"Whoever Comes After Putin Could Be Worse Than Putin"

David McCloskey dismisses comparisons to John Le Carré as exaggerated, yet he has earned the right to be considered one of the great contemporary espionage novelists. A former CIA analyst in the Middle East, his debut book, 'Damascus Station', dissected the cracks that would eventually lead to the downfall of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. In his new work, 'Moscow X' (Salamandra), McCloskey travels to Putin's Russia to explore the internal conflicts among oligarchs and politicians, and the role of Western intelligence services, against the backdrop of the Ukraine war.

"Neither side has achieved what it sought. The Russians wanted to install a puppet government in Kyiv, and Ukraine wanted to maintain its independence and territorial integrity," explains McCloskey. However, he believes that "time is on Russia's side." "It is very likely they will try again because they have different ways to achieve their goals. Consider their relationship with the United States. In a year or two, Trump might decide to abandon the Ukrainians, or the European Union might change its stance on Ukraine," says the former spy, warning Europe that Putin is a real threat: "If I lived in the Baltic republics or Poland, I would be very concerned." "Since the Romanov times," the author adds, "Russia believes it always needs more territory, and that hasn't changed."

As a premonition, 'Damascus Station' anticipated the end of Al-Assad, but a potential collapse of Putin's Russia would not, in itself, be good news for the West. "If you look at what might come after Putin, it could be worse than Putin himself," says McCloskey, citing a name, Nikolai Patrushev, the current right-hand man of the Russian president, as a possible successor.

"He has helped Putin consolidate the regime, has benefited economically from it, and shares Putin's idea that Russia should once again be a great nation," explains McCloskey, providing a key to understanding why, in his opinion, "there is currently no democratic prospect for Russia." "There is a common sentiment that the democratic experiment of the 1990s, which turned the country into chaos and a failed state, was something humiliating that should not be repeated." "But it is also true that nothing is completely predictable because the fall of Al-Assad also seemed unpredictable," he asserts.

Residing in Texas, McCloskey believes that with Trump, "we have reached the end of the era when the United States was the guarantor of Europe's security," a consequence, in his view, "of the failure of American foreign policy in recent decades." "Iraq and Afghanistan are examples that we do not have a good recent history abroad, and that has made us, as a country, want to look more inward now."

But how does one explain the electoral success and support of at least half of Americans for Trump? "The first thing to say is that Trump is not crazy. Appearing eccentric is part of his strategy. People enjoy his willingness to say things they wouldn't dare to say. Let's say it's part of his charm," responds McCloskey, who describes the work of a CIA agent as that of "a clandestine journalist." "Most of a spy's work is to explain what is happening in a certain part of the world through their sources, which can be intercepted calls or people. The view of the CIA as an illegal organization that changes governments belongs to the Cold War, but not to the current world."

In McCloskey's novels, there is a kind of personal hallmark, which is to delve into the crevices of authoritarian regimes and unravel the contradictions of their elites, who enjoy the benefits of 'Westernized' lives while keeping their compatriots in misery. "These types of political systems have something in common: to maintain power, autocrats must surround themselves with a radial system where some compete with others to always try to be close to power. Al-Assad had four different security agencies, Putin the same. The head of the Wagner group attempted a kind of mutiny, and we know how that ended," highlights McCloskey, who already has a new novel in American bookstores, 'The Seventh Floor'.