With all of the talk today about the effect of the election on Russia and its war in Ukraine, and about the relationships between not only Trump and Putin, but the relationship between Putin and Tulsi Gabbard, I thought something I happened upon yesterday was interesting. These are the opening lines of Marvin Kalb’s book, The Nixon Memo.

“On March 10, 1992, Super Tuesday in the presidential primary calendar, and most extraordinary story appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The headline caught my attention: ” Nixon scoffs at the Level of Support for Russian Democracy by Bush”. The lead of the story, written by Tom Friedman, then the paper’s diplomatic correspondent, was equally dramatic. “Nixon has sharply criticized President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d for what he calls the Administration’s pathetic support of the democratic revolution in Russia. He says one of the historic opportunities of this century is being missed.” According to Friedman, these views were contained in a memo that Nixon wrote and circulated to a limited number of officials and journalists. There was no doubt Friedman had seen the memo.

The Times quoted the Nixon memo as saying: “While the candidates have addressed scores of significant issues in the presidential campaign, the most important issue since the end of World War II – the fate of the political and economic reforms in Russia – has been virtually ignored.” Nidismissed Western efforts to help Russia as “penny ante” and warned that if Boris Yeltsin and the emerging “democracy” in Russia collapsed, “we can kiss the peace dividend good-bye”.

We now know that Russia is in the hands of Vladimir Putin, a former Communist, former KGB operative, and current strongman. Could we have done something to prevent that? I think that would have been very difficult. After all, how did Putin get into power? He achieved his position because he was the designated choice of Boris Yeltsin himself. It is very unlikely (read: impossible) to believe that Yeltsin thought that the Putin of the 1990s would turn into the Putin of the 2020s; in the early 1990s, Putin did not appear as a future strongman. Perhaps we could have helped Russia by providing options in the transformation of the country into capitalism, but it would have been difficult. The big problem, as I see it, was the manner in which the common elements (talking in condominium language) of the Soviet Union were converted into private property. The method used was to sell some assets to favored future-oligarchs at bargain basement prices, to give all Russian citizens, even the most lowly, chits giving them a piece of the common property but, at the same time, giving them every reason to sell those chits at highly discounted prices to future-oligarchs, and then set up a political system that allowed the oligarchs (now, no longer future-oligarchs) to finance politicians in return for favors and, finally, to allow the politicians to become so powerful that they no longer had to rely on the oligarchs, and in fact could control and manipulate the oligarchs. (There you have it: my 60 second course on the history of Russia from 1990 to the present.)

Are there parallels in our country? We have elected, for the second time, a billionaire, who seems to be powerful enough to control everyone around him. Everyone, that is, except for the richest man in the world, who has become the billionaire’s best friend and boon companion, and who obviously must think that he himself is so strong that the billionaire president will favor him when it comes to government contracts and that in fact, before you know it, the richest man in the world will control the billionaire president the way the oligarchs used to control Putin.

In Russia, Putin outsmarted the oligarchs. He did that by weaponizing the government, including the judicial branch of the Russian government (never an independent branch like ours has always been), against the oligarchs. And he did this out of the personal ambition of a man in his 50s. Can Trump do the same to Musk? Musk is betting that he can’t, that Musk is too powerful, that he is in a league of his own (which means that Trump can’t play one oligarch off against another), and that because Trump is pushing 80, he will not be able to carry on the fight. And I assume Musk thinks that, after Trump leaves the scene, Musk can bully his way around the next president (Vance or someone else) because Muskworld at that time will become so crucial to so many governmental activities that fighting Musk will be all but impossible.

With all his faults, Richard Nixon was a very astute individual, and his post-presidency advice tended to be on point. What would he think of today? I think he would be one of the RINOs, who continues to call himself a Republican, but who be railing against the dangers of Trump II, and who would take seriously the many arguments that can be raised alleging that the Trump playbook could lead to the demise of democracy in this country as we have known it, just as he feared that, without intervention, the nascent Russian democracy under Yeltsin would fail.

And, to top it off, it appears that we may start supporting not Russian democracy,  but rather the autocratic Russian government anout which Richard Nixon was so concerned.