Let’s be clear. Tucker Carlson didn’t interview Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin addressed Americans through Tucker Carlson.

The mainstream media’s horror at Tucker’s interview ‘coup’ was misplaced. By ridiculing Carlson for speaking with the dictator, they amplified Putin’s preferred narrative: that he is the victim of some kind of conspiracy of censorship. A misunderstood leader being silenced by the evil deep state of the USA…

Given the state of America right now, this narrative plays into some hard truths. The US is a nation that does have a kind of ‘deep state’ bureaucratic and legal class that is operating politically, in a manner out of touch with the people and their elected representatives. The country’s once objective legal system and police enforcement, have descended into a machine of political lawfare with a glaring hypocrisy between the left’s ‘get Trump at any cost’ mentality and their ‘protect the Biden family at any cost’ mentality. Trust in the mainstream media has never been lower, and with very good reason.

The American landscape is ripe for Putin to play his hand and push his false victim narrative. Putin knows the cynicism with which conservatives and libertarians in America now view their own government. So, who better to give the big interview to than the man who symbolises this giant middle finger to the establishment? The rebel who was apparently axed by his former conservative network for ‘speaking truth to power’ too often – Tucker Carlson.

Using Tucker Carlson isn’t surprising. Using the format of a podcast-length interview, also isn’t surprising. But why now?

Both Moscow and Kiev want to end this war, but neither wants to lose it.

As the second anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine approaches and winter abates, it’s time for some jaw-jaw before resuming the war-war. An estimated 500,000 souls have been killed (accurate data is difficult to come by). Analysts generally agree that Russia has borne 300,000 of those deaths, Ukraine roughly 200,000, mostly men. Given Ukraine’s population sits around 44 million, that’s getting close to one-in-100 of the country’s men. An horrific human toll.

It’s fair to assume Putin never expected Ukraine to put up such a noble fight. He’s managed to escape embarrassment thanks to a combination of cunning and good luck. Analysis by University of Sydney Professor Emeritus Graeme Gill – an expert on Russia and Soviet history – suggests early predictions that sanctions would wreck the Russian economy proved false. In the first year of the war, the Russian economy shrank only 2 per cent while analysts put the decline in the Ukraine economy somewhere between 20 and 40 per cent.

There have been very few food shortages in Russia and certainly no ‘lines in the streets’.

Western firms have exited Russia, but their departure has been an economic stimulus to domestic production in many cases. Where local workers haven’t been able to fill the gaps, imports from the Global South and China have.

As is typical in times of war, unemployment is negligible.

Oil and gas revenues in 2022 flowed into Russia at almost the same level as before.

Meanwhile, increased government wartime spending out of Russia’s substantial savings reserves from its large sovereign wealth fund have also proven to be an economic bonus. Ironically, decades of sanctions leading up to the war have made the Russian economy less dependent upon the West and quite resilient.

But Putin’s luck may be starting to run out. Unlike 2022, oil and gas revenue halved in 2023. The sovereign wealth fund piggy bank is now depleted, and inflation is on the march.

Professor Gill says the picture is even more grim for Ukraine. Resources, both in terms of equipment and manpower, are hard to come by. The US, Poland, and Slovakia are all winding back support and the country is running out of soldiers.

Whatever the strategic battlefield analysis, both countries have a lot to lose from a continued fight. Not to mention that brutal war between so-called ‘civilised’ developed nations in Eastern Europe in the 21st Century has a childish and foolish ring to it. It is an example of ego and immaturity and poor strategy that’s truly an embarrassment and disgrace to both nations and their leadership akin to the unbecoming barbarism of uncivilised gangsters.

Putin’s concerns about NATO expansionism, EU expansion, and Russian isolation, used to justify his February invasion in 2022, fail to do so. Ukraine, as a sovereign state, has every right to join any regional bloc it wishes. Russia can line defensive forces along its border in response, if it so wishes, but crossing that border is not a right it possesses. Hence why Putin spent half an hour on a questionable history lesson at the start of the interview, trying to justify Russia’s historical entitlement to modern Ukraine.

The BBC says this is familiar ground for Putin – it was an infamous 2021 essay he wrote called On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians that first formed his intellectual justification for the invasion.

‘Historians say the litany of claims made by Mr Putin are nonsense – representing nothing more than a selective abuse of history to justify the ongoing war in Ukraine,’ the BBC and New Statesman’s Europe correspondent Ido Vock writes.

