He's a threat to dollar hegemony and, therefore, a threat to our welfare/warfare/debt state.
China is a much bigger threat to our dollar hegemony. Russia has the world’s 8th largest economy behind Brazil and just ahead of Italy. It has the 77th highest per capita GDP just behind Antigua and Barbuda and ahead of Croatia.
It’s not even just about the dollar, China is in that passage as well. Russia and the U.S. combined have more than 90 percent of all nuclear weapons Russia. Even though Russia is a thuggish regime, they aren’t beyond the threat of trying to take us down with them via nuclear war if they feel desperate enough to do so.