Tucker’s Putin Interview a Lifeline to the West

1. Introduction

Relief. If there’s a single word that captures how I felt after watching Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, that’s it. Relief that the president of one of the world’s most powerful nations is eminently sane—intelligent, well-educated, and deeply common-sensical. This is not a leader looking to start a fight with anyone he doesn’t have to. Although Carlson seemed frustrated by it, Putin’s magisterial command of Russian and European history going back to the earliest origins of the Russian nation over a millennia ago revealed a man of great depth. This is what is known in research circles as providing context, something dreadfully lacking in today’s split-second media attention span. At least, in the West. Carlson at least tips his hat to Putin’s “encyclopedic” knowledge, evidence of his eidetic memory capacity. Compare that with US President Joe Biden, who can barely finish a coherent sentence. It’s hard to over-estimate just how relieved I felt after watching this interview.

Tucker Carlson’s historic interview with President Putin, aired February 8, 2024.

2. Putin Economics

Putin’s analysis of American foreign and fiscal policy is nothing short of brilliant. I gasped with realization when he explained that using the American dollar as a tool of foreign policy and dominance is a tragic mistake. The consequences have been the ever-upward spiral of money printing in order to keep foreign countries dependent on US cash, leading to the downward spiral of a devalued American dollar and soaring domestic inflation rates. This error was compounded by American sanctions against Russia starting in 2022, following Putin’s engaging a military conflict with Ukraine. Prior to that year, says Putin, 80% of Russian international trade was done in American dollars. Now its third-party trading in US dollars is down to 13%. Rather than weaken Russia, Putin explained, it has only strengthened them, in part by driving them deeper into the arms of trading partner China. Despite Western claims that Russia would succumb to an economic depression in response to sanctions, it posted a growth of 2.5%, not as high as China’s average of 5% annually, but still evidence of a robust economy. In the past year alone, Russia’s trade with China amounted to between $200–240 billion. Even Newsweek, more or less a mouthpiece for Washington’s deep state, admits: “The IMF has said that Russia’s economy will grow by 2.6 percent in 2024—more than double the 1.1 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) it made in October. By comparison, the U.S. economy will grow by only 2.1 percent this year, according to IMF figures.” [1]

Added to this is the rapidly expanding share of the global market now enjoyed by the BRICS nations. Putin estimated that US share of global markets in the past was as high as 47% but has slipped to around 30%. (Obviously this would need to be checked with the economic data.) BRICS nations 30 years ago had only about a 13% share of the global marketplace, but this has expanded to about 30%. At the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, “decreasing the prevalence of the US dollar in trade and financial transactions among the Global South was repeatedly referenced by the world leaders in attendance.” [2] Putin attributes this to the disastrous policy mistakes made by successive American political administrations.

3. America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy

Putin wisely spoke of a political leader’s need to assess a situation and then adapt policies to its reality. Instead, he argues, American leaders have doggedly pursued policies that reflect a total denial of reality. If the concept of global dominance backed up by force continues to be the US foreign policy, he warns, things can only get worse for America, not least because of the negative impact of successive American military invasions in countries around the world. Putin understands that different national entities have different constitutions and values, probably by virtue of the fact that Russia is a massive country that borders on many other countries. Whereas the US is virtually alone on the North American continent except for its neighbours Canada—practically a vassal state—and Mexico, leading to an American intolerance for other cultures’ values and political structures. “They hate our freedom,” or “they hate our values” was used to demonize Muslim extremist sects that were supposed to have been behind the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and other subsequent acts of terrorism. In fact, as religion scholar Karen Armstrong explains:

“...when asked what they resented most about the West, its ‘disrespect for Islam’ ranked high on the list of both the politically radicalized and the moderates. Most see the West as inherently intolerant...” With regard to 9/11, “they believed that Western foreign policy had been largely responsible for these heinous actions. Their reasoning was entirely political: they cited such ongoing problems as Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Western interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries.” —Karen Armstrong [3]

4. The Ukrainian Elephant in the Room

Although Putin makes an excellent historical case for Ukraine having been originally part of Russia, he said he respects their desire to be an independent state. As many top Western analysts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor, Larry Johnson, and Scott Ritter have explained, Putin has no interest in territorial expansion for its own sake. When Carlson asks him if he has his sights set next on Poland or Latvia, he laughs. “Why would we do that?” He insists that this is just Western provocation designed to rally more support for NATO and aid to Ukraine. Putin says Russia has no desire to provoke the West into more conflicts.

