Putin looms over a third successive US election

“Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Ex-President Donald Trump’s scathing catch phrase for a torrent of investigations during his administration also serves as an apt catch-all for the current meltdown over Moscow roiling US politics.

The United States might have beaten the Kremlin in the Cold War and ever since regarded Moscow as a mere irritant — albeit one with nuclear arms — and have been desperate to concentrate on the showdown with its new superpower rival, China. But Russia and its leader, whom President Joe Biden described as a “crazy S.O.B.” at a Wednesday fundraiser, won’t go away.

President Vladimir Putin has trained the malevolence of his intelligence agencies, his military power, global diplomacy and obstructive statecraft into a multi-front assault on American power in the United States and abroad.

He has carved out baleful influence at the center of US politics in an extraordinary display of an adversary penetrating and exploiting American political divides. The ex-KGB lieutenant colonel, who conceived a grievance after watching the Soviet Union dissolve from his outpost in East Germany, has sparked chaos in a single-minded effort to discredit and weaken the United States. Successive US presidents have underestimated Russia, misread its historic humiliations and struggled to work out how to change Putin’s course and contain his threat.

But Putin has been remarkably resilient following earlier signs that his invasion of Ukraine – nearly two years ago – was a disaster and could even bring him down. There are now signs that Russia’s reconstituting of its armed forces and willingness to absorb horrendous losses are turning the tide of the war and raising the prospect of a victory that would turn Putin into a far greater danger.

The Russian leader’s leveraging of power and successful forays into US politics are, meanwhile, threatening to cause a schism between the US and European NATO allies that could put the post-World War II security architecture at risk.

All the ways Putin is playing in US politics

Putin is advancing Russian interests against the US on multiple fronts.

Biden once tried to save US-Russia relations

Biden is just the latest president to be confronted by a national security migraine because of Putin.

Yet it wasn’t always this way. Early in his tenure, Putin sought cooperation. He was one of the first world leaders to call President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Bush famously once looked into Putin’s eyes and said he got “a sense of his soul” — one of the many catastrophic misjudgments of the Russian leader by presidents in the 21st century. President Barack Obama attempted a “reset” of relations with Moscow. But after a period as prime minister, Putin returned to the presidency and became increasingly hostile toward the West. The Russian leader was particularly incensed by the US-led operation to topple Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Obama’s critics now say he did too little to respond to Putin’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and paved the way for Russia’s full invasion two years ago.

Trump came to office haunted by allegations that his team colluded with Russia’s effort to damage 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. A probe by special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence of conspiring between the Trump campaign and Russia. But the special counsel did detail multiple contacts between the two and wrote that the Trump campaign believed it would benefit from information stolen and released by the Russians. Whether Russia helped Trump win is impossible to say. But the subsequent fallout forever soured the new president on US intelligence agencies that he regarded as a hostile “Deep State” and led him to torch their credibility among his millions of supporters. This whipping up of domestic antagonism and the damage to US institutions plays into Russia’s goals. And the spectacle of Trump, as president at a Helsinki summit, siding with Putin and trashing US intelligence agencies over their claims of election interference remains one of the most staggering moments in the history of US-Russia relations.

When Biden took over, he made a high-stakes bid to reduce the poison from relations with Moscow, meeting Putin in Geneva in an echo of old Cold War summitry. Approaching the talks with deep skepticism, Biden sought to halt Russian cybersecurity attacks and to reopen nuclear disarmament negotiations while trying to ease the risks of an accidental war.

It was not much more than six months later that he got his answer, when Putin invaded Ukraine, a sovereign, democratic neighbor, which led to what has effectively become a proxy war between Biden and a Kremlin leader who has said he sees the conflict as part of a wider clash with the United States and the West.

Putin’s efforts to weaken US power have only escalated since.

Russia’s use of espionage agencies to inject propaganda and discord in US politics through social media and more directly by intelligence agencies was described by Mueller in his final report as an effort “designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States.”

Ironically, those efforts use two of America’s great innovations — its open, adversarial, democratic political system and the computer technology that empowered the internet – in an attempt to bring it down.

And as recent days have shown, the Russian leader can always rely on one priceless resource – the reflex of American politicians to turn on one another in a way that makes his threat even stronger.