The Conspiratorial Fantasies of Kremlin Paranoiacs

Some people will blame Putin instead of going to therapy.

Nancy Pelosi appears on CNN’s State of the Union, January 28th, 2024 (CNN)

As readers of this newsletter are surely aware, I am hardly the kind of person who denies or minimizes Moscow’s global influence operations. After all, I wrote an eight-part series on the Trump campaign’s bid to sell out American democracy to the Kremlin. Unlike Russia’s apologists, I am capable of acknowledging the egregious failings on both sides of this geopolitical divide, including those of the United States.

But while I have addressed collusion-deniers at length, I have yet to examine their mirror-image opposites—those who see the Kremlin’s malign influence behind everything bad that happens. 

Now, I do not mean to imply moral equivalence between these two types of people. Unlike the apologists, Kremlin paranoiacs tend not to argue in bad faith. They also lack the same predilection for atrocity-denial. Still, they are just as prone to believing in nonexistent conspiracies and can exhibit comparable levels of delusion. As such, it is worth unpacking their mode of thinking about the world.

Occasioning this piece were recent comments by Democratic congresswoman and former House majority leader Nancy Pelosi, who suggested a few weeks ago that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have links to Russia. Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, she accused a group of protesters who interrupted one of her events of being stooges of Vladimir Putin.

“Make no mistake, this is…about Putin's message,” she declared. “I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia.”

Asked to elaborate, she stated that many of the protesters are “seeds or plants.”  She then appealed to the Justice Department to look into the matter. “I think some [of the] financing should be investigated,” she said. “And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”

By this point, you might be wondering what evidence Pelosi had to make such a claim. Following up on her remarks, a spokesperson helpfully, albeit unintentionally, revealed the answer: Nothing.  After noting her “three decades on the House Intelligence Committee”—another way of saying “trust me, bro”—the spox referenced a tweet from Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and consultant, noting that “Putin benefits from continued war in Gaza and expanded chaos in the Middle East.”

Pelosi, in other words, was talking out of her ass.

Russiagate hysteria

Fortunately, Pelosi’s statement elicited a refreshing degree of skepticism from the media. This marked a contrast to the Trump years, when much of the press gullibly repeated claims about Kremlin collusion from anonymous sources in federal law enforcement. Many such "bombshells" turned out to be unsubstantiated and often completely false.  What follows is just a small sample.

In June 2017, three CNN journalists resigned over a retracted story alleging that Anthony Scaramucci, while serving on Trump’s transition team, had connections to a Kremlin-controlled investment fund. In response to the fiasco, the network adopted stringent new rules designed to prevent a repeat occurrence.

Evidently, it didn’t work. Later that year, CNN suffered another major embarrassment. A December 2017 story stated that an email sent to Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 campaign included a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents. The initial report maintained that he had received the email before the Wikileaks materials became public.

The revelation, if true, would have been a very big deal, as it would have shown that Trump Jr. had obtained foreign intelligence to help his father’s campaign without alerting authorities.

But it soon emerged that he received the message only after the documents had become public. The network later included an addendum to the initial report to reflect the updated information—information, mind you, that happened to obliterate the very premise which made the story newsworthy in the first place.

CNN’s WikiLeaks debacle was not even the first botched Russiagate exposé to appear that month. Only days before, ABC News had to issue its own retraction. On December 1^st, 2017, a breaking news report stunned the political world and even caused a brief stock market crash. ABC had apparently learned that an associate of Michael Flynn was set to testify that the disgraced former national security advisor had been instructed by Trump to reach out to Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. As it happened, the story turned out to be a complete fiction. Brian Ross, the journalist who broke it, was subsequently suspended.

Finally, there was the infamous McClatchy report which contended that the Mueller team had uncovered evidence confirming one of the pivotal findings of the Steele dossier: That Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime personal attorney, was in Prague during the very period of the 2016 campaign when Steele alleged he had met a Kremlin operative there. Yet another smoking gun! Only once again, it was almost certainly not true.

The difference between the above stories and Pelosi's recent statement is that the former claims actually seemed plausible. The notion that people as boneheaded as Donald Trump and his associates would solicit campaign assistance from a hostile foreign power does not exactly strain the imagination.

Pelosi's conspiracy theory, on the other hand, was ridiculous on its face. Protests against Israel's morally indefensible treatment of the Palestinians happen all the time. It is not as if anyone needs some added incentive to participate in them.

