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Iraq War, the Color Revolutions, and finally, the Arab Spring.
    All these events serve as exhibits in the argument against a fundamental American assumption: that freedom trumps all the other values holding these societies together. On the contrary, many around the world believe that order is a higher good than freedom. Chaos is the overriding enemy, and chaos is American.
    Consider how the new conservatism played into Georgian Dream’s appeal. The party attracted a significant following from a broad swath of society that felt the president’s reforms had ushered in a color-blind, ethnically impartial, sexually liberated, global system of meritocracy that styled itself as a revolution—and, indeed, it was. Recall that around thistime, in Russia, the Putin government prosecuted and jailed the Russian female punk band Pussy Riot. (The last two jailed members were released in December 2013 on an amnesty measure, widely regarded as a “cosmetic measure” ahead of the Sochi Olympic Games. 28 ) The young women were punished not for political crimes but for trumped-up offenses against religious and social sensitivities. The prosecution was mere cover for the Kremlin to rid itself of figures who might’ve galvanized the opposition; the case stirred up countervailing popular support for Putin.
    All the while, Putin had been making highly public overtures to the Russian Orthodox Church, cracking down on gay activism in the country while extolling, by example, the virtues of manliness and the nationalist traditions of Russia’s religious institutions. Putin has been building an alliance with the church for years, turning it into a de facto official religion and cracking down against rival Protestant denominations given to more liberal attitudes. He built a public alliance with the church’s leader, Patriarch Aleksei II, frequently appearing with him on Kremlin-controlled television networks. The two men share a commitment to Russian nationalism and a dedication to restoring Russia’s lost glory. 29
    Some perspective is in order here: As a young KGB agent, Vladimir Putin lived through the last years of Soviet power, when the Russian Orthodox Church became a formidable force against the state. A devoted child of the Soviet system, Putin witnessed how the West allied itself with Russian religious institutions by smuggling Bibles and funds to believers, helping them undermine the Soviet state. That was a lesson Putin could scarcely forget. Indeed, as he once famously said, the collapse of the Soviet system was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century—and certainly the defining disaster of his life. It shaped his worldview, and it will always be associated, in his mind, with the collapse of order.
    Then, in an era when post-Soviet Russia was relatively weak—before the Iraq War spiked oil prices and pumped new blood into the Russian economy—Putin watched as pro-Western democratic revolutions overtook former Soviet republics, one by one. The Orange Revolution brought anti-Russian politicians to power in Ukraine. The Rose Revolution in Georgia ushered in the Saakashvili era. It is widely known that Putin regarded the Color Revolutions as artificial political events deliberately engineered by Western intelligence forces. Western funds came in from abroad to help protestors sustain their weeks-long occupation of central squares. Computers and Internet communications played a vital role; the way Putin saw it, these technologies were also supplied by the West for such purposes. His worldview can never credit popular feeling as genuine; dark forces must always be at work. Power, rather than ideals, drives human events.
    The irony here is that, a mere generation ago, it was Russia and China espousing revolutionary systems that overturned traditions and forced people to abandon their long-held values. Now, the reality is reversed: The Axis nations have forged a new conservative ideology to counter the West’s radical values and