Vladimir Putin Shouldn’t Be a Right-Wing Hero

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/09/vladimir-putin-shouldnt-be-a-right-wing-hero-524041

The sources of Putin’s appeal to American populists are manifold. They admire his strength and audacity in advancing Russia’s interests. They think he has the right enemies, namely the same establishment that also scorned Donald Trump. They see in him an antidote to the cosmopolitanism of the European Union, and a bracing reassertion of national sovereignty. They envy his pushback against fashionable progressive causes and his alliance with the Russian church to form a bulwark in favor of what they see as the traditional values of Western civilization.

Finally, the populist right harbors a profound skepticism toward U.S. interventionism after the misadventures of the past 20 years and a reflex to believe that, if the foreign-policy elite characterizes a foreign actor as a boogeyman, it is wrong — or, at the very least, likely to stumble badly in whatever action it undertakes.