Vladimir Putin’s worldwide influence is pernicious. Dare Theresa May confront it?
Nationalism always breaks its promises because nationalists hate enemies in their countries more than they hate the enemies of their countries. Millions of American conservatives proved it when they voted for Donald Trump, even though he was an open admirer of a hostile foreign power.
Local hatreds, not national security, moved them. They hated Obama more than they feared Putin. They hated political correctness. They hated – not without reason – the attacks on freedom of speech. They hated rich liberals and defence lawyers. They hated Black Lives Matter and immigrants speaking Spanish in the shop queue. They hated the “experts” who told them that fossil fuel caused global warming and gun ownership caused crime. For all their patriotism, when it came to the crunch, they cared as little for national security as the “reds” their ancestors condemned in the 20th century.
You should never lose your capacity for shock. Even connoisseurs of the grotesque have had to take a deep breath and count to 10 after watching the Republican president-elect of the United States preferring the word of Julian Assange to the word of his own intelligence agencies. That Assange is cowering from rape charges in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy, and maintaining that the same United States would persecute him if he emerged to face his accusers like an honourable man, only made the task of regaining your composure harder.
If that is not enough for you, consider that the CIA once inspired fear around the world. Now it is so feeble it cannot stop a Russian plot in plain sight to manipulate a US election. The FBI once harassed real and imagined communists it claimed were in the pocket of the Kremlin. In 2016, its director intervened on behalf of the Kremlin’s chosen candidate in the US presidential election. Russian enmity is hardly a secret. Watch Putin’s propaganda station, RT, which Ofcom believes to the amazement of all serious journalists to comply with Britain’s rules on broadcasting accuracy and impartiality, and you see that the regime hates the west and uses anti-western conspiracies to explain away its thefts and crimes.
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