Tucker Carlson is neither Walter Duranty (the notorious New York Times correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s who helped Josef Stalin cover up his murder by starvation of millions of Ukrainians, earning a Pulitzer Prize in the process) nor David Frost (who famously interview Richard Nixon at San Clemente, Calif. after the late American president resigned), but he did conduct an ambitious interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that aired on his website and the X platform on Thursday night.
“Is this a talk show or a serious conversation?” Putin taunted Carlson at the interview’s outset, before launching into a thirty-minute lecture on Russian history from Ninth Century to the present.
“Our history is very controversial,” Russian opposition politician Grigory Yavlinsky told me in 2003, as I relayed in recent memoir Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a ‘Foreign Agent.’ But Tucker didn’t argue with Putin on any of it as he struggled through the first half of the interview to focus on the present. When, at the one-hour mark, he finally did, the interview got interesting.
Russia does not have territorial ambitions on NATO countries like Poland or Lithuania, Putin said – even if his history lesson went to some pains to point out how tricky Poles and Lithuanians have been when it came to Russian imperial territory in past centuries. The Russian word “hitri,” or sneaky, came to mind as Tucker’s audience listened to Putin dance around these issues.
And then there was the tangent on “de-Nazification” of Ukraine on which Putin insisted and Carlson did his best to bridge beyond. Putin was clear about his various sources of peevishness – NATO expansion, support for insurgents in Russia’s North Caucasus, and a missile defense regime that excluded Russian involvement.
Some of Putin’s assertions were shaky at best – like his insistence that Ukraine’s Orange Revolution from 2004-5 and Maidan “Revolution of Peoples’ Dignity” from 2013-14 were both staged by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But his grievance about NATO expansion precedes the moment he became Russia’s president twenty-four years ago, indeed many U.S. foreign policy experts warned about it during the term of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
What were Putin’s big reveals? He alleged that multiple U.S. administrations – Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s – double-crossed Russia on promises not to press NATO expansion or include Russia in a joint development of missile defense. He seemed to suggest that the American president is merely a hostage to the agencies he is supposed to oversee, offering examples in both the cases of Clinton and Bush.
Putin also revealed that a younger Tucker sought to join the CIA but was rebuffed by the highly-politicized U.S. foreign intelligence agency, and went on to congratulate him for dodging a (figurative) bullet.
Putin also let loose his gripes about Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who mistakenly gave the Ukrainian SSR too much autonomy, the Russian president griped. One Kremlin insider story holds that Lenin’s death in 1924 might have been the result of poisoning – and that the Kremlin chef at that time was named Spiridon Putin.
On bigger issues, there was plenty of smack-talking the U.S. dollar. Putin was not wrong to say Washington puts the dollar’s value at some risk with its sanctions policies. When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, I remember arguing with a Middle Eastern businessman about Moscow’s mistake then – we’ll kick them off SWIFT and then they’ll be f***ed. No, the bazaar-tested tycoon told me, China and Russia will make their own currency and you’ll be f****d. The jury’s still out on that one, but mounting evidence over the intervening years suggests he had a point.
Other big stuff: how can a self-declared Christian leader prosecute a war that kills hundreds of thousands of innocents? Carlson pressed Putin. It’s very simple, Putin shot back, we only defend our people, we are aggressive, he said, against no one. No definitive answer reached there, though it remains pretty clear that it was Russia that invaded Ukraine two years ago and not vice versa.
To his credit, Carlson asked Putin for the release of Wall Street Journal correspondent and Bowdoin College alum Evan Gerskovich, going so far as to suggest that he be allowed to return home with Tucker’s crew. A final decision on that, Putin said, had to be reached between the intelligence services of the respective countries (earlier in the interview the Russian president shared his esteem for current CIA Director Bill Burns).
But as with talks to end the war, no agreement was reached during the two-hour interview. What mattered, and what was different, was that there was a conversation. However much Tucker Carlson may have been vilified as a useful idiot in the run-up to the interview that aired tonight, he accomplished a good deal more than his fellow Fourth Estaters back home who are too often too content simply re-gurgitating talking points and repeating excuses for failure.
Biggest takeaway, not unexpectedly, was the difference between hearing Putin speak vs our leaders
It s truly embarassing to have to contrast our reality with another country whose leader is at least lucid, if not a scholar of history
Typical Biden conversations. “Chocolate, chocolate chip”. “My butts been wiped”. “you know the thing”. “Ashley, time to let daddy wash your back”.
I didn’t watch the first 45 minutes or so, but the part about NATO was nothing different than what Pat Buchanan has been saying, (correctly), for the last 30 years.
With all due respect, I am driven to ask Mr. Patten how he feels about the Orange and Maidan revolutions and American CIA adventurousness abroad. I do not believe Putin’s assertion shaky or weak, but would listen to his answer. The CIA has proven itself untrustworthy, as has the FBI.
The history lesson was necessary to counter the more than several Europeans, as well as others, who argue that, historically, Russia has no claim to any portion of current day Ukraine and Russian speaking Ukrainians have no claim to being Russian.
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I was bothered that no specific mention was made that Putin’s ‘special operation’ was, in part, necessitated in response to Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham implementing, following the 2014 Obama funded coup, the funding of U.S. weapons shipments to the Western Ukrainian Neo-Nazis who then used those armaments to shell Eastern Ukraine civilians, killing/genociding upwards of 14,000 of these civilians from 2014 to the start of the special operation. I believe Carlson and his team may be clueless to this fact. The statement of facts such as this is necessary for equally clueless Americans to begin to understand the complicity and depravity of the U.S. government with regard to this situation.
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In my opinion, the biggest failure of the Carlson/Putin interview is that Putin should have been asked whether he agrees with the World Economics Forum’s (WEF) “Great Reset” goal, and/or whether Putin believes Russia’s sovereignty and is going to be threatened by this WEF goal.
My belief is that the current (Obama)/Biden regime is continuing Obama’s efforts to destroy U.S. sovereignty and enable takeover of the U.S. by the WEF’s “Great Reset”/”New World Order”. This is why the U.S. borders are being kept wide open…to destroy U.S. nationalism by diluting the country’s national identity with immigrants adhering to other national identities.
There are many video compilations of global leaders, including from the U.S., speaking in favor of a “New World Order”, “One World Government”, or “Great Reset”; but, Putin is not in any of them. Here are four of these videos –
– (Remove the space in each link below for it to work properly):
1) VIDEO: Compilation of major political figures calling for New World Order – 12/10/2023
marketsanity. com/video-compilation-of-major-political-figures-calling-for-new-world-order/
2) Creepy Video of World Leaders Promoting “Build Back Better” Great Reset Mantra – 3 years ago
youtube. com/watch?v=v00U8PdJTaI
3) COMPILATION: WORLD LEADERS SPEAK OF NEW WORLD ORDER – 5 years ago
youtube. com/watch?v=oom7TEyABoc
4) A New World Order Potpourri: Quotes from Biden, Bush, Kissinger, Kerry, Clinton, Nixon & Maddow – 10 years ago
youtube. com/watch?v=QBSJvtkPICM