The FRONTLINE Interviews

Michael Crowley

Politico

Michael Crowley is the senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico.

This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk conducted on June 12, 2017. It has been edited in parts for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Putin’s Road to War

The Putin Files

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Intervention in the U.S. Election

… The hacking of the [Hillary Clinton campaign chair John] Podesta emails. …What did you hear about it? What did you think when you first heard about it?And then tell me the story.

When did I first hear about the Podesta emails?¹

I don’t remember where I was.There wasn’t some moment.I think I underestimated what was happening.And in fact, after the election, I ran into someone who works in media, who, with a grin on his face, called me into his office and said, “I want to show you something.”He had printed out a couple of emails that he had received from friends, journalists, who replied to him when he said: “I think this is all about the Russians. This is the Russians trying to mess with the election. This story is really big.”

I was one of a couple of people who wrote him back and said: “Maybe, you know. It’s a little hard for me to believe that it’s happening on that scale.”He promised to be very discreet with them, and I'm not worried he’s going to leak those emails, but he was sort of waving them around as a trophy.I think I, even at that time, having become very interested in Russia and realizing what Vladimir Putin was capable of, still didn’t have the breadth of imagination required to believe that the Russians were trying to manipulate our election that way from Moscow.

Why not?

We’d never seen anything like it in this country.It just seemed so brazen, and it just seemed so surreal that something like that could be happening.Now, I had some inkling of Russian interest, because I had written about RT [Russia Today] and Russian propaganda and the way it was covering the election.I’ll sort of do an anecdotal thing if you allow me just back up quickly——because I think it’s better, maybe, than my memory of the email.In early 2016, so maybe like February, we have a magazine that comes out regularly on paper, and the editor says: “We’re doing a media issue, but I’d love to have you write for it, even though you do foreign policy.Can you think of some way media plus the election plus foreign policy?”And I said: “You know, it’s kind of tough to find the niche there.I could write the evergreen story about the foreign correspondents covering the American campaign.We’ve all read that, the sort of bemused French guy and the confused Japanese camera crew.”I said, “It might be kind of interesting to see how the Russians are covering this election,” because things were getting tense.We’d had Crimea; [Edward] Snowden was in Moscow.And he said: “Yeah, look into that. See whether that’s a story.”

I didn’t really know what to expect.And it was like this thing started dawning on me the more time I spent looking at Russia Today, which is known as RT, and Sputnik, these Kremlin-funded English-language propaganda channels.

At that time, it was primarily real animus toward Hillary Clinton. It was much more anti-Hillary that I was seeing.More and more, the more I dove into it, I was seeing more of a pro-Trump strain emerging, not just anti-Hillary, although at that time, that was, again, the dominant theme.But I thought, is it really possible that they could be rooting for Donald Trump?Some of these stories were—a lot of them were reveling in the chaos and the sort of cartoonish nature of Trump and the way he was making the democratic process look kind of ridiculous.

But I'm starting to sense this feeling that, you know, they might actually like this guy.That was a very strange feeling.So this story that I thought might be a dead end ballooned into this project that I became obsessed with, and we ended up slapping the headline “The Kremlin’s Candidate” on it.²

This ran, I think, in March of 2016.

I remember when the editor put that headline on the story, I have to confess, I chewed my nails.I thought, we’re going out on a limb here, because really, this feels very anti-Hillary to me, and I'm not sure they're fully on board with Trump from what I've seen.But I thought it was good enough. I could live with it.I was underestimating them.

What do you think was behind that?What did you come up with that felt like a supportable rationale for both their animus toward Hillary and their support of Trump?

I think there was also an unstated case.But first, the articulated case in these Russian media outlets, particularly in RT, was to describe Hillary Clinton as what we think of in Washington as a neocon.If you think back to the [George W.] Bush era, Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, [it was] this idea that she was no different from these Bush-era conservatives who used military force very promiscuously, talked about changing regimes very casually, felt that American democracy was something that the U.S. had a right and even a duty to promote around the world at the point of a gun, if necessary.

Now, it wasn’t crazy to ascribe some of that view to Hillary Clinton.Her husband had used military force to intervene in the Balkans, which was something that the Russians definitely resented.And as secretary of state, she was a supporter of the intervention in Libya that toppled Muammar Qaddafi.Of course she had supported the Iraq War.So she was depicted as this sort of militaristic democracy promoter who was sort of caught up—a lot of these Russian media stories talk about, they have this sort of military-industrial complex frame that you sometimes hear on the left in the United States, so that she was a warmonger and sort of a pro-democracy fanatic.The unstated case, which we can talk more about, I think, was Vladimir Putin’s personal resentment toward her.But that was not a theme of the propaganda.

