I expect they'll soon be selling tickets for the "Russia/Putin Friendship Tour 2022 - with your host dover beach"

I don't like linking to the New Catallaxy site, but just have a read of this post (and the comments following) to luxuriate in the "Conservatives for poor, misunderstood Russia" vibe oozing from the site.  (I use "luxuriate" ironically, of course.)

I am also amused how over recent weeks the unctuous-for-Russia owner of the site, dover beach, now  considers himself a military analysis expert.  

As Noah Smith wrote in his post Putin's War and the Chaos Climbers, about how the worst of the Left and Right have united in Putin/Russia sympathy (oh no, they'll say, of course Putin has done the wrong thing - it's just that it's completely understandable why he did it and Ukraine and the West were asking for it), there are a few possible explanations to consider:  

a.    he (Putin) just appeals to authoritarians (and it is clear the American Right has moved to embracing authoritarian to get their way - look at the gerrymandering and enforcement of religious views on abortion by stacking the Supreme Court);  

b.   But there is also this:

Another, more subtle theory — which I’ve advanced myself — is something I call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S. and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe. And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the Russian government goes out of its way to encourage such perceptions. To all of these groups, the distant sphinx of the Kremlin might have seemed like a power capable of offering support while representing no threat.  

c.     Noah then expands upon any way of looking at it:

The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.

This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.

It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.

Yup.

So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss. This doesn’t mean they’re ready to cheer for Putin openly, or even to hope for his victory — the blazing moral clarity of the situation is still too strong for that. But it does mean that they feel the need to muddy the waters, to curb U.S. support for Ukraine and make the establishment look irresolute, and to prepare narratives that would allow them to take advantage of a Putin victory.

What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization.