Putin’s choice: Peter the Great or Steve Witkoff
I was reminded of the modern tsar’s historically animated ambitions by a report in the news pages of the Journal last week. US and Russian negotiators are making diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine war by establishing the basis for a lasting and mutually beneficial economic relationship between the former Cold War rivals.
“Make money, not war” was the gist of the offer the Russian government apparently pitched to Donald Trump. We can hazard a well-informed guess how our President responded to that proposition. But there’s a problem. It is not only that we Americans should all feel revulsion at the idea that some free nation’s sovereignty can be violently extinguished as long as we receive a cut of the action. It is that for Ukraine, Europe, the US and the Russian leader too, making money and making war aren’t and never have been mutually exclusive activities.
The Journal story documents how Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close Putin aide, and Steve Witkoff, the President’s ambassador plenipotentiary to everywhere, have drawn up a list of commercial opportunities for the US and Russia if only Washington would sign off on Putin’s unlawful occupation of a neighbouring country.
The prospects on offer seem enticing: rare-earth mining and energy projects for US investors in Russia’s Arctic; joint missions to Mars between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Russian space industry; appropriation of the $US300bn ($458.3bn) in Russian assets frozen by European central banks after the 2022 invasion, to be used for collaborative investment in Russia and Ukraine.
The picture Mr Dmitriev painted for Mr Witkoff was of Russia as a land of opportunity. The offer is so appealing you wonder whether the American envoy and his colleagues were given the same sort of Potemkin village spectacle to which Tucker Carlson was treated on his visit to Moscow last year, the one where he expressed wonderment, for example, at the coin deposit-and-return system in Russian supermarket carts – technology that has been in almost every European store I have been in since about 1990.
That’s not all: Mr Witkoff seems to believe that the peace dividend on offer can benefit Ukraine too. In a very modern invocation of the swords-to-ploughshares principle, he has evidently told Ukrainian officials that its demobbed soldiers could soon be earning Silicon Valley-level salaries operating American data centres in the country. It’s unclear whether Russia has been offered any investment opportunities in the US as part of the deal. But we can at least hope that Mr Witkoff told Mr Dmitriev about an amazing bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan he would be happy to sell.
Perhaps my cynicism about Mr Witkoff’s curious mix of ingenuousness and rapacity is unfair. I don’t doubt that he believes in the old idea that a deeper economic relationship between the countries acts as its own guarantee of peace.
As he told the Journal: “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that is going to be naturally a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
It’s a beguiling idea: peace through commerce. Perhaps Mr Witkoff has been reading Norman Angell’s famous The Great Illusion (1909), whose central argument was that profitable economic engagement between industrialised countries made war virtually unimaginable because it was the “real guarantor of the good behaviour of one state to another”.
Five years after Angell’s book was published, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was murdered in a Sarajevo street, and for the next four years the richest and most economically integrated countries in history staged the bloodiest warfare humans had ever produced.
But you don’t even have to be mindful of history to be sceptical about big claims of peaceful and prosperous coexistence with Putin’s Russia.
Over his quarter-century in power, the Russian President has demonstrated that for him and his favoured courtiers, enrichment through cross-border economic activity is perfectly consistent with – indeed, a helpful facilitator of – violent campaigns to extend Russia’s borders.
Russia has long been adept at exploiting the cupidity of eager Westerners to advance its political aims. The Soviet Union played the capitalist game better than we did during the Cold War, showering riches on men such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen in exchange for secrets the Russians hoped would bring about the destruction of our political system. In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs, many of whom now surround Putin, welcomed well-meaning Western academics, businessmen and others to help them plunder their resources and pave the way for the kleptocracy that now holds up his global ambitions.
In the end, kleptocrats are going to do what kleptocrats always do. For Americans, making money with Russia in the hope of making peace would be a time-tested mistake. But helping to make money for Russia while it pursues its aims of undermining Western freedom and American leadership would be a crime.
An old Kremlin joke about Vladimir Putin is that the Russian President has only three trusted advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.