You can judge a country by the company it keeps.

When you think of Russia’s company, you think of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah. You think of George Bush, apparently one of the world’s most hated figures, looking into Vladimir “Pooty-Poot” Putin’s eyes, glimpsing his soul and finding him “trustworthy.” When you think of the United States you think of NATO, Germany, France, Britain and Japan.

Where Russia’s allies are not actually evil, they are the ragtag flotsam and jetsam of the world, struggling for continued relevance in a world that would simply like to put them out to pasture. In this category we can place the likes of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former British Premier Tony Blair, who were both in Russia this week helpfully parroting the Kremlin’s propaganda line designed to get the West to drop its guard so dictatorship can achieve final consolidation.

Kissinger will be forever associated with the corrupt administration of Richard Nixon, the only U.S. president ever forced to resign from office in disgrace, and with his inability to speak the English language without a foreign accent. Accused by some of being a war criminal, he won the Nobel Peace prize, just like Yasir Arafat and Jimmy Carter. He was Time magazine’s person of the year in 1972, just like Stalin was and the dictator Putin would become. Blair’s Labor Party is in the throes of utter collapse in Britain. Both have long ago passed from the limelight, and seem to want it back. In Kissenger’s case, senility appears to be creeping in.

Kissinger stated to Medvedev: “I have followed with great interest your becoming president and the plans you have put forward in some of your speeches. I wish you every success. It is important for Russia and important for the world.” God only knows what that gibberish is supposed to mean, but the fact that Kissinger didn’t say a word of public criticism about Medvedev, much less mention either the mind-blowing sham of his rigged election combined with his “predecessor” remaining in office as prime minister, and was photographed smiling and chatting with Medvedev, is being used by the Kremlin to score propaganda points and offset criticism over human rights violations recently raised by many countries’ actual leaders.

Kissinger is the U.S. chair of the panel called “Russia-USA: A Look Into the Future” which was formed last year and is also co-chaired by Russia’s former Prime Minister and KGB spymaster Yevgeny Primakov. While in Moscow he stated: “If supply is limited and demand increases, if countries compete for access to energy on a purely national basis, we are bound to see a repetition of the colonial conflicts of 19th century.” Marshal Goldman responded: “At the present time, Russia is not in a position to worry there won’t be enough for Russia. If anything, it might make Russia even more aware of the fact that they are in a very commanding position.”

In other words, Kissinger is a crazy old man who is doing the Kremlin’s bidding, not really so different that Germany ex-leader Gerhard Schroeder. Blair, in Moscow to attend a private investor’s conference, continued this line, stating: “Power is shifting east, and it’s shifting fast, not just to China and, in time, to India, but also to the Middle East and to Russia. They have a pride in Russia today they didn’t have ten years ago. We, in countries like mine, have to understand that change in psyche.”

Pride indeed. They’ve learned to be proud of the murder of Politkovskaya and the jailing of Khodorkovsky. They revel in the fact that their men don’t live to reach age 60. They beam over their lack of news reporting, political opposition and local government. They strut and preen over their $4/hour average wage, their AIDS epidemic, their fatalities by fire, their smoking apocalypse. They glow with satisfaction over the exclusion from the WTO and members Georgia/Ukraine heading for NATO. And they do all this much as Germans did when Hitler restored lost German pride after World War I.

The strange thing is that Mr. Blair isn’t planning to move to Russia right away! Well, he’s only British, so by his own terms he’s probably a bit slow on the uptake. He’ll figure it out sooner or later.

A book review in the Telegraph points out that when Ronald Reagan dealt with the USSR, he ridiculed its leaders to their faces rather than enabling their victim mentality as Blair would seek to do. One could say that, since he didn’t patronize, Reagan showed far more respect. The Telegraph relates:

Poor Mr Gorbachev. Every time he met Ronald Reagan at a summit, he was subjected by the American President to a stream of Russian jokes. Or rather, to be precise, Soviet jokes - the point of which was always to satirise some aspect of life under communism. What made it worse was that some of them really were very funny. I like the one, for example, about the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years’ time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?’ The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?’ And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

America had a foreign policy then, and a real leader to enact it. Perhaps, come November, we will again.