Putin For President A Counterfactual
After two months in office, Trump’s policy direction has become pretty clear to all of us. At least, if you define direction as “how to make bad stuff happen to as many Americans as possible.” I mean, plenty of people who voted for the guy are already whining about his actions; after all, they never expected the leopards to eat their own faces when they voted for the Leopards Eating Faces party.
But let’s take a counterfactual for a few minutes. Let’s go wild and imagine that somehow Russia’s Vladimir Putin was elected our president, and think a bit about what might be going on today if he were in charge instead of Trump.
First off, we all know how much Putin hates NATO; he even justified his illegal and inept invasion of Ukraine with the lie that it was to guard against a threat from NATO. So it’s a sure bet that as US president, Putin would do his best to undermine the most successful and effective defensive group in all of history, the now 32-nation alliance that kept the peace after WWII, that helped make the US the most powerful country in the world, and that the US has been de facto in charge of. How would he undermine NATO? Well, it’s a big and powerful organization, so using “little green men” as he did during his first Ukraine invasion in Crimea would not be enough. He’d probably have to use stealth to make trouble between the US and at least two NATO allies, maybe a big nation and a small one.
To make the maximum amount of trouble for the US, Putin would probably pick a big country that is vital to our economy, supporting tens of millions of US jobs; a country with which the US exchanges nearly $1 trillion per year in goods and services; a country that supported the US after 9/11 and whose soldiers fought and died with ours in countless wars; a country whose citizens make 20 million visits to the US each year, generating $20 billion in travel and tourism revenue and supporting 140,000 American jobs; and a country with which the US shares the longest undefended border in the world: sorry, what could it be but Canada, eh? If Putin could screw up the US-Canada relationship, well, he would achieve 80% of his anti-NATO objectives.
For his small country target, there are a lot more possibilities. But I bet he would focus on a NATO country that controls a significant waterway like the North Sea through which Russian warships pass; probably a country whose soldiers had one of the highest casualty rates supporting the US operation in Afghanistan; a country that hosts an important NATO base on Greenland, “the world’s largest stationary aircraft carrier;” and a country that is consistently the least corrupt and happiest in the world. So Putin might choose Denmark as his small NATO country to annoy. Yes, if Putin could screw up US relations with Canada and Denmark, he would be well on his way to whacking NATO and heading towards world domination for Russia.
Moving on, even with his efforts to weaken NATO, Putin would still be worried about the US military, by far the strongest in the world. What to do, what to do? First off, he could work to demoralize it by denigrating its heroes, like the Tuskegee Airmen, computer pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper, and General Colin Powell; he could name some of its military bases after Confederate traitors; and he could promote disunity in the force by targeting the miniscule number of soldiers who are transgender. But that’s really not enough; he could get more bang for his buck by instructing his subordinates to forsake the military’s $trillion secure communications system and replace it with unclassified commo that would be easy for Russia to intercept. Hey, he might even appoint an alcoholic as Secretary of Defense. Hell yeah!
Putin knows that US “soft power” is a substantial contributor to its success, so he would act immediately to eliminate it. He would probably appoint feckless cronies as American ambassadors around the world to tarnish the reputation of our country. He would also try to kill USAID, the international assistance agency that, for less than 1% of the US Government budget, has lifted countries like Korea out of poverty and promoted things like economic development, rule of law, and democracy in developing countries around the world. Putin would certainly shutter the Voice of America, which broadcasts unbiased, uncensored news about US policies and views to restrictive anti-democratic regimes around the world. Yep, soft power would disintegrate in an instant.
Next step, the economy. Putin has chafed at the “rules-based international order” that a victorious US instituted following WWII, to help improve the US economy and expand opportunities abroad for US businesses. Putin hates constraints like that, which limit taxes on international trade in order to promote competition and economic efficiency, or where pesky bureaucrats from the World Bank withhold funds from his corrupt projects. He would just dump the whole thing, knowing that the US is by far the largest beneficiary from this system, and that killing international economic institutions would speed the impoverishment of the US. Putin would probably announce big tariffs on goods from major trading partners like Canada, Mexico, or the EU. He would claim publicly that someone else would pay these taxes and that they would not cause inflation. Then, to create economic chaos, he might postpone the tariffs for a couple of weeks before reinstating them, since that would cause the stock markets to gyrate wildly and he and his oligarch pals could earn big bucks using their insider knowledge of these announcements to trade on stock options. Putin knows that chaos and uncertainty are bad for US business, so he will make sure to produce as much chaos as possible.
What else? Putin knows that the US higher education system is the envy of the world, is a major source of US wealth, and attracts more than one million international students every year; that it produces scientists and scholars who have solved some of the world’s toughest problems like curing cancer and infectious diseases like Covid-19 and putting roving spacecraft on Mars. Clearly it’s got to go! First he would withdraw research funds from universities to put the world’s most talented researchers out of work, and encourage them to look for more reliable employment abroad. He would falsely accuse them of anti-semitism. To reduce the number of paying foreign students – a reduction that would put many US colleges out of business – Putin would start playing games with their student visas, arresting them for imagined offenses, and making it clear that they were unwanted here.
Finally, even as US president, Putin will long for the familiar comforts of his Moscow hometown, and will want to bring some of that Russian je ne sais quoi to Washington. One of the things he likes best is to surround himself with fabulously wealthy oligarchs who think like he does – or if they don’t, can be tossed out of a top-floor window with no trouble. He would appoint oligarchs, robber barons, and billionaires to be his closest advisors and think for him; since thinking is too much effort for a real leader. He would steal money from the great mass of Americans by confiscating Social Security payments and cutting back on health care to fund his best friends’ lives of privilege.
Putin could do all that in just a couple of months; worse things would probably follow. Sounds kind of like a nightmare, doesn’t it? But don’t worry, as author Sinclair Lewis once said, it can’t happen here!
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