The sanctions against Russia—both the official economic sanctions and the unofficial, often petty-seeming sanctions such as banning Russian owners from cat shows—arguably represent the first great “geopolitical cancellation” of this new feminized era in the West.

This cancellation obviously goes far beyond the usual diplomatic noises that are made when the blame for conflicts is murkier and the victims more remote from us. It is a public reaction to an outrage that rises explosively above the usual outrages, involves fellow Westerners, and is available to tug at the heartstrings 24/7 on a variety of electronic media.

Moreover, it really does look like a broad translation of the usual domestic cancellation strategies to the geopolitical scene, including economic punishment, censorship, general ostracism, threats of judicial action, and indirect assistance for those who fight the Cancelled One, but of course no direct, overt involvement in that fighting.

Given the scale of this response, the scale of the atrocity that triggered it, and the scale of Russia’s ongoing losses in Ukraine, Putin’s downfall seems inevitable. After killing many thousands of innocent Ukrainians, destroying probably trillions of dollars’ worth of Ukrainian buildings and other infrastructure, utterly breaking Russia’s army and air force, and of course lying through his teeth about his actions and motives, he does not appear to have any way out—any peaceful “off ramp.” He is our generation’s Hitler, and I suspect he already knows that his days, in office at least, are numbered.

There are many potential pluses to a Putin downfall. One is that Russia again will have a chance to achieve what it could not achieve in the 1990s, namely a more mature form of government and economy, oriented towards and not against the West. Such a transformation of Russia, which I think is somewhat more likely than the alternative, would mean a final unification of all the West’s major powers, and at least a temporary “emboldening” of them. That in turn could usher in one of those periods of history, like 1990-2010, in which the West reigns supreme over all earthly comers. In this scenario, bad actors such as Iran, China, and North Korea would have to watch their step, at the very least, and the world in that sense would be a safer place.

But here’s the bad news. Even if the “best case” scenario happens—including a glorious Russian uprising and overthrow of the dictator, maybe even on Easter Sunday (April 24 in the Russian Orthodox calendar)—the West has suffered a blow in its own ranks that I think is of dire significance.

If you’ve read any of my previous essays on this site, you know that I have taken a generally dim view of the West’s future. Cultural/political feminization; mass immigration, multiculturalism and wokeism; and the lack of political tools for solving these problems, have doomed the West in the most basic ways, as I have seen it. On the other hand, conservatives in the West have been gaining strength and coherence in recent years in reaction to the excesses of Letfism/wokeism. As recently as a month ago, it had seemed plausible to me that a Zemmour-ization of the Western Right (Eric Zemmour is explicitly against both cultural feminization and mass-immigration/heavy-multiculturalism) could, eventually and with a lot of luck, restore the situation.

But what Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed all too clearly is that much of the Right in the West is, well, wrong, and about fundamental things. Sadly, these Wrong Rightists include Zemmour as well as prominent commentators in the US, Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance among them.

The Wrong Rightists hate, first and foremost, what they call the Globalist American Empire (GAE). Fair enough—I hate it too. The problem is that they view Putin not as a murderous kleptocrat and global troublemaker (as I view him), but rather as a valuable counterweight to the hegemony of the GAE—a counterweight they want to strengthen, not weaken. These pro-Putin rightists have seemed quite willing to nullify the sovereignty of Ukraine (and, since the invasion started, have been willing to let Putin’s murders of tens of thousands of Ukrainians go unpunished), in order to preserve this counterweight—this bastion of old-fashioned Christian values according to the peculiar delusion afflicting some of them.

Of course, quite a few of the Wrong Rightists are backpedaling now, saying they deplore what Putin did, etc. They understand, at least at some level, the parallels between their sentiments and the discredited sentiments of say, Laval in France and Lindbergh in the USA during 1939-41. They therefore tend to exhibit their distress over the impending collapse of Russia as a Great Power, and the impending destruction of Putin and Putinism, in ways that are more or less indirect. They are peevish about Ukrainian “propaganda.” They lament the “lost opportunity” to have prevented the horrors of this war by barring Ukraine from NATO, thereby calming the nerves of their sensitive hero in the Kremlin. They speak darkly of Ukrainian “Nazis.” They yearn for a swift settlement that preserves Putin in power (and, not incidentally, conceals the fatuity of everything they have claimed or predicted about all this). They emit copious cope about how Russia is still destined to “win.” Above all, they say the West should care less about Ukraine and more about problems at home.

