Vladimir Putin is far from a saint. No Russian leader can really be one and rule for long. (The principled democratic socialist Alexander Kerensky lasted just a few months in 1917.) The political history of Russia is tragic for complex historical reasons. If you want to understand that great but troubled country, undertake some extensive reading. A short list would include:
Richard Pipes’ magisterial Russia Under the Old Regime,
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs,
Dominic Lieven’s The End of Tsarist Russia, and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant series of historical novels, The Red Wheel.
You need not delve into Russia’s history to ask yourself: Does it really serve America or the West to cast Russia as our permanent enemy, as Senate anti-Russia hawks John McCain and Lindsey Graham insist to the point of obsession?
Don’t forget that these two pro-immigration globalists were among the leading champions of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. If they’d had their way in Syria, U.S. planes would have been risking dogfights with Russian jets, all to help al Qaeda’s Islamist allies conquer the country and repress a million Christian Syrians. The “moderate Syrian rebels” were merely a fig leaf, with no more presence or power than Iraqi “moderates” and “democrats” had in 2003. Remember neocon savior Ahmed Chalabi? Iraqis don’t.
Who Threatens Our Vital Interests in Europe More: Putin or Merkel?
What vital interests of ours does Russia threaten? Yes, it invaded Crimea, to take back disputed territory full of Russian speakers that was only transferred to Ukraine in the 1950s. Russia has violated the sovereignty of Ukraine, which was part of Russia since before the U.S. annexed Texas. As I said back in 1992, Ukraine should have secured its independence permanently by holding on to the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviets. But Bill Clinton convinced Kiev to trade those vital safeguards for a piece of American paper. As sympathetic as we should be to the people of Ukraine, who suffered their own Holocaust at the hands of the Soviet government in the 1930s terror famine, the battle over the border between Ukraine and Russia is none of America’s business.
Those who’d make it our business are busybodies, globalist utopians who dream of imposing their own ideological solutions on other countries — meddling in elections from Israel to Armenia, provoking resentment against America all around the world, then huffing and puffing with outrage because Russia may have helped leak authentic, damning emails about Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Just how long do they think that the U.S. can pretend it knows how to manage and police the entire world, before we suffer some push back? We don’t even know if Russia was trying to swing the election from Clinton — who looked unbeatable to most Americans in the know — or simply to weaken and humiliate her before she got into office. Putin may get more than he bargained for: a president who is much tougher, more nationalistic, and free of financial and personal ties to the Saudis, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
What Russia Wants
Russia craves excessive influence over the Baltic states, which rightly won their independence in the 90s, but which we brought into NATO, taking advantage of Russia’s post-Communist chaos to create a tripwire for possible nuclear war right on its doorstep. Step back for a moment, and put yourself in Russia’s shoes. Imagine if during the Civil War, while we fought for our survival, Great Britain had recruited Mexico as its military ally, even stationing troops and ships there. When we got back on our feet, we would have rightly resented that. I don’t think that President U.S. Grant would have let that stand for long.
Russia violates human rights, and Putin persecutes his critics, it’s true. But how sincere are critics of Russia on these subjects who breeze past far worse offenses in countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and Turkey? When McCain and Graham start demanding that the Saudis stop torturing rape victims, that China stop forcing women to have abortions, and that Turkey release hundreds of dissident journalists from prison, then and only then should we listen to their complaints about Vladimir Putin. (To Marco Rubio’s credit, in his Senate grilling of Trump nominee Rex Tillerson, he did survey Saudi abuses.)
The EU Wants to Silence Its Patriotic Critics
What Putin really threatens is not so much NATO as the EU — because he funnels money to patriotic parties across the Continent that oppose the oligarchs in Brussels, who are stealing sovereignty from voters, trying to impose legal abortion and gay marriage on Catholic countries from Poland to Ireland, and encouraging the mass colonization of Europe by Jew-hating Islamists of military age whom Turkey ships across the porous southern EU border.
The real threat to the West comes not from the economically stalled, oil-dependent Russia, with its shrinking demography and limited regional ambitions. The EU itself is the greatest danger to our allies in Europe, and hence to America. Its reckless embrace of a single currency, its destruction of internal borders, its suicidal acceptance of limitless Muslim refugees — these are acts of sabotage that Putin’s secret service could never dream of pulling off. The EU has gravely weakened major NATO countries such as France, Germany, and Britain — filling them with potential terrorists and endangering their banking systems. Smaller, poorer EU countries like Greece and Italy suffer the twin assaults of German austerity measures, and Angela Merkel’s delusional refugee policies.
The only hope for those Western nations is that their patriotic parties succeed in wresting power from sterile, aging elites, and restoring in each a healthy regard for its national interests — as Britain began to display with its embrace of Brexit, and the U.S. did by electing Donald Trump. If those parties do succeed, they won’t be Putin’s puppets, any more than Trump will be. But they will see as he sees that we have far graver threats facing us than border conflicts on the Dnieper.
We face a mass colonization of the cradle of Western civilization by millions of real or potential religious fanatics, tied to Saudi fundamentalism by a thousand financial strings. The polity responsible for imposing that threat on the West is the Soviet European Union, and its thousands of unelected apparatchiks. When that monstrosity collapses, there won’t be a Berlin Wall we can dismantle, but perhaps patriotic Westerners can converge on its headquarters in Brussels with sledgehammers and pickaxes, in the spirit of 1989. (Read more from “Who’s the Real Threat to the West: Putin or the EU?” HERE)
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