Now that Vladimir Putin is showing that his Russian imperialism and colonialism go far beyond his recent seizure of the Black Sea Ukrainian province of Crimea, it might be wise for us and our NATO allies to take seriously Sun Tzu's admonition that we "Know the Enemy" – particularly when that enemy is actually headed in our direction.

To begin this process, we must decide what truthful labels apply to this increasingly aggressive Russian “President for Life,” who condemns all Ukrainian, Baltic States and NATO leaders who oppose his cross-border aggression into Eastern Ukraine as “fascists” – suggesting that he is still a blame-game communist of sorts and even a fascist-Left monster himself.

But this nasty label varies greatly from the powder-puff label of “Soviet adventurism” we used to apply to the Soviet Union and which former Bush National Security officials Brent Scowcroft, Stephen Hadley and Franklin Miller mindlessly used again in a recent Washington Post article – i.e., “When NATO’s leaders gather in Wales in early September, they will address several issues critical to the alliance, including Russian adventurism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe[.]”

The word “adventurism” seems ludicrous in a world that loves and applauds great adventurers: Marco Polo, Columbus, Daniel Boone, Amelia Earhart, Neil Armstrong on the moon, Huck Finn.  So why not apply to Comrade Putin such truthful labels as invader, imperialist, colonialist, land-grabber, tyrant, and occupier of Central Europe instead?  And if he dislikes such condemnation, let him stop behaving like the consummate evildoer he has now become.

Knowing these labels to be correct, is this imperialist (whose troops wear black masks to hide their criminal identities) a mere competitor and adversary engaged in a little “adventure”?  Or is he a deadly enemy with Stalinist and “Evil Empire” ambitions, who might lead us into a politico-military, Cold War-style confrontation to the death?

In recognition of the latter possibility, most of his "Death to America" and “America, the Great Satan” co-conspirators – e.g., the Mullahs of Iran, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Fidel and Raul Castro of Cuba, the Ortega brothers of Nicaragua, Nicolas Maduro of the newly re-named CUBAzuela, and the increasingly aggressive Chinese – are all neck-deep into an anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-free-enterprise conspiracy so worldwide as to constitute Cold War II.

To date, mostly soft labels for “CommieTsar Putin”

To date, both the left-leaning media and the academic community limit themselves to relatively soft, tentative, and wait-and-see labels.  They call the man neither a Communist nor a Fascist, neither a right-wing or left-wing extremist – but only a strongman, an autocrat, an adventurer, a president, the Russian leader of a mere “regional power” according to Barack Obama – all of which avoid mention of the man's bloody Stalinist ideology and his Islamo-fascist allies.

Based on compelling evidence that Comrade Putin remains at heart a KGB-trained communist – selected for police-state leadership by former Premier Yuri Andropov (of psychiatric prisons infamy) and until recently still toasting "the memory of Dzugashvili," which was Stalin's real name – this lifelong bully clearly wants to be Russia's Czar for Life, its de facto "CommieTsar.”

With regard to his resurgent Marxist desire for world domination, this is the supposedly “former” communist who at last year’s Sochi Olympics labeled the collapse of the Evil Empire in 1991 “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” – when it was, in fact, by far the biggest human rights and “democratic” achievement of the century, instead.

In the wake of the man’s earlier annexations of the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia and his ongoing “Crime in Crimea,” several other appropriate labels for this aggressive evildoer’s actions and persona would be intruder, aggressor, invader, Vlad the Bad, occupier, imperialist, colonialist, dictator, Bolshevist bully, Stalinist, fascist-Left tyrant, and, alas, the above-mentioned CommieTsar.

A Bit of Russian Truth in History

Ironically, the latter is the modern version of the title that Vladimir Lenin assumed almost a century ago when, by a quasi-successful coup in early November 1917, he rudely replaced Alexandre Kerensky as "Chief Commissar" of what was still the Provisional Government of Russia – which was reshuffled and largely co-opted by the Bolsheviks but not actually ended until mid-January 1918.

Not grandiosely and falsely named the "Great October Revolution" until a decade later at a Party conclave in 1927, this only partially successful counter-revolutionary coup of November 7 was followed on December 8, 1917 by free, multi-party elections for a long-awaited (and now long-forgotten) West European-style All Russian Constituent Assembly.

In these elections, which Chief Commissar Lenin tried unsuccessfully to delay in order to avoid entirely, his unpopular Bolsheviks won only 24 percent of the seats in a multi-party parliament that formally convened and elected anti-Leninist officers on January 18, 1918. 

But then, after soundly defeating two major Bolshevik resolutions relating to Russia’s ongoing involvement in World War I, the lights of Russian democracy were turned off.  That infant Constituent Assembly was forced into recess by Lenin’s militia and never allowed to re-convene – in what amounted to Lenin’s second and only truly successful coup d'état, not in 1917 at all, but in the early morning hours of January 19, 1918.  

In effect, this was a murderous partial-birth abortion by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin before the new Russian democracy was even one day old – followed by five bloody years of civil war, until the counter-revolutionary and wholly illegitimate Soviet State of January 1918 finally declared itself the gosh-awful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in late December 1922.

By comparison, CommieTsar Putin and his neo-Stalinist supporters (yearning for the Soviet Union’s superpower status of yore) have already colonized two regions of Georgia and all of Crimea and are now trying to force the struggling young Ukrainian democracy into a permanent recess – i.e., a permanent withdrawal – from its Eastern and Black Sea provinces, while columns of masked invaders from Moscow-cum-Putingrad continue “mission creeping” their ugly way toward the rest of Ukraine, Moldova, and Central Europe.

The question now is whether our AWOL (Always Weak On Leadership) President Obama and many equally uncertain NATO allies will finally begin “standing tall” (à la Ronald Reagan) against Putin’s relentless imperialism and colonialism, or will continue “voting present” and “squatting small” (à la Barack Obama) as this fascist-Left Russian enemy goes marching by.

A D.C.-area attorney, writer, and national security strategist, Jim Guirard was longtime chief of staff to former U.S. Senators Allen Ellender and Russell Long of Louisiana.  His TrueSpeak.org website is devoted to truth in language and truth in history in public discourse.