By Andrew Sullivan Weekly Dish

Putin has called the West’s bluff. Xi will not have failed to notice.

Over the last few months, a conversation I had 30 years ago keeps popping into my consciousness. It was the end of the Cold War, and a post-Soviet Russian state was on the horizon. I remember talking with a journalist friend about the astonishing potential of that turn of events: the return of Russia as a great power, returning to its ancient nationhood and old religion, moving away from communism, and resuming a major role in world and European affairs. Probably not a democracy, but no longer totalitarian, and worth engaging with as an authoritarian power.

And my friend looked at me as if I were insane. Russia is always a threat, he said. The Kremlin is always the Kremlin — communist or nationalist. America will always have to confront and contain it. And now we have our chance to keep it permanently cut down to size, and protect its neighbors in the future from the threat they’ve always lived under. So what are we dithering about? No pandering to the Russians!

And he wasn’t wrong, was he? This week’s horrifying, brutal invasion of all of Ukraine — an independent sovereign state since 1991 — sure bolsters his case. The brazenness of this assault and the scale of the attempted regime change have shocked even those who had some sympathy for Putin’s worldview. And listening to the tyrant’s rants this week proved to me at least that he always saw the Soviet Union’s hegemony in Eastern Europe as indistinguishable from Russia’s historic destiny. The very distinction I was relying upon — a Russia different than the Soviet Union — is one Putin himself didn’t and doesn’t recognize. Many saw the death of the Soviet regime as a rebirth for Russia. Putin saw it merely as a funeral for Russian power and prestige, which it became his duty to restore.

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