Once a KGB thug…
During the Cold War, many on the political left in Western countries looked through the repression of the Russian people. Today, the moral equivalence of Russia’s “useful idiots” is on the populist political right.
Once a former KGB thug, always a KGB thug is the truth of the not-so-strange death in a Siberian gulag of Russian opposition democracy leader Alexei Navalny.
State-sponsored political assassinations by Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime is a reminder that crushing dissent at home goes hand-in-hand with the military invasion abroad to conquer and crush democracy in Ukraine.
During the Cold War, many on the political left in Western countries looked through the repression of the Russian people and the suppression of the national aspirations of the Soviet Union’s satellite states behind the iron curtain in Eastern Europe.
Today, the moral equivalence of Russia’s “useful idiots” is on the populist political right, mostly in the US. Traditional US isolationism and “forever wars” fatigue in middle America has morphed into culture warriorsblaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the so-called provocative eastward expansion of the defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organisation alliance.
It is perverse to blame the Ukrainian war on the understandable desire to share in US-backed collective security of those nations such as Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Poland, Finland and Sweden, which are the real or potential victims of Mr Putin’s thuggish ambition to restore the Soviet Union’s former frontiers and expand Russia’s borders westwards.
Amid the global geopolitical contest between authoritarianism and democracy, Mr Navalny’s death underscores how unconscionable would be any abandoning by the Western coalition of providing moral and materiel aid to support the Ukrainian people’s fight to maintain their democratic independence from Mr Putin’s Russia.
At the same time, Europe, especially the world’s third-largest economy in Germany, should be stepping up to share more of the defence burden with America.
A bigger European contribution to NATO would respond to Donald Trump’s legitimate point about delinquent allies not spending enough on self-defence, which is partly fuelling the neo-isolationism on the populist right.
News and analysis from AFR correspondents on the biggest global stories.
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