Matter

but in the event of an outright Russian victory, defined as gaining territory they didn’t have prior to the war, that wouldn’t augur well for the US establishment.

Even more important, Putin’s Russia lacks a universal ideology. During the Cold War the USSR relied on the global appeal of communism as much as on the global reach of the Red Army. Putinism, in contrast, has little to offer Cubans, Vietnamese, or French intellectuals. Authoritarian nationalism may indeed be spreading in the world, but by its very

The idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’, which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’.

Russian threat to Europe has reemerged. This might have been inevitable given that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, saw its external empire in Eastern Europe break free, and then experienced its own internal breakup. Russia accounts for roughly half the population and three-fourths of the land area of the former Soviet Union. It has retained a p

Ukraine was a republic in the old Soviet Union and became independent in 1991. Russia was uneasy about the possibility of close EU-Ukraine ties, especially if they diminished Russia’s influence over Ukraine and might pave the way for Ukraine’s entering NATO. Matters reached a full boil in late 2013, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian protester