{"id":51975,"date":"2025-03-09T11:38:29","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T19:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=51975"},"modified":"2025-03-09T11:38:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T19:38:29","slug":"qa-richard-sakwa-trumps-perestroika","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/09\/qa-richard-sakwa-trumps-perestroika\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A: Richard Sakwa: Trump’s Perestroika?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The eminent Russianist Richard Sakwa is emeritus professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book<\/span><\/a> (his fourth since 2020) is called The Culture of the Second Cold War \u00a0<\/i>which examines the prevailing attitudes and ideologies behind the drive for conflict with Russia.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Sakwa for a wide-ranging discussion in London last week.<\/span><\/p>\n

The below has been edited for length and clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n

~ James W. Carden<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

James Carden<\/b>: Good morning Richard. So the reason I\u2019m in London is that I wanted to speak to people who were kind of dissidents figures over here in order to figure out why the British foreign policy establishment seems even crazier than the American establishment on the issue of Russia and Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Robert Skidelsky [Independent peer in the House of Lords] told me a few weeks ago that part of the reason is that the memory of Munich<\/span><\/a> looms very, very large here\u2014as it does for our neoconservatives back home\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Richard Sakwa<\/b>: It\u2019s far, far worse here than in the United States. In the United States, there is a whole ecosystem of, you know, Consortium News, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft<\/i>, the whole stack of stuff. We do not have that here.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And of course the President of the United States is now on our side with regard to Ukraine \u2013 so that\u2019s a big breakthrough\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Oh, absolutely.<\/span><\/p>\n

This second Trump Administration is obviously very different from the first. He\u2019s learned that he\u2019s needed to capture and neutralize the intelligence services which hindered him from achieving a rapprochement vis-\u00e0-vis<\/span> Russia during his first term. But this is to be welcomed, of course it is. And it\u2019s very bizarre that in the British media and in the United Kingdom, peace is somehow considered a traitorous activity \u2013 as appeasement. Of course Munich looms very large, but it is a sign of the intellectual sterility and the barrenness of the British public sphere \u2013 by which I mean \u2013 the media, think tanks,\u00a0 <\/span>even academics.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And worse than that, it\u2019s like that in France as well. And I\u2019ve been saying that whenever the French and the British get together, you know nothing good is going to come of it. They launched the Crimean War of 1853, then, in 1860, the French and the British burnt down the Summer Palace in Beijing. Their detente of the early 19th century was one of the precipitating factors of bloc politics to the First World War.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And I\u2019m afraid today, this entente between the United Kingdom and France betokens a crazy Neo-imperialist strategy always directed against Russia. So we\u2019re going back to the roots of British Russophobia, which of course, is the Crimean War.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Yesterday I walked by a memorial to the Crimean War, not far from here. I thought, we\u2019re a long way from the days of John Bright who warned against \u201cchasing visionary phantoms abroad while your own country is rotting from within.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Indeed, Skidelsky\u2019s very keen on this\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Is there any sort of John Bright figure on the scene at all in the UK?<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Very few, sadly.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the worst thing is that in the Labour Party, which as you know has this huge majority of 411 MPs, and Starmer\u2019s achievement, brilliant achievement is to destroy the Labour Party as a movement. He\u2019s turned it into an organization. He\u2019s chased out the left, he\u2019s chased out independent figures. John McDonnell, and obviously Jeremy Corbyn has been expelled. It\u2019s a machine. So indeed, it\u2019s a neo-Soviet establishment that is emerging. And you used the word dissident earlier, and I think it applies because it\u2019s a neo-Soviet setup.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you, during the pandemic, we had zoom calls with Jeremy Corbyn and Stop the War Coalition. And it was in response to our calls for peace and our criticism of NATO, that Keir Starmer said that opposition to NATO is incompatible with Labour Party membership \u2013 even though the peace movement has been a long and hallowed tradition within the Labour Party.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

