How much of a threat is Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin? Russia’s military power and aggressive actions are undoubtedly serious, but the danger is actually even greater.

Putin is leading the charge against the liberating values of the Western Enlightenment that have in the past brought so much progress to humanity. If his fascist vision of the future triumphs — as it might because it is spreading — a darkness will befall the world.

Most analysis of Putin’s Russia agrees that it increasingly resembles the fascist states of the 1920s and 1930s. Like Russia today they were characterized by anti-democratic autocracy, intense appeals to aggressive, angry ultra-nationalism,militarization and dangerous international adventurism, control of the economy by the state and its favored, protected firms, and a suppression of civil society to prevent dissent.

Classical fascism generally pretended to be populist but in fact entrenched a high degree of inequality. It typically had as the leader of its all-powerful political party a charismatic leader who was a superhero, or in the case of Japan, a godlike emperor.

There were, of course, local variations, but the original fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, projected a bombastic image and liked to have himself photographed bare-chested to emphasize his hyper-masculinity. Putin follows the same script. Fascist regimes appealed to tradition, including emphasizing a conservative view of the role women were supposed to play as mothers and servile housewives. Most, though not all, fascist regimes worked well with traditional conservative religious institutions, as does Putin today.

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Fascism thrived partly by claiming to be the only defense against the extreme danger posed by plots against the nation by hostile minorities, scheming outside powers, secret traitors, and foreign ideologies. This is daily fare in today’s Russia. And like Mussolini or other successful fascist leaders at the height of their careers, Putin is genuinely popular.

Like Mussolini, Putin rules a nation with a weak economic base that has a hard time maintaining its military bombast. Of course he has what Mussolini never did — a large nuclear arsenal.

Putin’s Russia is not the only example of the rise of fascist-like regimes in the world today. China under Xi Jinping is certainly going in the same direction, and ultimately has a far stronger economic base. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is gradually turning Turkey into an almost classic fascist state but is even more overtly religious. Viktor Orban in Hungary seems to be an admirer of this style, and military rule in Thailand has returned that country to the kind of fascist like autocratic rule frequently practiced by the Thais in the past, with their aged and dying king put forward as the saintly emperor figure who fills the role of the missing charismatic hero leader. There are other cases that more or less fit the bill, including the ostensibly leftist Chavez-Maduro regime in Venezuela and perhaps the Egyptian military government led by Abdel Fattah Sisi.

“ Putin is indeed a menace, but would be much less of one if we could rest assured that in Europe and America, the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment were reassuringly solid. ”

What these regimes, past and present, have in common beyond their style of rule and appeals to nationalism is that they reject some fundamental parts of the Western Enlightenment that has been guiding progress in human freedom, economic growth, and scientific knowledge for over two centuries.

That Enlightenment, after centuries of struggle against its internal enemies within the West and outside it seemed finally to have achieved an unparalleled success by the early 1990s. Fascism and communism had been defeated. Most of the world agreed that relatively free market capitalism and liberal democracy were the best way to proceed, and this led to what now looks like a very premature celebration expressed most famously by Francis Fukuyama’s notion that we had seen “the end of history.”

The fact that the same phenomenon is spreading in various forms even into the most well-established Western democracies with the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and similarly xenophobic demagogues in Europe gives Putin far more importance than he would otherwise have. As in the 1930s, fascism’s appeal is broad and growing almost everywhere. This means that Putin can claim to be a model for others, not just a nostalgic throwback to Soviet grandeur combined with a corrupted form of capitalism.

If Russia or, in the long run, China even more are to become admired models, as Mussolini and Hitler were in their time, what is it that they promise, and why should this appeal so widely?

They claim it is possible to enjoy the benefits of modern science and technology without having the liberating political, social, economic, and personal freedoms that were fully a part of the original Enlightenment. Both fascist and communist regimes made the same claim, and it turned out that lack of freedom eventually crippled free thought sufficiently to make it impossible for them to adapt to new challenges. Nevertheless by the end of 1940, the Enlightenment had died in almost all of Europe and Asia, and it was only because its ideals survived in America and Britain that it was brought back to life in history’s most destructive war.

Putin is indeed a menace, but would be much less of one if we could rest assured that in Europe and America the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment were reassuringly solid. It is because they no longer are that Putin’s influence and example can spread, and this also gives comfort to those Chinese leaders who are pushing their country in the same direction. A similar drift and loss of faith in most of Europe in the 1930s ultimately let to a catastrophe. If the same thing happens again, who can foresee what disasters await us, or this time, who can be relied on to save us?

Daniel Chirot is the co-author, with Scott L. Montgomery of “The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World”. The paperback edition is being published in September.