Putin’s Hitler
Why didn’t Putin and his cronies simply buy Crimea from Ukraine – at ten cents an acre, like the Americans once bought Alaska from Alexander II of Russia – rather than launch a clumsy and noisy guerrilla war whose public relations outcome was predictable at the outset? The answer, I believe – concealed, camouflaged and biding its time – lies thousands of miles away, in the desert sands of the Middle East.
I have been saying that “Muslim” terrorism is a Russian secret services canard – and, to the small extent their self-serving aims are congruent, that of the CIA as well – ever since Putin declared, in a speech made even before he became Russia’s “president,” that “Russia will be the West’s shield from the Muslim menace.” By this he meant, needless to say, that Russia would be sponsoring “Muslim” attacks against the West until Western democracies are intimidated enough to trade freedom for security. Thus ISIS, I believe, is merely the latest in a long series of “Muslim” bugaboos grown by the Kremlin like homunculi in a mad scientist’s laboratory.
This post’s aim is not to adduce proof, but to encourage independent ratiocination. Consider how similar Putin’s geopolitical strategy is to that of Stalin, who helped to incubate the Nazis in Weimar Germany as that epoch’s ayatollahs, mullahs, and caliphs. Stalin’s calculation was that once Hitler had terrified the West enough, no Western politician would find the prospect of Red Army tanks purging Nazi evil from the whole of the European continent objectionable. Fortunately for us today, Hitler pre-empted Stalin and, by the time the war was over, American troops were in Berlin to defend Western Europe from its Russian liberators.
This time around, there are no American troops in the Middle East, where ISIS is now Putin’s Hitler. Last week’s newspapers were filled with reports that thousands of ISIS stooges had arrived in Europe, camouflaged as refugees, to blow up churches, schools, and government buildings; this week’s reports are of Russian arms and troops bound for Syria to confront “Muslim” extremism in a twenty-first century parody of a Crusade; and the following week, on September 28, Putin will address the United Nations, Urbi et Orbi, to share with all progressive Christendom his vision of himself as the modern St. George.
If Russian arms and troops continue to arrive in Syria, what or who is to stop Putin from taking over all of the Middle East, precisely as Stalin hoped to take over all of Europe? Seen in this light, Crimea is a red herring. Putin does not want to swap the West’s condoning the annexation for Russia’s taming the “Muslim” threat; instead, he wants the West to believe that, having done a naughty thing in his own back yard, he is about to do a nice one in the West’s. A plenary indulgence, such as obtained by the early Crusaders, is what he expects to receive for his armed peregrinatio in terram sanctam. And, once Russian tanks are on the ground and Russian military bases have dotted the map of the region, I repeat, nothing will stand between the Kremlin’s exculpation and its control of the Holy Land.
A global oil monopoly for Russia will be far and away the most trifling of strategic consequences if these events come to pass. There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, of course. But I fear that the West’s geopolitical strategy – ever since Stalin was pacified at Yalta with the central part of Europe which he persuaded the West was “Eastern” – has been little more than blind reliance on the power of that English proverb.
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© Copyright Andrei Navrozov and The Fleming Foundation