Putin may seem charming to those he’s courting, but let’s not forget that he’s the one raining missiles on innocent women and children on a daily basis in Ukraine.
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In 1898, Rudyard Kipling published “The Truce of the Bear,” a strangely haunting poem that recounts the story of Matun, now a blind and aging beggar who had once encountered Adam-zad, a bear who had some seemingly human characteristics and walks like a man. Face-to-face with the bear, Matun could have easily shot him, but he hesitated when the bear stood upright and, with a sad look on his face, clasped his paws together in what Matun took to be Christian prayer and stepped hesitantly towards Matun.
The hunter is suddenly confused, and uncertain about what to do. An instant later, the bear tears Matun’s face off with his iron claws. Matun is disfigured, his life destroyed. His advice for future encounters:
When he veils the hate and cunning of his little, swinish eyes,
When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer
That is the time of peril — the time of the Truce of the Bear!
Kipling makes it abundantly clear that the poem is an allegory. And that the bear is a symbolic stand-in for Russia. Kipling felt that Europeans naturally assumed that Russians were just like them, only living at the far eastern reaches of the continent. It’s a dangerous assumption. In fact, Kipling believed that Russians are really Asians inhabiting the western reaches of the Asian continent. While Kipling admired the warmth and humor of individual Russians, he distrusted Moscow’s ambitions to become an empire.
His first direct contact with Russians had come when he worked as a news reporter covering Russian incursions into Afghanistan in the 1880s. Czar Nicolas II, in what amounted to a diplomatic chess game, hoped to use Afghanistan as a gateway to challenge British holdings in India. The struggle with Britain involved both sides sending spies to negotiate with Afghan tribes and became known as “The Great Game,” an effort to divide the world’s resources among the leading colonial empires.
In Kipling’s eyes, the Russians proved just as capable of treachery as the Afghans, who, during the 1842 retreat from Kabul, had slaughtered 4,500 British soldiers and 12,000 camp followers after first promising them safe passage. Only one man, an assistant surgeon named William Brydon, was left alive in order to tell the British in Jalalabad what had happened.
Kipling wrote “The Truce of the Bear” just as Russia was beginning to launch yet another charm offensive in Europe while at the same time covertly laying plans to extend its control over Manchuria and possibly Korea. Moscow hoped that the recent construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad would provide access to much of East Asia.
As Russian invasion plans against Manchuria progressed, the US took the side of Japan, which was anxious to stop Russian expansion. Peggy Noonan pointed out in a 2022 column in The Wall Street Journal that US Secretary of State John Hay, in a note to President Theodore Roosevelt, expressed his own exasperation over Russian duplicity:
Four years of constant conflict … have shown me that you cannot let up a minute on them [the Russians] without danger to your midriff. The bear that talks like a man is more to be watched than Adam-Zad.
Japan offered to let the Russians have access to Manchuria in exchange for acknowledging that Korea was within Japan’s sphere of influence. The Russians refused. The Japanese launched a surprise attack against the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, in Manchuria, which started the Russo-Japanese War. With their eastern fleet out of action, the Russians sent their Baltic Fleet on a seven-month voyage to retake Port Arthur.
Japan had gone through a rapid modernization, and it was equipped with battleships that could outrun and outmaneuver the Russians. Two Japanese fleets converged on the Baltic Fleet and sank it. That left Russia without any viable options. Roosevelt convinced both sides to negotiate their differences at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard at Kittery, ME. Roosevelt later won the Nobel Prize for having arranged an end to the dispute.
In 2001, when George W. Bush was beginning to think seriously about launching his war against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the magazine I was working for in New York asked if I could arrange a luncheon at Bernardin, one of Manhattan’s trendier fish restaurants, with Sergey Lavrov, who was then Russia’s ambassador to the UN. Lavrov was happy to comply. I showed up a half-hour in advance and found Lavrov already seated by the window. He was clearly enjoying himself.
We talked about life in New York. Lavrov was living on Long Island. He spoke flawless American English and turned out to be brilliant, extremely sophisticated, and highly amusing — the perfect top-of-the-line diplomat.
I was surprised both by his astonishing knowledge of nearly every aspect of the United States and his objective analysis of the Bush administration’s political strategy and the motives behind it. I thought he would make a perfect Russian foreign minister — someone you could relate to.