When it came to Donald Trump, here you had a guy who kept saying, “We should have better relations with Russia in a broad sense.”Of course, why wouldn’t the Russians welcome that?Interestingly, I found that RT had sent a reporter to a Trump press conference, got called on somehow—to this day, I'm not sure whether that was random or not—and asked Trump a question about U.S.-Russia relations.And at this press conference, which was at the Trump Hotel, which was just opening at the time, Trump gave his spiel about, “We can get along great with Russia; I can get along great with Putin; we should work together.”RT quickly turned around a segment that they aired that night: “Trump says better relations with Russia,” and gave it big, warm, glowing treatment.I thought that was very significant.That sort of happened at the end of my reporting.As I say, I was starting to see more of that theme come through.

Trump also—there was a lot of very favorable coverage of Trump’s criticism of those policies that RT was criticizing Hillary Clinton for.Trump was saying: “We get involved in too many wars. These dumb wars in the Middle East, we go in, and we try to change regimes without knowing what's coming next.”That’s something that Vladimir Putin has been criticizing the United States for years.And finally, Trump said the overwhelming foreign policy priority of the United States had to be fighting terrorism, fighting radical Islam, fighting ISIS, and Russia can help us with that.We can cooperate with the Russians to fight these terrorists.

Vladimir Putin has been saying that since, really, the 1990s, that America and Russia should be in an alliance against radical Islam.… Many Americans have always looked skeptically at that rhetoric from Putin, but Trump actually seemed to be embracing it in a way no American leader or major politician had, really, since Putin came into power.So that was the pro-Trump case.

Putin and Trump …

There's some obvious connections that you could perceive if you watch it: strongman to strongman; to say the least, nationalistic, both of them extremely forceful in that position.

Yes. Now, that wasn’t explicit.RT is not, I would say, subtle, but it’s subtle enough that, you know, it won't articulate it the way you did.But I think there was a celebration of Trump’s kind of anti-democratic nature.Trump has these authoritarian tendencies.Trump, at times, showed a kind of you might say an open contempt for our democratic norms in many ways and was sowing chaos and confusion in our democratic process and in our election system that I think the Kremlin delighted in for sincere reasons or, you know, instrumental reasons.Russian leaders think that our democracy is hypocritical and not what we believe it to be, not what we promote it to be, and were sort of delighted at the way Trump was exposing many of its weaknesses and just generally sowing chaos and discord in the United States.… Instability in American democracy is something Vladimir Putin loves to see and wants to see more of.

Let’s talk a little bit about what Putin wants, what he may have wanted from the disruption and chaos that he seemed to have sown in the 2016 election.What do you think he wants?

I think above all, he wants self-preservation.I think Putin understands that in a country like his, you can easily leave the presidency and go straight to jail or a docket or worse.You could meet a violent end.I think he is paranoid about enemies at home and abroad.And I think he fundamentally and foremost wants to preserve his power inside of Russia.I think beyond that, he wants Russia to be stronger, and I think he has a nostalgia for the Soviet Union and its geopolitical strength and its territorial expanse.

I think he would love to see those old borders restored. I don’t think that he actually expects to see that happen.But, as you probably know by now in your research, one of the most famous Putin quotes has him saying that one of the great tragedies of the modern era is the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

I will interject here that you can look this up.I reported recently that when [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel visited Trump in the White House—do you know what I'm going to say?

Mm-hmm.

When Angela Merkel visited Trump in the White House this spring, she brought with her a 1980s-era map of the Soviet Union, of course with its borders hundreds and hundreds of miles to the west, encompassing the Baltics and huge swaths of territory that it has since lost, and showed this map to Donald Trump in the Oval Office and in effect said to him: “This is what you have to understand about Vladimir Putin.³

This is the Russia he sees as the rightful Russia, and if no one stands up to him, these are the borders he will gradually try to restore.”

So his own self-preservation, a restoration of Russian territorial reach.I think part of it for him is the reunification of ethnic Russians who were stranded in other countries, in his view stranded when the borders of the Soviet Union were ceded to what is Russia now.He talks frequently about these ethnic Russians who are sort of left in other countries and that he needs to protect them.This, of course, is a big issue in Ukraine.And I think finally, I think there's a measure of sort of an intangible kind of—and it flows from what I just said—stature and respect that he wants to restore to Russia, that he believes was lost.

I think he feels that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the events in particular of the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was president, when Russia was ruled by a man who, by all appearances, was an alcoholic, when its economy was a catastrophe, when women were turning to prostitution and men were dying of alcoholism, I think Putin saw that as an epic humiliation of the country that he loved.

Moreover, Russia seemed to be kind of taking orders from the West.NATO was going to expand up to its doorstep, and Russia was going to have to deal with it.We’re going to go in and bomb these countries.You don’t like it, but what are you going to do?We’re sorry. We’ll place a bunch of phone calls, but you kind of have to swallow it.I think he saw all of this as a humiliation.

