11 ISSUE IV
MARCH 2025
MARCH 2025
the new conversations: Russia in the World
Mara Levi interviews Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School.
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By Mara Levi
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. President in January of this year, global geopolitics has undergone significant upheaval, particularly on Russia’s place in world affairs—including the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, the U.S.’s relationship with Russia and Europe, and Russia’s broader ambitions in Africa and beyond. Arguably, few people among our faculty are better qualified to talk about this than Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs since 2001 and author of several books, most recently, “Nikita Khrushchev: An Outlier of the System” (2024), on her great-grandfather and leader of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to 1964. I sat down with Nina in late March.
It has now been more than nine weeks since the inauguration of President Trump. Keeping in mind his rather intuitive and often inconsistent approach to international affairs, how does the new US administration affect Russia’s role in the world?
I would take issue with you here. Not that I thoroughly disagree with you; intuitive is right, but I wouldn't call it inconsistent. Trump’s intuition is relatively consistent when it comes to international affairs: he is following “Great Power Politics.” Trump’s inaugural address as president was full of “Manifest Destiny” and frontier narratives, territorial versions of exerting influence, bringing back to the late 19th to mid-20th century Great Power Politics. In this sense, it is not inconsistent, and it is precisely what [Russian President] Vladimir Putin believes in: that Great Power Politics have never disappeared, despite the insistence by some, like [former US President] Barack Obama, that institutions, not personalities, are at the core of democratic politics.
Donald Trump agrees with Putin on many issues, including the importance of the personalities of those who lead Great Powers. This connection makes Russia’s role in the world indeed unprecedented. Basically, the idea of Great Power Politics is about the influence that “We can have, we have and the influence that we cannot have, we take.” And Trump buying into this makes Russia less of a pariah than the West under [former US President] Joe Biden's leadership tried to make it. And to be honest, I thought right from the start that Biden’s grand strategy was a fool’s errand. Russia is too big to be canceled. But yes, with Trump, any further attempt at eliminating Russia is cancelled instead.
So, the US and Russia share their idea of “the world” and their own role within it. Would you say this alignment also extends into their views of “liberal Europe” and “wokeness”?
Yes. In a way, no KGB could have planned for that. One could say that “God has a sense of humor” because you really can’t plan for that. But it's also not surprising: look at the rise of conservatives in Europe. It's just that when America or the West has a disease, the world sneezes and when Russia has a disease, it freaks out surrounding nations.
The current constellation is almost the natural result of geopolitics: When you fling one direction too hard, you literally fling another direction too hard. Putin was not at the forefront of this geopolitical trend. [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán was. Dick Cheney [former Vice President of the US under George W. Bush] was. Cheney studying the Hamilton papers and looking for total presidential power in them is part of the very same process. So, the process began early this century, but it took everybody twenty-five years to see and recognize it. Trump fits into this broader geopolitical trend in a typical American fashion, from Reality TV, essentially. Europe, too, has long been going in that direction. Look at the Alternative for Germany [in German: Alternative für Deutschland] in the Bundestag, at [Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, and so on.
In the course that I am teaching now [in the Graduate Program in International Affairs] on “Post-truth and Politics,” we read George Orwell's “1984,” and Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World” and ultimately, in today’s world, we’ve come to the point that it almost doesn't matter what brought us to that type of dictatorial politics, it's either the great liberalism, or the great oppression. Either way, we just end up with this completely Orwellian, Huxleyan world of dystopian absurdity.
Do you nevertheless see any divisions, any obvious fault lines between the US and Russian playbooks?
They are not the same playbook. They both became superpowers in the 20th century because they were giant frontier countries that took Europe as a starting point and shared the idea of a Messianic version of events and godly leadership. But: Trump is just playing for show, he is shallow. As much as there are similarities, they are also mirror opposites. Of course, we don't know what the US will look like in four years, but for now, the big division is that the US, by definition, is a democracy. Russia, by definition, is a dictatorship. They could potentially be dictatorships, but we're not there yet.
And we are hoping that we are not getting there.
