Putin is Napoleon III, as far as I'm concerned.
Putin, as I said before, is a bandit chief. He's running a kleptocratic gangster state. Whatever flirtation with far-right ideology he does is purely instrumental to the real goal of kleptocracy.
This isn't good, but it means that Putin is
fundamentally trying to maintain the status quo - he and his cronies robbing the Russian people and state blind. And that is why I say his strategic posture is defensive. All the 'offensive' stuff you listed is
defensive in the sense that it is a response to (actual or perceived) encroachment by the West.
Really the Cold War was the same thing. The USSR's fundamental posture was defensive, not offensive, despite its various aggressive actions around the world. It couldn't have been otherwise given the vast power disparity between the US and the USSR. But for various reasons, most of them having to do with domestic politics, the political establishment in the US and the rest of the West portrayed the USSR as an immediate menace, a credible threat to the security of the West, bent on subverting and destroying the "free world."
Now I see people making the same kinds of arguments about Putin, who leads a country which has an economy smaller than California's. We're supposed to believe that Putin poses an existential threat to the West.
It's utter nonsense. What poses an existential threat to the West is the neoliberal project to
destroy transform society and the fascist forces that project is unleashing. Putin can and should be opposed to the extent that he attempts to help those forces.
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-liberals-helsinki
Think of it as “the expressive function of the Russia freakout.” Just as there is what Cass Sunstein called “
the expressive function of law” — “the function of law in ‘making statements’ as opposed to controlling behavior” — there’s a purpose served by the constant keening over Putin. It conveys liberals’ sense of bewilderment and disorientation at a country they no longer recognize — a feeling not so different from that which motivated the Right’s manifold freakouts in the Obama era.
On both sides there’s a sense of loss about a bygone America that no longer exists: for the Right, the white, middle-class utopia of the Eisenhower years. For liberals, the upright decency of the
Jed Bartlet administration. The problem with these fantasies is neither of them ever existed.
To elaborate a bit on the first paragraph there, liberals are mostly in denial about the class forces that have hollowed out the Republic and made a joke out of American democracy. So the overwhelming focus on Putin serves to displace the idea that really Trump is of a piece with all the rest of American history. There is a sense that Trump represented a major continuity break in US history, and on one level that's entirely true (ie Trump negating Obama's legacy), but on another level Trump is just the logical next step of the last forty years. And liberals mostly don't want to face that. They want to pretend that the Mueller investigation will show that all the bad stuff is Putin's fault, and then once we impeach Trump or whatever everything will go back to normal, "normal" being defined as the Obama administration.
