Susan Glasser and Peter Baker: The New US Administration and Russia

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Join us for the fifth installment of our new speaker series "Russia: In Search of a New Paradigm — Conversations With Yevgenia Albats" to hear Susan Glasser (New Yorker) and Peter Baker (New York Times) speak with our eminent host about the new US administration and foreign policy towards Russia.

Few people in Washington understand the ins and outs of the White House decision-making process better than Susan Glasser, a columnist with the New Yorker, and Peter Baker, the Senior White House correspondent with the New York Times, who covered five US administrations.  Separately and together, they have been writing about Russia and Ukraine for two decades. They served four years in Moscow as co-bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin, culminating in a book titled Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution.

It seems this is the first presidential election in the US when the question, Who Lost Russia?, is no longer on the opponent's agendas. Putin, once the West's sweetheart, was pronounced as evil after the whole-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, whereas Russia turned into a pariah state on par with North Korea and Iran. However, it is a nuclear state with one of the most enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons on the face of the earth. Russia is also a close ally of China, and the latter is in fierce political and economic competition with the United States. What policy is the new US administration going to choose towards Russia? Will it be Reagan's "evil empire" style or Nixon's policy of Détente?

These are but some of the questions to be discussed in what promises to be an in-depth, informative conversation.

0:00 Yevgenia Albats: They know this city - your capital - in and out, and they really understand the way this capital works.
10:00 Susan Glasser: Trump and his inner circle have learned. The metaphor here is the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park film… have learned to open the door.
20:00 Peter Baker: [Trump’s] goal is to maximize these (first) two years, get as much done as you can, push the boundaries… and he won’t be constrained.
30:00 Peter Baker: The first thing to know about Europe with regard to the new Trump administration is that NATO is basically a dead letter.
40:00 Susan Glasser: I don’t rule out that that’s part of what he has in mind to bring Russia to the table here: a threat to do some things that the Biden administration has been reluctant to do.
50:00 Peter Baker: [Ukraine] Could use Trump as a way to excuse something that they otherwise would domestically have a hard time selling because they don't see another option - I could see that.
1:00:00 Yevgenia Albats: To what extent is there an understanding that you are dealing with a very specific type of regime; it’s not just Putin, but it’s this whole cohort of these KGB men who respect and force only?
1:10:00 Susan Glasser: Donald Trump has been a consistent admirer of Vladimir Putin, he has been a consistent skeptic of Ukraine, and more broadly, of NATO and of continued American military support to Europe.
1:20:00 Peter Baker: Societally, certainly the federal system… has constrained him to some extent from going further.
1:30:00 Susan Glasser: He has a mini obsession with nuclear weapons and with arms control dating back to the 1980s. He actually told Ronald Reagan that he would make a very good nuclear arms negotiator.
1:40:00 Peter Baker: We have a cyclical political system. In 1974 after Watergate, Democrats were high in the sky and Republicans thought they were done for a generation; six years later they were back in the White House.
1:50:00 Susan Glasser: There’s the human psychological tendency to always want to be an optimist… but it requires a willful suspension of disbelief to a certain extent about who this guy is and what his history is.