Can Ukraine—and America—Survive Donald Trump?

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The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.

Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?

Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.

Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in—not the entire left, but a really big part of it—on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered, as you know.

Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy. They’re not equivalent fantasies, certainly, but they’re nasty regimes in the Stalin case on a world-historical scale, and less so, but nasty, in Putin’s case. I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.

You’re right that in the thirties, there were people on the left who were pro-Soviet, pro-Stalinist. But you also know that a huge part of the left was anti-Stalinist.

O.K., that left that was pro-Stalinist was in my field until recently. They were the dominant trend in part of my field that I’ve been in for forty years. The right today also has people who are anti-Putin, I need to add.

Do you not share the view—and it’s my view—that if taken to its logical or worst extent, that the events in the White House last week could constitute a moral and strategic U-turn for the United States, which would be a disaster?

Presidents rarely turn a ship as big as the United States during a four-year term. Let’s remember the seventies, when Nixon was President and U.S. soft power was at a very low ebb, really in the toilet. We lost the Vietnam war. Nixon resigned over Watergate. The oil shock destroyed the Rust Belt. It was so bad that disco was popular. The seventies were really bad. And then what happened? America came back and had some of its best decades. So, it’s recuperable. Now, again, I’m not validating anything here, but Trump has revealed some truths about American power and America’s place in the world, and the European place in the world here, that are valuable truths. And he did it in his Trumpian fashion.

What are those truths?

So the truths are as follows: Zelensky is looking for security guarantees, which means that not just Ukrainians will die—that people from other countries, European countries especially, will die. The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war, and they’re fighting over whether they’re going to send any soldiers, even if there’s a peace deal, an armistice. Poland, which is Ukraine’s biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades. Trump, for all his Trumpy qualities, and we all know what they are—there’s no need to reiterate them, and I’m sure your magazine is full tilt in going after them—has nonetheless shown that it’s put up or shut up on the European side. And even though Putin couldn’t get the Europeans to get their act together, maybe Trump will.

Now, would I have done it Trump’s way? Do I appreciate that Trump is hurting American soft power? Yes, I get all of that, but I’m in the world that I’m in. I have the President that I have and I have the Europe that I have. And Europe just had a meeting where the principal public comment was that maybe they would get an armistice for a month, but it wouldn’t be an armistice on the battlefield. And nobody would send troops. I mean, what is this charade that we’re talking about? Trump exposed this. Now what are we going to do about it—first and foremost, as Europeans?

Now, that’s not to say that Trump is going to solve anything. It could well be that Trump’s actions produce the perverse and unintended consequences that we often see in politics. It could be that the situation worsens. But the situation was not going well. The Biden policy had dead-ended long before Biden left office. Something needed to be done. The trajectory we were on was failing. And let’s get on a trajectory that’s succeeding.

You’ve written and talked extensively about the dimensions and resiliency of American power since as early as 1880. When you hear people, including me, say that the encounter between Trump and Zelensky and the White House could really take us to a horrible place, do you think that’s alarmist?

Yes. I mean, you know American history. You know the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. You know that we had the Civil War. America has been berserk for as long as—Philip Roth: “the indigenous American berserk.” Now we have social media, and it’s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it’s encouraged because it’s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance—all of this is now how you make money, not just how you show your resentment and your outrage.

America is a place that—few people are willing to admit—is the most powerful country ever in recorded history across all dimensions: hard power, economic power, innovation power, energy superpower, soft power, alliance power. We could go on. There’s never been a power in world history on this level. The U.S. is five per cent of the global population and twenty-five per cent of global G.D.P. since 1880, more or less. That wasn’t caused by government—it wasn’t caused by Presidents. It can’t be suppressed and strangled by Presidents, no matter what they do, and they do a lot of things that I think are detrimental to American standing in the world.