In early December, some 60 percent of Russian voters sided with Putin’s United Russia party in the elections for Russia’s 450-seat parliament, the Duma. The vote has apparently given Putin license to prolong his stranglehold on Russia. While this was happening, Venezuelan voters were rejecting a package of 69 proposed amendments to Venezuela’s constitution that would have given Hugo Chávez extraordinary powers.

Russia and Venezuela have played huge roles in recent oil price increases, and their two leaders are strutting with bravado fueled by enormous influxes of petrodollars. Their leadership styles are similar, and they require an enemy in order to rally popular support. The easy enemy of course is the United States and what it represents. But the darkest part of all this is that their attitudes represent the thinly-disguised envy of America, which permeates many countries, including some of our “friends.” And inflating this anti-Americanism is our own highly unpopular president, who is made all the more vulnerable by thoughtless Americans in that strange self-flagellation unique to American politics.

Let’s face it: neither Putin nor Chávez care whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. In their quest to harm the U.S. economy and cut down what they perceive as U.S. hegemony, oil is their tool. Politics is one thing; committing economic suicide is another.

One reason for Putin’s popularity at home is that he has tapped into Russias’ two strong yearnings: a cultural affinity for a strong, Tsar-like leadership – quite different from Western European and North American predilections – and an understandable hunger for prestige and world recognition – a need to be relevant. In the course of 15 years, the Russian people saw their country go from superpower to junior partner, and then, thanks to Putin, through a renaissance of power. Putin’s sojourn has not been on the back of nuclear weapons – which the country still owns in abundance – but has been fueled by oil and gas.

With Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has recovered much of its Soviet-era position and power. What Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev could not do with nuclear weapons and raw military power, Putin has attempted with oil and gas, in what arguably can be called energy imperialism.

The recent elections, even with observers’ assertions of unfairness, put Putin in a commanding position. He will be around for a long while and he has to be reckoned with. He knows it, we know it, and China, with its dire energy supply predicaments, knows it.

Chávez is another matter. Cheered on by the unrepentant Fidel Castro, Chávez, who fashions himself as the new Simón Bolívar (or at least Che Guevara), thinks he is above the law and the rules, even those of his own one-sided game – all in the name of what he considers revolutionary bliss.

But make no mistake. The referendum was a crashing defeat for Chávez. Even in poverty-prone, populist-infused Venezuela, with his near complete control of the media and government machinery, he lost. Kudos to the Venezuelans, who are beginning to see the emptiness of populist sloganeering as their country falls apart. The country is realizing that it simply cannot be managed by slogans. Oil production, on which their economy depends heavily, is at its lowest level since the country’s first nationalization in the 1970s.

With oil prices near $100 per barrel, Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez, who at $60 would otherwise be monkeys, are expected to be 1,000-pound gorillas. At least in Venezuela, we have seen how far populism can take a leader. In Russia, apparently that point has yet to be reached.