For the twenty years that Vladimir Putin has reigned over his country, heads of state and government in the West have played pretend.
In international relations, pretending is commonplace. Those who govern democratic countries are careful not to lecture dictators and other tyrants. To put it bluntly, our leaders practice cynicism. Because it is not the charters of rights that drive them first, but the economic, financial and political interests of their own countries.
In other words, and regardless of political correctness, Western democrats know the deceitfulness of interlocutors like Putin, but play the comedy of power in order to ensure a modicum of stability in the world.
The Soviet Empire
However, of all the potentates, Vladimir Putin is the one whose room for maneuver is the least constrained. This man, whom his Western counterparts describe as a psychopath, a narcissist and a paranoiac, lives out of step with the current political reality. Its invented historical landmarks take it back to the days of the Soviet Empire.
This almost 70-year-old Russian autocrat, without a wrinkle in his face, who allows himself to be photographed bare-chested to display his oversized biceps, but who submits his intimate life to concrete censorship, casts a steely gaze on his interlocutors.
Putin never accepted glasnost and perestroika, ie the opening up and restructuring of the Soviet Union during the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, which led to its collapse. Even less the even more liberal attempts of Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation. Putin would have been more comfortable around Stalin.
Almost twenty years ago, I was in Ukraine. Memories of the Stalinist regime were still vivid there. A diplomat stationed in Kiev told me a well-known anecdote. When Stalin came to fish for sturgeons, the local authorities ensured that frogmen were in charge of hooking good catches on the hook of the “Little Father of the Peoples”, because one day when the latter had failed to take a specimen out of the water, the organizers of the fishing session had been sent to prison.
Ideological descendant
Putin is the ideological descendant of Stalin. He has his adversaries assassinated even when they stay abroad. He had his critics sent to Siberia and imprisoned Russian billionaires who publicly challenged him.
It is an understatement to say that there are sick people among the dictators who submit their people by depriving them of their rights and execute them according to their mood.
Vladimir Putin, one can believe, will only back down if the leaders of democratic countries stand up, show courage and put their democratic ideals above their current interests.
But these days, who wants to die for freedom? Especially when the nuclear threat lives in our minds? Especially when Trump, his Republican supporters and the Fox News television network express their admiration for Putin rather than siding with the world’s greatest free power, the United States and its President, Joe Biden.
Questions? What would have happened if Donald Trump had been re-elected?
