ACURA Q&A: Richard Sakwa: Trump’s Perestroika?

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Sakwa for a wide-ranging discussion in London last week.

The below has been edited for length and clarity.

—James W. Carden

James Carden: Good morning Richard. So the reason I’m in London is that I wanted to speak to people who were kind of dissident figures over here in order to figure out why the British foreign policy establishment seems even crazier than the American establishment.

Robert Skidelsky [Independent peer in the House of Lords] told me a few weeks ago that part of the reason is that the memory of Munich looms very, very large here—as it does for our neoconservatives back home…

Richard Sakwa: It’s far, far worse here than in the United States. In the United States, there is a whole ecosystem of, you know, Consortium News, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, the whole stack of stuff. We do not have that here.

Carden: And of course the President of the United States is now on our side with regard to Ukraine—so that’s a big breakthrough…

Sakwa: Oh, absolutely.

This second Trump Administration is obviously very different from the first. He’s learned that he’s needed to capture and neutralize the intelligence services which hindered him from achieving a rapprochement vis-a-vis Russia during his first term. But this is to be welcomed, of course it is. And it’s very bizarre that in the British media and in the United Kingdom, peace is somehow considered a traitorous activity—as appeasement. Of course Munich looms very large, but it is a sign of the intellectual sterility and the barrenness of the British public sphere – by which I mean – the media, think tanks,  even academics. 

And worse than that, it’s like that in France as well. And I’ve been saying that whenever the French and the British get together, you know nothing good is going to come of it. They launched the Crimean War of 1853, then, in 1860, the French and the British burnt down the Summer Palace in Beijing. Their detente of the early 19th century was one of the precipitating factors of bloc politics to the First World War. 

And I’m afraid today, this entente between the United Kingdom and France betokens a crazy Neo-imperialist strategy always directed against Russia. So we’re going back to the roots of British Russophobia, which of course, is the Crimean War.

Carden: Yesterday I walked by a memorial to the Crimean War, not far from here. I thought, we’re a long way from the days of John Bright who warned against “chasing visionary phantoms abroad while your own country is rotting from within.”

Sakwa: Indeed, Skidelsky’s very keen on this…

Carden: Is there any sort of John Bright figure on the scene at all in the UK?

Sakwa: Very few, sadly.

And the worst thing is that in the Labour Party, which as you know has this huge majority of 411 MPs, and Starmer’s achievement, brilliant achievement is to destroy the Labour Party as a movement. He’s turned it into an organization. He’s chased out the left, he’s chased out independent figures. John McDonnell, and obviously Jeremy Corbyn has been expelled. It’s a machine. So indeed, it’s a neo-Soviet establishment that is emerging. And you used the word dissident earlier, and I think it applies because it’s a neo-Soviet setup.

I’ll tell you, during the pandemic, we had zoom calls with Jeremy Corbyn and Stop the War Coalition. And it was in response to our calls for peace and our criticism of NATO, that Keir Starmer said that opposition to NATO is incompatible with Labour Party membership—even though the peace movement has been a long and hallowed tradition within the Labour Party. 

It is unbelievable!

Carden: So there is a troubling resemblance between Labour and the Democrats….

Sakwa: Oh yeah, the party of war. 

Carden: There seems to be, and for good reason, confusion among the public at large on both sides of the Atlantic with regard to the period of 2015 to 2022, about the Minsk process and who refused to do what— It seems to me that that is an important part of the story that often goes missing….

Sakwa: A crucial part. Minsk is absolutely essential to understand the run-up to the war. Minsk is much misunderstood; basically, the underlying idea was to return Luhansk and Donetsk, those two breakaway oblasts in Ukraine. That’s what Kiev wanted. But instead, they demonized their own people; and they launched a violent military attack on them. They then cut all social benefits and services, so babushkas couldn’t get their pensions and so on; they cut off water supply. These are the people you want to return to your own sovereignty?

