Brad,

If Russia fails, we fail. And Russia means Putin. There is no alternative on the horizon.

Russia is itself part of that Eurasian arc of instability in which AQ and other Saudi and Iranian proxies thrive. Therefore the proper framework for thinking about today’s Russia is to compare it not to Germany or Poland but to Pakistan and India.

Do we refuse to embrace Musharraf because his government is corrupt and brutal? Of course not. We need Musharraf to succeed because the alternative, an ISI-dominated regime, would be horrific.

Likewise the outcomes that confront us regarding Russia are either

a) the collapse of the Russian Federation into a small, western core surrounding Moscow and a constellation of chaotic, independent fiefdoms run by ruthless bandits in the Lukashenko/Aliyev mode; or

b) a stable, coherent Russian Federation that can control its borders, keep its WMD under lock and key and put down internal uprisings with both effectiveness and efficiency ie minimal loss of civilian life.

That may seem like a difficult choice to you, but it’s an easy choice to me.

The policy we’ve actually pursued has been to let the nonproliferation program wither for lack of funding, chastize every move by Russia to put down the Chechen bandits’ “rebellion” and to applaud the wholesale looting by pseudo-businessmen like that thief Khodorkovsky, who should have been imprisoned nine years ago. (Note that the city of Moscow alone has 23 individuals on Forbes’ top billionaire list. New York has 31. These top 23 thieves and their entourage control about 40% of Russia’s GDP. That’s an astonishing degree of theft not equalled by the grandest bandits of Brazil, Mexico or Africa.

Time to get serious about our real interests. Helping Putin is crucial for us– far more important in any case than this grand transatlantic pissing match known as the Atlantic “Alliance.” NATO is useless to us regarding Iran and AQ.

Again, if Putin fails, we fail. End of story.