It is unbelievable!<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: So there is a troubling resemblance between Labour and the Democrats\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Oh yeah, the party of war.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: There seems to be, and for good reason, confusion among the public at large on both sides of the Atlantic with regard to the period of 2015 to 2022, about the Minsk process and who refused to do what \u2013 It seems to me that that is an important part of the story that often goes missing\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: A crucial part. Minsk is absolutely essential to understand the run-up to the war. Minsk is much misunderstood; basically, the underlying idea was to return Luhansk and Donetsk, those two breakaway oblasts in Ukraine. That\u2019s what Kiev wanted. But instead, they demonized their own people; and they launched a violent military attack on them. They then cut all social benefits and services, so babushkas couldn\u2019t get their pensions and so on; they cut off water supply. These are the people you want to return to your own sovereignty?<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And they called the military operation an \u201canti-terrorist operation.\u201d I remember very well going there in 2015 and visiting Soviet-era bomb shelters and seeing these grandmothers living in these places. And the people on the street were a little bit befuddled and more than a little concerned as to why all of a sudden they\u2019re being branded as terrorists<\/i> by their own government\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Absolutely. And second, it\u2019s important to stress that Putin could have annexed those parts earlier, like he did Crimea. But he was trying to stop that with Minsk, and he\u2019s now condemned for being far too soft by the Russian nationalists.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: One of the things, of course, that people don\u2019t understand is that the Russians have hawks of their own, but Putin\u2019s not one of them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Absolutely not.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s condemned all the time. Even some Russians I met on my recent trip to Chicago were claiming that he\u2019s going to sell them out again. That Putin is going to sell them out because Trump has opened up this rapprochement, and he\u2019s now going to be seduced again by the West and so on\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And there seems to me to be, among parts of the elite, a real bitterness in Russia, exemplified, perhaps, by an article written by Sergei Karaganov. His attitude was kind of like, \u201cWell, we expect this from the dopey Americans. But the Europeans?!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Yep. Indeed, it was a very harsh piece.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Basically he\u2019s arguing that the Europeans have been fully vassal- ized, and also infantilized, in the sense that they\u2019re no longer able to define their own strategic objectives and purposes.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t use the term, but my argument is they\u2019re locked in a Cold War mentality and have not been able to overcome it. Worse, the whole European Union has been Eastern Europeanized with all of the bitterness and the historical baggage toward Russia, which is genuine, of course. But it\u2019s time to move on. It\u2019s time for what we hoped at the end of the first Cold War, peace and reconciliation.<\/span><\/p>\n

So Minsk was absolutely crucial in all of this, and it\u2019s much misunderstood. And the style of debate today is so worrying,\u00a0 <\/span>because those who keep condemning Russia for disinformation, fake news, and so on\u2014 are the ones who are peddling falsehoods. So the disinformation industry is precisely a whole exercise in disinformation and misinformation.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But also, to back to your first point, what is most fascinating is that this whole epoch, in many senses, began in Munich with Putin\u2019s speech of 2007 when he broke with the unipolar world and criticized America\u2019s claim to be a global hegemon and the project of NATO enlargement. People forget that on this, Gorbachev and<\/i> Yeltsin held the same position as Putin.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As you say, they have their own constituencies, their own factions. <\/b>[For more<\/span><\/a> on Sakwa\u2019s factional model of Russian politics, see his 2019 book Russia\u2019s Futures<\/i>].<\/span><\/p>\n