Putin's Political Rise

And he saw the relationship between Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Boris Yeltsin, as what?

I think Putin saw the relationship between Yeltsin and Clinton as an embarrassment.Again, Yeltsin was—I can't diagnose him, but by all appearances, an alcoholic.He was a drunkard.And he seemed to be a sidekick to the American president.Whereas just a few years earlier, you know, imagine Ronald Reagan meeting with even Mikhail Gorbachev, who Putin thought presided over this catastrophe, at least it was these two great leaders on the world stage, seemingly on equal footing, negotiating from two positions of strength.Putin saw Yeltsin, I believe, as a kind of a diminished figure, a sidekick, often kind of ridiculous.

I don’t know what Putin thought of this particular episode, but one can only imagine how he felt when word emerged that Yeltsin, on a state visit to Washington to see Bill Clinton, in I believe 1994, who was staying in Blair House across the street from the White House, stumbles downstairs in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, and by one version of events, actually gets out the door and onto Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting for pizza. “Pizza! Pizza!,” he is shouting.⁴

This is not the great Russian leader that Vladimir Putin believes his country deserves.

But by all accounts, democracy is beginning to take hold.The economy is starting to improve by the mid- and late ’90s. Was it really that bad?

You can get somebody else to speak to the particular—the trajectory of the economy in the ’90s, but I can tell you—you have to remember, there was an epic financial crash in the late ’90s, so whatever incremental gains were being made—and I really don’t think that they really—that is not my understanding.I don’t think the Russian economy was making great strides.It’s possible the contraction had slowed, but in general, people were miserable; standards of living were falling.And in about 1998, I believe, you had a major market crisis that destroyed the movement.

However, you do ask a good question: Was it really that bad?There is a strong school of thought that says this humiliation narrative that Putin articulates and that I think we often project onto Putin is exaggerated; that Putin has created this story for domestic consumption, that Putin has positioned himself as a savior who came in and rescued Russia from the ultimate depths of economic misery, exploitation by oligarchs, geopolitical humiliation, and that Putin has been this savior.Conveniently for Putin, very soon after he took power, oil prices, global oil prices surged, so money is pouring in.The Russian economy is growing. Standards of living are finally starting to rise.

Now, that’s great timing on Putin’s part.I don’t think that there are many people who are going to tell you that Putin engineered new economic programs that were brilliant and insightful.But I do think that an important question for people in the United States to try to understand [is], as we try to figure out what does Putin really think and how do we deal with this guy, is this sense of humiliation authentic, or is this a story he’s telling the Russian people as a way to harness nationalism for his own political gain, to distract from the fact that the Russian economy has severe problems, and distract from the fact that corruption is running rampant and that these oligarchs who he claims he would crack down on are doing pretty well under him?

Take me to the night, New Year’s Eve, ’99, when Yeltsin—set the scene for me when Yeltsin basically passes the torch to Putin.

… Unexpectedly, with the world diverted by this thing called Y2K that no one remembers anymore, as we’re on the brink of the new millennium, Yeltsin gives a nationally televised speech in which he essentially concedes that he is not the right man to lead Russia anymore, that he’s tried everything he can.⁵

He believes he’s had some successes.There have been a lot of great disappointments, but that his time on the public stage is over, and he turns power over to a previously not well-known Kremlin bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin.

Why? How does Putin find himself in that position?

… What Putin was best known for at that time was leading a ruthless counterterrorism campaign, as he described it, in the Russian republic of Chechnya, which had been seeking to break away and declare its independence.The Kremlin described this as an Islamic insurgency funded by Arab states, and really, [it marked] the beginning of this existential threat to Russia, because if Chechnya were to break away, all of these other republics would want to break away, and it could mean the dissolution of Russia.The Soviet Union is gone, but now Russia, with all its component parts, could break up.Maybe like if one of the 50 United States were to try to break loose, who would be next?

Putin is put in charge of suppressing the Chechen independence movement, and there's great popular interest in this in the big cities in Russia, particularly in Moscow, because there have been these tremendous apartment bombings, where I believe hundreds of people were killed.There's a whole question about those bombings and who was behind them and what happened, which I'm not qualified to speak to in detail, but they are blamed on the Chechens.⁶

Putin is put in charge of leading the campaign to suppress the Chechen insurgency, and he becomes very popular.Russians mostly know him for this.

I think Yeltsin understands that Putin can successfully hold power at this point.

Because he looks like a strongman.

