How to stop this Russian semi-clandestine political juggernaut? Here looking back to 1947 helps. As the Cold War dawned, President Harry Truman eventually accepted that American power had to be used to prevent a Kremlin takeover of Western Europe. Thus was NATO born and American troops returned to Europe to prevent a Soviet invasion. Military power still matters, and the limited efforts made by the Obama administration to bolster deterrence in Europe may not be sufficient.
Yet it’s the political aspect that’s most intriguing. In the late 1940s, to prevent friends of the Kremlin from taking over via the ballot box, especially in key countries like Italy and France, Truman unleashed American intelligence to secretly support anti-Soviet parties of the democratic left. Aid, in cash and kind, was provided to European socialists to undercut the appeal of Communism by offering a robust reform program inside the democratic, Western system. This worked astonishingly well, and throughout the Cold War, the CIA and others quietly backed the European democratic left, politically undercutting the appeal of Moscow’s stooges.
The same must be done today. We must learn to work with moderate nationalists and anti-globalists, who are rising politically across the West. Stop denouncing them as racists and xenophobes, listen to their legitimate concerns, and start cooperating with the reasonable ones against Moscow. Seventy years ago, Washington successfully forged a quiet alliance with the moderate left to fight the Kremlin, and today we must do the same with the West’s moderate right. If we refuse to do so, they will gravitate to the only force which welcomes them, and his name is Vladimir Putin.
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