Carden: And they called the military operation an “anti-terrorist operation.” I remember very well going there in 2015 and visiting Soviet-era bomb shelters and seeing these grandmothers living in these places. And the people on the street were a little bit befuddled and more than a little concerned as to why all of a sudden they’re being branded as terrorists by their own government…

Sakwa: Absolutely. And second, it’s important to stress that Putin could have annexed those parts earlier, like he did Crimea. But he was trying to stop that with Minsk, and he’s now condemned for being far too soft by the Russian nationalists.

Carden: One of the things, of course, that people don’t understand is that the Russians have hawks of their own, but Putin’s not one of them….

Sakwa: Absolutely not. 

He’s condemned all the time. Even some Russians I met on my recent trip to Chicago were claiming that he’s going to sell them out again. That Putin is going to sell them out because Trump has opened up this rapprochement, and he’s now going to be seduced again by the West and so on…

Carden: And there seems to me to be, among parts of the elite, a real bitterness in Russia, exemplified, perhaps, by an article written by Sergei Karaganov. His attitude was kind of like, “Well, we expect this from the dopey Americans. But the Europeans?!”

Sakwa: Yep. Indeed, it was a very harsh piece. 

Basically he’s arguing that the Europeans have been fully vassal- ized, and also infantilized, in the sense that they’re no longer able to define their own strategic objectives and purposes. 

He didn’t use the term, but my argument is they’re locked in a Cold War mentality and have not been able to overcome it. Worse, the whole European Union has been Eastern Europeanized with all of the bitterness and the historical baggage toward Russia, which is genuine, of course. But it’s time to move on. It’s time for what we hoped at the end of the first Cold War, peace and reconciliation.

So Minsk was absolutely crucial in all of this, and it’s much misunderstood. And the style of debate today is so worrying,  because those who keep condemning Russia for disinformation, fake news, and so on— are the ones who are peddling falsehoods. So the disinformation industry is precisely a whole exercise in disinformation and misinformation. 

But also, to back to your first point, what is most fascinating is that this whole epoch, in many senses, began in Munich with Putin’s speech of 2007 when he broke with the unipolar world and criticized America’s claim to be a global hegemon and the project of NATO enlargement. People forget that on this, Gorbachev and Yeltsin held the same position as Putin. 

As you say, they have their own constituencies, their own factions.[For more on Sakwa’s factional model of Russian politics, see his 2019 book Russia’s Futures].

And what is interesting is that this new phase begins again with another Munich speech, JD Vance’s absolutely extraordinary speech at the Munich Security Conference last month. Which was—whether or not you agree with all the points—was a very profound statement.

And Trump detests war, by the way. I mean, it’s a peculiar thing, but he does.

Carden: He’s the only person who talks about it, albeit in his uniquely discursive way—but he’s always talking about how terrible it is that all those, as he puts it, beautiful young people are getting killed and the beautiful golden domes of the churches are rubble…

Sakwa: Absolutely. For that, I take off my hat to him, that he’s actually saying that. Whereas our Starmers and Macrons…

Carden: …and Bidens and Blinkens…

Sakwa: And Biden, of course. Biden loved it. I mean, 50 years of catastrophic, as Robert Gates says, mismanagement of foreign policy from Biden.

Carden: Gates was no stranger to mismanagement..

Sakwa: In his own way, he knew whereof he spoke. 

Carden: What about the reaction here to the Zelensky-Trump blow up last week?

Sakwa: Obviously the British media, the Financial Times, and so on, said, “Oh, how disgraceful. He bullied this courageous Churchill of our times.” Quite the opposite. He’d been told to wear a suit, and even when they greeted him outside the White House, Trump joked about it. You know, he sort of tapped him on the shoulder, “Oh, I see you’ve dressed up for the occasion,” sort of avuncular sort of manner.

So, Trump wasn’t there to humiliate him. And it went normally for 35-odd minutes. But it was when he started challenging JD Vance, “Can I ask you what sort of peace are you talking about?” And JD Vance, absolutely rightly, pushed back. 

