Cartoon Tyrant

One problem with spending decades cultivating fear among friends, foes and everyone in-between, is that success means you rarely get the truth.

Sometimes, when the stars align and happenstance smiles on you, the truth is consistent with what everyone thinks you’d like to hear. In such cases, you’re happy and those around you relieved. More often than not, though, people who’ve succeeded in becoming universally feared exist in an echo chamber of their own making. They can’t escape confirmation bias, because everyone around them worries that being the bearer of bad news is a death sentence.

To be sure, that conjuncture exists to varying degrees in all organizations and hierarchies, from small businesses to large corporations to colleges and universities to organized crime to governments, democratic and otherwise. No one wants to disappoint the boss.

In all but the most extreme cases, there’s usually someone who, for whatever reason, is generally immune from persecution and thus free (encouraged, even) to “speak truth to power,” as it were. In the Italian mob it’s the consigliere or, perhaps more commonly in modernity, someone in the caporegime who’s related to the boss. In large corporations it might be a long-running CFO who’s been in the position since the current CEO’s father was in charge, for example. Even autocrats typically have at least a few trusted advisors tasked with delivering a reality-based assessment of current events, sugarcoated though it might be.

When soft autocracies complete the transition to one-man rule, autocrats tend to drift further and further away from reality as the perceived peril of delivering bad news grows. Once “don’t shoot the messenger” becomes a plea for clemency rather than a figure of speech, autocrats become tyrants.

Vladimir Putin’s transformation to tyrant is now mostly complete, and while you’re certainly justified in harboring skepticism towards Western media stories which purport to describe what’s going on inside the Kremlin, headlines suggesting Putin is “misinformed” about the conflict in Ukraine and also about the prospects for the Russian economy are consistent with historical examples of late-stage dictatorships.

Citing US intelligence sources and multiple government officials, media outlets including The New York Times and the AP described Putin as hopelessly out of touch, not because his mental acuity has deteriorated, but rather because no one’s willing to incur the risks that go along with delivering bad news to a tyrant. “Advisors are scared to tell him the truth,” the AP said, citing declassified intel. White House communications director Kate Bedingfield suggested Putin is also being misled about the Russian economy.

Somewhat ironically, the US is attempting to wake Putin up to the reality of his own predicament. As the AP put it, “the [Biden] administration is hopeful that divulging the findings could help prod Putin to reconsider his options in Ukraine.” Antony Blinken publicly stated that Putin’s capacity to strategize is likely being hampered by the absence of “people [who] have the ability to speak truth to power.”

As the Times wrote, editorializing around the same intelligence, “Putin seemed genuinely unaware that the Russian military had been using conscripts in Ukraine, and that drafted soldiers were among those killed in action.” One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described “a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,” something Putin is belatedly coming to terms with. Now, there’s “persistent tension” between Putin and the Defense Ministry.

If there is, in fact, distrust between Putin and Sergei Shoigu, it means the circle is complete. Putin’s closest confidants were too terrified to tell him the truth and then, once he discovered he was being misled, that created paranoia, putting officials and advisors in an even more precarious position than they’d have been in had they just told him the truth from the outset.

At this point, Russians are scared of Putin to an extent rivaled only by the fear-induced paralysis that exists in Pyongyang. Putin isn’t likely to execute a dozen Russian lawmakers and military leaders with an antiaircraft gun for being insufficiently attentive during a long speech, but not because he’s somehow less ruthless than Kim Jong-Un. Rather, the international community castigates flagrant acts of Tarantino-esque brutality as backward and not befitting of a major power.

Major powers do their dirt behind closed doors (e.g., China in Xinjiang), under the pretense of law and order (e.g., police brutality in the US) or on the excuse political opposition is tantamount to treason (e.g., Russia and Alexei Navalny). When it comes to military misadventures, major powers are generally expected to confine any neo-imperialism to countries that “don’t count.” You can invade Iraq and depose its government, for example, just like you can send your air force to Syria to prop up a dictator. You can’t, however, start a war in Europe. That’s not a gentlemanly thing to do. You can strip Hong Kong of its democracy and subsume it within an autocratic system from which it was nominally independent, but you can’t seize Taiwan with your military. Again, that’s not a gentlemanly thing to do.

Outrageous, public brutality doesn’t necessarily preclude good relations with nominally civilized nations. Mass, public executions certainly haven’t hindered the Saudis from maintaining diplomatic ties with Washington, for example. But it does relegate you to the equivalent of second-class citizenship geopolitically, in much the same way as disrupting the peace in Europe (or seizing Taiwan) risks the revocation of your membership to the club of nations allowed to treat the world like a giant Risk board.

China insists Beijing is committed to an unwavering strategic partnership with Moscow. But Beijing also has a strategic partnership with Tehran and Xi keeps North Korea in his pocket as a kind of nuclear vassal state. Maintaining good relations with pariah regimes is something China does as a matter of course. Too many commentators seem to believe the Moscow-Beijing nexus is an alliance of equals — a partnership destined to define the multipolar world of the future, as Sergei Lavrov suggested this week. It’s doubtful Xi sees it that way. Putin has relegated Russia to second-class citizen status on the world stage. Xi sees that as an opportunity on multiple fronts. Publicly, he’ll call it a “partnership.” In reality, it’s opportunistic exploitation.

Putin’s reign has reached a dead end. He’s now completed the metamorphosis from KGB operative-turned autocrat to stereotypical tyrant.

For years, Putin was in on the joke. In fact, he reveled in it, staging photoshoots he knew would become Western memes, laughing nefariously during face-to-face interviews with mainstream US media outlets and generally perpetuating his own legend. We were laughing at Putin, and he wasn’t just laughing with us, he was laughing louder.

Over the past two years, though, he’s increasingly the subject of a joke he doesn’t seem to be in on, or if he is, he doesn’t find very funny. From the comically long meeting tables to absurd harangues about drug-addicted Nazis in Kyiv to, most recently, an ill-fated attempt to equate himself with Harry Potter author JK Rowling, Putin is a laughingstock. And so, unfortunately, is Russia.

The risk now is that, having been summarily banned from gentleman’s Risk, he embraces the deranged tyrant role on the assumption he has nothing left to lose.