"You have an autocrat in power—or even now a despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps. We don’t know what the inside looks like. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. These are surmises. Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners. [snip]
"The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation." -- Stephen Kotkin, scholar of Russian history, in a New Yorker interview with David Remnick, "The Weakness of a Despot." The interview also delves into the threat that a cornered Putin poses, and how the Biden Administration has been dealing with that dynamic.
2 comments:
The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West
And they always do this. Every despot believes democracies are decadent and weak, and then learns the hard way how wrong he was. Kaiser Wilhelm II did it. Hitler did it. The imperial Japanese junta did it. Saddam Hussein did it. Now Tin-of-Pu is doing it. One despot after another does this and then gets his ass kicked by those same democracies. And then the next despot comes along and makes the exact same mistake. They must be idiots.
That sounds good but it's not clear to me that the "resilience" of the West will work any miracles for Ukraine. As ugly a mess as Ukraine is for Putin and his military it seems like there remains a chance that in the process of destroying the country they'll manage to sufficiently paralyze what's left, giving them just enough breathing room to declare a victory of sorts and install a puppet government that will pretend to rule over what's left. . . for a while. Seems like Afghanistan.
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