Here are just a few examples of this output (to which I may add soon as time permits):

What I think all this means is that the Western Right in general now is left with much less credibility in the eyes of the average normie citizen, just as occurred in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. In particular, the pro-Putin, “America First” sector of the Right, the sector that happens also to be most deeply concerned with the most serious issues, such as mass immigration, has grandly shot itself through the foot—or maybe through the heart. This has left the Left/center-Right “GAE” coalition in a much better position, so that there won’t be a Zemmour-type president in the USA any time soon—and I’m guessing now there won’t be one even in France. Thus the West’s demise will have been hastened at the very moment of its own apparent triumph over its longtime mortal enemy.

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World War II ended less than two decades before I was born, yet I’ve always felt that it belonged to much more distant age—set off from modern existence by its different ways of thinking and doing, different patterns of speech and dress, grander scale of horrors and heroism, even the monochrome of its newsreels. The bad things, especially, seemed mostly unrepeatable in the world where I grew up.

American isolationism is a good example. Conservative Americans, for the longest time, didn’t want to help Britain, or Western Europe, with their struggles against Hitler and Mussolini. The USA had helped out Britain and France in 1917-18, and felt that they shouldn’t have to do anything like that again. Let Europeans sort out their own problems, they said.

That was part of their public reasoning, anyway. Another part of it seemed much more instinctive and tribal, much more driven by the false logic of “the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend”—their enemy being FDR, of course, their new friends being the Axis dictators.

It might seem facile to criticize the American isolationists of 1939-41 from our postwar perspective, but really they should have known better just from the information available at the time. In any case, it’s always striking now to read and hear the things they said. Here, for example, is aviator Charles Lindbergh, on September 11, 1941 (Europe conquered, Britain under siege, Wehrmacht nearing Moscow etc.), blaming the British, Roosevelt, and “the Jewish,” for pushing America towards war:

The Pearl Harbor attack, less than three months later, embarrassed the America First movement into silence. Lindbergh himself spent much of the war trying to get into combat to redeem himself, and eventually succeeded—in getting into combat, not at redeeming himself.

But anyway, here we are again, with the same kind of geopolitical setup (armed dictator on the prowl abroad, liberal Democrats in control at home), resulting in the same strange mindset on the part of American conservatives.

By the way, in case this is the first essay of mine you’ve read, I’m pretty conservative too (notwithstanding David Goldman’s swipe at me, below, as a “neocon/GlobLib”). Yet the fellow conservatives who, in defiance of recent history, have started talking up Putin and talking down Ukraine, the US and the Western alliance, are now as alien to me as DEI consultants.

I’ve already set down my own anti-isolationist, fight-the-bad-guy thoughts on Putin and Ukraine, a month ago on this site. Here I just want to record, mainly out of sheer amazement and chagrin, some of the sentiments I’ve been reading in recent days from elsewhere on the American right.

To keep things manageable, I’ve focused mainly on two prolific and very widely followed commentators, Goldman and Richard Hanania, and I’ve organized their comments by their major themes.

“Ukraine is a corrupt and backwards place that isn’t worth defending—or invading”

“Ukrainians are So Dumb”

“It’s All NATO’s/Neocons’ Fault for Expanding NATO and Threatening Russia”

“Putin is Smart and Will Win”

“The Woke are the Real Enemy—not Putin”

(See also “No Viet Cong Ever . . .“)

“You Neocons are So Dumb”

“Love Ukraine = Hate America”

“We Should Cut a Deal With Putin”

“Our NATO Allies Won’t Help Us—In Fact, NATO will collapse”

“We’ll Be Better Off When Russia and China Have More Power”

“Enough with the World War II Analogies!”

“And Now For Some Other Clever Ideas”

I’m aware that, as readers go through all these posts, they might find themselves agreeing with the sentiments expressed. But, as I post this, the long-awaited Russian offensive to conquer (presumably) Ukraine is just starting. It’s unlikely to be as dramatic for Americans as Pearl Harbor was, especially since it’s an attack on Ukraine, but modern electronic media, and weaponry, are going to be amplifying factors. I hope it will shock many of the Putin apologists and associated naysayers into rethinking their attitudes.

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