Because he looks like a strongman.I think Yeltsin may also have understood that the Russian deep state is making a comeback.Yeltsin suffered a severe backlash from the kind of KGB military and intelligence establishment for this kind of chummy relationship that he had developed with Bill Clinton and for having at least for the perception, at least, that he had kind of allowed American Western NATO power to expand into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc, had tolerated NATO expansion, had essentially enabled Bill Clinton to conduct military campaigns in the Balkans, that the old KGB and military guys were horrified by.

I think he may have understood that Putin was from that world and could hold things together.Finally, you should talk to Strobe Talbott about this and others.⁷

But I don’t know how explicit it might have been, but I think Yeltsin was worried about what would happen to him when he left power.There had been rampant corruption under his watch, and I think he was worried that he might be prosecuted.I don’t know what kind of agreement might have been made, but we know that Putin took no action to prosecute Yeltsin or to allow any investigations into what role Yeltsin might have had into the enrichment of his oligarchy cronies, and not for airing— …Well, Putin gets the job, and he pretty explicitly talks about starting a new era in Russia.I believe at one point he says he’s going to restore the honor and dignity of Russia.He casts himself as a savior.He’s healthy; he’s young; he’s virile.We see him shirtless hunting, and you know, he is as sober as a statue.I mean, as far as we know—well, I don’t want to say the guy doesn’t drink.I'm sure he does drink, and I believe he does drink, but he is as sober as a statue in public.His behavior is incredibly disciplined and restrained.So in many ways, temperamentally and in style, he is the anti-Yeltsin, and I think that is symbolic of this idea that he’s bringing back a kind of dignity and strength to the Russian presidency that had been missing under Boris Yeltsin.

He continues to prosecute the campaign in Chechnya in a very brutal way that causes a lot of upset around the world and in the United States but wins him high approval ratings in Russia.He gets off to a good start pretty quickly, and he enjoys the benefits of a boom in global oil prices around the turn of the century.He initially is not confrontational toward the United States and the West, and that’s an interesting thing, because he does have a lot of resentment about the Putin-Clinton relationship.He does have a lot of resentment about NATO expansion and the military.

You mean the Yeltsin [relationship]—

Yes, I’m sorry. But perhaps because I think at the time he takes power, the country really is starting to get a little bit better, and the oil money is coming in, he has less of a need for bellicosity, nationalism, these kind of foreign distractions.He also has this military campaign inside of Russia’s own borders, so that is his kind of militaristic outlet, the rallying cry against the Chechen Islamic terrorists.

Putin's Vision for Russia in his First Term

There's a sense that he wants to befriend America in some way.Certainly after 9/11 he makes the overture to President George W. Bush, the offering of support.Give me the lay of the land there with the new president.

George W. Bush comes into office with a lot of things on his mind that don’t involve Russia.It’s not a high priority for him.He doesn’t want trouble with Russia.I think he’s happy to try to work with this new guy in the Kremlin.He doesn’t want to pick a fight.Bush came in initially with fairly modest foreign policy ambitions and was not the kind of gun-slinging neoconservative that many people remember.

Putin similarly is in a relatively benign state of mind and is not looking to pick a fight with the West.The initial contacts between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are relatively friendly.⁸

Bush famously says that he and Putin, in their first meeting, bond over family and religion,and Bush says that he was able to get a sense of Putin’s soul, which is a quote that will come back and haunt him for years.

I think, to some degree, this reflects the fact that Bush had a pretty superficial interest in Putin and Russia at that point.He didn’t have big plans for Russia and kind of wanted to believe that Russia wasn’t going to be a problem and that he could get along with Putin.And so they did, initially.

You mentioned the phone call that Putin places to Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.Now, that call was interesting for a couple of reasons.One of them is that it’s a reminder that, at that point in time, the relationship between Washington and Moscow was pretty good.Putin was reaching out and hoping there could be cooperation.The other is, it’s a reminder of the significance of that moment to Putin, who, since the beginning of the insurgency in Chechnya—and this brings us all the way up to Donald Trump in the present moment—has been saying to the United States: “We need to work together against Islamic terrorism.I'm fighting Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, and they're supported by Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arabs.You shouldn’t criticize my perhaps unfortunately heavy-handed response at times.You should be on my side, because these guys are coming to get you eventually.”

And indeed, I believe after the Sept. 11 attacks, Putin says that Russian intelligence had been aware of some contacts between Osama bin Laden and Chechen terrorists.⁹

… I think that that moment is very interesting, because this is a theme that we have heard from Putin since the 1990s up until this present day.He says, “We should be working together as Judeo-Christian nations, fighting the scourge of Islamic radicalism that is a threat to us both.”We can talk more about why people think that that’s a much more complicated statement than it sounds like, but that’s where we were on Sept. 12 or 11, 2001.

