That’s for “Make Russia Great Again,” meaning President Vladimir Putin’s struggle to take the country back to the days it ruled much of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine.
There have been times we may have missed the post-Stalin era of the Cold War, when we suspected the USSR’s gray bureaucrats were no more interested in dropping the bomb on us than we were on them. We were relatively fond of Mikhail Gorbachev, who let the Berlin Wall be torn down, as President Reagan demanded, and his vodka-soaked successor, Boris Yeltsin, who in 1996 handed over the keys of a much-diminished Russia to ex-KGB chief Vladimir Putin.
[Here it’s also worth remembering that the Soviet Union’s disastrous war in Afghanistan of the 1980s accelerated the USSR’s decline.]
During the Cold War, it was a conservative American shibboleth that it was communism, specifically, and not totalitarianism that kept Russia and the Eastern Bloc from being set free. Since the ‘90s, Russia has been suppressed by Putin, who has an ideology that is closer to Peter the Great than Vladimir Lenin, and a small group of oligarchs who maintain a huge wealth gap between themselves and the nation’s people. Populists – rather than conservatives – in the U.S. seem unfazed by this post-communist totalitarianism. Ask Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
End of Liberal Democracies
ICYMI, Putin told Financial Times in mid-2019 that the growth of national populist movements in Europe and America has “become obsolete.” The following year, President Trump was considering pulling out of NATO and cutting the U.S. alliance with South Korea, according to Phil Rucker and Carol Leoning in their book, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. So, Putin’s timing is off – or like the rabid MAGA supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol January 6, 2021, he expected Trump to be in the White House today.
And so now Putin has sent troops into Eastern Ukraine, formally recognizing two Kremlin-backed separatist regions. If sanctions and NATO support for a resolute Ukrainian government don’t stop Putin, how much farther will he go?
--Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash
•••
Go to https://thehustings.news to read News & Notes.