Don't Be Duped

President Putin and Americans' false rationalizations

On June 12, 2025, President Trump said that he was confused because “President Putin lost 51 million people [in World War II], and he did fight. Russia fought. Sort of interesting, isn’t it? He fought with us in World War II and everybody hates him. And Germany and Japan, they’re fine.” He said “Someday, somebody will explain that to me…”

But when I served as his national security advisor in his first administration, I did explain to him that the idea that the Kremlin is a natural friend today because Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was our ally in World War II is a false rationalization based on misunderstanding of history. Consider this from Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World:

While some speculated that President Trump sometimes appeared to be an apologist for Russia and Mr. Putin because the Kremlin was extorting him with damaging evidence of business improprieties or embarrassing personal conduct, Trump’s over-optimism about improving Russian relations fit a pattern of optimism bias and wishful thinking across two previous administrations. And the unreciprocated efforts to improve relations with Putin left U.S. presidents vulnerable to the KGB case officer’s subterfuge. At the 2018 press conference in Helsinki, when asked directly by a reporter if he had “compromising material” on President Trump, Putin did not give a direct answer. He responded, “Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this, when President Trump was in Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect, but back then when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow. . . . Do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it’s difficult to imagine utter nonsense on a bigger scale than this. Please disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.” Putin was never going to be Donald Trump’s friend. He used the Helsinki summit to undermine the U.S. president and keep alive speculation about the slanderous contents of the Steele dossier.

The basis for Trump’s persistent optimism bias, even as Putin undermined him publicly, had an added dimension. For some of the self-proclaimed strategists around President Trump, the pursuit of improved U.S.-Russian relations despite continued Russian aggression was based mainly on two rationalizations: first, a misunderstanding of history and an associated nostalgia for the alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II; and second, a peculiar sense of kinship with and affinity for Russian nationalists. This latter rationalization is based on a perceived commonality of interest in confronting Islamist terrorism and protecting what these Trump strategists regarded as wholesome and predominantly Western, Caucasian, and Christian cultures from dilution through multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious immigration. In a July 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News, President Trump said that the characterization of Russia as an adversary was “incredible” because of the country’s tremendous sacrifices during World War II. “Russia lost 50 million people and helped us win the war,” President Trump said. Some Americans and Europeans view Russia as the repository of a purer version of Christianity and, under Putin, a bastion of conservatism that is protecting Western civilization from postmodern ideas that are anathema to some conservatives.

But both rationalizations are fundamentally flawed. The alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II was an “alliance of necessity.” In the midst of that war, Russia had initially tried to stay out of the conflict by signing the cynical Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in the brutal dismemberment of Poland and the inevitable annexation by the Soviet Union of the three Baltic states. It was only when Nazi Germany turned on its accomplices that the Soviets found themselves unexpectedly fighting on the side of the Western Allies and (after the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 1941) the United States. It was an alliance that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had tried his best to avoid; he had been hostile to the governments and people of the West. The only factor that held the unlikely allies together was Adolf Hitler. And while it is true that the Soviet Union bore the largest sacrifice of fighting in terms of lives lost, once the war ended, the alliance of necessity dissolved and gave way to a cold war between the two powers.

Despite the U.S. desire to regard Russia as an erstwhile ally grateful for American bloodshed for a common cause and the $11.3 billion in U.S. assistance under the Lend-Lease policy, Russia’s memory of the alliance in World War II does not evoke warm feelings among Kremlin leaders. Some Russians view U.S. and U.K. delays in opening a second front in France as an intentional effort to allow the Soviets and the Germans to bleed each other to death on the Eastern Front. And they believe their exclusion from the joint American-British effort to build an atomic bomb was part of a plan to dominate the Soviet Union and the postwar world. If the prospect of improved relations with Putin relied on a natural confluence of interests with respect to Europe or to Russian nostalgia for the World War II alliance against Nazi Germany, that prospect was dim.

Ignorance of history combined with bigotry to generate another source of delusional thinking about Putin’s Russia. Some Americans were easy targets for Russian disinformation because they felt a kinship with and a cultural affinity for Russia as a defender of social conservatism and Christianity. That basis for optimism about improved relations with the Kremlin was not confined to the United States; it was even more prevalent in parts of Europe. For example, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban expressed alignment with Russia, declaring that Hungary would be “breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West” in order to build a “new Hungarian state.” Some saw Putin as a modern-day crusader who was protecting Christianity from Islamist terrorists after U.S. interventions in the Middle East made the world less secure. The Russian Orthodox Church, which acts as an arm of the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services, praised Putin’s intervention in Syria as part of the “fight with terrorism” and a “holy battle.” Russia actively cultivates these feelings of racial and religious kinship to further polarize and weaken Western resolve to confront the Kremlin’s aggression.

For more on the the history of the United States and the Kremlin’s aggression, see Battlegrounds pages 21-84.

See also perspective from former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan in the Battlegrounds podcast, Russia’s War on Ukraine: View from Moscow (originally published July 2023).