You Are Only A Strongman Until You Are Not

 Here is the difference between a strong democratic country and a country run by a strong man: the country endures the loss of its leader.

• Pericles dies and Athens persists
• FDR dies and Truman drops the A-Bomb

The strong man ends up on a meat hook (Mussolini), or blowing out their brains (Hitler), or enjoying the scenery of St. Helena.

MAGA and Trump admire Putin for his strength. They want us to be like the Russians. Losers must pine for losers.

Ukraine keeps crossing Russia’s red lines. Putin keeps blinking.

On day one of the invasion in February 2022, Putin warned that any country that stood in Russia’s way would face consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history,” a threat that seemed directed at countries that might arm Ukraine.

If Russia’s territorial integrity were threatened, “we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff,” he said a few months later in September. “The citizens of Russia can be sure that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be ensured — I emphasize this again — with all the means at our disposal,” making a clear reference to Russia’s nuclear weapons.

***

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion “proved the Russians are bluffing,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former Ukrainian intelligence and defense official, now an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “It shuts down all of the voices of the pseudo experts … the anti-escalation guys.”

The attack was “risky,” he continued, “but it sent a very powerful signal and helped us change the narrative about Ukraine — that it is not able to win — and on the Russian red lines. Both narratives have been destroyed.” 

However,

It was to become a striking pattern, yet the U.S.-led policy on military aid to Ukraine has remained timid, according to many analysts.

Boris Bondarev, a Geneva-based former Russian diplomat who resigned in 2022 to protest the war, said in an interview that Washington’s fear of triggering a direct military conflict with Russia had crippled the U.S. response, leaving its goals in the war unclear and projecting American weakness to Putin and other global adversaries.

“When you put your enemy’s red lines, so to speak, as the crucial factor of your own strategy, you will always be on the losing side,” he said. 

What can save Putin? Donald Trump.

Well, the United States kept Francisco Franco in power for decades.

sch 8/24

From today's book review newsletter from The Guardian, How Tyrants Fall by Marcel Dirsus review – road to revolution. This sounds like it backs my opinion:

Dictatorships, he argues, are rather precarious things. Anything can bring them down. Beware the big crowd. Dirsus endorses the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule”. If that many of your subjects participate in mass demonstrations, you’re done for. So how do you deal with the mob? Don’t suppress them, Dirsus says, for if “you shoot, you lose”. Violence begets a spiral of resistance and repression.

That autocracy gives its people safety and stability is an illusion. 

sch 8/25