Vladimir Putin

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Putin is a former intelligence officer, a patriot, a nationalist.

How did we think he would react to U.S. encirclement of his country by NATO and U.S. meddling in his internal affairs?

How did American patriots in the Truman-McCarthy era react to the discovery that Hollywood, the U.S. government and our atom bomb project were riddled with communists loyal to Josef Stalin?

Why cannot we Americans see ourselves as others see us?

Why is Russia still supporting the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, the Post and Journal demand to know.

Well, Russia has a long relationship with the Assad family, selling it arms and maintaining a naval base on Syria’s coast. Did we expect Russia to behave as we did when our autocratic ally of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, was challenged by crowds in Tahrir Square?

We ditched Mubarak and washed our hands of him in weeks.

Russia stood by its man. And does not Putin have a point when he asks why we are backing Syrian rebels among whom are elements of that same al-Qaida that killed thousands of us in the twin towers?

Is the Syrian war so clear-cut a case of good and evil that the Russians should dump their friends and support ours?

If the Assad family is irredeemably wicked, why did George H.W. Bush enlist Hafez Assad in his war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, a war to which Damascus contributed 4,000 troops?

There is another reason Russia is recoiling from America.

With the death of its Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russia is moving back toward its religious and Orthodox roots. Secretly baptized at birth by his mother, Putin has embraced this.

Increasingly, religious Russians look on America, with our Hollywood values and celebrations of homosexuality, as a sick society, a focus of cultural and moral evil in the world.

Much of the Islamic world that once admired America has reached the same conclusion. Yet the Post is demanding that our government stand with “the persecuted rock band” of young women who desecrated with obscene acts the high altar of Moscow’s most sacred cathedral.

Upon what ground do we Americans, 53 million abortions behind us since Roe v. Wade, stand to lecture other nations on morality?

Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, trade, arms reduction—we have fish to fry with Putin. As for our lectures on democracy and morality, how ‘bout we put a sock in it?