Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” He was right. George W. Bush said he looked into Vladimar Putin’s soul and saw a man he could trust. He was wrong.

One side effect of Bush’s Iraq disaster is his lack of attention to what’s happening in Putin’s Russia: murder, war crimes and growing economic power fueled by oil and natural gas.

Ben Stein, the comedy action and former Nixon adviser, made this point well on Fox News this week. He said Putin’s energy sword is just as dangerous to Europe – and to the world – as the old Soviet military sword.

What is our policy? I don’t know. And I suspect that most of the big shots in Washington – Republican and Democratic alike – are in the dark themselves.

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