There is no better vantage point to gauge Moscow’s perceptions of a potential Hillary Clinton administration. In practice, the institute is more like a hybrid of West Point and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service: MGIMO prepares the elite of Russia’s diplomatic corps and houses the country’s most influential think tanks. Better known by its native acronym, MGIMO, the institute is the crown jewel of Russia’s national-security brain trust, which Henry Kissinger dubbed the “ Harvard of Russia.” I have been hard-pressed to offer a more comforting explanation for Clinton’s behavior - a task that has fallen to me as the sole Western researcher at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Moscow State Institute of International Relations. To Russians, it appeared that Clinton was straining to fabricate a rationale for hostilities. Racist? Putin often touts Russia’s ethnic diversity. Intolerant? The president personally attended the opening of Moscow’s great mosque. Anti-woman? Putin’s government provides working mothers with three years of subsidized family leave. The nation Clinton described was unrecognizable to its citizens. To Russian ears, Clinton seemed determined in her speech to provide this missing ingredient for bipolar enmity, painting Moscow as the vanguard for racism, intolerance, and misogyny around the globe. That’s because, while there may be differences over, say, the fate of Donetsk, there is no longer a fundamental ideological struggle dividing East and West.
It injected an element of personal animus into an already strained relationship - but, more importantly, it set up Putin as the representative of an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the United States.Įven as relations between Russia and the West have sunk to new lows in the wake of 2014’s revolution in Ukraine, the Kremlin has long contended that a Cold War II is impossible. In Moscow, this was seen as a reprise of Clinton’s comments comparing Putin to Hitler. Worse, they were words originally directed at neo-Nazis. Two years earlier, in the most famous address of his career, Putin accused the West of backing an armed seizure of power in Ukraine by “extremists, nationalists, and right-wingers.” Clinton had not merely insulted Russia’s president: She had done so in his own words. To Kremlin-watchers, those were not random epithets. In a speech last month nominally about Donald Trump, Clinton called Russian President Vladimir Putin the godfather of right-wing, extreme nationalism. 25 as the day she began the Second Cold War. If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the world will remember Aug.
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