Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 1 – Following the
election of Donald Trump, many in Moscow expected a new and improved era in
Russian-American relations given the Republican’s statements about the
desirability of such an evolution and even more his lack of any criticism of
the Russian government.
When that shift did not happen, many
Moscow analysts blamed liberals and the American establishment for constraining
the American president who, they still believed, wanted better relations with
the Kremlin but could not pursue them because of opposition in Congress and
elsewhere.
But now at least one Russian
analyst, Aleksey Popov, has gone further and suggested that even the real
“Trumpists,” those grouped around Steve Bannon and his Breitbart portal have
become pro-Ukrainian and thus anti-Russian, extinguishing what little hope
Moscow still had for positive changes in Washington (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36706).
Bannon’s reputation as “almost a
pro-Russian figure” in the Trump entourage has been based on his statement at
the Vatican in 2014 when he said that he “does not justify Vladimir Putin and
the kleptocracy he represents (this phrase is often left out in Russian
sources, AP points out).”
“But,” the Breitbart founder,
continued, “we, the Judeo-Christian West must recognize that he speaks for
traditionalism. Putin has come out in defense of traditional institutions and
he is doing this with the aid of nationalism. People want to see their country
sovereign: they want to see patriotism in their country.”
However, Popov says, “all this was
said in 2014,” that is, more than three years ago. And in the middle of last month, he
continues, Breitbart after Bannon’s return “published an interview with Joel
Rosenberg, an expert on Islamism, under the eloquent title, ‘Putin is more
dangerous than radical Islam.’”
The Bannon outlet featured
relatively few stories about Russia and Ukraine in 2016, but most of them were
increasingly critical of Moscow. And “after Trump’s inauguration, the position
of Breitbart gradually took on greater definition” and was consistently hostile
to Russia in ways it had not been before, the Moscow commentator says.
In February 2017, for example, the
portal carried an article that dismissed Moscow’s argument about volunteers
going to Ukraine by suggesting that “80 percent of the Russian army consists of
volunteers. The American one consists entirely of volunteers.” Thus, to use
Moscow’s logic, one could call “American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan ‘volunteers.’”
At the end of March, it featured a
statement by former NATO secretary general Andres Fog Rassmusen who said that “Trump
should meet with [Ukrainian president] Poroshenko before he does with Putin.” But the clearest indication yet that the
original Trumpists have now moved away from being pro-Russian came in August.
On August 23, Breitbart carried an
article that said among other things that that day is “the European day of
memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism. Russia in recent years has
promoted the rehabilitation of Stalin’s image … possibly without recognizing
that Russians now dream about the restoration of the hammer and sickle.”
According to Popov, such a
declaration is “the logical end of the evolution of Breitbart’s position on the
Russian question because all Ukrainian matters in America are considered
through a Russian prism. One can only
guess what was the cause of this evolution,” but no one can deny it has
occurred and that it matters for the closest backers of the US president.
“In any case,” he concludes, “Breitbart
today is a clear denial of the thesis about American conservatism and Trumpism
being potentially friendly to Russia. Yes, there are some individual positively
inclined toward Moscow like [Patrick] Buchanan, but there are [today] no conservative
groups” that follow his approach.
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