Russia was once enemy number one in the US. So how did Vladimir Putin infiltrate the Republican Party?

On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conservative media commentator Tucker Carlson used his nightly Fox News platform to ask why the Democratic establishment was being hostile towards Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin," Carlson said.

"Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason."

He mused that hating Putin had become "the central purpose of America’s foreign policy", which, he argued, could force the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe — something no one from either side of politics has called for.

Mr Carlson insisted his audience ask themselves: "Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?"

A day earlier, former US president Donald Trump shared an equally unusual take on a conservative radio show, seeming to praise Putin’s "peacekeeping" operation in Ukraine’s separatist-held regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as "genius" and "very savvy".

"How smart is that?" Mr Trump asked.

"There were more army tanks than I've ever seen. They're going keep peace all right."

Since the full-scale Russian assault began, the host of America's most-watched cable news show and his long-time ally — the former US president — have scaled back their rhetoric concerning the Russian autocrat.

Fox personality Tucker Carlson said it was "obvious" that "getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia". ( Reuters: Lucas Jackson )

But their first instinct revealed Mr Putin's creeping influence in right-wing American politics, which has gone well beyond what US intelligence agencies called an attempt by the Russian leader to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

It also showed how far some Republicans have drifted from the "red peril" paranoia of the Cold War era when another of their presidents, Ronald Reagan, dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil empire".

And even since 2012, when then-presidential nominee Mitt Romney called Russia America's "number one geopolitical foe".

After Carlson's comments aired on Fox News, American journalist Robert Mackey counted four separate instances of translated clips from Tucker Carlson Tonight appearing in Russian news reports in under a week.

In one prime-time address, which was later dubbed in Russian, Carlson declared that Ukraine was "not a democracy" and labelled the country "a client state of the Biden administration".

After researching the interplay between Fox News and the Republican Party for more than a decade, Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at media watchdog Media Matters, said he was not surprised.

He recalled right-wing media commentators comparing Mr Putin's strength with the perceived softness of then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, and sees the cable network's recent coverage as a more extreme version of the same impulse.

"They were contrasting him with the particular type of masculinity that they saw in Putin — with his judo and posing shirtless on a horse — and using him as a foil to make Barack Obama look bad," Mr Gertz said.

Commentators say Vladimir Putin's hyper-masculine image has been held in contrast to Democrat leaders by some Fox News hosts over the years. ( Reuters: Ria Novosti )

One widely circulated meme compared a photo of Mr Putin looking stern on horseback with one of Mr Obama smiling while riding a bicycle.

Fox News made it the "Pic of the Day" amid Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil," Sarah Palin, former Republican vice-presidential candidate, told another popular host, Sean Hannity.

"They look at our president as one who wears mum jeans and equivocates and bloviates."

In 2008, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin said a Russian invasion of Ukraine would lead to a war with the US. ( Reuters: John Gress )

Just six years earlier, Ms Palin had taken a much tougher stance on Russia.

In 2008, when she was running for vice-president and Mr Putin's troops were invading Georgia, she argued in favour of strong US sanctions against Russia, as well as allowing Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO.

As Mr Gertz pointed out, certain conservatives in the Republican Party at that time expressed admiration for Mr Putin’s emboldening of the Russian Orthodox Church and anti-LGBTI sentiment.

In recent weeks, like Mr Obama before him, President Biden has similarly been accused of not standing up to Mr Putin soon enough, by Republicans and Fox News pundits alike.

One early poll found 62 per cent of Americans believe Mr Putin would not have acted if Mr Trump was still president.

When Donald Trump defeated Hilary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, aided by a Russian hack-and-leak operation, it became more challenging for Mr Trump's supporters to openly criticise the Kremlin, according to Mr Gertz.

"You might expect the idea of a foreign dictator attempting to alter US presidential elections would be something that would unite the country in some way," he said.

"But what you saw was a fairly wide swathe of the Republican Party and the conservative media trying to find a way to make excuses for it because Donald Trump spoke so favourably about Vladimir Putin."

As recently as this week, Mr Trump told Hannity that he "got along" with Mr Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"I got along with them well," he said.

"That doesn’t mean they are good people. It doesn't mean anything other than the fact that I understood them and perhaps they understood me — maybe they understood me even better."

Many Republicans including Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Senators Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham and former vice-president Mike Pence have slammed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney has slammed what she called the "Putin wing" of the Republican party. ( AP: J Scott Applewhite )

And a recent poll found 66 per cent of Republican voters placed the blame for the war entirely on Mr Putin's shoulders.

But Mr Gertz said some right-wing media personalities see the war as a political opportunity.

"I think the cynicism is pretty extreme," Mr Gertz said, of Carlson and his colleagues.

"They all made a bet that the most important thing they could do with the Russia-Ukraine crisis… is to attack the Biden administration.

"Typically, the way this happens in foreign policy is that the Republican Party and Fox News, which reflects it in a lot of ways, has both an interventionist wing and an isolationist wing.

"The interventionists will attack a Democratic administration for not doing enough… but the isolationists will attack them for doing anything at all."

"The pincer move", as Mr Gertz described it, is "designed to hammer the Democratic administration from both sides" and can change tack from hour to hour, or even segment to segment.

That isolationist instinct can be traced back to the early 20th century, according to Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University who studies US politics and social movements.

After World War I, Senate Republicans voted down a bill to join the League of Nations in order to, as they saw it, protect American sovereignty.

In 1940, many joined the America First Committee, which opposed arming to fight the fascist movement, which was gaining momentum in Europe.

Even during the early Cold War, many anti-communist Republicans wanted the United States to depend on its nuclear superiority to counter Soviet power, rather than enlarging the military.

"There's a tradition, which in some ways Reagan went against, actually, ironically, by wanting the US to be much more aggressive and really expand the defence budget tremendously, which he did during his presidency," Professor Kazin said.

"So, in that sense, Trump is a reversion to a very strong tradition in the Republican Party, which really begins when the US is a victor in World War I — or one of the victors in World War I — and wants to help make the world more democratic."

In recent weeks, the tug-of-war between the more hawkish traditionalists and Trump loyalists inside the Republican party has come to a head.

"It's very dangerous to have one large part of one of the major political parties in America being very dubious about whether it's a good idea to counter… a nuclear power, which is invading another country without any provocation," Professor Kazin said.

"On the other hand, I should say that most Republicans are now supporting a tough stance against Russia, because they understand that's popular among most voters."

A more recent poll found a majority of Americans support the sanctions levelled at the Kremlin by the United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere.

This has left some Republican members, such as North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn, whose labelling of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as "a thug" was roundly condemned, increasingly isolated.

Republican Madison Cawthorn called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a "thug" and his government "incredibly evil". ( Reuters: Republican National Convention )

Some of those spurned by Mr Trump, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney, who was ousted from her party's leadership for supporting an investigation into the January 6 Capitol riots, have repudiated the former president.

Congresswoman Cheney went so far as to declare that: "Trump's interests don't seem to align with the interests of the United States of America."

Professor Kazin said he takes his cues from this audience.

"He knows what his fans and his listeners and, in general, what people out there in the larger media world are saying," he said.

"And when the front pages and home pages of every media outlet in the country are filled with news about the valiant Ukrainians, he would be very stupid — and he's not stupid at all — to keep saying what he was saying before the invasion."