KILL PUTIN

 

          From the year 1400 to the end of WW II, there was always at least one war going on somewhere in Europe.  Then, for eleven years, there were none.  In 1956, the USSR (briefly) invaded Hungary.  Then interstate wars disappeared again until 58 years later, in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimea.

 

          And now Putin is at it again, rolling through the Ukraine.

 

          In 2011, Steven Pinker’s book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” detailed the extraordinary reduction in violence and war that humanity has witnessed since the Middle Ages, and especially over the last 150 years.  An entire chapter is devoted to the complete disappearance of certain types of conflicts, specifically the imperial war to acquire colonies and the colonial war to keep them.

 

          And now there’s Putin.

 

          Those of you who read this blog, or have observed the world recently, will not have spent a lot of time lately worrying about the resurgence of colonial wars and the reemergence of the great imperial bear of Mother Russia.  My fear, and perhaps yours, has been the growth of an emerging fascist world government based in a strategic partnership among President Xi, the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, Globo-Capitalists, Silicon Valley and Big Pharma.  It scares the bejesus out of me, but not because I envision foreign tanks encircling Philly and unleashing artillery fire on the doggie park near my house.  That’s not what the modern bad guys do.  Instead, they force you to take medicines because if you don’t, they won’t let you out of the house and you can’t have a job or travel on a train and they disappear your money so you can never have fun or see your kids.  And even if you take the shots, they make you wear a diaper on your face to prove you will obey them forever.

 

          And they do it all from their chalets in Davos.  That’s a key point here.  Nobody wants “territory” anymore.  Bill Gates doesn’t want to march troops into Donetsk Province in the Eastern Ukraine.  Fauci doesn’t want to set up shop in Starobilsk, though I hear the pierogis are to die for.  Those guys just want to push buttons and have their well-educated, woke foot-soldiers adjust your DNA, edit your social media postings, and empty your brokerage accounts if you ever try to buy a gun.

 

          But Putin invades things, for some reason.  He invades places all the time it seems, and then there’s the exotic poisons that wind up inside Russians who don’t like him, and the mangled bodies of dead journalists.

 

          All of which brings to mind Condaleeza Rice’s assessment of Putin about ten years ago (which I will have to paraphrase since I can’t find the exact quote): “Vladimir Putin is a bad actor, but there are many bad actors we have to deal with.  The problem with Putin is the 5% chance he is delusional.  I mean, who wrestles a tiger bare-chested?”

 

          And that remains the problem.  An invasion?  With bombs?  Blowing up people and buildings and bridges?  It’s like the 19^th Century never ended, and Putin the Great will be riding through on a choo-choo soon, reviewing his peasants and their quaint little cottages.  Condy’s estimate was a 5% chance Putin is delusional.  What is it now?  10?  25?  50?  The true significance of his desire (in 2022!), to seize “territory” in frozen hellholes like the Eastern Ukraine is that it proves he is mentally ill.  Once you win, you have to build the bridges again.  And fix the potholes.  In the 21^st Century, doing this 19^th Century stuff means you are nuts.

 

          The neo-isolationists, or whatever they are now called, are telling us he will stop with the Ukraine, and there’s no vital U.S. interest at stake, and we can’t always be policing the world, and it would just be another 20-year war we wind up losing.  And I can’t say they’re wrong.  I don’t see any point of getting involved in a war either.  But Putin has nukes, and there’s a very good chance he’s a fruitcake, so we have to take him out.  What happens between Russia and the Ukraine may be largely irrelevant to us in the West, and it’s largely irrelevant to me, but the existence of a guy like Putin is a danger to everyone, so we have to kill him.

 

          Except, we don’t really do that sort of thing.

 

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          You don’t read much about the 1815 Congress of Vienna these days, but I guess I’m still pissed off about it.  It’s at the root of our Putin problem.

 

          Europe in 1815 was a jumpy place.  Napoleon Bonaparte had just spent twenty years rolling through the continent conquering duchies and principalities and grand cities, and deposing various monarchies hither and thither.  In addition, the American Revolution and the French Revolution had birthed a number of liberation movements full of people who were considering new ideas about individual liberty and national sovereignty.  And all this was happening in a world where you could still find feudalism if you looked for it, and where a large majority of the world population lived on the equivalent of $2 a day until they died at the age of 30 or so.

 

          So an Austrian named Metternich and some other statesmen from Russia and Prussia and England and France had a meeting in Vienna and basically turned back the clock.

 

          It was a peace conference, or it was billed as a peace conference, and what it did to establish peace was to reinstate and bolster all the faltering monarchies in Europe and protect them with dozens of treaties and alliances.  Up until the Congress of Vienna, it was more-or-less accepted that if Prince Rupert of the Dominion of East Westwick was getting a little soft in the gray cells after eighteen generations of incest, it was OK to push him aside and install yourself as the new kingpin.

 

          But the Congress of Vienna changed all that.  The numerous treaties concluded at the Congress had the effect of installing the modern understanding of national sovereignty across Europe, though no individual treaty did so explicitly.  From 1815 on, sovereigns (primarily monarchies) could not be taken down simply because they inconvenience you or because you want their harbors or vineyards.  Instead, a reciprocal understanding developed among European states: your Prince Rupert is just as legit as our Grand Duchess Hildegarde.

 

          A few months after the Congress, in Paris, the Holy Alliance was forged among Austria, Prussia and Russia.  This agreement went even further.  Its purpose was to restore monarchies and the divine right of kings, and even return colonies to the imperial powers that had lost them.

 

          The unfortunate result of these agreements was to protect national governments from external challenges without regard to how cruel or ineffective or authoritarian those national governments might be.  And this idea of sovereignty survives in the reluctance of modern governments to kill despots like Saddam Hussein or Bashir Assad or Vladimir Putin.  It is actually illegal in many countries, including the U.S., to assassinate foreign leaders.  See: Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981.

 

          Authoritarians in America, by which I mean leftists, regularly lament the need for democratic governments to build consensus and implement change incrementally, rather than impose some utopian vision in an instant.  But one of the most important advantages democratic countries have over authoritarian ones is that the legitimacy of democratic states is rooted in popular support.  What this means is that the sovereign represents his nation and that any attack on the sovereign is an attack on the nation itself.

 

          For example, I personally have nothing but contempt for Joe Biden.  In fact, I don’t really view him as a real person.  To me, he’s more of a Max Headroom character, or an avatar shared by Bernie and Barack and Nancy and Chuck in the D.C. Metaverse.  However, I would view a physical attack on him by a foreign power as an attack on me personally. He is the president.  He is the democratically-elected (sort-of) symbol of America.  Killing him would be an act of war.

 

          On the other hand, there is almost nobody in Russia who would view the assassination of Putin as an assault on their beloved homeland.  The only real support an autocrat ever has is from those who depend on him for their own stream of corrupt influence and power and money.  Most people, in Russia and elsewhere, would regard the violent end of Putin as an inevitable result of his own murderous nature.  Nobody misses Saddam.  Nobody misses Ceausescu.  Nobody will miss Kim Jong-un.  Nobody will miss Putin.

 

          This difference, the legitimacy of an elected president versus the illegitimacy of a thug like Putin, is a tremendous advantage for the democracies of the world over the thug-ocracies like Russia.  Yet we never take advantage of it, though it would not be difficult to do so.

 

          The assassination of Putin could change the world.  Incentives are everything.  You only have to vaporize a few Putins and Saddams before the position of murderous psycho dictator becomes a lot less attractive as a career destination.

 

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          Some theorists on international law have suggested that dictatorship itself should be outlawed as a violation of basic human rights.  I suppose the world is not ready for such a doctrine, but with traditional warfare becoming less common and more frowned upon, it is not outlandish to hope for a time when violent, evil sovereigns come to be viewed as madmen and criminals rather than legitimate rulers of nations.

 

          There are problems with such a concept, of course.  The only way it can work is as a matter of raw international power politics, but there will be attempts to regulate the process or bring it under the control of NGOs and bureaucrats and lawyers.  That can never work.  Only some combination of near-universal approval and raw military superiority can prevent an assassination of this type from causing more problems than it solves.

 

          There is also the objection that taking out somebody like Putin might lead to retributions and further retributions and ultimately to wars, but that is unlikely.  Obama and Hillary managed to kill Muammar Qaddafi (despite U.S. law) by pulling the rug out from under him and allowing his many enemies to kill him, but no larger international wars resulted.  Libya became a lawless place and largely remains so, but is it truly worse than when the only “law” was Muammar himself?

 

          In any event, that’s not my problem.  And it’s not my proposal.  I’m not suggesting we FIX some hellhole, I just want to eliminate the madman at the top.  If another psycho-killer takes over, kill him too.  We know nation-building doesn’t work, so let’s try something simpler.  Eventually the murderous lunatics will grow less ambitious and somebody like John Kerry will rise to the top and bore everyone with his climate-change warnings.  Problem solved.

 

          In any event, the danger that killing a sovereign nut-case will lead the world to spiral out of control is non-existent.  The true peril is that, like today, nothing will be done about the real monsters that we all know are monsters.  Many nations have laws on their books against killing them, and most world leaders are perfectly comfortable with that.  In part, it is because Joe Biden and others like him have real doubts about their own legitimacy.  But it is also because Biden and his peers are neither brave, nor aggressive, nor decisive.  They’re just not very good leaders and they won’t take the steps that need to be taken.  That’s why, when somebody like Putin comes along, they don’t know what to do about him.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki