The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia and Political Warfare 1945-2020
By Tim Weiner
Henry Holt & Company, 2020
To play around with an old phrase, sometimes the greatness of the parts diminishes the whole. Tim Weiner’s “The Folly and the Glory,” which detailed the political warfare between Russia and the United States during and after the Cold War, was on many individual levels an excellent and deeply relevant accounting of the fight between the nations’ intelligence services to strengthen their governments’ geopolitical standing while weakening the other side. Taken as a whole, however, all its component parts made the reader lose sight of its most important message, the success Russia enjoyed in manipulating 21st Century American politics, so much that it may have put itself out of business.
“The Folly and the Glory” was many things: straight diplomatic history, mini-biographies (e.g. of Cold War icon George Kennan and CIA operations chief Frank Wisner), tales of failed, flawed (Mobutu) and even successful US covert actions. (The reviewer, then an innocuous junior analyst at the CIA, was tangentially involved in one of the latter, targeting early 1980s Poland.) On the Soviet/Russian side, Weiner told the story of its “active measures” disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Western democracies from within.
Weiner’s historian’s chops and journalistic prowess were on full display throughout, with sources throughout the diplomatic and intelligence community providing first hand accounts of key events. He also gave the reader important insights into the Russian point of view, focusing on how the physical and psychological impact of World Wars I and II informed their postwar and current outlook (even insight on the motivation for invading Ukraine).
All of this was great, if at times redundant from Weiner’s earlier works, most notably “Legacy of Ashes,” his 2007 takedown of the CIA. It’s hard to get excited about another retelling of the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. More importantly, Weiner’s focus on old, well known history distracted the reader from the book’s more salient modern topic, “Russia, Russia, Russia!” The reader would have been better served by Weiner using selected aspects of the book to provide historical context for how easy it’s been for Russia to get modern Americans to do its bidding.
The simplest way was with money, clandestine payments in exchange for information to celebrated Soviet spies Aldrich Ames, John Walker, Robert Hansen and Ronald Pelton and fees paid for services to political leeches like Paul Manafort and fallen patriots like Michael Flynn. Mitch McConnell did not have to be bought off; he stopped an investigation into Russian activities in the 2016 election because it might have looked bad for the Republican Party. Weiner also showed how they used social wedge issues to weaken Democrats who largely oppose neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin, hence the MAGA tee shirts saying “I’d Rather be Russian than a Democrat.” Perhaps in a postscript to a later edition, Weiner could explain that the Russians could probably do away with active measures against the US because the current president is doing it for them, sowing division in speeches and on Truth Social posts, both marinated in lies, labelling any opposition as deranged radical Marxism all while pcombining aspects of a centrally planned economy, Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution while basking to the chants of “USA, USA!”
“The Folly and the Glory” has a little bit of everything for everyone. For newcomers to the author and his subject matter, it’s a historical primer with a modern exclamation point. For those who wanted to see it a little more streamlined, it’s still a useful tale, perhaps providing the basis for a sequel covering 2020 onward.