But we don't know. And I actually think that one of the handicaps people have is that they cannot imagine the worst. For example, when the Biden administration was saying “Ukraine is going to win because good guys win” – this sounds nice and in Hollywood, yes, the good guys win, but in reality, there is absolutely no way that Ukraine could have won [its war against] Russia, the largest country in the world and four times Ukraine’s population. Instead of having a policy on how to handle Russia, [the US] keep attempting “to strengthen” Ukraine despite all territorial losses, population losses, and so on. So, the lack of policy and good ideas is, as always, an analytical handicap. In that sense, I think we should be prepared to think of the worst rather than say what we would hope doesn't happen - because it very well might. A policy based on hope is truly a fool’s errand.
That's right. As an international affairs student, I feel like another of our analytical handicaps is that we often only focus on big players. So, I’d like us to broaden the scope away from US-Russia relations and hear your assessment of Russia's relationship with other global geopolitics – both regarding its long-standing proximity to authoritarian leaders but even more so regarding other developments like Russia’s rapprochement to the new Syrian government under Ahmed al-Sharaa or Putin's support of the government coups in Niger and Burkina Faso. What's the idea here?
I have already mentioned Viktor Orbán, and I have said that Putin was not an original right turn. In fact, Putin was a baby when Orbán was already having fascist tendencies. Orbán understands Putin and his discomfort with this almost kindergarten belief in good vs. evil in the West, the Hollywood narrative of Boris and Natasha from the 1950s Cold War cartoons. Russians are always the bad guys, and Biden fully bought into this, selling himself as Gary Cooper of “High Noon.”
Orbán doesn't think it’s that simple and he’s right. America, however, knows no Geography. Have you ever looked at a Russian map? It goes from Germany to Japan. Everybody imagines we are going to defeat Russia as if it's Germany in 1945, but it is not, it is huge, and we cannot just bomb a nuclear power.
[Recep] Erdoğan [President of the Republic of Turkey] and Putin share a relationship of the Sultan and the Czar. They have a lot of similarities in how they approach the world, and they have a lot of tensions. You asked about the Syrian government and obviously, [former Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad was kicked out with a great effort by the Turks. But then the Turks also fight the Kurds, and so on.
It's a very complex international scene, but it’s not too difficult to make sense of Putin’s behavior within it. As much as he is psychotic in his relations to history – insisting on the imperial spheres of influence, he is also pragmatic. He is a KGB man. And we see that in the way he talks to people, including Trump - he did this for a living. [Ukrainian President] Volodymir Zelenskyy, on the other hand, is an actor. For him, performance is everything. I don't understand how he has a designer for his military outfits, but he doesn't have advisors who tell him not to go to the White House and play Captain Ukraine anymore. That was a role for Biden, Trump runs his own Reality TV show.
Let's also not forget that Putin is a judo master. He is a black belt, and his politics are very tactical, like a judo fight. It's actually the same thing with the Syrian government. Russia wants its military bases there and the new Syrian government is interested in the Russians because they don't want the Turks to have too much power and are always afraid of the Americans coming in and telling them what to do. So, Putin becomes one of the players balancing out others. And that is what geopolitics is about in a complex world – although the US often forgets that. The American view of geopolitics is “us vs. everybody else.” One of the problems with that is that they repeatedly provoke Putin and try to talk him down, which makes him act more aggressive. I also find this fascinating about the European approach to the Ukraine situation: somehow, they seem to think that if they push Putin, he will blink. No, he is going to blow up the world, he is not going to blink.
Would you say the same about the support of government coups on the African continent? Is it a tactical opening to underline Putin's power and sphere of influence?
Yes, absolutely. If the West is for certain governments in Niger and Burkina Faso, Putin is going to be against them. Because another part of judo is that you go into every opening and are going to hurt your opponent before you figure out if you can make something out of it. And if you cannot make something out of it, hurting the opponent is good enough. Until the war, Putin was more of a splinter than anything else. But the US decided to make its own campaign out of the war, which exacerbated Putin’s “splinterism” to the point that he took it as a course of aggressive action, rather than a course of intensive interference.
