Top Highlights

• A 2014 Russian Culture Ministry report outlining the “Foundations of State Cultural Politics” defines the country’s identity only in negation to the West: “Russia is not Europe.” By that it means that Russia is illiberal, authoritarian, nationalistic, Orthodox Christian, and economically autarkic, a compilation of reactionary values distilled into ...
• Putin speaks of Russia as opposing not necessarily Europe but what it has become: a place of hedonism, depravity, self-indulgence, cosmopolitanism, and materialism.
• Eurasianism: a repudiation of Western liberalism’s most essential moral claim—that a human being is not a means to state-determined ends but is an end unto him- or herself.
• Western
• Emotive congressional testimony to the contrary, countries, authoritarian ones in particular, “behave” as they wish, often in illegal or immoral ways. Declaring otherwise does not make it so. And unless a concert of rule-abiding countries prevents bad actors from doing illegal or immoral things, world order collapses.