Four years ago, Russian trolls and commentators openly supported Donald Trump for president of the United States; while commentators are less outspoken now given the reaction of Americans to Russian interference in the U.S. elections, Moscow is still supporting him via its troll factories, says the U.S.-based Russia analyst Kseniya Kirillova.
But at the same time and because it serves the Kremlin’s broader purposes, the analyst says, Moscow is now supporting both radicalism on the right, which it sees as Mr. Trump’s base, and radicalism on the left, which is opposed to him (dsnews.ua/world/tramp-i-levaki-kogo-i-pochemu-podderzhivaet-kreml-v-amerikanskoy-politike-01102020-401054).
In 2016, Moscow supported Mr. Trump, not expecting him to win but to create problems for Hillary Clinton, whom the Kremlin viewed as the likely victor. Now, while Mr. Trump remains Moscow’s “preferred candidate,” it is also looking beyond the elections and promoting the radical left.
Not only does that help Mr. Trump because he links Democratic candidate Joe Biden to it, but it helps Moscow because it helps elevate the radical left in ways that will undermine Mr. Biden if he emerges victorious. The radical left is marginal and mostly in the streets, but it has the ability to promote an agenda that Mr. Biden won’t be able to completely avoid.
That agenda, which includes the isolationism Mr. Trump also supports and radical social changes that will further divide and weaken the U.S., is one that the political technologists in Moscow fully back as well. What makes the Kremlin especially interested in supporting the radical left in the U.S. lies elsewhere, Ms. Kirillova continues.
Strongly influenced by the continuing impact of Soviet ideology that presented the U.S. as a citadel of oppression and injustice, she says, the Putin elite, like the Soviet one out of which it emerged, believes that this image of the U.S. will help Moscow prove to the world that the U.S. “doesn’t have the right to pretend to the role of world leader.”
To realize this goal, of course, doesn’t require that Mr. Biden be in the Oval Office, the analyst says. “On the contrary,” if Mr. Trump wins a second term but is hounded by a radical left in the U.S. boosted by Russian trolls, Moscow can count on those on the left in the U.S. to do its work for the Russians by criticizing Mr. Trump’s social policies.
Some in Moscow may believe that they are playing “a long game,” Ms. Kirillova continues, and that the radical left is on the rise in the U.S. But that seems unlikely, even if that is what the Kremlin, so strongly in the grip of Soviet ideological propositions, strongly believes and will seek to promote.
Understanding that Moscow has good reasons for supporting those at both ends of the American political spectrum is critical to overcoming the overly simple conspiratorial thinking that the Russian authorities are backing only one side. They have obvious preferences, but in this case as in all others, they play to win even if they don’t get what they most want.
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).