The viewership of over 100 million that the interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin with American journalist Tucker Carlson garnered on the X platform and a website—almost in real time—has been truly extraordinary, but unsurprising. Putin is a man of history and a cult figure among world statesmen who combines a cerebral and erudite mind with vast experience in statecraft and diplomacy; Carlson is a trained historian and a highly skilled professional who finds nuggets of gold in the dry haystacks of politics. Therefore, it was a match made in heaven.
Putin later aired a grievance that Carlson was not provocative enough, but the latter too had a game plan—in the event, the interview became a moveable feast for both the mind that we use to generate thoughts in the form of images, ideas, concepts and goals, as well as our intellect that discerns the quality of those thoughts and decides which one to act upon. From an Indian perspective, the historicity of the interview in geopolitical terms is striking. It holds lessons for the current phase of India’s foreign policies and the attendant gyrations of its diplomacy.
The world of yesterday in the 1990s that Boris Yeltsin’s Russia navigated was a hugely transformative period. In a way, it was similar to the challenges India is facing currently—a world in disorder as the certainties of bipolarity dissipated. The comparison can be stretched further, since in the 1990s, Russia also had to face formidable challenges as a middle-ranking power—like India today—harbouring aspirations and ambitions of a civilisation state with a “tryst with destiny”, but locked into a ‘rules-based’ arena, which was indeed the backdrop of Putin’s appearance at the helm of affairs in the Kremlin in 1999.
The External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, said the other day in an interview with a German daily, “Everyone conducts a relationship based on their past experiences. If I look at the history of India post-independence, Russia has never hurt our interests. The relations of powers like Europe, the US, China or Japan with Russia, they have all seen ups and downs. We have had a stable and always very friendly relationship with Russia. And our relationship with Russia today is based on this experience. For others, things were different, and conflicts may have shaped the relationship.” Not a word or comma can be disputed in what Jaishankar said. But that was not the whole point.
What was missing was no less crucial—the striking similarity in the historical post-Cold War trajectories of the Russian Federation and India, both spearheaded by ‘westernist’ elites superimposing on the idea of Orientalism, as Edward Said used the expression.
Yeltsin made an earnest effort to position Russia in the western camp. The Indian elites have also pursued a similar path. The Russian approach reached its apogee in 2000 when, as Putin recounted to Carlson, he floated the possibility of Russia joining NATO to President Bill Clinton when he visited Moscow in 2000. Of course, it goes to the credit of the Indian elites that they never went that far. Putin recalled, “If he (Clinton) had said yes, the process of rapprochement would have commenced, and eventually it might have happened if we had seen some sincere wish on the side of our partners. But it didn’t happen.”
Interestingly, this was despite Russia’s past experience that the US and its allies were sponsoring the Jihadi terrorist groups in the Caucasus in the 1990s. When Putin confronted Clinton with incontrovertible evidence of covert activities, Clinton feigned ignorance; subsequently, when Russian intelligence followed through with the CIA, the latter disdainfully held its ground saying, “We have been working with the opposition in Russia. We believe that this is the right thing to do and we will keep on doing it.”
The curious thing about the Russian-American tango is that Washington fundamentally pursued policies to weaken Russia and carry forward the momentum of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, which led to the dissolution of a powerful Slavic nation with Orthodox Christian faith, was a calibrated geopolitical move to ‘erase’ a staunch ally of Russia with access to the Adriatic Sea, which is a veritable NATO lake today. When Yeltsin protested, pat came the reply that the UN Charter and international law had become “obsolete… everything was outdated, everything had to be changed”.
Putin recalled: “Yeltsin was immediately dragged through the mud, accused of alcoholism, of understanding nothing, of knowing nothing. He understood everything, I assure you.” But the mother of all American betrayals came with NATO expansion. Putin told Carlson: “Well, we were promised, no NATO to the East, not an inch to the East… And then what? They said, ‘Well, it’s not enshrined on paper, so we’ll expand.’ So there were five waves of expansion, the Baltic States, the whole of Eastern Europe, and so on. And now I come to the main thing: they have come to Ukraine ultimately.”
The paradox is, the American side also knew all this while that Yeltsin had genuinely sought a partnership with the US, but kept on pressing the pedal regardless to disintegrate Russia and carve out of it a few nice little states that could be subjugated and dominated. This is the crux of the matter. When asked about the American motive, this is how Putin framed the reply: “I can only guess why: too big a country, with its own opinion and so on. And the United States—I have seen how issues are being resolved in NATO.”
Quintessentially, the same thing is happening in the US-China relationship today. If this can happen to Russia and now an even more diabolical version to China, can India be far behind as it gallops toward the third slot in the pecking order of international power dynamic? Putin’s Carlson interview raises some profoundly troubling questions for India’s strategic calculus.
(Views are personal)
M K Bhadrakumar
Former diplomat
