It’s been an ongoing theme ever since we launched The Global Politico. And I thought, given that, that we really ought to devote the full conversation today to Russia. But The Global Politico in its current iteration, sadly, will only have this episode and the next episode. I’ll be contributing to their New Yorker Radio Hour. It may go on a bit of a hiatus, but I’m going to make a little bit of a career change, and work full-time at The New Yorker as a staff writer. So, this will be not our last, but our second-to-last episode of The Global Politico, at least with me as host. Glasser: But I have to say, first of all, I need to make a little announcement of my own, because it will help to explain what this episode of The Global Politico is about. Julia, thank you for finally being on The Global Politico. She’s a contributor to The Atlantic, and she is one of the smartest Russia hands in Washington today. She is an author-she’s writing a book she can tell us about, about Russia. I’m really delighted that our guest this week is my friend and someone who knows Russia much better than I do, Julie Ioffe. Susan Glasser: Hi, it’s Susan Glasser, and welcome back to The Global Politico. You can read our full discussion below, or listen to it here. ![]() And I worry that in this showdown Putin’s going to outmaneuver Trump and the U.S.” ![]() “And this is kind of the built-in advantage of an autocratic system, where Putin already knows how to do all this, and he’s kind of a better tactician, and kind of a better strategist. president, whereas Trump is still kind of getting his sea legs,” Ioffe says. ![]() “You know, this isn’t his first rodeo, and this is not his first U.S. In a confrontation, she argues, Putin may well prove a smarter actor on the world stage than the American president who had started out hoping to be friends. And I worry that they’re both going to start clawing their way out of their respective corners and that that’s going to lead to a lot of collateral damage.” Both very kind of emotional knee-jerk decision makers, to an extent. … Now … you have two guys, Trump and Putin, who are both painted into a corner, strategically, both at home and geopolitically, who are very prideful. “The reason I’m scared is because… in the Cold War there were kind of protocols and rules developed and lines of communication, and there were just-the way things were done. “I’m very scared,” Ioffe tells me of the brewing confrontation between the two blustery leaders. We covered everything from why she thinks Russia is just as much Arrested Development as it is The Americans, to what Washington consistently gets wrong about it, to why Putin has been so successful at playing four straight American presidents. I talked Russia, Russia, Russia for this week’s Global Politico with the journalist Julia Ioffe, a Russia-born reporter who is one of the few to have covered both Putin’s Moscow and Trump’s Washington. And of course there’s the matter of that Russian election intervention – and the still ongoing investigations of whether Trump or his campaign team knew about it. Just a few days ago, Trump spoke once again, if a bit plaintively, about his desire to get along with Putin even as his administration was putting out a tough new round of sanctions hitting Putin’s inner circle. Tweet or no tweet, as Trump now contemplates a retaliatory strike on Putin’s Syrian partner, it’s more clear than ever that Russia remains the signal foreign policy dilemma of the Trump presidency – the issue on which the president has split, repeatedly, with top advisers like his now-booted secretary of state and national security adviser. But the belated rebuke of Putin was short and cryptic enough that it seemed to underscore the strange mystery of why Trump, while allowing his government to pursue an increasingly confrontational series of policies aimed at countering Russia, has never publicly disavowed his oft-stated admiration for the strongman leader who ordered his spies to intervene in the U.S. ![]() It took a chemical weapons attack in Syria by Putin’s ally (“Animal Assad,” in Trumpian twitter-speak) and gruesome pictures of dead children to prompt the criticism.
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