Hindsight Should be Foresight

I had the radio on driving to Los Angeles today and caught the last few minutes of Jake Tapper’s Sunday morning show on CNN. He spent those minutes recalling how every U.S. President from Clinton to and including Trump bore witness the Putin’s aggression, duplicity, human rights violations, suppression and murder and, in each case, rebuked Putin feebly or not at all, and then adopted policies of rapprochement in an effort to “normalize” relations with the Russian State.

Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but apparently world leaders still need corrective lenses when looking at Putin and Russia.

What causes this myopia? The fundamental error in our approach seems, to me, to be the mistaken belief that Putin is just one of us, a regular guy, the head of a powerful country yes, but someone with hopes, fears and sensibilities much like our own. So, if we just make amends and show him some understanding, he’ll come around and play nice with the rest of the world from now on.

Wrong!

Throughout history there have been megalomaniacs that have altered epochs and countries—Caligula, Napoleon, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin and Hussein to name just a few—and none of them had the decency DNA we hoped to find in them. Rather, they were all brutal thugs. Putin belongs in that fraternity and must be recognized as such, which means he must be faced down and punished, and never rewarded.

I predict that the sanctions imposed by the West, coupled with the Ukraine’s heroic resistance, Russia’s downward spiraling economy, military losses and domestic protests, and the World’s condemnation will cause Putin to call for negotiations very soon. We cannot make the mistake of allowing those negotiations to become a device for Putin to snatch some semblance of victory from his impending defeat. He must withdraw his forces from Ukraine, abandon the separatist enclaves, return Crimea to Ukraine and pay reparations. The sanctions remain in place. We have to keep our glasses on, see Putin clearly for what he is and give him nothing.