Vladimir Putin, Tyrant: The Russian leader’s actions express essential and unalterable truths about human nature, which we ignore at our peril.
By Waller R. Newell
When Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Crimea in 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry professed bewilderment that such imperial aggression could happen in the modern age. It was like something out of “the 19th century.” Kerry’s reaction to Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine was equally baffled, as the patrician American diplomat lamented that the war would distract Putin from working with him on climate change. Common to both reactions was the astonishment that the material calculations and preoccupations of Western democracies might be blown away by a resurgence of old-fashioned tyrannical ambition.
As I show in Tyrants: Power, Injustice, and Terror, the writing had been on the wall for years regarding Putin’s grand geopolitical ambition to reestablish Russia’s control over at least some part of its former Warsaw Pact possessions, without much regard for the desires of the people who live there. Just as Putin’s previous conquest of Ossetia and Crimea shocked people into realizing that tyrannical ambition has not been outmoded by the progress of history, but is a recurring and permanent feature of human psychology and the political landscape, his current aggression again leaves people shocked that such terrible atavistic seeming actions are part of the world we are living in. It is precisely the comparative peacefulness and prosperity of the democracies that lulls us into an unawareness that wolves like Putin and Xi Jinping are always prowling just beyond the perimeter of free self-government. Putin’s latest aggression—this time aimed at the very heart of Europe—may have the salutary effect of shocking us into looking the threat of tyranny straight in the face.