A new basis for Russian foreign policy?

From a recent Asia Times column by Spengler:

By mid-century the population of a political entity that in 1980 seemed destined to rule the world will have fallen by a half (in the case of Ukraine and Moldova) to a quarter (in the case of Russia). What remains of Russia stalks the world scene like a man whose terminal cancer leaves him no motivation save amusement and revenge.

In the same article, Spengler makes some interesting but highly debatable points about Christianity. The pagan element of Christianity, Spengler claims, is a handicap, not an advantage.

Christianity appeared as the gravedigger of traditional society, calling individuals out from their nations into a new people of God. Where it compromised too deeply with traditional society, through syncretic adoption of pagan elements, ultimately Christianity failed, as in the ex-Christian, neo-pagan continent of Western Europe. Where Christianity liquidated the languages, culture and memories of its converts, it flourished, uniquely in the case of immigrants to the United States.

This strikes me as wrong-headed. The apparent failure of Christianity in Western Europe has to a large extent coincided with the abandonment of the pagan elements in Christianity. Initially, after conversion, European cultures were not radically altered by Christianity; their pagan character eroded only over centuries, so that even today, within living memory, one has been able personally to observe the disappearance of residual pagan customs in European cultures. (In recent times this has perhaps been the consequence of industrialization and urbanization as much as of Christian hostility, or rather Christian negligence.) For example, until two hundred years or so upper-class Europeans and Americans would challenge to a duel anyone who offered them a serious insult; this was a pagan survival, not the product of a Christian ethos.

Christianity, or at any rate "pure", New Testament Christianity (such as Simone Weil espoused), does not seem to provide a complete cultural blueprint in itself; it needs some particular, traditional culture as its foundation. It is too other-worldly to stand by itself. Its proper role is to inform and elevate traditional culture, not to replace it. A Christian culture that forgets about its need for a pre-Christian foundation is likely doomed. Christian charity, to take one notable example, is self-destructive unless it rests on a foundation of justice. However, the idea of justice is pre-Christian; New Testament Christianity has nothing to say about it.

If Spengler is correct that the American (Evangelical Protestant) form of Christianity has the best prospects, it will be because that form of Christianity will rely on Biblical Judaism to furnish a foundation in a particular traditional culture.