A Primrose Path Paved with Putin Flattery
You don't need to be a NeoCon collecting pieces of John Bolton's mustache to recognize what Putin is
It’s not impossible to dislike Joe Biden and despise Vladimir Putin at the same time. In fact, this is or ought to be the default conservative position as we witness the horrors the Russian strongman is unleashing on Ukraine while Biden makes Jimmy Carter look like a successful president.
Putin can blame “neo Nazis” and “drug addicts” all day but the fact is, he has instigated the troubles in Ukraine’s east that he is using as a pretext for unprovoked war on a people who have enjoyed more and more freedom since the Soviet Union’s collapse. His “little green men” troops instigate instability in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine looks to the free west both because we represent genuine human rights (unlike Russia) and because they remember what Russians have done to Ukraine over the centuries. They know about Stalin’s Holodomor. They know Russia as a giant bootheel poised to crush their freedoms and lives.
Putin started this war, which he had been planning to do since at least 2013 according to Russia experts. This is simply a fact. Anything Putin says now is an excuse or a lie, or both.
You don't need to be a NeoCon collecting pieces of John Bolton's mustache to recognize what Putin is.
We can debate why he struck now, and I believe the evidence supports the position that Putin invaded now because Joe Biden has spent his first year in office being weak and weakening the United States. He reduced America from energy independence to dependence by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing oil and gas leases on federal land. Then when gas prices spiked Biden went, hat in hand, to OPEC and Russia begging them to pump more oil. Biden has insulted American history and sent the military off on divisive witch hunts for “extremists” while both Russia and China rise to challenge the US. Biden is keeping the federal government’s and woke capital’s boot on the neck of US energy producers. All of that is true and it has weakened America.
The Kremlin watched Biden's Reno 9-11 style evacuation of Afghanistan.
Putin saw this, and he decided now is the time, the US will never be weaker in his lifetime than it is right now, and he invaded Ukraine without justification.
He has no justice in mind, no purge of actual threats. Vladimir Putin is an old Soviet hand from the worst old days when the KGB was a genuine international threat. The Soviet Union may be gone, for now at least, but it never died in Putin’s mind. Screaming “America First!” on repeat doesn't make that fact untrue. Experts on the Russian dictator concur that, first, he’s a ruthless and brutal thug who heads a mafia-style government. From a western and especially from a conservative point of view, Putin truly has no redeeming qualities. Sure, every once in a while he’ll call out the woke, but that’s a psyop, not what he really thinks. He’s just trying to design appeals to divide an already divided America and create confusion.
The truth about Putin is he is still a communist, he’s also a Russian nationalist, and he wants to resurrect Russia’s old empires in whatever guise he can manage. Part Peter the Great part Dobby the totalitarian house elf.
So far, he can’t manage a lot. Under his corrupt, authoritarian, paranoid leadership, Russia is bogged down in Ukraine battling against what is, on paper, a far inferior military force. Ukraine’s military is chewing Russia’s armor and infantry up, though, doing the world a favor while it also saves its people. Putin cannot rebuild the USSR if he can’t even cross Ukraine. If Russia wasn’t so deeply and hopelessly corrupt, and if Putin hadn’t elevated his communist thug mafia cronies like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to his government’s highest positions, he might have already won in Ukraine.
Let’s discuss Shoigu for a second. Putin installed him atop Russia’s military, but Shoigu has no military experience. He was a minor paper pushing functionary in the Communist Party during the Soviet days who won Putin’s trust and is now installed into power because Putin wants him there. Like Putin and the other members of his paranoid claustrophobic inner circle, Shoigu wants the Soviet Union restored. The invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to start that. Just a reminder to my conservative friends who weren't there, the Soviet Union sucked. It was truly awful. Our hero, Ronald Reagan, called it literally the “evil empire.” He was right.
Putin wants it taken off the ash heap of history and restored to its former menacing glory. He wants to dominate at America’s expense. No one should twist themselves into an intellectual pretzel to make excuses for Putin in his Ukraine misadventure, whether you think Biden is a dummy or not.
A.J. Rice is Editor-in-Chief of The Publius National Post and author of the book, The Woking Dead: How Society’s Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture. He serves as CEO of Publius PR, a premier communications firm in Washington D.C.