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PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump & the Russophobes

There is no faction in Washington on either side of the aisle — if, indeed, any such aisle any longer matters — that does not nurse one or another measure of Russophobic paranoia.

The extent to which Trump’s démarche toward Moscow succeeds will be the extent to which the U.S. can transcend a long, regrettable history and finally embrace the 21st century. 

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, August 25, 2025

There is no saying yet whether Donald Trump will succeed in negotiating the end of the Ukraine war, or a new era of détente between Washington and Moscow, or new security relations between Russia and the West, or cooperation in the Arctic, or all the goodies to come of reopened trade and investment ties.

All this remains to be seen. Trump’s mid–August summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage may or may not turn out to be “historic,” a descriptive all presidents in the business of great-power diplomacy long for.

There are all sorts of reasons to harbor doubts at this early moment. Can Trump promise the Russian president peace given the policy cliques, the Deep State, the military-industrial complex, and other such constituencies that have so long and vigorously made certain no such thing breaks out?

Those who craft the Deep State’s subterfuge ops viciously destroyed Trump’s better policy initiatives during his first term — his initial attempt to reconstruct relations with Russia, those imaginative talks — too promising for their own good — with North Korea’s leader. The record suggests we had better brace for the same should Trump and his people do well in negotiations as the weeks — and it will be weeks at the very least — go by.

And so to the question of Trump and his people. Marco Rubio at State, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Steve Witkoff taking time away from his real estate ventures in New York, all subject to the president’s orders, none with any experience in statecraft: Is the Trump regime competent to navigate through a diplomatic process this complex and of this potential consequence?

Let us not count these people out, but it is hard to see it.

And finally to the Russophobia that Trump brought forth as soon as he came to political prominence during the 2016 campaign season. I consider this the most formidable challenge Trump now takes on as he attempts to end a proxy war and bring relations with Russia into a new time.

I say this because Russophobia is about more, much more, than near-term geopolitical strategies and policy choices. This is a question that goes to the ideology that makes America America, to the collective psyche, to Otherness and identity (which are intimately related in the American mind).

It was interesting to hear Trump make reference to the Russiagate rubbish during his post-summit remarks in Anchorage. Here, according to the Kremlin’s transcript, is part of what he had to say as to the disruptive effects of the Russiagate years:

“We had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we would like to have dealt with. But we will have a good chance when this is over.”

This is fine, true enough so far as it goes. But behind Russiagate there is a century of history — two if you go back to the beginning. Trump may not understand this as he pursues his démarche toward Moscow — almost certainly he doesn’t, actually — but this is the magnitude of his project when viewed in the large. This is the history, in the thought he might accomplish something “historic.”

Can Trump put a long, regrettable past thoroughly into the past, or at least set America on a path such that it may finally embrace the 21^st century instead of continuing to fall behind in it?

Of all the questions I pose here, this is by a long way the weightiest.

History’s Ebb & Flow 

This may seem a frivolous line of inquiry given the unrelenting prevalence of anti–Russian fervor abroad among America’s power elites. There is no faction in Washington on either side of the aisle — if, indeed, any such aisle any longer matters — that does not nurse one or another measure of Russophobic paranoia.

But the history of America’s Russophobia is to be read two ways. Animosity toward Russia, from the Czarist Empire to the Soviet Union and now to the Russian Federation, is a sort of basso ostinato in the history of U.S.–Russian relations. But we also find a top-to-bottom ebb and flow among Americans, in policy and popular sentiment alike.

Speaking straight into the poisonous state of U.S.–Russian relations, Putin went to considerable lengths in Anchorage to note the many occasions in the past when Russians and and Americans took harmonious and constructive relations more or less for granted.

This story begins in the first decades of the 19^th century, when the United States was but a half-century old and the West began to take note of the modernizations Peter the Great set in motion a hundred years earlier. Here is the ever-perceptive de Tocqueville in the first volume of Democracy in America:

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time …. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

Apposition from the first, then — if not opposition. Indeed, the idea of “the West” as a political construct arose during de Tocqueville’s time precisely in response to the rise of Czarist Russia. It was, thus, a defensive reaction from the first.

Seven decades later America swooned into the first Red Scare in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. And two more decades after that, what? With the World War II alliance against the Axis Powers, F.D.R., clever man, had Americans referring to Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”

Alas, the extraordinary powers of media and propaganda. No sooner was World War II over (and Roosevelt in his grave) than America plunged into the second Red Scare, a.k.a. the McCarthyist 1950s. And after that the détente of the late 1960s and 1970s, and after that Reagan’s “evil empire” nonsense.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse we had the Russia-as-junior-partner years, when the inebriated Boris Yeltsin stood aside while Western capital raped the formidable remains of the Soviet economy. And then to the Putin years. What we live through now would amount to a third Red Scare apart from the fact Russia is no longer Red.

Looked at another way, U.S.–Russian relations are back where they more or less started. “Putin’s Russia,” as the phrase goes, is again America’s great Other, and by easy extension the West’s, just as it was two centuries back. Then as now, the project is to “make Russia great again,” as we might put it; then as now the West drifts into irrational reaction in response to the emergence of a nation of another civilizational tradition.

There is no missing the fungibility inherent in the U.S. stance toward Russia over the years, decades, and centuries — the extent, I mean, to which it is changeable according to changing geopolitical circumstances. It is not merely possible that the reigning Russophobia of our time will at some point pass. History’s lesson is that this is probable — maybe even inevitable.

But one man’s horse-trading and dealmaking will not make this happen, and I would say this is so especially if the man is Donald Trump. History itself will do this work. Its wheel will turn such that America’s alienation from Russia, and by extension the non–West, will prove too costly. This is already the case, providing one is willing to look instead of pretending otherwise.

At a certain point, to put this another way, refusing to accommodate the emergence of the new world order that stares the West in the face as we speak will come at a higher price than accommodating it.

In so many words, Donald Trump proposes an accommodation of just this kind. The extent to which his démarche toward the Russian Federation succeeds will be the extent to which America proves able again to transcend the Russophobia into which it has once more fallen.

Trump may not, once again, understand this, but I don’t see that this matters overmuch. He has taken a step on a path. For now it remains to see how far down America is prepared to go.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.

August 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment