Unless you reside under a rock, you’ve watched or at least heard about the interview Tucker Carlson conducted with Vladimir Putin. The American establishment is in a panic. Tucker resembles an asset who has gone rogue over the last few years and is now too big to stop, chatting amiably with a global supervillain. ‘You have a great name. He must kill your name before he kills you,’ said Juba the gladiator to Maximus in the film of that name.  It is similar with Carlson. He is resilient to the usual strategies employed to burn assets.  In part this is because he is independently wealthy; in part because half of America listens to him; in part it’s because he seems a good man. One can never really know these things, but he didn’t get on Epstein’s plane. There doesn’t seem to be any leverage.

Carlson seemed a little out of his depth interviewing Putin. He was not prepared for a winding lecture on the history of the Rus, but this winding lecture was not a mere jousting tactic Putin employed. Westerners, as befits democracies, think in electoral terms, and our intelligentsia are desperate for severance with the past. States like Russia and China think in civilisational phases.  Thinking beyond post-second-term retirement plans is an advantage if you want your society to have a long future.

Because many in the West believe our governing values to be universal and internationalist, we think that everybody should get behind them. We advocate for democratic and liberal reform around the world not only for the benefit of markets but for theological reasons; it is our secular religion. Anybody who does not agree is a rogue state. We are always on the lookout for Munich again and the partitioning of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss, because such historical analogies are the only ones anybody remembers, and, to the liberal, Hitler is more satanic than Satan.

Yet it is foolish, for those in the West, to view Putin as an ally, especially in an age experiencing the return of multipolarity and realpolitik. Those suspicious of the Washington establishment and its broader consensus invert conventional thinking and presume that anybody who criticises the endless march toward global homogenisation is a friend. But Xi and Putin are leaders of the old school. Their interest is their own national interest; it is certainly not in ours, nor in anything internationalist. Putin is for Russia.

In the old days, this was enough to consider such a forthright leader, even a rival, somebody you could work with. National interest was about sovereignty, firm borders, and the security of the state: in sum, power.  There was less requirement that national leaders swear pledges to internationalist causes, especially when they, who think in terms of their own interest and assume others do too, are likely to view this sort of thing as gamesmanship.

The American establishment does not act in the American national interest, as Putin pointed out. Many establishment types genuinely believe that the expansion of Nato, of Cold-War-era geopolitics, is in the national interest. But like any justified true belief, it may be scuppered by being mistaken or deceitful. The unipolar world, where America could presume fresh global norms courtesy of the Pacific Fleet, is fast fading.  National interest is not only strategic and geopolitical, but domestic too. It is found in the prosperity and security of those who are citizens of those states. Western establishments pretend to love the oppressed of the world but neglect their own citizens, who increasingly they appear to resent. Many are viewed as leftovers from a homogenous, religious and patriarchal world the establishment wishes would hurry up and expire. If Tucker’s mission is anything, it is to reverse that, not to help Russia.

One thing Putin said that was undeniably true is that the Russian in the street is more aligned with his principles than the man on the street in America is with Biden’s.

He was also exactly right when he said that true executive power is not vested in Biden, something the West has always been very proud of. But power dispersed into agencies and bureaucracies that amount to a new praetorian guard – which is what the separation of powers has degenerated into – is power unaccountable. Should the Russians ever want a revolution, they know whose head to take. Who can say the same in America?

Most of all, one was left with the impression of Putin’s statesmanship. This should be a shot across the bow for the West, which for decades has served up safe electoral options who amount to absolute buffoons. Not all of them are stupid; nobody climbs to the top of a political machine by being stupid. But their intellect is not the sort of wisdom that we might hope for in a philosopher-king. The ethic of the democratic politician is next to the ethic of the real estate salesman. Late-stage representative democracies must produce woolly products who will not frighten skittish consumers. What sitting Western leader could give a half-hour expose on a thousand years of history?

It is not in the emergence of a strong and overbearing Russia that the West’s interest is served. But rivals do serve a purpose; verbose sociological types call it external threat theory. The West needs to wake up, not into bellicose aggression, but into a period of reflection. We have forgotten who we are, something those rivals are determined not to allow happen to their own states. They note that ‘New Liberal Man’ is not in the national interest; they reinforce standards that until recently were considered essential for any healthy society. An elite that allows a body politic to harm itself recklessly is no better than a parent that allows a child to do the same: unless, of course, that parent does not love that child.

The retreat of American power is bad news for we antipodeans. Without American guarantees, our country is at the mercy of her northern neighbours. Americans are a cousin people, connected by blood and history, even if we scramble to dilute those things. Anti-Americanism, always a preoccupation of the Australian left, has become more widespread across our thinking public. The problem is not with American power but with the character of American power. Sometimes these things require a global supervillain to point them out.