As Dugin points out, Putin started out pro-West. And George Kennan, of all people, very correctly foresaw where we are now back in 1998, when NATO expansion was first passed by the Senate:
"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''
''What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,'' added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ''X,'' defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
''And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia,'' said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ''It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''
...
We are in the age of midgets. The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age -- one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.
As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ''This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.''
Russia has real grievances against the West, but that doesn't mean Putin has to associate his party with far-right whack jobs like Dugin. That's a choice he made, and he started that all the way back in 2008 with Georgia. Invading Crimea was another not terribly good choice.
It's not like we haven't seen Obama make the effort to find diplomatic solutions to thorny problems. They should realize there is some difference between Obama and Bush. Had Russia pursued that with Obama, I have no doubt a solution to Crimea could have been found. But what distinguishes Crimea is that no such effort was made. Instead they unilaterally declared Ukraine to be in chaos and moved in. I believe that's because Putin is, at this point, pandering to his right wing, for two different reasons: to get at whatever oil and gas might be close to the Crimean coast, most importantly, but secondarily to keep them on his side as going into this year the Russian economy had already run into some roughness.
The problem here is that Dugin is even whackier than our Tea Party folks, and that's saying something. So this whole thing is now down to a competition between two right-wing regimes. I don't see any reason to take sides in that by endlessly quoting RT and RIA-Novosti and whatever other sources to beat up on the new Ukraine gov't's policies, which is what I see happening here.
Meantime, except for this, Dugin and his faction in Russia never gets mentioned. I didn't know who he was until I ran into his name in that article I quoted at the top by accident. The constant drumbeat of threads on this topic somehow never address the far-right connections Putin has.
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