Let us, for a moment, equate Europe not to the rise of authoritarianism but rather to Western liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. The Great Power Politics you have been describing are then pointing at a widespread anti-European sentiment, in the US and Russia but also around the world. As a German, I have seen very Slavophobic and fear-mongering discussions of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, oftentimes targeting the general Russian population for its alleged complicity. So, I wonder whether this anti-liberal sentiment is somewhat "homemade" and what should have been done differently and what can be done differently in the future.
That's a fantastic question. As you noticed, I already took a few shots at Europe. When the invasion started, while I expected America to act like a moron - no offense - (American view of the world is of the Shining City upon a Hill with all the consequences of such a high-strong view), I thought that Europe, with its proximity to Russia would know better. But suddenly they deal with Russia as if they also watched the same Hollywood movie. They could have gotten down from their high horse and talked to Putin, not in ultimatums mind you. He is a short insecure Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB, tell him that you actually think he's as important as you are; he is also part of Europe and so on... Instead, I get the impression that people like [Former Vice-President of the European Commission] Josep Borrell or [President of the European Commission] Ursula von der Leyen are on Putin's payroll. Because with the amount of hatred towards Russia they spout, Putin does not even need to make an argument for the Russians. This is not to defend him in any way but it's just right there for the Kremlin to use. When Borrell said that Europe is a garden and everybody around it is a jungle, he wasn't fired after this, and he should have been. So, what the Russians did is that they just had this comment on repeat on TV. Similarly, for the Russians, and even for me, as critical as I am, there is a question of what the Azov battalion and what "Glory to Ukraine," which was used as a Nazi slogan, is doing in this Western narrative? There is no such thing as good or bad Nazis but when it concerns Ukraine, there seem to be all these great Nazis because they fought the Soviets in World War II and now fight the Russians. Imagine if something like that were to happen in Yemen. There would be screams all over. Europe is stomping on its own argument. And Putin uses this to show that the West is hypocritical, that it wants Russia to be defeated, that it wants all Russians to be punished. They are making the whole nation responsible and that's also why Putin has all these overtures toward African countries. He’s telling them they are united with Russia because they are equally treated as not being “white enough,” as discards. Because of the West's hypocrisy, Putin is able to unite the rest.
What should have been done differently instead of total sanctions? And sanctioning all the oligarchs who could have been on the Western side if they were allowed to be there? When it's over, the Europeans are not only not going to trust Russia, which they shouldn't, but also, Russians are not going to trust the West because it showed that it's not this kind of liberal, wonderful order. Sanctions should have been much more considerate; they should not have thrown the baby out with the water. Europe could have done things differently if it hadn't idiotically followed the Joe Biden, “High Noon” aviator glasses Gary Cooper persona. Now, Europe says it is going to have its independent policy, and I really hope it does.
I was very lucky to have been George Kennan's - one of the major people designing the containment policy of the Cold War - last research assistant and he always said, "The problem with American foreign policy that America only sees the world from an American point of view, rather than seeing the world from the point of view the world sees itself.” And so, as long as Russia is not seen from the point of view Russia sees itself, it's always going to be a disaster. Russia doesn't need to be appeased, but we certainly need coordination and containment. And containment requires relationship. Simply saying that "we are just going to show them how horrible they are" is not going to work - show me the country that wants to be defeated.
I was also interested in hearing about how Russian media represent Russia's role in the world as well as how they represent the US and other actors - in a way you already addressed that when talking about Western hypocrisy. But is there anything else you would want to highlight, especially with regard to the anti-liberal discourses we see here in the US when it comes to DEI, queerness, ...
All of that, yes. So, Russia, in addition to using these comments by people like Josep Borrell, [Vice-President of the European Commission], Kaja Kallas [High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy] or Ursula von der Leyen [President of the European Commission], is great at propaganda. Propaganda is art. It's not really a skill and Russians are very artistic and so they come up with the most Orwellian absurd formulas. It was always there but since the war began it has become so ridiculous, it's unreal. And as always in propaganda, it's also about making an argument that "they are out to get us." So, we have to stay the course against our offenders, we have to be nationalistic and patriotic and anybody who's saying anything critical of the war or the Kremlin has to be kept out of the country, put in prison, fined, and so on.
