In the spring of 2007, I interviewed Václav Havel on a bench in the garden of Prague’s Czernin Palace. The playwright and former Czech president discussed his shifting views on the war in Iraq, the role of art in unfree states, the dangers of political obsession and indifference — and his yearning, 11 years after he had quit smoking, for a cigarette.
We also spoke about the importance of truth, particularly in matters of international diplomacy. “I think we can talk to every ruler but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth,” Havel said. Turning to Vladimir Putin — or “Ras-Putin,” as he called him — he added: “With me, he gets more and more suspicious. We have to tell him plainly what we think of his behavior.”
Havel’s comment — which followed the murders of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the prominent critic Alexander Litvinenko but preceded Russia’s invasion of Georgia, its seizure of Crimea, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the poisoning, imprisoning and death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the massacre at Bucha and the obliteration of Mariupol — comes to mind after the single most shameful vote ever cast by the United States at the United Nations.
On Monday, for the third anniversary of Russia’s brutal lunge toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian government put forward a resolution in the General Assembly demanding Russia’s withdrawal of its forces and accountability for its war crimes as the basis of a “comprehensive, lasting and just peace.” Ninety-three countries supported the resolution; 65 abstained, including China. Among the 18 who opposed it were Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Equatorial Guinea and, vomitously, Israel and the United States.
Later, the United States won a wan 10-0 approval for a Security Council resolution (with five abstentions, including from Britain and France) that called for an end to the war without mentioning who started it. This is supposed to be a mark of realism, on the view that scolding Moscow for its sins will do nothing to advance a diplomatic end to the war.
On a broader level, it’s also meant as one in a series of moves to woo Putin back toward the West and away from his partnership (as the junior member) with China’s Xi Jinping — what foreign-policy pundits are calling a “Reverse Nixon,” in contrast to the 37th president’s efforts to detach China from the Soviet orbit.
But the effort is bound to fail, and not just because Moscow, with its no-limits friendship with China and a pliant administration in the United States, finds itself today in a very different strategic position than the one Beijing was in the early 1970s, when it had blown up its society in the Cultural Revolution while coming close to full-scale war with Russia.
Havel would have understood the deeper reasons.
In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel explained the ways in which communist regimes like the one in Czechoslovakia maintained control. It wasn’t simply, or even primarily, through the threat of force. Rather, it happened through the construction of a “panorama” of mutually reinforcing slogans that most people found relatively easy to go along with, even if, at some level, they knew they were based on outrageous distortions and obvious lies.
Putin spent the first part of his career as a low-level enforcer of that system. He’s spent 25 years in power perfecting it from the top, creating a world in which his dictatorship is “sovereign democracy,” political opposition is “terrorism,” the Jewish president of Ukraine is “a neo-Nazi” and the biggest war in Europe in 80 years is just a “special military operation,” undertaken as a defensive measure against an aggressive NATO.
At nearly every turn, he’s been able to get away with it, often with the reluctant acquiescence of Western leaders, from George W. Bush to Angela Merkel, who looked away from his misdeeds for the sake of diplomatic comity. But he’s never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump.
By participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn’t setting itself up as some sort of evenhanded broker to end the war. It is turning the United States into an accessory to Russia’s crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated. Unlike Nixon, who moved China toward our corner, at least for 30 years, Trump is moving America toward Russia’s corner, while betraying an ally and breaking the Atlantic alliance.
At this point, Tucker Carlson, Putin’s preferred poodle, may as well be secretary of state.
In his essay, Havel movingly described the ways in which tyrannies are brought down: when a handful of brave souls decide to “live within the truth,” which gives their “freedom a concrete significance.” Their early acts of truth-telling — like refusing to participate in sham elections or other regime fictions — will exact an initial price as the government amps up its means of repression. But over time the regime’s panorama of lies will gradually, then suddenly, fall apart. It’s exactly what happened just 11 years after Havel foresaw it, with the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall.
This administration, like its predecessor, had the opportunity, through an easy U.N. vote, to live within the truth when it came to Russia and its malevolence. Instead of working to deconstruct Putin’s panorama of lies, it opted to keep it in place, to reinforce it, to build on it. It’s a choice that will haunt, and shame, America for years.
