Whatever lingering affection those on the right might have for Putin’s regime should be vanquished by his war of choice.
Whatever lingering affection those on the right might have for Putin’s regime should be vanquished by his war of choice.
T he Russian invasion of Ukraine will likely be one of the most important events of the relatively young 21st century, upending decades of relative stability between European states. While its effects on geopolitics, markets, and elections remain to be seen, the invasion will also likely continue to widen the growing divide on the American right. A small but increasingly visible and potentially influential faction of American conservatives sees a friend and model in Vladimir Putin. They are wrong to do so, however. Putin is not our friend. Nor is his Russia an example for American conservatism. Conservatives should know the reality of Russia’s social situation, how many of our national interests are incompatible, and how Putin’s governance is not a fit for America.
If you make the mistake of perusing Twitter or reading the comments on news pieces, it will not be hard to find voices loudly wondering why on earth we would have tensions with Russia given that Putin is an able conservative leader who has done much good. While it’s too easy to find wild opinions online, it’s not too difficult to find influential conservative figures aping these talking points. These views range from merely being skeptical of the mainstream conservative consensus to actively praising Putin’s talking points about the invasion. Possibly the most vocal in his admiration is former Reagan administration official and paleoconservative par excellence, Pat Buchanan. Buchanan has consistently Putin as a “stalwart defender of traditional values,” and praised Russia as a place that “conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents” can ally with.
They could not be more wrong. For one, it beggars belief to imagine that a former KGB officer is in fact some sort of true believer. Indeed, the realities of Putin’s Russia point to a less rosy and more cynical view. For starters, for all the talk of traditional values, actual religiosity in Russia remains quite dismal. With a 6 percent church-attendance rate, Russia remains barely ahead of highly secular countries such as Norway and Sweden. Even more worrying is the abortion rate. While this continues to decline after the Soviet era (as it does in the United States, in large part due to the successes of the pro-life movement), it still remains dramatically higher than in the United States. Far from leading a traditional social revival, Putin’s Russia continues to slide into demographic decline.
The reality is that Putin’s image of a conservative restorer is a political narrative in the same way former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic reinvented himself from a communist apparatchik to a firebrand Serbian nationalist. Travel writer Colin Thubron’s discussion with a Russian citizen highlights the superficial nature of this brand of conservatism in his travelogue The Amur River: Between Russia and China:
I murmur something about the resilience of believers. She suddenly brightens, ‘Oh! We weren’t believers! My father was a Communist and my mother was an atheist! We were all atheists!’ She is laughing at my perplexity. ‘We used to buy sticks of dye to decorate Easter eggs too, in secret. But nobody believed in the Resurrection!’ She adds, as if informing me: ‘There is no God.’ She had walked into the church from habit, not from piety. ‘I think it’s tradition that people live by, not belief . . . that statue in Lenin Square…he’s part of who we are.’
More important, the United States and Russia have national interests that remain in conflict with one another. Any “America First” approach to foreign policy that seeks to anchor American policy to concrete interests must prioritize our own interests over Russia’s. What are those interests? There’s a wide consensus that a top core vital interest of ours is to ensure the physical safety of the United States and to prevent attacks on the homeland. One of the main ways we have sought to achieve this has been to ensure a great power cannot threaten us. As strategist George Friedman writes in his book The Next 100 Years, this has been the north star of America since the Monroe Doctrine. American grand strategy dictates that we not only deny our hemisphere to a great power but also ensure no single power could dominate the Eurasian landmass.
Realistically, there are only a handful of states that could pose this threat: namely, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, India, and Germany. The latter two have been successfully brought into the American orbit. Germany went from being the great power of the 19th and 20th centuries to a non-nuclear power aligned with American interests by treaty. In Asia, the United States has focused its attention away from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region in order to counter China, a strategy wisely escalated by the Trump administration.
That leaves Russia. The United States does in fact have objectives that are compatible with Russian interests. Stability in Central Asia and the Middle East as well as nuclear security are two major issues among others where American lawmakers can find common ground with Russia. However, as this invasion (and Putin’s awful speech justifying it) demonstrates, Putin’s objectives in Europe are far broader than many doves had imagined. Rather than simply seeking restraint from NATO, Putin has shown he believes that it is Russia’s right to exercise an armed veto on our relations with the entire continent, with the aim of rendering NATO totally obsolete. Geopolitically this would return Europe back to the era in which wars on the continent were commonplace. It is unrealistic to imagine that America, after being drawn into two bloody European wars in the 20th century, would remain insulated from the negative effects of chaotic Europe in the 21st. The American balance of power in Europe has not only led to the end of Soviet communism and great-power wars, but has also ushered in an era of historically unprecedented peace and prosperity. It would not be restraint but recklessness to jettison a successful strategy of nearly 80 years because those challenging it posture themselves to be our ideological allies.
Moreover, American conservatism has functionally nothing to learn from Putin’s ideology and governance. While some admirers could point to Putin’s belief in Europe’s historic heritage, in reality, the similarities are so vague as to be utterly nebulous. It would be nearly as useful to point to the Islamic State’s belief in God and opposition to anarchism as a basis for a shared ideological partnership. American conservatism is not rooted in some quasi-Soviet nostalgia or a hope to restore Tsar Nicholas’s orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Instead, our conservatism seeks to preserve our specific mix of influences, as so eloquently outlined by Russell Kirk in his Roots of American Order. Kirk lists Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London as sources of American identity and politics. Thanks to Russia’s Orthodox heritage, there will always be some affinity between American and Russian civilization. However, the early British and Protestant influences on the American character, combined with the effects of settlement, Revolution, and frontier expansion, all mean that an American conservatism is inevitably different. While it would be a mistake to pretend historic American conservatism is just libertarianism, the American emphasis on constitutional rights, localism, and republican virtue would be alien to the Russian experience. It would not be conservative but radical to wish to uproot every historic influence on one’s country and replace it with another totally outside your country’s experience and culture.
For now, it is not likely that Putinism will become a mainstream position among conservatives. Polls of Republicans show a regard for Putin’s Russia generally in line with America’s justifiably negative view, if not more pronounced. However, as rising voices seek to launder Putinism, we should remember how unhinged that truly is. Far from being a beacon of responsible statecraft, and cooperation, Putin’s Russia is a hostile competitor seeking to undermine our national interests while hiding its own decline behind a charade of traditionalism. The last thing conservatives should be doing is needlessly lionizing a foreign autocrat.