Lavrov appeared to be so intelligent that I naively thought he might somehow be able to restrain some of the worst excesses of Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB heavy, who, despite his best efforts, still exuded a peasant’s lack of sophistication that Donald Trump, today, must find easy to relate to.
I didn’t care much about Putin; Lavrov was the mystery to me and now, as foreign minister, he remains one. How can an intelligent man allow himself to be complicit in the senseless bombing of innocent women and children as Putin doubles down on his efforts to break the back and soul of Ukraine?
An explanation for my confusion, I decided, was evident in an earlier encounter with a political assassin when I was just beginning to freelance in Paris. I was asked if I was interested in translating a book by a former government hitman who had killed at least 18 people during his career but insisted he was innocent of a recent murder that had turned into a major political scandal. After reading his book, I expected to meet a French version of James Bond. Instead, the assassin turned out to be a stooped middle-aged man in a worn trench coat, who spoke in a timid voice. “Sure, I killed those 18 people,” he told me, “but I didn’t kill this guy.”
We judge the veracity of what someone is telling us by all sorts of factors that have nothing to do with what is actually being said. We listen to the tone and confidence in the speaker’s voice; we pay special attention to body language, and most importantly, we look deeply into his or her eyes and then judge the instant facial reactions to what is being said.
My Paris experience convinced me that none of these natural techniques guarantees that we actually understand what is really going on.
When Bush first met Putin in 2001, he was smitten even more than Donald Trump. Bush later said at a news conference:
I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue.
Bush later learned that Russia was facing financial collapse and Putin felt that he had to win Bush’s help in avoiding sanctions.
Trump probably knows more about how Russia works than any former US president. A good part of Trump’s fortune was earned by selling high-end, luxury real estate to Russian oligarchs.
It’s not hard to see why Volodymyr Zelenskyy is nervous these days. Trump knows the Russians primarily as transactional business partners; You give me that, and I’ll let you have this.
Real estate proved to be a great vehicle if an oligarch wanted to export profits extracted by raping Russia’s economy. No one wants a ruble, so ultra-expensive real estate is as good a vehicle for money laundering as anything else. You buy an expensive property and let it sit until you need the money. When you need cash, you can sell the real estate for hard currency that can be used anywhere in the world. If you needed to make a quick deal, Trump was your man.
It’s not hard to see why Volodymyr Zelenskyy is nervous these days. Trump knows the Russians primarily as transactional business partners; You give me that, and I’ll let you have this.
Trump used to show his disdain for his current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, by referring to him dismissively as “Little Marco.” Picking Rubio for the role may be showing Trump’s disdain for the State Department itself as just another collection of elitists. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth’s understanding of global affairs comes from his past as a weekend anchor for Fox News — another pick that doesn’t exactly exude seriousness or inspire confidence.
All of that is shocking enough, but Trump’s news conference after the return of his envoys from talks about Ukraine with Lavrov was even more shocking. Trump blamed Ukraine for Putin’s surprise attack that launched the current war. “You [Ukraine] should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump told a news conference.
That was extreme, even for an established Kremlin fellow-traveler. The immediate conclusion was that Trump probably had already made a deal with Moscow. The US drops support for Ukraine in exchange for promised access to Ukraine’s valuable rare earth mineral deposits.
Europeans also fear that the current events might emerge as an unofficial agreement between billionaire autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington to carve up the world’s resources among themselves.
Vice President JD Vance’s speech to a security conference further exacerbated European uncertainty. Vance had been expected to talk about unifying security. Instead, he talked about Trump’s obsession with changing American culture and its essential values. The Trump administration, he announced, no longer wants to be connected to any notions involving inclusion, equality, or diversity.
The Trump administration, one gathers, is no longer interested in democracy. Trump’s America intends to become a winning player among the anti-democratic, empire-building autocrats.
Vance’s cluelessness left little doubt that America under Trump no longer wants to be the leader of the Free World; it has moved into the enemy camp. Vance and Trump are no longer fighting Adam-zad. They aspire, in fact, to become his best friends.
How long they’ll survive remains to be seen. They might ask Matun about that.
