The Cold War is over. It’s time the West started acting like it.

When the hot war with Germany ended in its defeat in the second world war, it was immediately accepted back into the community of civilised nations. It was expected to be a bulwark in the fight against the new threat of communism. And so it was, until it began itself adopting the tenets of cultural Marxism from the mid-2000s in the guise of the European Union, for which it is a proxy.

It is time to acknowledge that Russia is the new Germany and China the new Soviet Union in the emerging 21st century realpolitik.

When Russia abandoned communism it should have been afforded the equivalent treatment as was given to Germany on Hitler’s defeat. Russia is historically part of the West, which is the heir of Christendom. Certainly, Russian democracy since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been far from perfect, but it isn’t doing too badly for a country that had never experienced it before. At least it was on the path to democracy and the West should have done what it could to help it along that road.

Instead, America stupidly froze it out.

Although the West did not face the same existential threat from hostile forces at the end of the Cold War as it did in 1945, such threats are always just over the horizon. The rise of China to its present belligerent state was not entirely unpredictable (ironic understatement) at the time. It was only a matter of when not if – just ask Napoleon.

‘But Russia opposes Western interests around the world,’ the neo-cons weep into their historical dustbin. Some of their allegations predate the current situation in Ukraine.

There are various sound objections to the neo-con view. Western Third World interests in which Moscow has ‘interfered’ are largely illusory in any case and of importance only to said, failed neo-cons. The last-but-one iteration of the alleged Russian threats was its support for Assad against the Syrian ‘democratic opposition’. Assad is a bad actor; that much is clear, but he is preferable to all the alternatives. At least five factions are vying for control of Syria – four of which are Islamist terrorists. Assad is the equivalent of Mubarak in Egypt and Hussein in Iraq.

Has America really not learned that those dictators were necessary evils, in that they kept forces even worse than themselves under control? Sorry squeamish liberals, of which neo-cons are just a mutant species: terrorists speak only the language of brutality. As has been clearly shown in several countries in the Middle East, only a leader who shows them more terror than they show themselves can keep them under control. The Syrian opposition is, in fact, just another Islamist faction. Exhibit A: the widely circulated video of its fighters screaming ‘Allah Akbar’ while beating a downed Russian pilot to death. ISIS itself was just an offshoot of that ‘civil society’ group, born by ‘misappropriating’ Obama’s military aid to the former, but potentially with his tacit support.

Finally – wrongly excluded from full participation in the civilised world – what was a great and proud nation to do but cause trouble in the marches?

It makes no sense for conservatives to support Ukraine in its dispute with Russia. Ukraine is, albeit with fits and starts, on a Western-mandated path into the EU. Conservatives support Brexit. A weaker EU, not a stronger one, serves the interests of an independent Britain.

Far more importantly, EU Marxism-lite (which is getting heavier all the time) is a far bigger threat to world order than so-called Russian authoritarianism. Even on the (dubious) assumption that Moscow is more repressive than Brussels, the latter is still a greater threat, because it is more insidious.

The EU is still falsely considered by many, across the political spectrum, to form the second lung of Western civilisation, whereas in reality it is so riddled with cancer that it must be excised at once to have any hope of saving the patient. This anachronistic view of the EU as a friend enables it to peddle its political devastation around the world with relative impunity.

The EU is decidedly not the same Western Europe that Reagan so heroically defended against communist aggression in the 1980s. While Russia may not have reached the pinnacle of Mount Democracy, and may have stopped for a rest along its climb, it is still facing up. But the EU reached the summit in the 1990s and is now well on the descent into Totalitarian Vale.

The entire hope of Western civilisation now resides solely, not even in America, but within the conservative wing of the Republican Party (with apologies to certain Eastern European conservative parties, which have good intentions but are too small to make a difference). US Democrats look to the EU socialist state with envy. No one has any illusions about what an alliance with Putin would entail, however. In consequence, far more care would be taken to confine Russia to its proper sphere.

The Russian regime is in fact more favourable to conservatives in several key respects than the EU. Expressing various conservative positions on social issues, such as the view that there are two genders, or that marriage should involve one of each, is a criminal offence in the EU. In Russia, it is the opposite. While a true conservative riles at the state purporting to mandate any given position on a social issue, conservatives should, albeit marginally, prefer the regime which at least gets its underlying debating position right. That is to say, conservative authoritarianism trumps the Marxist version if one has to choose.

Historically the Donbas region of East Ukraine belongs to Russia. It has a large, ethnic Russian majority. Stalin arbitrarily drew the border between Russia and Ukraine, placing the Donbas within the latter, when its position was of no consequence. At that time, which side of the line one fell on was the difference between living in the Eastern or the Western region of Hell. The misdrawn boundary, however, took on real significance when the Soviet Union broke up. Russian nationals living on the Ukrainian side naturally felt a strong affinity with Russia. Western-oriented governments in Kiev have repressed their Eastern residents to varying degrees ever since.

In 2004 the neo-con US President George W. Bush naively teamed up with George Soros to overturn the election of the pro-Russian Victor Yanukovych as Ukrainian President, installing the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko in his place: the so-called Orange Revolution. In 2010, Yanukovych won another election, which international observers declared to be fair. Yet four years on he was forced from office in another coup backed by Soros; this time aided by his natural ally Obama. The pretext was Yanukovych’s last-minute reversal of a plan to take Ukraine into the EU. Ukraine has had two Presidents since, Poroshenko and Zelenskyy. Both of them operated under the unwritten but ironclad rule: ‘Look too far East and America will take you out.’ Western conservatives should not be seeking to force the Russian residents of Eastern Ukraine back into a union that looks to emulate what they escaped in 1991.

Nato is essentially a babysitting club in which America takes military responsibility for nations which – with the exception of the UK – are too weak to defend themselves. And, to make America’s job that much harder, most of Nato’s members (in Western Europe at least) suffer from a cultural self-loathing which would sap them of the will to pull the triggers of such pitiful armaments as they do possess.

Russia, on the other hand, has a well-equipped military. At least as importantly, it still retains the strong self-belief which is required to fight effectively when called on to do so – just ask the Chechens! Russia would be a great addition to Nato. Instead, by freezing Russia out, the West is forcing it into an alliance with China.

There is no clear American path to victory in war with China. With Russia on the wrong side in that potential conflict as well, defeat for the West is a more likely result. For these reasons, the West should propose a settlement to Russia in which it is admitted to Nato and the Donbas region of Ukraine is transferred to its control.

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