Is Putin’s Russia the Reincarnation of Stalin’s Soviet Union?

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrives for his bilateral meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on March 24, 2016, to discuss Syria and Ukraine at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

Like him or not, Pat Buchanan rolls out the facts.

Clearly, progressive liberals like Liz Warren and the Obama cabal, along with the” war party” of George Bush, the military industrial complex elites, and the Bill Kristol neocons, are trapped with only distant memories of a long passed peak of the dismantled USSR.

Meanwhile Vladimir Putin survives, so far, as but a shadow of the Soviet communist killers of the Cold War era.

Mr. Buchanan asks readers, “Is Putin’s Russia really a reincarnation of Stalin’s Soviet Union? Is Russia a threat of similar magnitude?”

Russia is “our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” thundered Mitt Romney in 2012, now cited as a sage by liberals who used to castigate Republicans for any skepticism of detente during the Cold War.

The Black Sea’s western and southern shores are now controlled entirely by NATO: Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey. Russia’s lone land passage to its naval base in Crimea is a narrow bridge from the Kerch Peninsula.

With the breakup of the USSR, Russia has been reduced to two-thirds of the territory and half the population of the Soviet Union.

Its former republics and now neighbors Georgia and Ukraine are hostile. Its space launches are now done from a foreign land, Kazakhstan. Its economy has shrunk to the size of Italy’s.

It has one-tenth the population and one-fifth the economy of its looming neighbor, China, and, except for territory, is even more dwarfed by the United States with a GDP of $20 trillion, and troops, bases and allies all over the world.

Most critically, Russia’s regime is no longer Communist. The ideology that drove its imperialism is dead. There are parties, demonstrations and dissidents in Russia, and an Orthodox faith that is alive and promoted by Putin.

Where, today, is there a vital U.S. interest imperiled by Putin?

Better to jaw-jaw, than war-war, said Churchill. He was right, as is President Trump to keep talking to Putin — right through the Russophobia rampant in this city.