How to Alter the Course of Another Country’s Foreign Policy
Vladimir Putin is on the verge of victory in his decades-long crusade to demolish America’s global primacy. How did he pull it off?
There is no higher achievement in international relations than peacefully altering the course of another country’s foreign policy to better suit one’s own strategic agenda — and there is no greater diplomatic mastery than engineering what professionals call a “realignment” of interests.
This is best accomplished not with coercion, but by subtly reshaping the other country’s perceptions of its circumstances, leading it to redefine its objectives and priorities, because it comes to see that doing so is in its best interest. If perceptions cannot be changed, a more effective — though riskier — approach is modifying the underlying reality to force a reassessment of interests. Success is much harder, but also far sweeter, when the country in question is a historical adversary, as my book “Diplomatic Tradecraft” makes clear.
Such geopolitical victories are extremely rare in history. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, is on the verge of a triumph not seen since President Richard Nixon’s opening to China more than half a century ago — potentially with even farther-reaching consequences.
As he struggles to subjugate Ukraine by force, Putin is much closer to victory in his decades-long crusade to demolish — quietly and peacefully — America’s global primacy. Although his professed goal is to improve U.S.-Russian relations, he has helped orchestrate a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy. With stunning speed, Washington has pulled away from Europe and closer to Russia, thrown away most of its soft power and abandoned democracy, both at home and abroad. Putin’s ultimate aim is dismantling the U.S.-made world order of the last 80 years, which he concluded long ago undermines Russia’s strategic interests.
I don’t want to give Putin more credit than he deserves, because luck has played no small part in his feat. But he has also exhibited a distinct set of skills that have helped him take advantage of an exceptional opportunity. Whether one reviles or admires his actions, he has outdone his fellow world leaders at the “realignment” game.
A strategic thinker, Putin is as well-versed in diplomatic tradecraft as he is in his own profession of spycraft. In his drive to weaken American power, he has been deliberate and patient, knows what he wants, experiments with different methods to get it and adjusts his strategy when needed. He has also shown a kind of empathy by trying to understand American society and politics — a recognition that, to destroy a system, it helps to know how it works and what motivates the people who defend it. Although the combination of “Putin” and “empathy” may seem cringeworthy, empathy can be used for both noble and nefarious purposes, as I’ve previously pointed out.
Putin’s greatest vulnerability, of course, is his authoritarian rule, which forces his lieutenants to tell him only what he wants to hear. Despite that shortcoming, the Russians have done remarkably well, though it took time. Following the above formula, they first lobbied the American ruling class of both political parties to rethink the U.S. role in the world, meaning to stop meddling everywhere — especially in Moscow’s “sphere of influence” — and to treat Russia as an equal superpower.
Modifying reality
When traditional diplomacy didn’t work, Putin resorted to altering reality by helping to put U.S. power in the hands of a political outsider who denounced the so-called liberal world order as disastrous for the United States. The country, this novice insisted, had been “systematically ripped off,” “ravaged” and “raped” by much of the world. Even if he didn’t necessarily mean to benefit Russia, his determination to dismantle the global system would effectively do Putin’s work for him.
As it turned out, Donald Trump was more than willing to carry Putin’s agenda forward. During his first term in the White House, he openly admired the Russian leader’s strongman style, treated him better than longtime democratic U.S. allies, undermined NATO and sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies. But all that would be dwarfed by what was to come when he returned to the Oval Office.
In the last three months, the Trump administration has embraced a worldview that strikingly resembles Putin’s, with spheres of influence, where big countries dominate small ones. It conceded Russia’s main demands to end its war in Ukraine — ceding Ukrainian territory and blocking NATO membership — before negotiations even began. The administration voted with Russia, Iran and North Korea against a U.N. resolution condemning the war, and its officials have recited multiple Russian talking points, culminating in blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion.
Trump has shielded Russia from sweeping tariffs that have disrupted global trade and thrown the world economy into chaos. And in a clear sign that his administration no longer considers Moscow an adversary, it halted U.S. cyberoperations against Russia.
Most important, Trump’s destruction of both America’s democratic institutions and the liberal world order is moving at a speed that likely exceeds Putin’s wildest dreams. The administration’s proposed 84-percent cut of the international affairs budget, along with its planned shuttering of embassies and consulates around the world, if enacted, would end U.S. global primacy as we know it. As a result, Americans’ way of life is all but certain to deteriorate.