Some people we've read, and I'm sure we will talk to, say that Putin desperately wanted the respect of the United States country diminished, wants that sort of connection, but flees from it when he sees the United States take on the war in Iraq.And it in some ways makes him feel that they're eventually coming for him, I suppose.

Well, the Iraq War is important for a couple reasons.One is Putin resents the kind of promiscuous use of American military force abroad.Putin resented the way America intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s.He thought that America was getting a little too comfortable throwing its weight around.I think as a Russian leader, and particularly a cold warrior and former KGB man, you just inherently don’t like seeing the U.S. military in action.

Compounding that, in the case of Iraq, was the way this was framed as regime change.We’re taking out a foreign leader who we don’t like, on security grounds.But also, there was a kind of political ideological component to it.Part of the way the Iraq War was sold and justified in Washington was that we were going to bring democracy to the Middle East, that these authoritarian governments in the Middle East were dangerous to us and also just kind of offended our core values, and we now had a pretext to go in and knock them out.You know, democracy had been spreading inexorably in the 1990s.It’s important to remember, again, Putin, who’s never been a believer in democracy, felt that we were getting carried away with the hubris of our set of values, democracy, human rights, civil society.Democracy really was flourishing in the 1990s, and many people were saying, “This is the destiny of the world, and history is ending.”

It kind of hit up against some limits by the end of the Bill Clinton era.Under George W. Bush, well, it actually looks like they're kick-starting that project.And in the places where it hasn’t naturally taken hold, unlike, you know, the former Soviet bloc, Eastern Europe, Poland, the Baltics, these countries that were adopting basically our democratic system to varying degrees, wasn’t happening in the Middle East.

Now the Americans are getting the idea, maybe we’re going to go in with bombs and tanks. We also did this in Afghanistan.Again, democracy was much less a part of the justification for the American invasion of Afghanistan, and Putin had no problem with the American invasion of Afghanistan.But we did start talking about how this was an opportunity to promote our values.

But I think it’s important that we not make it all about Iraq.Some other things were happening around this same time that were related to what I've just been talking about that I think Putin found extremely alarming.

Let me just add, before I stop talking about Iraq, I also think that there was, in a way that was maybe reminiscent of the 1990s and the way Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo over Yeltsin’s protests, and without United Nations approval invoking NATO as his sort of authorizing power in the 1990s in Kosovo, and leaving Yeltsin looking a little bit weak and ineffectual, I think Putin resented the way the Americans went into Iraq despite his protests.

He looked like somebody who, you know, you can complain, you might not like it, but at the end of the day, you don’t really have a veto.We’re going to do what we want.I think that that was diminishing for him as well as alarming.

But what is the larger picture here?If you allow me, I’ll just take a moment, because I think this is really important.

What's happening around the time of the Iraq War is the Bush administration takes on this idea, although the Iraq War is primarily sold as a security action to prevent a nexus of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, it becomes part of this larger democracy promotion project that becomes the core of George W.Bush’s presidency.Indeed, remember that George W.Bush’s second inaugural address was almost entirely about the promotion of democracy around the world and bringing freedom to oppressed peoples, almost a Cold War-era speech, in a way, for a different kind of world.¹⁰

In conjunction with that, the U.S. vigorously supported a sort of democratic revolution in the republic of Georgia on Russia’s southern border, former Soviet republic, a country that Vladimir Putin feels the United States has no business being involved in.The U.S. government is lending explicit moral support, a lot of American money.Much of it in the form of NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and civil society groups is pouring in to help activists who are staging what is described as the Rose Revolution.

This chapter gets overlooked and forgotten sometimes, but if you go back and read the contemporaneous coverage, it was a big deal.Putin did not like this.So this was not an invasion. I think realistically, Putin doesn’t think we’re going to send our army into Moscow to depose him.But what he starts to see in Georgia is Western money and rhetoric and sort of, you know—what's the word I'm looking for?You know, the kind of glamor of Western democracy and all the values and prosperity the West has to offer, coming in to knock out a Putin ally in Georgia.

Then, the next year, something similar happens in Ukraine. Putin also sees the West as playing a very fundamental role in what is known as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.Now we focus a lot on what happened in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 to 2014 that led Putin to come in and grab Crimea and among other things.But Ukraine in 2004, on the heels of Georgia 2003, and some other pro-democratic Western activity in other former Soviet republics, I think Kyrgyzstan is a significant one—I'm a little foggier on my Kyrgyzstan—this starts to paint a picture [for] Putin of the United States, wow, this is like the 1990s on steroids.They are really pushing democracy even in places where there was no past democratic tradition.There's now a kind of whiff of gunpowder to it because of the Iraq War and because of Afghanistan.I think, in his mind, he starts thinking, well, where is this going? How far might this go?

