Not in vain is Russia heir to the traditions of Byzantium; intrigue, secret diplomacy and espionage are integral to the Third Rome’s strategic culture. Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has proven a consummate practitioner of statecraft in this fashion, as well as an able defender of the national interest. Yet where is he leading Russia? The answer remains a mystery. His formidable will and predisposition to action are impressive, but only in the service of a higher principle will these gifts signify greatness.

Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.

Western traditionalists might feel an affinity for certain aspects of Vladimir Putin’s drive to restore the Russian state. Such sentiments are often justified. Putin is unapologetic in his defense of actual national interests and has deftly reclaimed the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Eurasia. In the August 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia, he delivered the Russian response to Washington’s creation of the Kosovo client state and stood firmly against American globalism. Open Society NGOs were expelled from Russia on his orders, and oligarchic influence curtailed, if only to an extent. The current Prime Minister has also initiated pronatalist campaigns to reverse post-Soviet demographic freefall and strengthened the Orthodox Church’s social profile. While Putin may be credited for carrying out these policies, other aspects of his rule betray the ideological indifference of a technocrat and myopic opportunism.

Putin’s liberal tendencies are first and foremost evident in his chosen successor to the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev might style himself a reformer in the spirit of Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, but his pretensions fall flat. The president’s worldview is shaped by the same empty liberalism that has arrested Russia’s post-Communist cultural recovery from the 1990s to today. His closest advisers are virtually indistinguishable from the official front-men of financial elites in the West—their modernization projects are intended to strengthen the primacy of the oligarchs, and they hail mass immigration from the Caucasus and Central Asia as a disposable labor resource and political dependency. In the typically bourgeois formula of Calvin Coolidge, the business of Russia Inc. is business—production, consumption and profit. For the global civilization that Russians are entreated to join, there is no value higher.

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.

In his classic work East and West, the French scholar René Guénon noted modern man’s quest to transform the world in his own image and likeness. The materialism and spiritual disorder that reign in our age are to be imposed everywhere:

If [Westerners] merely took pleasure in affirming their imagined superiority, the illusion would only do harm to themselves; but the most terrible offense is their proselytizing fury: in them the spirit of conquest goes under the disguise of ‘moralist’ pretexts, and in the name of ‘liberty’ they would force the whole world to imitate them!

Nearly a century has passed since Guénon wrote this passage, but his thoughts retain all of their original relevance. Today’s Western elites have globalized their model of social chaos, an achievement they proclaim the inexorable advance of progress. They, the masters of history, possess the wisdom and technocratic expertise to will into being a free and equal garden of earthly delights; the defiant shall be crushed.

Yet events didn’t run according to script on October 10th in Belgrade, Serbia. What was supposed to be a triumphal march of the Open Society in the capital of a vanquished nation met determined and forceful opposition. That Sunday President Boris Tadic’s pro-EU government pushed forward with the Belgrade Pride Parade, a familiar and by now non-controversial affair in the contemporary West. Accompanying around 1,000 marchers were five times as many riot police and Interior Ministry gendarmes in American digital-pattern camouflage. And that’s where the choreography spun out of control. Thousands of young men from various Serbian rightist groups took to the streets and engaged in skirmishes with police, as well as attacking government buildings and Tadic’s Democratic Party headquarters.

This September, Russian citizens remember the 6-year anniversary of the terrorist attack in Beslan, North Ossetia. In the aftermath, then-president Vladimir Putin echoed Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue: “We showed weakness, and the weak are beaten”. This harsh realism guides Russia both in the unforgiving Caucasus and the wider world. Yet at the scene of the slaughter, where Chechen and Ingush militants gunned down schoolchildren, the Ossetian authorities have raised a cross in memory of the victims and vow to build an Orthodox church there.

In the United States, a wholly different scene unfolds as we approach the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. National debate continues over the propriety of establishing Cordoba House, an Islamic center two blocks from the site of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. The original Cordoba Mosque was built after the eighth-century Muslim conquest of southern Spain. The Moorish invaders razed the Church of San Vicente to erect their triumphal monument, just as the Hagia Sophia was topped with Turkish minarets to commemorate the 1453 sack of Constantinople. It is a strange age we live in when a second Cordoba Mosque near the site of a major assault by jihadists is meant to signify “bridge-building” and “interfaith dialogue”. Toleranz über alles!

Despite historical context, opponents of the mosque have been reduced to arguing that building it so close to Ground Zero would be insensitive to the victims of 9/11. That is their central premise, one heavily conditioned by the shallow sentimentalism that grips public discussion. Mere feelings cannot form a sound basis for counteraction.

Traditionalists are often painted as partisans of lost causes. The ideologues of modernity and “progress” thus consign actual rightist movements to history’s dark remnants, all the while leading humanity’s march into a radiant future of equality and liberty.

We have witnessed their future, and all its supposed radiance is but an artifice. Modern civilization offers a plethora of material goods to mask the denial of the one true Good; it creates virtual worlds of distractions and amusements to convince man to forget how he abandoned the one true God.

Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher and premier theorist of the White Russian movement, saw this earlier than most. The Whites were first into battle in the confrontation with one particularly savage program of the Revolution, Soviet Bolshevism. As an unabashedly faithful Christian, monarchist and patriot, Ilyin understood the full gravity of the threat and how to combat it; above all else, he knew victory could only be achieved through the will to spiritual resistance, in a war beginning in our own hearts.