>>520995854
barbecued meat offerings and then Bush proceeded to praise how nice and genuine of a man, and how manly of a man, President Putin is.
That bromance, always a one-sided bromance of Bush loving on Putin, quickly faded when it became clear that Putin's agenda would not coincide with America's and was in fact bound up with a willingness to defy Washington when doing so served Russia, despite America's insistence on subservience from the rest of the world (it was still the "unipolar moment").
What happened is there was a diplomatic afterglow after 9.11.2001 when world leaders, no matter what they truly thought of America and its leaders, heaped lavish praise on America and its leaders. Of course this honeymoon of global sympathy for America was doomed to be short lived as America proceeded with its planned-since-the-90s (see PNAC) invasion of Iraq.
In other words, from the beginning, Putin was fated to become a bogeyman to America and the West because he would not fall in line with Washington's agenda like a good puppet leader of a lesser state during the unipolar moment of what was expected to be unchallenged American dominance in the world, and sure enough, Putin's refusal to toe the line encouraged other national leaders to follow suit and begin rejecting Washington's demands in favor of their own national interests. Putin opened the door of defiance against unilateral American rule, and this is the cardinal he committed that the West, America and its British imperial advisor nation above all, can never forgive.
But even Trump is a Putinist whether he knows it or not and, if he knows it, whether or not he ever admits it. He is just another one in the line of new nationalists in the 21st century who have broken with the dream of globalization that the world would be unified in a system of trade, even perhaps a homogenizing world culture, based on American interests.

Putin is thus the most courageous of today's leaders.