Putin explains that solutions to the Ukrainian situation have been repeatedly sought by Russia; they have always been open to negotiation. Most poignantly, the bloodshed of nearly half a million Ukrainian soldiers could have been averted early in 2022 with the negotiations in Istanbul, in which an agreement had already been drafted and signed by some of the parties. As a show of good faith for those negotiations, Russia had acquiesced to Ukraine’s demand to remove their troops from striking distance of Kiev. “We agreed with them that having our troops there was like negotiating with a gun to their heads,” says Putin.  

It’s now well known that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson advised the Ukrainian government not to accept the Istanbul peace agreement, urging them to fight instead. Putin rightly sees this Western interference as a proxy for NATO expansion, something the West had agreed not to do as a condition of peace with Russia following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and also the later Minsk accords in 2014. Yet as Putin explains, NATO expanded into five more countries during that three-decade period. Ukrainian President Zelensky exacerbated the situation by passing diktats that forbade any further negotiated settlement with Russia, what Putin calls “an absurd decree.”

Vladimir Putin, courtesy Wikimedia.

As the aforementioned Western military and policy experts have pointed out, the 2014 Maidan coup, orchestrated by the CIA, made the clash with Russia all but inevitable. Even then, Putin showed admirable restraint, waiting until 2022 to take military action. This was in large part a response to outrages committed by the Ukrainian government—even before Zelensky—against its Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbass, Luhansk and Crimea, including the bombing of civilians. This practice continues to the present, with a New York Times investigation revealing that a missile strike on a marketplace in Kostiantynivka was fired by the Ukrainian military, killing 17 people, though the report claims this was an error. “A further 32 people were wounded on 6 September by the impact of the missile 12 miles (20 km) from the frontlines in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, in one of the highest civilian death tolls from a single incident in recent months,” reports The Guardian. [4] Then a bakery in Luhansk was shelled on February 4, 2024, killing at least 28 people, all civilians. “This is the territory that Ukraine is trying to ‘get back.’ The same territory that they’ve been torturing for a decade,” explains Redacted News journalist Clayton Morris. [5]

 According to Putin, Ukraine passed laws that Russians were “non-titular citizens,” creating an underclass with less rights than ethnic Ukrainians. And while Putin respects any nation’s right to independence, he was rightly alarmed by the way in which Ukraine built its national identity. They chose to lionize controversial World War II figures such as Stepan Banderas, a Nazi collaborator. Statues to him were erected across Ukraine, claiming that Ukrainians were freedom fighters against Russia during that war, forgetting that Russia was an ally of the West, fighting the Nazis. Russian troops, not Ukrainians, were liberators.

Putin said that one of his stipulations for a settlement with Ukraine is the “de-nazification” of the country, presumably including the disbanding of the neo-Nazi units in the Ukrainian military such as the Azov battalion. These units were the drivers of the violence against Russian-speaking Ukrainians following the Maidan coup:

“The key organization in the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas (OUN-B),” explains historian Russ Bellant. “The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s, began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them. … They were backers of forming the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was the all-Ukrainian division that became an armed element on behalf of the Germans, and under overall German control.” [6]

The Nazi philosophy of the “pure race” has thus infected this dangerous element of Ukrainian society, targeted against what are seen as non-ethnic Ukrainians, despite their close historic and biological ties with Russia. Putin therefore calls the Ukraine conflict “an element of civil war.” He describes a real-life recent incident when an Ukrainian army unit was surrounded by a superior Russian force. Russian soldiers called out to them: “Surrender. It is hopeless to keep fighting. Surrender and save your lives.” The Ukrainians shouted their answer in perfect Russian, saying, “Russians do not surrender.” Tragically, the unit was then wiped out.

