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Just a few weeks ago, many influential figures on the American right loved, just loved Vladimir Putin. In fact, some of them still can’t quit. For example, Tucker Carlson, although he has reluctantly withdrawn from full support for Putin, still blames the United States for the war and promotes the russian disinformation on US-funded biological weapons laboratories.
For the most part, though, Putin lovers in America are having a moment of truth. It is not so much that Putin reveals himself as a tyrant ready to kill a large number of innocent people: they already knew or should have known. The problem is that the strong man they admired, whom Donald Trump praised as “clever” and “genius” just before Putin invaded Ukraine, is turning out to be remarkably weak. And that is not an accident. Russia faces disaster precisely because it is ruled by a man who does not accept criticism or tolerate dissent.
On the military side, a war that Russia clearly envisioned as a blitzkrieg that would overrun Ukraine within days has yet to capture any of the country’s 10 major cities, though long-range bombardment is turning those cities to rubble. On the economic side, Putin’s attempt to insulate himself from possible Western sanctions has been a debacle, with everything indicating that Russia will have a depression-level slump. To see why this matters, you need to understand the sources of the right-wing infatuation with a brutal dictator, an infatuation that began even before the rise of Trump.
Many on the right just like the idea of authoritarian rule. Just a few days ago, Trump, who has toned down his praise for Putin, chose instead to express his admiration for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Kim’s generals and aides, he noted, “cowarded” when the dictator spoke, adding that “I want my people to act like this.”
But now we’re relearning an old lesson: sometimes what looks like strength is actually a source of weakness.
Whatever happens in the war, it is clear that Russia’s army was far less formidable than it appeared on paper. Russian forces appear to be poorly trained and poorly led; There also seem to be problems with Russian equipment, such as communication devices.
These weaknesses might have been apparent to Putin before the war had investigative journalists or independent watchdogs within his government been in a position to assess the country’s true military readiness. But such things are not possible in Putin’s Russia.
The invaders were also clearly shocked by Ukraine’s resistance, both by its determination and its competence. Realistic intelligence assessments could have warned Russia that this could happen; but would you like to have been the official standing up and saying, “Mr. President, I am afraid that we may be underestimating the Ukrainians”?
On the economic side, I must admit that both the West’s willingness to impose sanctions and the effectiveness of those sanctions have surprised almost everyone, myself included.
Still, economic officials and independent experts on Russia should have warned Putin in advance that the “Fortress Russia” idea was a deeply flawed idea. It shouldn’t have required deep analysis to realize that Putin’s $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves would become largely unusable if the world’s democracies cut off Russia’s access to the global banking system. Nor should it have required deep analysis to realize that Russia’s economy relies heavily on imports of capital goods and other essential industrial inputs.
But then again, would you have wanted to be the diplomat who tells Putin that the West is not as decadent as he thinks, the banker who tells him that his “war chest” will be worthless in a crisis, the economist who tells him that Russia needs imports?
The point is that the case for an open society, a society that allows dissent and criticism, goes beyond truth and morality. Open societies are also generally more effective than closed autocracies. That is to say, while you might imagine that there are great advantages to ruling by a strong man who can simply tell the people what to do, these advantages are more than outweighed by the absence of free discussion and independent thought. No one can tell the strong man that he is wrong or urge him to think twice before making a disastrous decision.
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