And what is interesting is that this new phase begins again with another<\/i> Munich speech, JD Vance\u2019s absolutely extraordinary speech at the Munich Security Conference last month. Which was \u2013 whether or not you agree with all the points \u2013 was a very profound statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Trump detests war, by the way. I mean, it\u2019s a peculiar thing, but he does.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: He\u2019s the only person who talks about it, albeit in his uniquely discursive way \u2013 but he\u2019s always talking about how terrible it is that all those, as he puts it, beautiful young people are getting killed and the beautiful golden domes of the churches are rubble\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Absolutely. For that, I take off my hat to him, that he\u2019s actually saying that. Whereas our Starmers and Macrons\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: \u2026and Bidens and Blinkens\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: And Biden, of course. Biden loved it. I mean, 50 years of catastrophic, as Robert Gates says, mismanagement of foreign policy from Biden.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Gates was no stranger to mismanagement..<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: In his own way, he knew whereof he spoke.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: What about the reaction here to the Zelensky-Trump blow up last week?<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Obviously the British media, the Financial Times, and so on, said, \u201cOh, how disgraceful. He bullied this courageous Churchill of our times.\u201d Quite the opposite. He\u2019d been told to wear a suit, and even when they greeted him outside the White House, Trump joked about it. You know, he sort of tapped him on the shoulder, \u201cOh, I see you\u2019ve dressed up for the occasion,\u201d sort of avuncular sort of manner.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, Trump wasn\u2019t there to humiliate him. And it went normally for 35-odd minutes. But it was when he started challenging JD Vance, \u201cCan I ask you what sort of peace are you talking about?\u201d And JD Vance, absolutely rightly, pushed back.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So the narrative in the Western media is so misleading. Because they weren\u2019t out to humiliate him, it was Zelensky who was out to, as it were, to teach the American leader a lesson. But there\u2019s a certain status involved here. So it was disrespectful\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And they humiliated Marco Rubio in the process, which was probably just a bonus for them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Oh, sitting on the sofa there?<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Yep.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: That was collateral.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Let me circle back to what\u2019s going on in Britain. Starmer, after a very rough start, seems to be having something of a moment in the media. He\u2019s now being hailed as the leader of the free world and all that. It seems to me that all the coverage and the spin about his meeting with Trump is permeated by an air of unreality. Starmer was successful, I think, with regard to the tariff issue, but not on the war issue.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This idea that the UK and the French are going to put peacekeepers on the ground, and that there\u2019s going to be an American backstop, is totally off the rails. I mean, the UK has an army that could fit into Wembley\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: With seats to spare. Yes. I think the troop level is down to 75,000 now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And one of the things that gets left out is that the side that\u2019s currently winning the war on the ground is never going to agree.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: In fact, it looks as if they\u2019re going to be a big Russian offensive.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

They\u2019re gathering forces for when the weather gets better and the spring comes. Maybe that\u2019s why they\u2019ve held back for the last few weeks. Also to give Trump a bit of breathing space, so as not to antagonize things. But absolutely, an absolute air of unreality. The politicians and the media here say that Starmer has behaved impeccably. It\u2019s a parallel reality; it doesn\u2019t take into account the strategic factors on the ground, and Russia has got something to say about these things. It\u2019s a sign of Anglo-French imperial arrogance. It\u2019s also the deeper civilizational arrogance of liberal civilization, which is now in the process of repeating 19th century tropes about needing to be out there to civilize the world. And so Russia is now considered like backward peoples.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And of course Starmer, since he\u2019s been elected, in the first six months, he made every single mistake in the book, and invented a few more. And today, while he\u2019s not inventing mistakes, he\u2019s simply repeating mistakes from the 19th century. The logic which they are engaging with is the logic that led to the First World War and, of course, perpetuated this Cold War.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So it\u2019s very, very dangerous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Right. And one of the things that is really appalling about the establishment\u2019s recklessness in pursuing this insane program of waging a proxy war with Russia over the Donbas\u2014I mean, I never understood why it mattered to the United States as to who controls the Donbas\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: It would matter if this was a genuinely unprovoked war. But it was not. The Donbas people themselves, whom I know very well, didn\u2019t even want separatism. Some did, of course, but they basically wanted autonomy, cultural and linguistic autonomy.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not as if it suddenly, unprovoked, like a Marvel comic villain, Putin woke up in the 24th of February 2022 and says\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: \u201cI have to have this<\/i>\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: And that he did it because he was evil. Why was he evil? He was born evil. He was Hitler incarnate. Which is just so infantile and stupid \u2013 and of course leads to things like the First World War, where you have mass slaughter for a purpose which still years later, we still don\u2019t fully understand\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: The Western position is extremely short sighted, but it is also deeply immoral\u2026 I wonder, have you been to Limehouse?<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: No. In East London?<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: Yes. I was there yesterday, and there is a church, St Anne\u2019s\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Oh, right.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And it\u2019s beautiful, a kind of oasis in this working-class area. And there\u2019s a memorial in the graveyard dedicated to the men of the parish who perished in the First World War. And it\u2019s an enormous stone, four-sided, of just names, names, names, and names\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