Whatever their plausibility, however, such unsupported assertions enable bad faith actors to say "See? Everything you hear about Russia's nefarious conduct is wrong!” This despite the fact that the Kremlin does try to sow chaos and instability in Western countries. When it came to Russiagate, in particular, repeated screwups by established media outlets could not have done more to help Trump and most of his party dismiss the scandal out of hand even when core elements turned out to be true.

Let's all just get a grip.

As a Republican-led Senate committee has already shown, Donald Trump and his campaign did try to collude with the Kremlin. Their actions constituted a grave threat to American democracy and national security and were clearly matters the public deserved to know.

Nevertheless, the Russiagate scandal ended up exacerbating a longstanding misconception about Putin, one which sees him as an omnipotent puppet master able to manifest any crisis he wants. Whether it is Brexit, Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, or protests against Israel, many otherwise smart people presume that Putin must be the cause.

That is simply not how the world operates. Phenomena like these arise from complex interactions of variables, most of which have nothing at all to do with Russia. Once they do start to emerge, the Kremlin may very well try to take advantage of them. But no one actor is capable of conjuring them up out of thin air.

Neither Putin nor Russia itself is all that powerful. In terms of global reach, economic heft, and strategic capabilities, Russia is a shadow of what its Soviet predecessor was. But to the extent that it can exploit crises which have already begun to surface, it will often do what it can to inflame them.

The domestic backlash against Biden’s support for Israel did not magically come into being because Vladimir Putin flipped some secret switch. But now that it is happening, might the Kremlin try and extend a helping hand? Sure, why not?

Either way, it is pointless to locate the cause or solution in distant Moscow. If Biden and the Democrats want to put the matter to bed, they will have to take stock of their own incompetence and change course.

For many in the West, notes Mark Galeotti, a prominent Kremlin-watcher, Putin is “so dangerous and powerful that it is best to try and buy him off rather than confront him.” It is a false impression that affords him far more influence than he deserves. Worse still, it gives rise to a counterproductive impulse to offer him unnecessary concessions.

This wrongheaded view of Putin along with the resulting tendency to treat Russia with kid gloves is responsible for several disastrous turning points in Western policy toward Moscow: The failure to offer NATO membership to Ukraine during the alliance’s expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s; Obama’s infamous “Russia reset” in the wake of Moscow’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, which helped pave the way for the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014; and the subsequent slow-walking of military aid to Kyiv both then and now, which has needlessly prolonged the war. It has also fueled the irrational paranoia behind incessant calls for a “peace deal” that would sacrifice millions of unwilling Ukrainians to a permanent and bloody occupation.

As Galeotti explains in his book, We Need to Talk about Putin, the image of Putin as a strategic genius playing five-dimensional chess vastly overstates his abilities. All the Kremlin can do is observe evolving conditions and improvise a response. It throws a lot of shit at the wall and sees what sticks. Efforts to compromise Western actors through corruption and blackmail?  Yes.  Covert social media campaigns?  Certainly.  Cyberattacks?  No doubt about it.  But it is the height of fantasy to believe Putin can engineer social movements, control the Republican Party, or hold Donald Trump on a little string and direct his every move.

The same gullibility that informs wild conspiracy theories about ubiquitous Russian influence also lends itself to hero-narratives around federal investigators like Robert Mueller and Jack Smith.  Just as Russia cannot drive everything that happens in the world, no criminal investigation is going to blow the roof off of Republican villainy and restore peace and justice for all.  That isn’t real; it is Hollywood-inspired nonsense.

Sweeping investigations which end with rich and powerful criminals in handcuffs are not how America works. They are not how most countries work. Donald Trump has a better chance of getting elected or dying before he ever sees the inside of a prison cell. 

There is no one easy trick to defeating the bad guys; it is a lengthy and complicated process requiring lots of grunt work that must start at the grassroots. It takes patient organizing and competent leadership of the kind that can achieve decisive election victories.

Whatever the truth of the matter, blaming foreign evildoers for one’s inconsistent electoral fortunes does not serve much use. Even when the claims are true and interference from overseas really does play a part, what exactly are we supposed to do with that information? Enact legislation to strengthen the criminal code and shore up the country’s cyber-defenses? Sorry, but it ain't gonna happen—not when one of the two parties is hellbent on enabling such interference while the other is too weak-willed to abolish the filibuster.

Crying about foreign meddling is no substitute for winning elections. Likewise, moronic fearmongering about Kremlin-manufactured Palestine protests will do nothing to salvage Michigan come November. Neither federal investigations nor explosive revelations are going to save us; we will need to save ourselves.