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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It’s easy to see why Vladimir Putin has emerged as the lodestar of certain elements of the political right across the West. Russia’s president poses as the champion of nationalism vs. rampant transnationalism, of Christianity vs. secularism, and of European identity in general.

These are battles that set conservatives’ teeth on edge. The political left in the West has for decades been relentless in its support for global governance, for limiting Christianity’s moral imprint on policymaking, and for stigmatizing the West in general.

But conservatives can certainly find a better champion for these causes than the former KGB agent who publicly pines for the supranational Soviet Union, presides over a society replete with social ills, and does not miss an opportunity to promote Russia not as a Western power but as an Asian one.

It is an astonishing trifecta that Putin has worked very hard to accomplish.

On transnationalism, for example, Putin has posed as an enthusiastic supporter of the United Kingdom leaving that most dysfunctional of supranational organizations, the European Union. “No one likes to feed and subsidize weaker countries and be a caretaker all the time,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying.

On Christianity, when Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Orthodox Church pleaded with Putin to become the defender of the Christian faith around the world, Putin reassured him that “you needn’t have any doubt that that’s the way it will be,” according to Russia’s Interfax.

With religion, Putin is relying on more than his own propaganda. Since the 1500s, Russia has put forward the vague notion that it is the “Third Rome”—the rightful successor to Rome and Byzantium as the center of Christianity. The claim was supposedly first made by the monk Filofei of the Pskov-Eliazarov monastery in two epistles which, unsurprisingly for Russia, have gone missing.

Fast forward five centuries, and Putin’s vow to Hilarion was enthusiastically endorsed by Washington evangelical outlet Christian Post, which explained that “Putin has long been a supporter of Christianity and Christian values within Russia.”

When visiting Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban this year, Putin praised his anti-immigrant positions by stating that what Orban was doing was “to defend European identity.” That, he said according to a translation by RT, “is likable to us.”

Small wonder perhaps that Europe’s right-wing leaders are smitten with Putin, seeing in him the leader who will defend Europe from the spiritual decadence they accuse the United States of spreading. The leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front, Marine Le Pen, recently said of Putin that “we are defending common values … the Christian heritage of European civilization.”

Even Putin’s main protégé in the Mideast, the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, says piously that “Vladimir Putin is the sole defender of Christian civilization one can rely on.”

At home, Putin uses this international support to show his conservative bona fides. “We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilization in every nation for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life, not just material existence but also spirituality,” he told the federal assembly in 2013. “Of course, this is a conservative position.”

When it suits him.

As the Tory policy adviser Peter Franklin puts it, “If Putin wants to be seen as a defender of ‘traditional values’ and ‘spirituality,’ then why the diplomatic coziness with the likes of China, Cuba, and North Korea? There’s nothing spiritual about a communist dictatorship.” Or the butcher Assad, for that matter.

“The whole thing is a joke,” said David Kramer, a Russian expert who served as former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “The only thing that matters to Putin is staying in power.”

Putin in fact seems more of the school of Kremlin leaders who feel more the gravitational pull of the other half of Russia’s identity—the Asian part, like Joe Stalin telling a Japanese diplomat once, “Russia is an Asiatic country, and I am myself an Asiatic.”

Thus Putin has pursued a “Eurasian Union” that brings together European former Soviet republics such as Belarus and Armenia with non-European ones such as Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. It’s been envisioned as a customs union, but Putin has more grandiose plans. “We suggest a powerful supranational association capable of becoming one of the poles in the modern world,” he wrote in 2011.

The union has foundered, but that has only made Putin reach further east. Last month he actually proposed to Beijing to expand the Eurasian Union by including China, India, Iran, and Pakistan.

Even the Putin-controlled RBTH observed five years ago that “he seems more comfortable at Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS meetings than he is at the G8. ‘The West treats us like we just came down from the trees,’ Putin once remarked.”

At home, Putin presides over a nation that is hardly puritanical. Russia has the world’s highest divorce rate, the highest rate of injecting drug users, and one of the highest rates of alcoholism in Europe, while abortions last year reached almost a million. Unsurprisingly, Russia population has declined under Putin.

Observers point out that the support Putin receives from some quarters may have less to do with policy than with the fact he finances many of these parties. In France, Le Pen’s Front National has received at least 40 million euros from Russian-controlled banks. According to a paper, far-right parties from Hungary to Bulgaria to Austria all receive funding from Putin-controlled entities.

Equally, it comes in handy that Russian disinformation campaigns have succeeded in spreading Moscow’s propaganda throughout the West, through such outlets as RT. (For more from the author of “How Putin Hoodwinked the Political Right” please click HERE)

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