What did Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin tell us? The Russian president is not a deranged warmonger

Like many across the world, I was eagerly waiting for Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin to drop. If nothing else than to just tide over the fatigue at relentless western propaganda over a war that has spelt a formal end to the post-Cold War era, triggered a worldwide energy and food crisis, and made stark the difference between Global South and the rich West. The war may be evenly balanced, stalemated, or skewing towards Russia (depending on who you ask), the propaganda war has been comprehensively won by the US-led West with all avenues of Russian information (or even disinformation) choked off. The age of social media notwithstanding. It is a little suffocating. Especially if you don’t know Russian and want to look beyond what is being shoved down our collective throats. On many counts, not to speak of a better view of the war, the interview — a painstaking, exhaustive, two-hour affair, didn’t disappoint. Not that Putin said anything terribly new. He didn’t need to. It was surreal to watch the entire gamut of legacy media in the Anglosphere and the collective West, suffer a veritable meltdown over an interview. The extent to which talking heads and leaders in the West appeared mortified at public getting access to the Russian leader’s statements and thoughts was intriguing. It suggested a nervousness that Putin may challenge  western narratives of the war. That should not warrant such apprehension unless opinion makers in the West don’t trust the public to believe their lies. Is Putin really the deranged warmonger that the West would have us believe? Why did he invade Ukraine? Does he want to conquer the Baltic states next? Does he want a nuclear war? Why isn’t he interested in peace? The answer to these and many other questions unfolded in fascinating detail, and in a delicious bit of irony the self-righteous West couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether the Putin that emerged sitting across an American journalist was a pantomime villain or Thanos reincarnate. Many publications, journalists, think tankers appeared derisive, dismissive, and the western leaders, abusive. Hillary Clinton called Carlson, whose interview of the Russian president has already ratcheted up nearly 200 million views on the ‘X’ platform alone (not counting the views on his website tuckercarlson.com) since it was put up on 9 February, “a useful idiot”, a “puppy dog” who has been “fired from so many outlets in the United States,” referring to the journalist’s former stints at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. For context, mainstream shows on American cable networks struggle to reach a million views, if at all. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, whose name came up during the interview, has exploded in anger, calling Carlson a “stooge of the tyrant, the dictaphone to the dictator and a traitor to journalism” and accused him of “betraying his viewers and listeners around the world” and his “fawning, guffawing, slack-jawed happiness at having a ‘scoop.’” The visceral hatred towards a journalist whose only crime seems to be doing journalism is curious. Carlson had put up a video on why he chose to interview the Russian president, and it is tough to counter his argument that “two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed… They have no real idea what’s happening in this region, here in Russia or 600 miles away in Ukraine. But they should know. They’re paying for much of it in ways that they might not yet fully perceive.” As far as “fawning” interview of a leader is concerned, it is tough to top the hagiographic, cringeworthy PR that western liberal outlets such as CNN regularly conduct of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Putin, a wily old operator with a formidable knowledge of Russian history and a firm holder of the notion that culture and faith act as binding force for nationhood, dominated the format. He didn’t let Carlson, a seasoned journalist from the right, settle down and controlled the pace and terms of the interview. His long-winded soliloquy on Russian history at the very beginning of the interview threw Carlson off-guard and evoked dismissive derision from the West. The western narrative on the war in Ukraine is constructed around a degree of mythmaking and even lionization of Putin. The Russian president has been invested with almost preternatural powers to manipulate information, meddle in democracies and lead a pack of authoritarian leaders that are purportedly challenging the US-led rules-based order. For a man possessing such superlative powers, a man so dangerous that his words cannot be allowed to permeate into open societies lest the vulnerable population are swayed by the seductive appeal of Putin’s narrative, the Western media appeared disappointed, almost. ‘Putin is too boring and blew the chance offered by Carlson’, was the near unanimous view. The Economist wrote, “A Trumpist provocateur and host on Fox News until he was sacked last year, Mr Carlson gave Mr Putin lots of chances to stir up American politics. For a supposed sorcerer of electoral interference, the president did a poor job… Invited, more than once, to blame nato for the war—a bogus explanation favoured by American isolationists—he repeatedly blathered about history.” Wall Street Journal observed that “The Kremlin had got what it wanted: a two-hour platform for Putin to communicate his ideas to the West… But the propaganda effect was not as strong as the Kremlin intended, because most people will stop listening.” According to New York Times, “Much of the interview constituted a familiar Kremlin history lesson about Russia’s historical claim to Eastern European lands, beginning in the ninth century, that Mr. Putin made little effort to distill for American