When he sees Georgia and Ukraine, again, he might not be thinking that the paratroopers are going to be dropping into the Kremlin to get him.But he might be thinking, you know, if this starts to get momentum, and democratic movements are flourishing along Russia’s borders, and authoritarians are being thrown out around the world, and everyone is talking about these revolutions, and they're cool, and there's beautiful girls in the street throwing flowers around, could that happen to me?And if it does, not only do I lose a job that I like, what else do I lose? Do I lose my freedom? Do I lose my life?I think this makes him sit up and pay attention.

It’s true.And you can feel it. And you can see that he would worry about it.All strongmen do at some moment.We've been told that the Qaddafi murder and that video of it is a haunting nightmare that lives within him.

Yes, apparently he talks about that a lot.

Yeah.And you can see a guy who’s forming now—and meanwhile NATO is encroaching.You know, everything, all of that stuff started by the Clintons is there.

Yeah, I should have mentioned there's a lot of—around this period of time, ’03, ’04, ’05, new NATO members are being added.There's talk about pushing NATO to every corner of Europe that we possibly can, into the Balkans.So the NATO expansion, the march continues. He finds that very threatening.

The Reset and Arab Spring: Putin as Prime Minister

How do you explain what happens with [Dmitry] Medvedev?How do you explain what happens with Medvedev, both the impulse to do it and the impulse to undo it?

Yeah, I can talk a little bit about this.You’ll talk to people who have their arms around it much better.… I know Obama administration officials told me that they underestimated the larger plan Putin had with Medvedev.Putin puts in Medvedev. He’s a friendlier guy. He seems a little more Westernized.He’s more open to the West, or at least in his kind of style and appearance and rhetoric.He’s a softer face than Putin, quicker to smile—I don’t know, easier to talk to, diplomats say.And I think Putin likely—and Medvedev is not a particularly strong power center.He’s one of several people in Putin’s orbit who he chooses after a period of some uncertainty.

I think that people in Washington underestimated the degree that this was part of a plan, as it now appears in hindsight, to put in a relatively weak figure, to allow Putin to step back for a period of time, but to retain influence behind the scenes.

Why in the world would experienced Hillary Clinton and less experienced, but whatever, President Barack Obama, buy into this?What were they hoping for?I mean, they tried the reset idea, and [that] obviously hadn’t exactly flowered.

A couple things.We can come back to Hillary Clinton.Well, let me just say on Hillary Clinton, remember, in Hillary Clinton, you had someone who, in her formative years in public life, as first lady in the 1990s, was present for this aberrational moment where the United States and Russia kind of embraced one another awkwardly.It was never perfect, but she was there at all these chummy state dinners with Boris Yeltsin.In fact, at one of them, Yeltsin turns to Hillary and tells her he has a photograph of her in his office that he looks at every day. Who knows what to make of that?

But she kind of comes of age, in a political sense, at a time when we’re dealing with the Russians, and we get a lot of business done with the Russians.We have these significant nuclear arms reduction and nuclear security and other diplomatic agreements in the 1990s.So she may think this can be done.You can work with the Russians; you just sort of have to know how to do it.

And you have to get Putin out of the way.

And you have to get Putin out of the way, because even her husband was worried about Putin in the short time that they overlapped.She could tell Putin was someone else.But so, OK, Putin is stepping out of the way. It’s possible to do business with the Russians.We did it in the 1990s. So Putin was a bump in the road.But now we can get back on track with this project that Bill Clinton dreamed of and indeed, Clinton hoped would be fundamental to his foreign policy legacy.We can't forget how important Russia was to him. …Russia will be integrated into Europe; we’ll Westernize Russia; we will defang this enemy of ours of so many decades. Hillary may have had that muscle memory.I think Barack Obama also, with Hillary, shared a sense that many of America’s problems around the world were the fault of a needlessly bellicose, confrontational Bush administration that was practicing cowboy diplomacy in foreign policy.You know, you're with us or you're against us. We’re going to walk into the saloon with a pistol cocked and start asking questions with a gun pointed at everybody.

I think Clinton and Obama come into office thinking, we’re going to have a new model of foreign relations, and it’s non-zero-sum.We’re going to try new things, and we’re going to talk to people that George W. Bush alienated.We’re going to rebuild the international order. We’re going to have a much more cooperative world.And you can't have a cooperative international system if Russia is sidelined and hostile.

So Medvedev is there and seems like an appealing guy and someone you can do business with.I think in hindsight—and you should ask them about this—I think they realized they underestimated the degree to which Putin was in the shadows but still exercising control and biding his time for a return and not interested in these things they were interested in; not interested in going back to something like the 1990s; not interested in Russian integration into the West, making Russia look more like Europe, flattening out its particular Russian characteristics.