Ukraine has repeatedly tried to deflect blame for their actions against their own citizens, taking it as far as the International Court of Justice. However, the results have not gone in their favour, likely because the evidence does not support their allegations. “The International Court of Justice ruled against Ukraine’s assertions that Russia bankrolled separatists and discriminated against Crimea’s ethnic community,” reports Clayton Morris. “This is being called a victory for Russia because almost all of Ukraine’s allegations were thrown out. This comes on the heels of another UN decision last year that found no evidence of Russian ‘genocide’ in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the Western media ignored that story.” [7]

Carlson asks Putin how a world leader can be a Christian when he has to kill by proxy of his military forces. Putin shrugs, saying that you have to defend your own family, and that he considers the various cultures and religions in his country as part of the larger Russian family. Redacted News reporter Natali Morris has repeatedly pointed out that Russian intervention was, in part, a result of Russian-speaking Ukrainian mayors in afflicted regions appealing to Moscow for help during the civilian persecutions following Maidan.

Putin repeatedly stressed during his interview that Russia is and always has been ready to negotiate a solution to the Ukraine war. “Sooner or later, it will resolve,” he says. But he stresses that de-nazification is a condition of any settlement. Carlson bristled at this, asking how Putin could expect to root out an ideology, but Putin stood firm on this point.

5. Conclusion: Putin the Sane

Carlson asks him if he sees today’s multipolar geopolitical situation as shifting into a new duality of two global hemispheres of power. Putin uses the analogy of the human brain, which has two hemispheres, noting that they must operate in unison or else the individual is sick. He stresses the need for Western cooperation with Russia so that conflict can be de-escalated, making the world safer for everyone. This is clearly not a foaming-at-the-mouth warmonger. He chooses his battles carefully and only after deep thought and consideration of multiple perspectives.

Carlson’s historic interview touched upon several other topics, notably the development of AI. Putin believes that eventually all nations will have to negotiate an international agreement on the use of AI, much as was done for nuclear weapons. We are at another one of those inflection moments in history when scientific curiosity—absent any serious ethical debate—has overrun any common sense notion of human self-preservation. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains that what it’s possible to do isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. One wonders if this thought passed through Robert Oppenheimer’s mind as he watched the first nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert, or later when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed.

Scott Ritter, commenting on Carlson’s interview, says that not only does Putin know Russian history inside and out, “he knows the Russian soul.” You could see from Carlson’s deeply furrowed brow that at times he seemed to be struggling to keep up, despite the best of intentions. It’s not his fault—like most Americans, he has been cultured to be ignorant of history in general and certainly ignorant of Russian history. Instead what most Americans have had since the Cold War began in the 1950s is a steady diet of Russophobia designed to keep taxpayers shoveling money into the war machine. Ritter justifiably assesses Carlson’s interview a “tour de force,” at least for Putin:

“…the Russian president was introducing an American audience to the nuances of Russian history, and the nuances of the Russian soul, and if you don’t understand Russian history, if you don’t understand the Russian soul, then you’re basically on a journey without a map. And I think that’s the value of this interview, because Tucker Carlson doesn’t have a map. Tucker Carlson, though, had the courage to set forth on the journey. And in a conversation with the Russian president that was maybe less a dialogue than a monologue, the Russian president helped create a map, a map that guided not only Tucker Carlson, but every American viewer through the complexities of what makes Russia tick. And you have to understand this if you’re to understand the issues that confront Russia in the West today.