More importantly, Vock notes that, ‘Regardless of the historical realities, none of Putin’s assertions would form a legal justification for his invasion.’

Among Putin’s most bizarre assertions, the notion that Poland collaborated with Hitler prior to the second world war, and the idea that Russia is not expansionist, were the two stand-outs. Putin’s thesis on Poland is that it had cooperated with Germany initially, then refused to cede to key demands somehow forcing Hitler to start the war by attacking them. The New Yorker magazine’s Masha Gessen astutely observes the perverse nature of such a reading of history. ‘The idea that the victim of the attack serves as its instigator by forcing the hand of the aggressor is central to all of Putin’s explanations for Russia’s war in Ukraine.’ Gessen also observes Putin’s not-too-subtle attempt to connect Nazism with Poland. ‘As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared.’ It seems Putin’s over-arching main message from his decision to engage the US public is: ‘We are not expansionist aggressors, we invaded Ukraine because we were provoked by breaches of the Minsk treaty of 2014 and the part of Ukraine we want is really Russian anyway.’

Putin wants a negotiated end to this war and this is him laying out his opening case in that negotiation. We should remain highly sceptical.

Tucker Carlson told his viewers after the interview they’d have to be idiots to think Russia was expansionist, but he should probably be a lot slower to accept a former KGB agent’s sincerity. Russia has recently taken Transnistria from Moldova, South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, and now has invaded Ukraine to support the separatists of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic.

Like most conflicts, this all comes down to whether you think history lessons tell us much about who morally is entitled to what and why, or whether you think what really matters is what the majority of people living in any particular region want, today. The latter would appear to have more chance of bringing long-term peace, it would seem. Claims of control from faraway cities like Kiev or Moscow are rarely welcome in any battle for local autonomy. But Putin is trying to make both the historical and present moment arguments. As always, it’s not the rational performance that will carry most weight, but the human and emotional one. And on that front, Putin has chosen the right vehicle in Tucker Carlson to make his lengthy address to America. He has achieved his goal of seeming disarming and non-aggressive. And he has added weight to his own arguments, albeit through a considerably skewed and subjective interpretation of both history and more recent events. Carlson, on the other hand, has demonstrated that however good he might be as a storyteller and presenter, his long-form interview style is nowhere near challenging enough. While an interviewer will destroy an interview if they constantly interrupt and challenge every point (it’s often best to let the interviewee demonstrate their own foolishness by just staying silent) polite firm challenge is the hallmark of a good interview. And there was plenty for Carlson to challenge that he did not.

As former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in The Daily Mail, ‘He didn’t ask Putin why even now he is using the most brutal means of modern warfare to maim and murder innocent Ukrainian civilians. He didn’t take him to task for the torture, the rapes, the blowing up of kindergartens.’

Putin asserted in the interview that Johnson had gone to Ukraine in the Spring of 2022 and told Zelensky to fight on, scuttling a peace deal that Putin was ready to accept. Johnson described the suggestion as ludicrous.

‘As every member of the Ukranian government will confirm, from Zelensky down, nothing and no one could have stopped those lion-hearted Ukranians from fighting for their country – and nothing will.’

Describing Carlson’s performance as ‘bum-sucking servility to a tyrant’, Johnson wrote that, ‘…the Russian leader chose to invade a sovereign and independent European country – with no justification other than his arrogant desire to crush that country and rebuild the Soviet Union.’

He called on conservatives not to fall for Putin’s lies. ‘You are the heirs of Ronald Regan … you cannot make America great again by selling out Ukraine and allowing Putin to use violence to rebuild the Soviet empire … by investing only a fraction of the US Defence Budget you can help those valiant Ukrainians to turn the tide, put Putin back in his box, and help secure the Euro-Atlantic area for a generation without risking a single US soldier.’

It’s right for Americans and Europeans to be sceptical of the motives of their own leaders at this time. The tough-guy exuberance for a fight shown by the Biden administration, the Biden family’s own questionable connections to Ukraine, and the seeming unwillingness to seek a negotiated peace are all cause for concern. But Johnson is ultimately right. Conservatives must never make a hero of Vladimir Putin – a man who is every bit the murderous tyrant, communist dictator and centralised-state control freak – the very worst of the anti-freedom leftist elites against whom we battle daily.

And a master manipulator.

Damian Coory, a former broadcast journalist and corporate PR consultant, is host of The Other Side, a weekly classical liberal news-commentary review show on ADH.TV

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