Wide-eyed former Fox host tagged along as Russian president steered the conversation through Russian history and justifications for war
Wide-eyed former Fox host tagged along as Russian president steered the conversation through Russian history and justifications for war
Depending upon Putin’s target audience – and while Carlson is mostly known in the US, maybe it’s non-American – I think that a larger problem with this tack is that Americans don’t have a history of land disputes made on historical grounds. I think that a more-likely reaction to “we controlled Land X at Time Y, ergo it we rightfully should have it regardless of what borders are like today” is going to be more or less a shrug. You might make be on stronger grounds somewhere like, I don’t know, Hungary.
That may honestly sell well in Russia, but if Putin’s aim is to make a case for annexation to Americans, I don’t think that he’s choosing very strong grounds to make it.
The US’s identity was built around – and to some extent, still is – the concept of independence from the British Empire. Some of the most-common words used in the US associated with national identity are “freedom”, “liberty”, and “independence”. If one is going to make a case to the American public that because Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire at one point, that it must again be run out of Moscow, I think that the framing probably isn’t what I’d be choosing.
I think that he’s kinda lobbing a softball there to Ukrainian propaganda if they want to draw parallels, long as they don’t piss off the Brits.
And I don’t think that the Nazi thing is going to work well either. In the US, being Nazi has a lot to do with being anti-semitic, not, I don’t know, anti-Slavic or whatever else is more-emphasized in Russia, and pointing out that the elected president is Jewish kind of makes that argument really awkward.
I feel – without having seen the actual material, mind – like he’s pushing a narrative crafted for domestic Russian audiences, not tailored to an American one.
I get that there are maybe limits on what he can say because anything he’s going to be recorded saying could have political impact in Russia, but he could have shown up with Lavrov in tow, had Lavrov say whatever the hell he thought would be most-compelling to an American audience – Lavrov’s popularity in Russia doesn’t matter much – and just hopped in himself with whatever he wanted to have himself saying.
I don’t think that this is going to wind up being a masterful political move, at least based on what in the thing The Guardian mentioned.
I’ll also add that the interview doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of favorable traction in the major conservative American outlets. The only reference to “Putin” on the front page of Fox News mentioned the interview, but chose to highlight that he was wrongfully holding an American journalist from the (also conservative) Wall Street Journal.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/putin-hints-prisoner-swap-wsj-reporter-evan-gershkovich
Breitbart, which is one of the most-friendly media outlets specifically to Trump – and loves its conspiracy theory – was not commenting very favorably on Putin saying that the US blew up Nordic Stream 2:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/02/09/america-blew-up-nord-stream-pipeline-claims-president-putin-in-tucker-interview/
And which decided to highlight Trump’s pro-NATO and anti-Russia credentials: