The Tragic Success of Global Putinism

How the West underestimated an ideology’s animating force

For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

Read the full version of my latest piece in The Atlantic (paywall).

Putin Visiting the Obukhovskiy Factory in January 2023. Photo via WikiCommons