“Let’s be clear. Russian President Putin didn’t provide any groundbreaking information. Almost everything he said has already been said before in one way or another. But what he did do was provide this information in a context that was approachable by an American audience. And this is the value of this interview.” —Scott Ritter [8]

Ritter’s mention of the deep historical context provided by Putin is important, especially given the cultivated shallowness of most Western education and media. The problem with this approach to communication is that it is too easily weaponized for propaganda purposes. It tends to rely on the binary logic of either/or, right/wrong, us vs. them. It’s a rhetorical trick that is used to mobilize public support every time another war looms on the darkening horizon. Nora Bateson, daughter of legendary ecologist Gregory Bateson, recently wrote about her father’s work with Margaret Mead as another kind of fascism was sweeping the world of the 1930s and ’40s. Bateson senior had worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services; precursor to the CIA) during the war but later suffered profound regret and shame for his participation in propaganda efforts that likely cost enemy lives. He and Mead were thus motivated to study communication:

“Bateson began to ask how fascism takes hold of societies and what might make it more difficult for those kinds of ideas to find purchase. He began what would be a lifetime of work addressing the thinking that was susceptible to fascist ideas and how to meet this sticky problem. One of his observations is that when any aspect of a living system is torn from its contextual relationships, it can then be exploited. How a description is made of a person—a family, a community, a culture, or an ecosystem—matters. … Does the description hold the complexity, or does the description sever the relational connections? The more relational, contextual understanding there is, the less likely polarities are to take over.” —Nora Bateson [9]  

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead at work. Courtesy Nora Bateson, “Communication is Sacred.”

It may be that Putin, with his complex grasp of history, innately understands the principle being articulated by the Batesons. We can either continue deploying the propaganda wars and psychological operations in pursuit of a power agenda that takes no account of the existential risks it creates for all humanity, or we can seek to broaden the dialogue between our two cultures in hopes of rapprochement. As Nora Bateson argues: “How do you think about change if not in linear strategies? You tend to the relationships.” And any relationship—even an international geopolitical one—cannot thrive in one-sided or one-dimensional communication. “An understanding of living systems reveals that change cannot be produced through linear control, so how does one participate in the processes that produce systemic change? This is a critical moment in the history of humanity to be asking that question.” [10]

Ritter admits that the interview doesn’t solve anything, but “it’s the beginning of a process… today was just a start.” In Ritter’s view, Carlson’s genius isn’t particularly in the interview itself so much as “his ability to interface with Americans” at a time when trust in mainstream media has hit an all-time low. Ritter rightly calls Carlson’s interview with Putin “one of the most important interviews of the modern era, because this interview has the ability to stop the West and Russia from going to war, to stop the West from committing suicide.” [11]

Putin is throwing the West a lifeline, a way out of a European conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflict no one wants. We should thank him—and Tucker Carlson—with all our hearts.

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[1] Brendan Cole, “Russia's War-Time Economy on Track to Outpace US Growth,” Newsweek, February 1, 2024: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-imf-2024-economy-sanctions-1866071

[2] Katharina Buchholz, “U.S. Dollar Defends Role As Global Currency,” Forbes, August 31, 2023: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/08/31/us-dollar-defends-role-as-global-currency-infographic/?sh=3342fca95999  

[3] Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2009, p. 300.

[4] Lorenzo Tondo, “Ukrainian market tragedy may have been caused by errant missile fired by Ukraine,” The Guardian, September 19, 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/ukrainian-market-tragedy-may-have-been-caused-by-errant-missile-fired-by-ukraine  

[5] Clayton Morris, “US approves more money for war,” Redacted, February 5, 2024: https://redacted.inc/u-s-approves-more-money-for-war/   

[6] Paul H. Rosenberg and Foreign Policy Focus, “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret,” The Nation, March 28, 2024: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret/  

[7] Clayton Morris, “UN Court Rules Against Ukraine in Russia Allegations,” Redacted, February 1, 2024: https://redacted.inc/u-n-court-rules-against-ukraine-in-russia-allegations/

[8] Scott Ritter: Statement on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin, YouTube, February 9, 2024:

 

[9] Nora Bateson, “Communication is Sacred,” The Bigger Picture with Alexander Beiner, Substack, February 6, 2024:

Communication is Sacred by Nora Bateson

 

[10] Nora Bateson, “Communication is Sacred,” The Bigger Picture with Alexander Beiner, ibid.

[11] Scott Ritter: Statement on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin, ibid.