How the late Roy Cohn can help Trump handle Putin to end the war in Ukraine

Roy Cohn, the audacious New York lawyer who mentored Donald Trump as a young businessman, can guide now-President Trump in dealing with Vladimir Putin. Even though he has been dead for almost forty years.

Understanding Cohn is a roadmap to understanding Putin.

Early in his career, Cohn became a national figure as an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy to unmask Communist agents in the federal government. In law and politics, the intense attorney and prosecutor earned a reputation for brashness, ruthlessness, and a focused attention to destroy his opponents. Image, influence, and power were his currencies.

For all his outer self-assuredness, Cohn suffered from an inner torment. All his adult life, he lived as a closeted gay man. Even though he brought his male companions into his public social life, he publicly denied his sexual orientation. He denied he had AIDS as the disease visibly wasted the life from him, right up to when he died in 1986.

So how does this relate to Putin? Mainstream Russia analysts dismiss the very premise as a ridiculous or irrelevant heresy. Even among those who privately find the evidence persuasive remain publicly silent for fear of ostracism.

The prevailing academic culture of the past generation forbade a full assessment of Putin the man. Those who have read CIA psychological profiles of the Russian leader tell us that American intelligence has failed to address key traits that a president must know.

The profiles, synthesized within the confines of politically correct rainbow blinders, fail to say this: Putin shows 20 of 21 common behavioral traits of repressed homosexual men. Roy Cohn shared those same traits.

Trump can recall Cohn’s traits in dealing with Putin.

Self-repression of one’s inner being can cause one to overcompensate. That overcompensation can shape a contrary public image. It can also propel one to enormous success.

The Beltway establishment sees the Kremlin chief acting with strategic purpose to rewire the world order, challenge NATO, and rebuild the old Russian empire as a latter-day Peter the Great. Indeed, Putin shows those goals and has worked to achieve them.

By thinking back on Cohn, Trump might find that Putin’s latest war in Ukraine might not be orchestrated under some grand strategic plan. It just might be the product of Putin’s own human frailties, frailties that the progressive West can never acknowledge because of its own ideological blinders.

This has been unfortunate for Russia, for Ukraine, and for us. In war and diplomacy, as in all human relations, human psychology can be a greater motivator than calculated strategy. Everybody has weaknesses. Putin’s weaknesses are ripe with neuroses and phobias.

Trump has skillfully exploited such psychological conditions in business, entertainment, and politics. He has employed it in statesmanship, from Kim Jong-un to Governor Justin Trudeau.

Trump can expand his upper hand in talking to Putin. Putin isn’t about Russia. Putin has no political institution, family dynasty, or other governing system to preserve and pass along. He has not named or groomed a successor. His regime is all about himself.

Here is what makes Putin tick and why the late Roy Cohn is important again.In our psychopolitical profile of Putin, circulated almost samizdat style for years and published in 2021, we found that Putin displays 20 of 21 most common observable symptoms and neuroses that Austrian psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, who studied under Sigmund Freud, discovered among closeted and tormented homosexual men.

Across thirty years of in-depth study of the KGB and its successors, including among those who grew up with Putin in Leningrad, or worked with him in the KGB, we collected some extraordinary biographical insights.

Multiple witnesses separately told us that as a young man, Putin led a hidden life in a Leningrad street gang that raped boys perceived as weak and “effeminate.” FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who defected to the UK and was assassinated in 2006 after alleging Putin’s homosexual life, verified these reports. He added lurid details of pedophilia that he said Putin had purged from his old KGB file.

As a young man, Putin aspired to join the KGB. He studied German, English, and law to become a foreign intelligence officer. However, his past, once discovered in the deep background check while Putin trained at the Yuri V. Andropov KGB Higher School, made him ineligible to become the foreign intelligence officer he had aspired to be. His past made him vulnerable to blackmail if stationed abroad. But it made him ideal as an enforcer.

The KGB put him in a counterintelligence unit instead. He was never a “spymaster” as so many claim. He received only one assignment outside the USSR, but even that was inside the Soviet empire. It wasn’t to spy against the West. It was merely to supervise a municipal Stasi political police force in East Germany. His KGB comrades nicknamed him “Stasi.”

In an age of DEI, our study of Putin was unacceptable. Some of the most ardent supporters of aiding Ukraine, even those in the psychological or psychiatric disciplines, agreed with our conclusions in private. But they would never risk the ostracism for breaking the groupthink of their peers.

So why does it matter?

Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 appears to have been driven by an urge from his inner torments that, once set in motion, required public justification. His reasons for the invasion and its goals became varied and contradictory, even outlandish, from a need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine to Putin’s simple craving for, in his words, “action” after being “bored” and craving “a brouhaha.”

Psychoanalysis from pre-politically correct times would have recognized, or at least considered, the drivers of the Russian dictator’s invasion. Bergler dedicated his entire career to treating closeted gay men. He studied more than a thousand of them. He wrote important studies of their inevitable pathologies. These included internalized homophobia, ceaseless provocations of others, paranoia, injustice-collecting, and predatory behavior.

The patients’ common denominator was masochism. Roy Cohn. Vladimir Putin.

“The psychic masochist’s life is studded with invisible-to-others slights, with injustices contrived out of thin air, with apparently harmless situations which to him convey an unmistakable call to arms,” Bergler wrote in 1959.

“The homosexual’s bitterness and malice, for which internal reasons exist, is constantly shifted to external difficulties,” Bergler found. “The indignation of some of these trapped homosexuals – trapped by themselves – is sometimes tragicomic. Equally tragicomic is the excuses they give.”

This “pleasure in displeasure” is from Freud’s “pleasure principle,” a linkage of the superego’s role in punishing the ego. The superego can become so punitive that the ego finds pleasure in self-punishment. Bergler used this often to describe the basic dilemma in attempting to reason with closeted gay men even when they voluntarily sought him out for therapy.

Many of Bergler’s patients would defend their masochistic relations with abusive men by claiming, “He mistreats me because he loves me.” The psychoanalyst found a tendency among closeted gay men to provoke for the sake of receiving punishment.

This is pure Putin. If he receives insufficient punishment, or if the punishment ceases, he will resume provoking.

Putin shares the masochism of Bergler’s patients. During his preparation of the Ukraine invasion, he left $218 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves in Brussels, home of NATO headquarters. The EU froze the reserve and later sent proceeds of the interest to Ukraine. When his war dragged into its second year, Putin recast the invasion as a fight against NATO, and later, against the entire Western world – western civilization, even – because of what he called their historical injustices.

Putin’s thematic incoherence belied his lack of real strategy.

Precise punishment matters. Bergler found among the thousand men he studied that the means of punishment, and the worthiness of their punishers to mete out the discipline and humiliation, are of great importance.

He concluded that homosexual men in public denial “are subservient when confronted with a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person. The only language their unconscious understands is brute force.”

Such men, in Bergler’s findings, seek a “stronger person,” a superior powerful man from whom they can receive attention. Trump, as that archetypical stronger person, is ideally suited to handle Putin.

Putin wants Trump’s attention. He has received it again. The two have agreed to meet in one another’s country to deal with the fate of Ukraine.

Trump has the upper hand. His acceptance of Putin as a peer might not be enough.

Putin might choose to keep provoking the American president for the sake of receiving a worthy spanking. Trump might keep this in mind, along with Roy Cohn, when practicing the art of the deal.

Fredo Arias-King is a member of the Center for Security Policy board of directors. He is founder of the peer-reviewed Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, now in its 33^rd year. He is a former member of the board of advisors of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

J. Michael Waller is Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy.