While Donald Trump was in office, he was one of Putin's superfans and apologists. The notion of dictators as charismatic, capable strategists is an illusion
is an elegantly sophisticated counterpart… who is not reckless but has always done the math." In the words of one American commentator, Vladimir Putin is like a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy, whereas Barack Obama "stumbles with checkers." On the eve of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the Russian dictator as "very shrewd, very capable," adding "I have enormous respect for him. Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia was breathlessly hailed as a forward thinking, capable leader: yes, the selfsame MBS who ordered the hit and literal butchering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist affiliated with the Washington Post.īut surely the most consequential examples today are Xi Jinping and especially Vladimir Putin. Remember when Bashar al-Assad of Syria was seen as a savvy “reformer,” invested in the welfare of his people? Except that he became notorious for inflicting chemical weapons on his subjects. Falk suggested that “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third world country.” That’s not been the experience of Iranian women who are brutalized and jailed for failing to wear hijab nor of gays executed by public hanging nor of any Iranians who value their freedom nor of any of the victims of Iranian-backed Islamist terrorism. In 1979 Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, dismissed concerns about Khomeini’s political vision of Islamic totalitarianism. SUGGESTED READING How the West got Russia and China Wrong By Aaron Friedbergįor example, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was rising to power, he found admirers among Western intellectuals. But, depressingly, many politicians and intellectuals persist in misreading dictators. The engineered Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor), the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields of the twentieth century should have taught us to evaluate dictators properly. No death toll can truly capture the devastation that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and their ilk inflicted upon the world. But anyone that acts as a tyrant over the people of their country, and causes the pain and suffering of a war, is no genius, writes Yaron Brook and Elan Journo. One American commentator described Putin as a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy. We instinctually ascribe political and strategic genius to the authoritarians of the world.
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