The scramble among European leaders to respond to US President Donald Trump’s dramatic shift in policy towards Ukraine and Russia has been matched by a scramble among politicians, activists, commentators, and academics to explain that shift. There are new explanations every day: that President Trump is engaging in a shakedown of the Ukrainian government, that he simply prefers bilateral "great power" negotiations to the liberal international order, even that he is a Russian intelligence asset.

Most of these explanations are either highly personalised and focus on President Trump’s temperament, or highly depersonalised and try to explain his policy based on abstract factors like the global balance of power. What few of them engage with is the fact that his policy has as much to do with satisfying the preferences of his base as his own preferences or the demands of global politics, and that American conservatism has grown markedly more pro-Russia and pro-Putin over the past decade and a half.

The American conservative right, once the movement that, in the words of President Reagan, decried the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world”, has undergone a significant shift in its attitudes towards Russia since President Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012. It increasingly aligns itself with the politics of Russia under President Putin, a development rooted on the one hand in admiration for President Putin's domestic policies and a growing opposition to the values embodied by European liberal democracies.

President Putin's domestic politics present a model that many American conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, find appealing. He has established a highly centralised, autocratic state championing "traditional" values, positioning himself as a defender of conservative social norms against what he........

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