And I think that\u2019s kind of our bottom line, right? That this stuff needs to be avoided at all costs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Absolutely. And the worst thing about Zelensky and the Starmers and Macrons of the world, they want Trump to own<\/i> the war. And he\u2019s not going to own this war. And absolutely rightly so. He\u2019s not going to do it.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re celebrating this year the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A really important moment, and of course the establishment of the United Nations system and the Charter system. Also, interestingly enough, we are now celebrating, this year, the 40th anniversary of Gorbachev\u2019s coming to power in the Soviet Union, which put an end, soon afterwards, to the first Cold War.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And I very much welcome it, because we\u2019ve had this absolute stasis and logjam. And Trump, I now think of him as the ice breaker. He\u2019s breaking up this logjam, which is a 40-year one. Gorbachev tried to break it, he failed. After the Second World War, we tried to establish, with Yalta and Potsdam, a system of great power politics embedded within the United Nations. And now I think we are in a next phase with this new team in the United States, with the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance system \u2013 we\u2019re entering into a moment of boundless historical opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another interesting analogy is that just like it was Russia<\/i>which unexpectedly defected from the Soviet Union, leading to the end of the Soviet Union \u2013 change came not from the periphery but from the center. Interestingly enough, today it is the United States<\/i> which is leaving its own alliance system, which is amazingly analogous to how Russia behaved under Gorbachev 40 years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: It was the center<\/i> that gave up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Yeah, the center gave up. And today the center\u2019s giving up, which of course means the periphery is left bereft. I mean, to call the European leaders like headless chickens gives them a sense of direction and intelligence, which is giving them rather too much credit. And you can quote that, because I think it\u2019s absolutely appalling. The fact that they\u2019ve appointed Kaja Kallas as the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs\u00a0and all these people\u2026these are people completely out of their depth, consumed by a burning hatred of Russia. And Ursula von der Leyen [EU Commission President] is just as bad. Read her speeches.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And the soon-to-be-former German foreign minister\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Oh yes, Annalena Baerbock.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

You listen to the language they use, and it\u2019s so disturbing. They have forgotten the terror of war. Some people are actually precisely arguing that Trump is a Gorbachev\u2014like figure. So to push that analogy we just made, that Trump is creating a perestroika, but maybe, hopefully, he will be more successful than Gorbachev was in opening up a genuine new epoch of comity between nations.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Trump, ultimately, even though he\u2019s got his tariff obsessions and so on\u2014he does open up the possibility<\/i> of great powers working together. And when I say great powers, it doesn\u2019t mean at the expense of small and medium ones\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: It\u2019s very transactional. But there are also echoes of the Rooseveltian, Gaullist vision of great power cooperation and reciprocity that is embedded in the UN Charter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Absolutely.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: And we\u2019ve forgotten about the values, the principles that are embedded in the UN Charter. And that I think that kind of motivated Gorbachev\u2019s vision of a Europe whole and free which was a direct echo of de Gaulle\u2019s vision. I\u2019m not expecting Trump to reach those heights, but it is interesting that he hasn\u2019t rejected it out of hand like every American president has since the end of the Cold War.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: Yes. You\u2019re absolutely right about his Gaullist echoes and of a larger agenda. In his own way, in his own inimitable way\u2026 But yes, he is.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And also you touch on an extremely important thing there, because I\u2019ve been saying \u2013 as people joke \u2013 the same thing for almost 40 years, that we really need to go back to the Gorbachev\u2019s Common European Home. Because ultimately, this is what this present generation of European leaders fail to understand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Macron used to say it, but of course he said that before lunch, and after lunch he says quite the opposite, and after supper, a third thing entirely. But he also always said that there cannot be European security against<\/i> Russia, it has to be with<\/i> Russia. And it does. It\u2019s an uncomfortable neighbor. It\u2019s a big neighbor. You don\u2019t always like it. You don\u2019t always have to agree with it, but you have to work with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I will actually even go a little bit further\u2014you\u2019ve already said that Putin is a moderate in the context there. He is. He also has his very moderate constituents. We talked about the siloviki, who are the hardline security guys. But there\u2019s also now the business lobby in Russia saying, \u201cMake peace. Overcome the sanctions, reestablish direct flights with the US,\u201d and so on. And so the business lobby is mobilized.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot more going on at the moment. Which is fantastic as far as I can see. He\u2019s finally doing his rapprochement. It\u2019s not detente yet. It\u2019s rapprochement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carden<\/b>: So far, so good.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sakwa<\/b>: A little bit of sunshine in this endless warmongering.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

James W. Carden is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) The eminent Russianist Richard Sakwa is emeritus professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book (his fourth since 2020) is called The Culture of the Second Cold War \u00a0which examines the prevailing attitudes and ideologies behind the drive for conflict with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1321],"class_list":["post-51975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51975"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51981,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51975\/revisions\/51981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51975"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=51975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}