Yeah, but why they partner with Communist China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela...heck they are still Cuba's #1 creditor and talked of whipping their debt clean, but getting cheap offshore oil leases there and nickel mining may have something to do with it...
Right/wrong/indifferent...they make it too easy for people who want to bash them to bash them...
They never partner with sane people (not counting Euro's who deserve to get bent over on energy...)...
So, as much as people here are stuck on the cold war...it's no different with them and proxies they are paid to support with goods and services (credit, tech and weapons)...
No Saints anywhere...ZERO.
I do not know of their reasons for all countries. I think they mostly ditched support for Cuba but like to have a place to dock the occasional war ship, when they venture that far from home. I recall they stopped giving subsidized oil to Cuba.
China was not their first choice as an ally. They wanted to be part of Europe but that would remove them as an enemy giving NATO a reason to exist. Then there was Russia gate and Ukraine gate, and trying to sabotage the gas pipeline at the last minute. Russia is now a conservative Christian nation.
I know they did not want an ISIS run nation in Syria so close to home as that would spill over into countries near Russia. Russia and Iran, not the US, fought ISIS BTW. The US, according to John Kerry, was happy to see ISIS advance on Damascus.
Some people who ID as progressives thought that Russia gate and Ukraine gate were a joke and a waste of time. They were pissed that the Dems wasted years on that instead of pushing progressive agendas.
Kim Iversen and the Moderate Rebels/Grayzone guys come to mind.
BTW Katy Halper and Matt Taibbi were fired by Rolling Stone as the "Useful Idiots" because they dared to question the propaganda that Assad was evil and should be deposed.
We can skip the conservative assertion for the moment...I think there is significant differences in what that really means between Americans and Russians and even Europeans...and focus on the one part I find the most problematic - Christian.
First, we have to recognize the medieval Great Schism that parted the Eastern Orthodox Church from the Catholic Church in 1054. The political motivations of authority (Pope vs Council of Bishops from East and West) gets overplayed (though I do not discount their importance) that overshadows the cultural impacts of the Greek speaking East and the Latin speaking West (a natural division resulting from the split of the over-extended Roman Imperial remnant) while the religious differences often get tossed in as mere contributors to the growing rift. The East was more mystical and philosophical in worship and the West more legalistic in a Roman sense to the practical and scholastic. There is differences in the incarnate Christ (Devine or Devine and Human), Iconoclasm, celibacy, medium used in the Eucharist...and a big one - The Trinity and the Nicene Creed. All of this threw fuel on the fire and caused the split, and it culminated in violence when the armies of the 4th Crusade saw sacking Constantinople in 1204 more rewarding than kicking the Muslims out of Jerusalem and some greedy Venetians and a deposed Byzantine Prince convinced the nobles leading the army...and all it did was make more territory ripe for rampaging Muslims who captured Constantinople in 1453 and it's renaming Islambol/Islambul...later a more Hellenic influenced Arabic - Istanbul. OK, a long-winded way of saying they got a lot of anti-Western bias and I concede it is not all unjustified.
Second, unlike the prelates overseeing the Holy Sites in Jerusalem who get along with Israel the Russians never seem to get along with Israel and appear to delight in their discomfort and in arming their enemies.
Third, the Russians arm and support the most nefarious regimes on the plant...none more troubling than the Mahdi Death Cult of Iran who has stated too many times to count its intent to exterminate the Jewish state.
It is a peculiar form of Christianity that sees nuclear-armed genocidal-maniacs as good partners and sees Israel as an enemy, and this peculiarity cannot be blamed in any way on an Orthodox distrust of the West no matter how justified it might be and be considered authentically "Christian" in character. IMO it is not unlike the Christianity of Nazism. And I do not see any evidence out there capable of altering this opinion.