ears.” The newspaper quoted Nina L Khrushcheva, a professor and the great-granddaughter of the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, as saying, “Russians are used to his history lessons… but American viewers must be going nuts with all this historical verbosity.” And therein lies the rub. At the very beginning of the interview, Putin says, “Let’s look where our relationship with Ukraine started from. Where does Ukraine come from?” and then meanders through 9th century history of Russian statehood to contrast with the idea of ‘Ukraine’ as a nation that, he claims, is an artificial 20th century construct. Before we challenge the historicity or accuracy of Putin’s claims, it is worth noting that the Russian president’s attempt to link the present war with the Slavic history of the Middle Ages and righting of historical wrongs as a motivation for his actions have triggered a meme fest in cyber verse. It is not so much the validity of Putin’s claim but his attempt to delve into the pages of history that was singled out for ridicule. It says as much about the Russian president as it does about how Americans perceive history. Cultural history as a unifying theme for nationhood and an intrinsic part of national identity might be an alien concept for a country such as the United States, a colony of immigrants and opportunists that stresses on multiculturalism almost as a fetish. As Scott Greer writes in his blog, “not only do Americans know little about Eastern European history, they know little about history in general. And they don’t care about this ignorance. Americans are a people who left the past behind. That’s part of the new American identity… The past is still very much alive in Eastern Europe. It animates the war in Ukraine, regional fear of Russia, and Putin’s ambitions. The strong ethnic identities and hatreds are kept alive by a strong remembrance of the past.”This is exactly why Putin describes the invasion of Ukraine as a “civil war”, not the violation of a sovereign nation. In his telling, Ukraine is an artificial state “shaped at Stalin’s will” that cannot take away the fact that Russia and Ukraine share a “a common language”, “family ties — every third person there had some kind of family or friendship ties; common culture; common history; finally, common faith; co-existence within a single state for centuries; and deeply interconnected economies.” And therefore, he tells Carlson, “What is happening is, to a certain extent, an element of a civil war. Everyone in the West thinks that the Russian people have been split by hostilities forever. No. They will be reunited. The unity is still there. Why are the Ukranian authorities dismantling the Ukranian Orthodox Church? Because it brings together not only the territory, it brings together our souls. No one will be able to separate the soul.” In its derision towards Putin, the West seems to have overlooked the fact that there are two sides to Putin’s narrative of historical grievance that has goaded him to go to war against Ukraine. One side is obvious. Putin is driven by a revanchist motive to attach those parts of Ukraine that has, in his telling, historically been part of the great Russian empire. Conversely, it also means that the NATO narrative of a bloodthirsty warmonger out to attach sovereign states on its periphery as an imperialist project is bogus. The Russian president goes to great lengths to lay out the justification for his actions where revanchism is as much of a motive as is NATO’s expansion, EU enlargement and promotion of ‘liberal democracy in Ukraine. And while justifying why he was compelled to invade Ukraine, he also categorically dismisses the notion that he eyes the Baltic states or Poland, or parts of Europe bordering Russia that have never been part of the Russian empire. Putin’s rambling narrative is to reassure the audience that he has no plans to conquer land after land after capturing Ukraine, and that this is a fake narrative peddled by the West to justify America’s containment strategy against Russia and encroach into Russia’s sphere of influence. As professor and political scientist John J Mearsheimer writes in Foreign Affairs, “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it.” To a direct question from Carlson, Putin is equally categorical. “Can you imagine a scenario where you send Russian troops to Poland?” Vladimir Putin: Only in one case: if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering…  It is absolutely out of the question. You just don’t have to be any kind of analyst, it goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of global war. And a global war will bring all of humanity to the brink of destruction. It’s obvious. Putin also offered off-ramps to the war and revealed that had it not been for Johnson (who was probably acting under instructions from Washington), the peace deal would’ve been signed last year. The former British prime minister fulminated and kicked up quite a storm in response, slamming the interview as “ludicrous” but it turns out that Putin wasn’t lying, after all. Ukrainian media had reported that Russia had offered to the end the war in 2022 in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality and that possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit who apparently “forced Kyiv to abandon the peace deal”. If construction of the key narrative, ‘that Putin is a monster out to ravage Europe and does not understand the concept of peace’ is challenged, then the moral justification of the crusade against Russia breaks down. Putin may be an autocrat, but he is not an irrational actor. For the Russian president, Ukraine is of core strategic interest and he is ready to absorb a large amount of material and reputational losses to restore deterrence. By conducting an interview with him, Carlson has performed an invaluable task. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.