True American Conservatives DO have something in common with Putin and it is not an ideological agreement and it has different principles and motivations - both are EU skeptics, and both do not accept the western political elite’s myth that (no matter what Putin is about) the EU is NOT about empire building - it is. The EU is NOT about Liberty, NOT about democracy, NOT about “tolerance” or “diversity”; it is about expanding CENTRAL authority over more and more daily life in Europe in Brussels, in unelected bureaucrats and supra-national courts given final and perpetual say-so by one-off “democratic” acts which close off local, “national” democratic decisions about many things after that.
One may laugh or cringe at the Portuguese president of the Commission, but what he is saying is part of the root ideology of the EU. When Putin and Lavrov visited Brussels in January 2014 for a summit meeting with the EU leaders the same Barroso talked about "creat[ing] a common economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok". Several other leading politicians of EU member countries have spoken of a European Union from the Bay of Biscay to the Urals. (Latest of those was David Cameron during a visit to Kazakstan this year.)
These statements are no more meaningless phrases than the phrase "ever closer union" in the original EU (EEC) treaty. They mean it!
And the reason is the statist ideology that pervades the political discourse in Europe. Europe is a small peninsula on the European-Asian landmass. The individual countries will not be able to compete with the large popolous nations in Asia and the Americas for raw materials and energy supplies. Therefore the Union must grow larger and larger - the only way to safety (they feel).
Bad luck for Russia and Ukraine who happens to be in the way of that expansion - and bad luck also to the United States if the US decides to go along with the EU, because in the end it will have to be the US who for a third time will have to come to the aid of a Europe that has involved itself in a major conflict.
The EU is our enemy. Sunni Islamists are our enemy. Shia Islamists are our enemy. China is our enemy. Communists are our enemy. And Eurasianists are our enemy.
First, to Putin the phoniness of EU liberalism is no different than the phoniness of the USA ideology. He opposes all of us simply because NATO stands in his way of expansion.
Buchanan, however, wrote about Putin being "one of us" based on some cultural-conservative trends in Russia. That, it is now clear, was a huge mistake.