So the narrative in the Western media is so misleading. Because they weren’t out to humiliate him, it was Zelensky who was out to, as it were, to teach the American leader a lesson. But there’s a certain status involved here. So it was disrespectful…

Carden: And they humiliated Marco Rubio in the process, which was probably just a bonus for them…

Sakwa: Oh, sitting on the sofa there?

Carden: Yep.

Sakwa: That was collateral.

Carden: Let me circle back to what’s going on in Britain. Starmer, after a very rough start, seems to be having something of a moment in the media. He’s now being hailed as the leader of the free world and all that. It seems to me that all the coverage and the spin about his meeting with Trump is permeated by an air of unreality. Starmer was successful, I think, with regard to the tariff issue, but not on the war issue. 

This idea that the UK and the French are going to put peacekeepers on the ground, and that there’s going to be an American backstop, is totally off the rails. I mean, the UK has an army that could fit into Wembley…

Sakwa: With seats to spare. Yes. I think the troop level is down to 75,000 now.

Carden: And one of the things that gets left out is that the side that’s currently winning the war on the ground is never going to agree.

Sakwa: In fact, it looks as if they’re going to be a big Russian offensive. 

They’re gathering forces for when the weather gets better and the spring comes. Maybe that’s why they’ve held back for the last few weeks. Also to give Trump a bit of breathing space, so as not to antagonize things. But absolutely, an absolute air of unreality. The politicians and the media here say that Starmer has behaved impeccably. It’s a parallel reality; it doesn’t take into account the strategic factors on the ground, and Russia has got something to say about these things. It’s a sign of Anglo-French imperial arrogance. It’s also the deeper civilizational arrogance of liberal civilization, which is now in the process of repeating 19th century tropes about needing to be out there to civilize the world. And so Russia is now considered like backward peoples. 

And of course Starmer, since he’s been elected, in the first six months, he made every single mistake in the book, and invented a few more. And today, while he’s not inventing mistakes, he’s simply repeating mistakes from the 19th century. The logic which they are engaging with is the logic that led to the First World War and, of course, perpetuated this Cold War. 

So it’s very, very dangerous.

Carden: Right. And one of the things that is really appalling about the establishment’s recklessness in pursuing this insane program of waging a proxy war with Russia over the Donbas—I mean, I never understood why it mattered to the United States as to who controls the Donbas….

Sakwa: It would matter if this was a genuinely unprovoked war. But it was not. The Donbas people themselves, whom I know very well, didn’t even want separatism. Some did, of course, but they basically wanted autonomy, cultural and linguistic autonomy. 

So it’s not as if it suddenly, unprovoked, like a Marvel comic villain, Putin woke up in the 24th of February 2022 and says…

Carden: “I have to have this…”

Sakwa: And that he did it because he was evil. Why was he evil? He was born evil. He was Hitler incarnate. Which is just so infantile and stupid—and of course leads to things like the First World War, where you have mass slaughter for a purpose which still years later, we still don’t fully understand…

Carden: The Western position is extremely short sighted, but it is also deeply immoral…I wonder, have you been to Limehouse?

Sakwa: No. In East London?

Carden: Yes. I was there yesterday, and there is a church, St Anne’s…

Sakwa: Oh, right.

Carden: And it’s beautiful, a kind of oasis in this working-class area. And there’s a memorial in the graveyard dedicated to the men of the parish who perished in the First World War. And it’s an enormous stone, four-sided, of just names, names, names, and names…

And I think that’s kind of our bottom line, right? That this stuff needs to be avoided at all costs.

Sakwa: Absolutely. And the worst thing about Zelensky and the Starmers and Macrons of the world, they want Trump to own the war. And he’s not going to own this war. And absolutely rightly so. He’s not going to do it.

