Well, we all knew it had to happen. After all, look at the Romans. Their empire had barely got started before its leadership system descended to the point where idiots and madmen could capture power. Nero and Caligula come to mind. But it took another couple of hundred years before the whole country crashed. The Russian Empire lasted for much longer than that and was saved from its first run to ruin by the takeover of the Communists about a hundred years ago. But their style of ruling was even more corrupt than the tsars they replaced, and soon capitalism was eating their system away from the inside. And with capitalism comes economic dictatorship. Enter Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs.
It is unfortunate for all of us that Putin is a madman who is not an idiot. “Crazy like a fox” would be a better meme. But insane he is. There are two main disconnects in the Russian power pyramid. In the first place, he has surrounded himself with lackeys intent on their own profits. Power flows down from the top, but it doesn’t suit any of them to allow information to flow upwards. So Putin thinks he has twenty state-of-the-art fighter planes ready to fight, but only one can get off the runway. He thinks he has a huge, well-trained army, but they can’t tie their bootlaces, let alone get their outmoded tanks to the site of the battle.
The second disconnect is in his own mind. Like his favourite American president, he looks at the world through narrow blinders, and actually believes the propaganda he feeds his people.
Oh, sure. Sooner or later Putin is going to make enough gains that he can claim victory over the Ukrainians. The term for this, a “Pyrrhic victory,” also comes from the Romans. It’s a battle where you win but you throw away so many of your resources that you destroy your army.
The outcome of this is going to relegate Russia to the second rank of world powers, in keeping with its economic output, with a GDP somewhere close to Canada’s.
(It’s an interesting lesson for us, when you think of the power Russia wields. If Canadians wanted to get our act together, we could achieve a similar leadership role in the world, for good or ill.)
But Russia’s leaders have constantly sacrificed its human and natural resources for their own benefit, and Putin and his oligarchs are probably worse than the feudal Tsars. The loans are coming due, and he’s running out of options for maintaining his façade. Hopefully his people are going to finally see what he’s been doing, despite his propaganda machine. Then they’ll get rid of him and try to pick up the pieces of their mangled economy.
Unless he goes off the deep end and embroils us in a larger war. Then all bets would be off. Remember, we’re dealing with a madman, here. And if he truly has cancer, he isn’t going to care what he does in order to win. Pyrrhus of Epirus could teach him a lesson on that, but he wouldn’t listen. Putin is going down and taking the last shreds of the Russian Empire with him. It’s only a matter of how many innocent souls he’s going to drag along.