, “Putin and the Presidents” sets out to establish a couple of dispiriting truths, one of which could be seen as a takedown of American optimism: Mr. Putin has always been exactly who he seemed to be. The leaders of the free world have been hoping he wasn’t.
Putin and the Presidents, Tuesday, 10 p.m., PBS
An episode of “Frontline” marked by the series’ customary directness, “Putin and the Presidents” maps out the various missteps committed by the White House as regards the former KGB agent who became Russia’s supreme leader in 1999 and whose tenure has been marked ever since by deception, accusations of outright murder and unprovoked warfare. While not intended as prophetic, Bill Clinton is seen in a rather slippery 2000 moment telling the press about his initial encounter with Mr. Putin, whom he declares “capable” of “preserving freedom, pluralism and the rule of law,” without actually implying he would.
What ensues over the hourlong “Putin and the Presidents” is an account of disasters in slow motion (even if the program moves along briskly enough). While there’s no triumphalism about it, the ascension of Joe Biden to the U.S. presidency is portrayed as a kind of endgame. With President Biden in the role of de facto Putin foe, we are told, one product of the Cold War is facing off against another. The Russian president, for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration of the Soviet Union represent the defining moments of his political life, has been trying to resurrect the U.S.S.R. ever since. And blaming the West all the while. Despite his spycraft and falsehoods, Mr. Putin clearly misjudged the political will of America and its allies regarding Ukraine. But, as the show also notes, he had reason to.
Directed by Michael Kirk, the program implies that Mr. Clinton may have had Mr. Putin’s number: Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration, recalls a moment that occurred when the American president, having been more or less rebuffed by Mr. Putin, met with the Russian’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, and the chilling look on Yeltsin’s face when Mr. Clinton told him what he really thought about Yeltsin’s successor. George W. Bush, conversely, and famously, looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul,” which in retrospect seems to have been a misreading. Daniel Fried, then a member of the Bush administration, recalls the moment and the reaction of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “He said that line and you go ‘uh oh.’ And Condi does her version of ‘not comfortable.’ Just for a second.”
But the Bush administration’s campaign to have Ukraine and Georgia join NATO was seen as a Western provocation by Mr. Putin, and the lack of military response from the U.S. during the 2008 Georgian invasion gave Russia license. Likewise, Barack Obama’s anemic reaction to the 2014 annexation of Crimea, which the show interprets as a prelude to the current Ukraine situation. The point is made that Mr. Biden, as vice president, had encouraged a more forceful reply to the Crimean piracy, and the show also recounts how the fractiousness of the Biden-Putin relationship, rooted as it was in Mr. Biden’s longtime service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was aggravated by his public encouragement of Russians, notably students, to resist the Putin regime.
The treatment of the Trump years by “Putin and the Presidents” follows the wildly divergent approach to Russia taken by Donald Trump—the notorious Helsinki press conference, for instance, in which President Trump sided with Mr. Putin over U.S. intelligence services, and his refusal to acknowledge Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “Putin thought Trump was a fool and easily manipulable,” says John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s onetime national security adviser. Mr. Trump’s approach to the Kremlin intersected with what the program asserts has always been Mr. Putin’s agenda, namely an undermining of Western institutions and democracy itself; Jan. 6, according to author and historian Timothy Snyder, was “the big beautiful wrapping” on the four-year gift that the Trump years had been to Vladimir Putin, who now faces his “old nemesis,” Joe Biden. The show hardly portrays President Biden as the world’s savior, but it gives him credit, perhaps to the free world’s advantage, for knowing that Mr. Putin can’t be trusted.
Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
News and insights on Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the West’s response, selected by the editors
Appeared in the January 27, 2023, print edition as 'Leaders Taken in by a Tyrant
Comments
Post a Comment