We’re celebrating this year the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. A really important moment, and of course the establishment of the United Nations system and the Charter system. Also, interestingly enough, we are now celebrating, this year, the 40th anniversary of Gorbachev’s coming to power in the Soviet Union, which put an end, soon afterwards, to the first Cold War. 

And I very much welcome it, because we’ve had this absolute stasis and logjam. And Trump, I now think of him as the ice breaker. He’s breaking up this logjam, which is a 40-year one. Gorbachev tried to break it, he failed. After the Second World War, we tried to establish, with Yalta and Potsdam, a system of great power politics embedded within the United Nations. And now I think we are in a next phase with this new team in the United States, with the breakup of the Atlantic Alliance system— we’re entering into a moment of boundless historical opportunity.

Another interesting analogy is that just like it was Russiawhich unexpectedly defected from the Soviet Union, leading to the end of the Soviet Union—change came not from the periphery but from the center. Interestingly enough, today it is the United States which is leaving its own alliance system, which is amazingly analogous to how Russia behaved under Gorbachev 40 years ago.

Carden: It was the center that gave up.

Sakwa: Yeah, the center gave up. And today the center’s giving up, which of course means the periphery is left bereft. I mean, to call the European leaders like headless chickens gives them a sense of direction and intelligence, which is giving them rather too much credit. And you can quote that, because I think it’s absolutely appalling. The fact that they’ve appointed Kaja Kallas as the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and all these people…these are people completely out of their depth, consumed by a burning hatred of Russia. And Ursula von der Leyen [EU Commission President] is just as bad. Read her speeches.

Carden: And the soon-to-be-former German foreign minister…

Sakwa: Oh yes, Annalena Baerbock. 

You listen to the language they use, and it’s so disturbing. They have forgotten the terror of war. Some people are actually precisely arguing that Trump is a Gorbachev—like figure. So to push that analogy we just made, that Trump is creating a perestroika, but maybe, hopefully, he will be more successful than Gorbachev was in opening up a genuine new epoch of comity between nations. 

Trump, ultimately, even though he’s got his tariff obsessions and so on—he does open up the possibility of great powers working together. And when I say great powers, it doesn’t mean at the expense of small and medium ones…

Carden: It’s very transactional. But there are also echoes of the Rooseveltian, Gaullist vision of great power cooperation and reciprocity that is embedded in the UN Charter.

Sakwa: Absolutely.

Carden: And we’ve forgotten about the values, the principles that are embedded in the UN Charter. And that I think that kind of motivated Gorbachev’s vision of a Europe whole and free which was a direct echo of de Gaulle’s vision. I’m not expecting Trump to reach those heights, but it is interesting that he hasn’t rejected it out of hand like every American president has since the end of the Cold War.

Sakwa: Yes. You’re absolutely right about his Gaullist echoes and of a larger agenda. In his own way, in his own inimitable way…But yes, he is. 

And also you touch on an extremely important thing there, because I’ve been saying—as people joke—the same thing for almost 40 years, that we really need to go back to the Gorbachev’s Common European Home. Because ultimately, this is what this present generation of European leaders fail to understand.

Macron used to say it, but of course he said that before lunch, and after lunch he says quite the opposite, and after supper, a third thing entirely. But he also always said that there cannot be European security against Russia, it has to be with Russia. And it does. It’s an uncomfortable neighbor. It’s a big neighbor. You don’t always like it. You don’t always have to agree with it, but you have to work with it.

And I will actually even go a little bit further—you’ve already said that Putin is a moderate in the context there. He is. He also has his very moderate constituents. We talked about the siloviki, who are the hardline security guys. But there’s also now the business lobby in Russia saying, “Make peace. Overcome the sanctions, reestablish direct flights with the US,” and so on. And so the business lobby is mobilized. 

There’s a lot more going on at the moment. Which is fantastic as far as I can see. He’s finally doing his rapprochement. It’s not detente yet. It’s rapprochement.

Carden: So far, so good.

Sakwa: A little bit of sunshine in this endless warmongering.