Putin Tests the Waters in Estonia and Georgia

There is, during this time, something else happening, which is this development of cyberspace, cyber technology, cyber as a political instrument, cyber as a force.The Web in the West becomes something else Vladimir Putin can worry about. Tell me about that.

… If you're Vladimir Putin, and oil prices are much lower than you would like them to be, and the era of easy oil money is over, but you want to have a strong posture on the international stage, you want to be a great power, you're angry when Barack Obama describes you as regional power.¹¹

You know, you would like to have a strong military so you can tell people to back off, establish deterrents, take coercive actions toward other countries that require a strong military fist behind them. You just don’t have the money for that.

But the good news if you're Putin is now there is a cheap way to do these things, to intimidate other countries and to be a player on the global stage, and to make people fear you, and to make people fear what you might do in response to actions they take, and that is through laptops. They're not expensive.And increasingly, in lieu of what in the Cold War might have been new tank divisions rolling through the Warsaw Pact countries up to the border of NATO countries and intimidating the West, what Putin has are armies of people at laptops harassing, intimidating, humiliating his critics, foreign governments, political dissidents, and even manipulating the information and news that we read in the United States and in European countries.

I think it’s important to understand that his turn toward cyber comes at a time when he doesn’t have the money for the kind of military power he might like.And indeed, I believe Russia is cutting its military budget right now at a time when the United States is talking about a new big military buildup.He’s found a very cheap substitute.

Putin Returns to the Presidency, Sparking Protests and a Crackdown

Take me into the 2011.He’s going to come back. The people are not happy.The Web is spreading the word. Hillary gets involved.It’s another one of those moments that we check off on the list of why he doesn’t like Hillary Clinton, I suppose, and also why he fears the Web and may want to turn it into an offensive weapon for him.

… So Putin has spent now several years since the middle of the Bush administration growing evermore wary and suspicious and resentful of these color revolutions that are happening in his neighborhood, from Ukraine to Georgia.And now the Arab Spring breaks lose, and tyrants are being toppled in the Middle East, and the United States is cheering a lot of this on.

Putin is already very unsettled about what seems to be happening to autocrats in the 21st century and believes that the U.S. is happy to see autocrats go and wants to see democracy spread as far and wide as possible, and believes that Hillary Clinton is one of the main cheerleaders of this vision; that she has this impulse deeply within her; that she is, in effect, what we often colloquially call a “neocon,” believes that the promotion of democracy around the world is [the] core mission of the United States foreign policy.True believer in this stuff.

So when protests erupt in Moscow in 2011, and he is rattled by them and by their size and by their intensity and by some of the rhetoric, he is infuriated to hear Hillary Clinton essentially cheer on the protesters, to give them solace by offering words of public encouragement, which in fact were not that inflammatory.¹²

I mean, I think she has some relatively traditional language about freedom of expression and people being able to express their political preferences and choose their own path.

But Putin understands this as what he describes as a signal to the protesters from Hillary Clinton, that she’s giving them the signal.I think Putin and others around him also believed that the U.S. government is funding some of this work, is very explicitly working to subvert and destabilize him, possibly even using covert action.But at a minimum, he finds it incredibly provocative that Hillary Clinton feels the need to chime in at this moment of weakness, that it’s a kind of kick in the gut when he’s weak for which he may never have forgiven her.Clinton herself has said she believes that Putin resented this and plotted revenge for it.

Putin Asserts Himself on the World Stage in his Third Term

When he takes Crimea after—or you could say recaptures Crimea after Sochi [Olympic Games], and the sanctions then follow eventually on Ukraine, it really is, at that moment, almost like the United States is on the edge of a clash with him; that he’s expecting, maybe he doesn’t feel that our response is going to be—maybe he worries that our response will be larger than it actually is.But at certainly that moment, where are we, into ’14—Yeah. What's the state of play?Where does he stand? Where do we stand?Where are things right before the cyber incursion into the United States political process begins?

Right, OK. So in the context of that, well, you know, again, it’s so interesting.The whole thread through this story, or one of the most important threads for this whole story is democracy as an ideology and democracy as a tool, in his view, of American foreign policy.And democracy is a thing that threatens him and that he hates and that he wants to subvert.

The reason he winds up seizing Crimea is because there has been a popular revolution in Ukraine that drives out a mostly pro-Putin authoritarian ruler, with the promise of greater democracy, transparency, civil society in a Western style.Putin, again, sees this as engineered by the West and strongly supported by the United States.Again, this is our obsession with promoting democracy even into parts of the world that he believes are rightly part of a Soviet sphere of influence, where there are not democratic traditions and democracy doesn’t belong.

