Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shocked the world. It should not have. Vladimir Putin has been threatening Ukraine for years. To support those threats, Russian media has dutifully featured ludicrous, fabricated tales of Ukrainian misdeeds and even atrocities against beleaguered Russians, and he has asserted that a nation with a Jewish president whose relatives died in the Holocaust was run by Nazis.
Few outside Putin’s orbit believed these assertions but nor were they widely challenged as long as Putin’s territorial ambitions seemed to remain modest — a Crimea here, a South Ossetia there. Western leaders hoped Putin would somehow be dissuaded from more drastic military action — that cooler heads would prevail — forgetting that in Russia there is only one head that matters.
The economic and political fallout of Putin’s war might not be fully known for months, perhaps years, but the mere fact of the invasion reveals a good deal about the perils of investing almost total power in a single person. These perils need to be taken to heart because it has become fashionable in some corners of American society to romanticize autocrats, Putin in particular. Donald Trump recently called him a “genius,” while former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted to having “enormous respect” for Putin, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson instructed his viewers to ask themselves why some Americans “hate Putin so much.”