Americans have been hearing about globalization’s negative effects for years, and many have legitimate concerns that must be addressed. At the same time, few understand how U.S. superiority has benefited their lives — from the dollar’s might as the world’s reserve currency, to their country’s extraordinary ability to project hard power, to its unsurpassed, though recently diminished, soft power. If Trump and Putin push ahead with their project, we need to prepare for a very different reality. This is where abstract “realignment” theories become painfully real.
Plan, recalibrate, adjust
Putin’s drive to engineer a shift in America’s global posture wasn’t easy. It started nearly two decades ago — about six or seven years into his rule — when he determined that the liberal world order and the democratic system that sustains it posed an existential threat to his regime. So he decided that it had to be weakened and eventually dismantled.
Putin’s initial instinct was to attack it from the outside — his now-infamous 2007 speech in Munich provided the opening salvo. The United States was again an adversary that had done Russia so many wrongs and so humiliated it that a path to a normal relationship was all but lost. He helped build alliances and institutions that excluded the United States, such as the BRICS and the Eurasian Economic Union, and strengthened existing ones like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
But while U.S. supremacy declined somewhat, the reasons for that had less to do with Putin’s efforts and more with the overall diffusion of power in the global system, as well as with Washington’s hubris and post-9/11 missteps like the Iraq war.
Realizing that targeting the liberal order only from the outside was unlikely to produce his desired outcome, Putin recalibrated, seeking to undermine it from within. His new strategy was to destabilize Western countries by empowering extremist forces, distorting public discourse and eroding faith in institutions.
Beginning in Europe, the Russians utilized one of the bedrocks of liberal democracy: free speech. Although it’s difficult to measure the impact of their disinformation efforts on elections, multiple studies have revealed the lengths to which the Russians went to build hundreds of fake news websites, create thousands of fake social-media profiles, manipulate platforms’ algorithms to stir up fake controversies and target millions of unsuspecting citizens.
Putin now has several friends among European leaders, none more reliable than Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has proved his loyalty by holding up European Union aid for Ukraine and blocking sanctions against Russia. The European Parliament has a growing far-right bloc sympathetic to Putin, but the EU policy shift he seeks hasn’t materialized, and the union’s stance remains decidedly anti-Russian. Even Brexit, which Putin actively supported, hasn’t reversed Britain’s animosity toward Moscow.
Sealing the deal
Putin’s greatest success emerged across the Atlantic. He and his government learned from some of the mistakes they made in Europe, where they had too many countries to deal with, and their influence efforts often lacked focus and depth.
Their 2016 campaign in the United States was much more sophisticated, deliberate and rooted in an understanding of American society. They took the time to learn how the political system worked at the local, state and national levels, what issues divided Americans and why, what problems they deemed most serious, and how to manipulate their fears. The Russians’ content resonated, misled and even duped, as though they believed the U.S. education system had produced gullible citizens easily susceptible to such manipulation.
Putin’s war on modern liberalism at home, his self-styling as a defender of “traditional values” and his denunciation of the West as “decadent” and even “satanic” found an unexpected audience among a small cadre of American conservatives. What began as fringe admiration and common cause has evolved into a potent alliance, and ideas once confined to the margins have migrated to the Republican Party’s mainstream.
We may never know the full extent of Trump’s communications with Putin during his time out of office. But the 90-minute phone call they had in February proved a watershed moment. With that old-fashioned tool of diplomacy, Putin seems to have sealed the deal: persuading Trump that reshaping America’s role in the world to suit Moscow’s interests is not only acceptable but necessary.
In the last major realignment of interests at the end of the Cold War, the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe — with one or two exceptions — didn’t need much persuading to ally themselves with the West. They were drawn by its soft power and the promise of freedom, democracy and prosperity. Those positive perceptions, regardless of how accurate they were, had been formed long before the Berlin Wall fell and didn’t need to be “reshaped.” If the United States and its allies deserve any credit, it’s for managing the realignment, rather than engineering it.
By contrast, Putin’s role in the current realignment is much more direct and active, and his crusade will continue, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. Trump’s apparent frustration with Putin’s refusal to accept an extended ceasefire doesn’t change the big picture, and neither will Putin’s acquiescence to a truce, should it ever materialize. Demolishing the U.S.-led order remains both men’s ultimate goal.
The transcript of their February phone call, if ever released, might provide the definitive proof. It would certainly be a very useful teaching tool for us at the Washington International Diplomatic Academy.
What’s your take?
Why do you think Trump is so willing to do Putin’s work for him?
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Nicholas Kralev is the founder and executive director of the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, and a former Financial Times and Washington Times correspondent. His books include “Diplomatic Tradecraft,” “America’s Other Army” and “Diplomats in the Trenches.”