American progressives are caught beetween a rock and a hard place, reluctant to vote either for Trump or Clinton, and fearing that a vote for Jill Stein will spoil the race between the two main contestants. Even those aware that Trump would be unlikely to attack Russia, while Clinton would be, doesn't help them. Perhaps we need to take a closer look at what might unite a neo-fascist with a leader with a democrasocialist etho

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Many foreign policy observers were surprised when Donald Trump declared that he would 'do business' with Vladimir Putin, and those on the left in the US were doubly disturbed, seeing Trump as a neo-fascist.

Following the business mogul's acceptance speech, the picture looks a little clearer, though not necessarily simpler. Trump appears to be winning over American Evangelicals, notwithstanding his crude language and his several wives, probably in large part thanks to his call for law and order. In fact, this backing will bring double returns, because it aligns him in yet another way with the Russian President. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Vladimir Putin is a committed Eastern Orthodox, not only preaching a return to religion, but visiting monasteries and reserving a privileged place for Kyril, the Russian Patriarch on the presidential reviewing stand.

Vladimir Putin's embrace of religion is an integral part of his traditional worldview, based on solid families and what he refers to as sovereignization. As the eminent Russian blogger living in the US known as the Saker wrote in 2014 http://www.serendipity.li/the_saker/Re-Sovereignization_of_Planet_Earth.htm :

"The Russian end-goal: to unseat the US from its role as a world hegemon, (and to) present another civilizational model which openly rejects the current Western paradigm of a society run by small, arrogant minorities," in which individual countries are no longer sovereign, and to "challenge the current liberal capitalist economic order embodied in the Washington Consensus and replace it by a model of social and international solidarity (call it '21 century socialism' if you want)."

Writing in Russian Insider recently, Russian paleo-conservative blogger Roman Nosikov noted that: "The recent meeting of the NATO-Russia Council shows that basically the parties are not yet ready for dialogue, because Russia is a country and NATO is a bureaucratic structure. A country has interests and goals, while a structure has reports, work plans, schedules and cadres. The country has a reality, and the structure has an ideology.

Nosikov goes on to say that:"Russia offers the restoration of international law". and transparent rules of the game".a capitalism that is not diseased with the ideology of supremacy and bureaucracy," referring to Vladimir Putin's repeated calls for a return to sovereign states loosely organized around several regional poles to replace overall US hegemony, one dominant state (the US) with subordinate allies..

This is a more elegant way of describing a new world order than that of Donald Trump, but if these two meet, they will understand each other, at least on this level, which is about the survival of a nuclear-armed planet.

More on Trump/Putin to come.

Authors Website: http://www.otherjonesii.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:

Born in Phila, I spent most of my adolescent and adult years in
Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, my latest being Russia's Americans.

CUBA: Diary of a
Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia
Sanchez

Lunch with Fellini,
Dinner with Fidel: An Illustrated Personal Journey from the Cold War to the
Arab Spring

America Revealed to a
Honey-Colored World

A Taoist Politics: The
Case For Sacredness

I began my journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome,
spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before
they made the revolution ('Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young'). After
spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying
Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, I wrote
the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of
the Soviet Union ("Une autre Europe, un autre Monde'). My memoir, 'Lunch
with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel', tells it all. 'A Taoist Politics: The Case
for Sacredness', which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and
modern science and what this implies for political activism; and 'America Revealed
to a Honey-Colored World" is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from
the City on a Hill'.