Three Pictures are Worth a Hundred Thousand Screams
Filed under: Russia
One of the most fundamental truths about humanity is that we can always trust a malignant little troll like Vladimir Putin to destroy himself, and his country, sooner or later.
History will show that Putin's Waterloo came when his ham-handed thugs launched their cowardly, dastardly attack on the peaceful cultural offices of the British Council across the country. Not only did this craven act betray to the world the true nature of the Putin regime, but it galvanized and motivated the mighty people of Britain, and especially their journalists, to march into battle against the neo-Soviet regime.
And so we get a devastating analysis of Putin's failure as a ruler from the Financial Times, one of the world's most well-respected newspapers, complete with three graphics that tell the tale better than any words ever could.
First the one at the top of this page, showing Potemkin Russia in all its inglorious horror. Then this one:
showing how Russian economic development has lagged far behind the rest of the post-Soviet countries, none of which have the benefit of massive oil and gas reserves to artificially inflate their progress. Take the energy windfall away, and Russia stands on the brink of oblivion as all the other nations roar past it into the sunrise of democracy.
Then finally this one:
indicating how Russia's political development also lags behind other key states like Poland and Ukraine with which it is in direct competition.
As if that were not enough, the FT quotes from a brilliant new book by the Economist's Russia correspondent, Edward Lucas, which lays out a battle plan for the "new cold war" with neo-Soviet Russia, highlighting that while Russia's intentions are malignant it's power is quite limited, so the time is now for action before things get worse. As Lucas shows, even a relatively impotent Vladimir Putin, like the stateless Osama bin Laden, is still capable of causing much horror in the world -- as Lucas and the FT emphasize, he's as much of a threat to his own people as he is to us. The FT writes: "Mr Putin then is a failure, not a success. But he is a dangerous failure. The regime he has created is unpredictable: nobody can know how the post-election duumvirate will work." We've used formal military force against the "dangerous failure" that is bin Laden, but Lucas shows how we can and must defeat Russia on economic battlefields (our prior piece about Turkmenistan gives one concrete example of our many opportunities to do so).
It can be seen from this brilliant reporting that the U.S. has not yet taken the leadership role it ought to have in dealing with neo-Soviet Russia. The coming election ought to change that, unless we intend to let Putin's Russia fester like an open sore as we did Hitler's Germany, dealing with the problem only when it becomes a disaster.
del.icio.us | 
digg | 
technorati | 
stumble upon | 
furl | 
reddit