Stephen KotkinStephen Kotkin is a preeminent historian of Russia, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the author of an acclaimed three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. (The third volume is forthcoming.) Kotkin has also written extensively and insightfully on geopolitics, the sources of American power, and the twists and turns of the Trump era. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with Kotkin on Wednesday, November 6, in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election.
You’ve written a number of times for Foreign Affairs about the war in Ukraine and what it means for the world and for American foreign policy. So let’s start with an obvious question. It’s impossible to know, of course, but what do you imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin is thinking right now, with Donald Trump poised to return to the White House for a second term?
I wish I knew. These opaque regimes in Moscow and Beijing don’t want us to know what they think. What we do know from their actions as well as their frequent public pronouncements is that they came to the view that America was in irreversible decline. We had the Iraq War and the shocking incompetence of the follow-up, where Washington lost the peace. And we lost the peace in Afghanistan. We had the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. We had a lot of episodes that reinforced their view that we were in decline. They were only too happy to latch onto examples of their view that the United States and the collective West, as they call it, is in decline and, therefore, their day is going to come. They are the future; we are the past.
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