His response to this initially is to seize Crimea and then lecture the United States about how we support self-determination in places like, for instance, Kosovo, where he opposed NATO intervention in the 1990s.But now we don’t support—now we don’t support self-determination in Crimea where, even after Soviet—Russian forces have moved in, there’s a popular referendum.People vote to become part of Russia.International observers call it illegitimate, but he holds this up to kind of poke us in the eye and say, “You talk about freewill of the people and freedom of expression, and that’s what's happening here.”So even this is part of that theme to him.

This comes as a shock to the Obama administration, which every step of the way in Ukraine underestimated what Putin was going to do, not only the seizure of Crimea but his ultimate military incursion into eastern Ukraine, and later his intervention in Syria, and even his intervention in the 2016 election.These things all catch the administration, the Obama administration, by surprise.I think in part because the White House is distracted by a lot of other problems around the world and doesn’t want to have to think about Russia and Europe, Obama is trying to pivot to Asia and has this nightmarish problem in Syria, is concluding the Iran nuclear deal.There are a lot of other things going on.

And, by the way, Obama wants Russian cooperation on some of these issues, notably including the Iran nuclear deal, so [he] doesn’t want to believe that the relationship is getting this bad.But that’s the context leading up to this interference in the election, is that Putin believes that our support of democratic movements, reformist movements has now come to Ukraine in a way that’s completely intolerable, and maybe to him is almost tantamount to—not an act of war, but a real provocation, a real poke in his eye.I think he thinks that we must understand how infuriating this is going to be for him.

His response completely transforms the relationship between the U.S. and Russia, which has been growing gradually more tense.And I think the asylum that he gives to Edward Snowden the previous year is a very important data point here that’s worth revisiting.But this is a clear statement to the Obama administration and the world that Putin isn't interested in this international system and international order that we have created. He’s happy to violate it.And he is potentially returning to a kind of Soviet-style geo-power politics in which might makes right, and that makes for a very tense relationship leading up to the 2016 election.

And finally, at least for this particular program, the decision to grant Snowden asylum, the meaning of that?

Well, I think people are still debating the meaning of it.And that is a very interesting question, particularly in the context of a moment in time where our relationship with Russia is largely defined by computers.There's no evidence that clearly indicates any pre-existing relationship between Snowden and the Kremlin.There are a lot of people who argue quite persuasively that Snowden had nothing to do with Russia before he went there.

There are people who are serious, who have a background in intelligence and military, who think that we might not know the full story.And it’s an interesting question.But at a minimum, this was a poke in the eye by Putin and I think, you know, the first big event in a series of events like that, where Putin was sort of thumbing his nose at Barack Obama and the United States, and doing things that he knew we were going to find obnoxious and provocative, seemingly without really caring much about our response.

I would just quickly add to that, it might be worth your revisiting the op-ed that he wrote in The New York Times. ¹³

… I think it was just after he took in Snowden. This was kind of a one-two punch.And people were already saying, “You know, that was pretty obnoxious,” and even, I would add, sort of reminiscent of the Cold War, you know, taking in a guy that we considered to be a spy, and many people were calling a traitor, and harboring him in Russia, in Moscow.

Then, after Barack Obama threatens to conduct air strikes in Syria, Putin very audaciously publishes an op-ed in The New York Times lecturing Obama about this, kind of talking down to him.Something seems to have curdled around this time in 2013, so I think that’s an important part of it also.

Thank you.

Can I ask one follow-up?Why was the Obama administration caught by surprise by the Russians meddling in our election? Why was the reaction so timid?

I think that’s a great question.I was asking it of a lot of people this fall, and I never got a truly satisfactory answer.I do think there's a way in which it—well, I was going to say it kind of boggles the imagination that they would and could do this.I suppose if you're an old cold warrior, you wouldn’t feel that way. Anybody at the CIA would sort of scoff at this.But it may be that policymakers in the White House who, some of whom are younger and weren't cold warriors, just didn’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.

… They had been dealing with the Chinese, for instance, for a long time, and saw what the Chinese could do, so hopefully would have been wise to what you can do with a computer.But that stuff was piracy and theft and stealing, you know, personnel files.I just don’t think we had ever seen something like this before.It was so audacious and so kind of out of a bad thriller, it just might have been hard to believe.

I'm not sure that’s the right answer.I think I feel a little more confident on the second part of your question. I think you said, why didn’t they do more?I think the Obama administration was very tangled up, and even paralyzed to a degree, by the perception that they might be trying to influence the election, and particularly given that there was this misguided assumption that Hillary Clinton had it pretty well locked up.

I think the feeling was, how are you going to talk about this without seeming to be influencing the election and taking a side?You were just going to open up this Pandora’s box, and the whole campaign is going to become about this.I just think they preferred to stay out of it and litigate it when Hillary won, as they assumed that she would.

Thank you.

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