Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.

With Russia’s military intervention in Syria, the United States now faces an old adversary on a new battlefield. Putin wants to support the murderous regime of his ally Bashar al-Assad while at the same time boosting his tough-guy image at home and undermining U.S. influence. As usual, Putin leads with force—artillery in Ukraine, jets in Syria—and then welcomes negotiations while doing as he likes on the ground. So far this strategy of bluffing and bullying has paid off; the White House has meekly gone along with the charade of diplomacy, with any political chill between the United States and Russia quickly criticized as a potential “return to the Cold War.”

The use of the cliché is ironic, given that the way the Cold War was fought and won seems to have been forgotten today. Instead of standing on principles of good and evil, right and wrong, and the universal values of human rights and human life, the West has offered engagement, resets, and moral equivalence, repeatedly meeting Russian aggression with little more than press releases expressing concern. The United States and the European Union at last imposed sanctions on Russia following the invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. But the move arrived timidly, and sanctions have been insufficient to deter Putin or to reverse the years of damage done by the so-called leaders of the free world, who talk about promoting democracy while treating the leaders of the most repressive regimes as equals. Their embrace is what helped keep Putin in power for so long, immunizing him against charges of being anti-democratic. I know. I watched it happen.

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I did not expect my new career in what can only generously be called Russian “politics” to be an easy one. The opposition was not trying to win elections; we were fighting just to have meaningful ones. In 2000, Putin was Yeltsin’s handpicked successor; when he came up for reelection in 2004, there was never any real doubt about the outcome. Even in 2007, when I won an opposition primary for the next year’s presidential election, I maintained I was an activist, not a politician. I knew I would never be allowed to appear on an official ballot, whose spots were reserved for the loyal opposition; the point was to expose that fact and to try to strengthen the atrophied muscles of the Russian democratic process.

My initial goal was to unite all the anti-Putin forces in the country, especially those that had nothing else in common—like the liberal reformer camp I belonged to and the National Bolsheviks, who wanted to uproot the entire system. Our fragile coalition marched in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the months ahead of the 2007 parliamentary elections, in the first serious political protests since Putin had taken office. We wanted to show the people of Russia that resistance was possible, and to spread the message that giving up liberty in exchange for stability was a false choice.