In a way, it's very "Tucker Carlson" [American conservative political commentator]. Because Tucker Carlson is very creative and so are Russians, they are loose with facts - when you have 11 time zones, facts in Moscow are not the same as they are in Vladivostok. An example here is Russia's propaganda anti-LGBT law: nobody knows the rules. Similarly, the Russians will say all the time that they are for the old values - we don't know exactly what old Russian values are, but Putin always states how he is against having “parent number one and number two" and other speeches are suddenly against all-gender bathrooms as it is a major problem in the world. So yes, they push these kinds of narratives but it's a bit of a "maybe, maybe not" situation: you don’t know what the rules are.
I'd say the anti-Western propaganda in Russia began about fifteen years ago, and - very few will admit it - it was actually a response to the American anti-Russian propaganda with Hollywood anti-Russia films at the forefront. In 2007, “The Golden Compass” came out with evil-looking enemies screaming in Russian and dressed like Rasputins. Then, the minions cartoons - who is “Despicable Me” Gru? A Russian! In 2010, "Salt” with Angelina Jolie, and a few years later, "November Man" with Pierce Brosnan, which is deeply Anti-Russian. These are just a few examples but basically every other film is about "horrible Russians.” This was even before 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine! And so, in many ways - I know it's a very unpopular view in the West and I understand why – I’d argue that Russia has a reciprocal approach: You step on it, it is going to pay you back. And that's why I am so confused by the idea of "we'll scare Putin and he will blink." Never.
Again, that's where George Kennan would come in with his idea of containment as an actual policy. You level your sanctions, you have a plan B, you don’t destroy diplomacy, which USA has so unthinkingly done. And when you have a KGB Lieutenant Colonel of 5 foot 6 saying he is 5 foot 7 because he is so insecure, you don't tell him he's going to invade the world because after a while - and that's why I think Europe is suicidal - he’d say, fine, you’ve convinced me. In fact, I insist that first, it was the Western, hybrid, sanctions, weapons war on Russia, and only afterwards, it became a Russian war on Europe.
For Russia, Ukraine was the issue and it should have been resolved as such. Instead, it went broad and now, the European Parliament and everybody else says Russia wants to attack. If you tell Putin he wants to attack, he eventually will. Putin is very clear that he is not going to be defeated. He won't allow it to happen. Ever. If he were to be defeated, he would take the world with him.
To maybe end this a little less grim, it is one thing to talk about Russia and another to have insight into the country, as you do through having repeatedly lived in Russia for many months since the war started. I would like to hear what the mood in the population is like. Obviously, not every Russian is in favor of leading a war against Ukraine.
No, exactly. I mean, now there are more people in favor of the war, precisely because the West was very harmful to the population. But in the beginning, a large majority of people wanted out of the war and Russia was not let out of it. I understand that once you are an invader, you must pay but when you do not let Russia out and lead a hybrid war on Russia and Russians, you, of course, have to expect that Putin will have more support not less. People rally around the flag, that's a very common reaction to insults from the outside.
But, absolutely, not every Russian is in favor of the war, I still think that about half of the population wants out of Ukraine. I spent six months in Russia each of the past three years, precisely because I needed to witness that. And it's fascinating: when you go into a bookstore, a George Orwell poster hangs there. I visited this monastery in a provincial city, a very religious, patriotic city, and there is a bird painted on a stone in blue and yellow colors. That's support for Ukraine, right there. In another town, a store selling party equipment has one of its many balloon arrangements in blue and yellow. You don't do that by accident and you always encounter this. It’s just that when Western journalists go to Russia, they have a different agenda; they are there to see how bad Russia is.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of opposition, and I was there to document it. I hope to write a book about this. It's probably not whether it’s enough to withstand the oppressive state on a mass level. The reason I kept going to Russia is to show that if you expect not to face reprimand, don't leave just because you don't want to be there, because the fewer people leave, the less of a chance for Putin to keep going. The large opposition inside [Russia] is much more important than the large opposition outside. It's a very complex geopolitical tragedy that is unfolding there and Russian society is just as complex. While it does not surprise me that the US looks at this from a Hollywood perspective, it shocks me that Europe does so, too. Come on, Boris and Natasha aren’t your invention - get a grip on critical thinking, as we call it here at GPIA!
Mara Levi is an MA candidate in international affairs at The New School.