What's Russia to Us?

Rod comments on an important essay by Angelo Codevilla, and on Russia and China's place in the world vis-a-vis America.

by Rod D. Martin
September 12, 2019

Angelo Codevilla is brilliant, and his The Ruling Class is perhaps the must-read book of the decade (Rush Limbaugh famously agreed). I always love anything he writes, including 99% of this essay, “What’s Russia to Us? Up From Russophobia”, which I’ve reprinted below.

But before we get to that, I would like to share a few of my own thoughts on his essay, as well as on Russia, on China, and on the looming fate of both.

1. I have an important quibble in Codevilla’s third sentence (which he more than corrects by the end of that same sentence, though not clearly enough to suit me for the average reader). I’m not in the business of defending Vladimir Putin, but I think it’s important to point out what he did and didn’t say. The opening paragraph repeats a point often quoted in the west that the west got wrong: Putin did not say the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy. Rather, he called it a “geopolitical tragedy”. Most westerners don’t understand the qual…