Twin Brothers: Why Trump and Putin Reinforce Each Other Without a Pact
There is a story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full. ...