Putin As Failed Machiavellian

I know I take Machiavelli a little too serious when it comes to history and leadership evaluations.

I know this because his reputation post-Prince is a mixed bag at best. Bouncing between criticisms of immorality and glamorizing criminal behavior in politics, to either being a wry satire of other political polemics of its day and thus should not be taken literally, to being a bad influence on 20th Century dictators, and more recently a dated, unrealistic how-to manual to manage political high office.

However, I'm kind of with Erica Bremmer at The Guardian when it comes to understanding The Prince: a neutral reading of the work showed me how Machiavelli was trying to warn leaders about avoiding despotism that tends to leave their empires in ruins. As Bremmer notes:

Yet the more I read, the more I questioned this story. I started noticing that Machiavelli’s writings speak in different voices at different times. At one moment he seems to applaud men who break their oaths at will, caring little for just dealings. But he also says – in a passage most scholars pass over – that “victories are never secure without some respect, especially for justice”. For every cynical Machiavellian precept, I found two or three others that clashed with it...

Where suggestions in The Prince would justify some underhanded tactic like bribery, or use of force, Machiavelli would then also offer warnings, reminders that the powers-that-be need to temper their actions lest they cross a line with their citizenry that can't be undone.

One of the Prince's most famous philosophical debates is the question: Is it better to be Loved or Feared? Machiavelli noted that being both Loved and Feared is the best possible state, but difficult to achieve. Being Loved is good but relies too much on mercy and leniency, and vulnerable to others who would abuse that Love for their own greed. 

The argument falls on Being Feared as the more manageable, but even then Machiavelli gives a great warning that leaders must avoid letting that Fear become Hate:

For a man may very well be Feared and yet not Hated, and this will be the case so long as he does not meddle with the property or with the women of his citizens and subjects. And if constrained to put any to death, he should do so only when there is manifest cause or reasonable justification... a wise Prince should build on what is his own, and not on what rests with others. Only, as I have said, he must do his utmost to escape hatred...

A later chapter goes into a little more detail:

A Prince, as I have said before, sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. From these, therefore, he should abstain. For so long as neither their property nor their honour is touched, the mass of mankind live contentedly, and the Prince has only to cope with the ambition of a few, which can in many ways and easily be kept within bounds...

Or as Guido the Killer Pimp once said (paraphrasing), Never ever fuck with another man's livelihood. In short, do not fuck with a person's employment or personal life. As long as you don't piss off too many people, you'll stay a Prince:

To be brief, a Prince has little to fear from conspiracies when his subjects are well disposed towards him; but when they are hostile and hold him in detestation, he has then reason to fear everything and every one. And well ordered States and wise Princes have provided with extreme care that the nobility shall not be driven to desperation, and that the commons shall be kept satisfied and contented; for this is one of the most important matters that a Prince has to look to...

It's not said directly in his work, but later political observers and philosophers interpreted from Machiavelli's warnings that the real answer is that the leader must seek Respect above all else. You can be Loved and Respected for your integrity, valor, courage, what have you, and stay in power: You can be Feared and Respected for your cunning, decisiveness, judicious application of force, what have you, and stay in power. As long as your soldiers/office workers/voters Respect you for getting the job done, you're solid and cool.

One reason why I keep referring back to Machiavelli: When I read my histories and witness the evils of war, bloodshed, and strife - and sometimes when I reviewed the Characters of our American Presidents using Professor Barber as a guide - I keep spotting where the political leaders responsible for a lot of the suffering tended to be the Machiavellian types seeking to rule by Fear but failing to retain - or even failing to gain in the first place - the Respect of those they sought to rule.

Good Presidents - at least the ones we admire and respect even decades after their deaths - are the ones who performed competently even in matters of, well, moral uncertainty. As long as most of your citizenry prosper and are left untouched by some of your questionable decisions, you should do well as a leader.

So how does all of this talk about Machiavelli involve Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin? The Prince of Russia, leader of one of the major global powers, backed by a massive mechanized army and a nuclear arsenal, overseeing a financial kleptocratic empire that has inspired fear and dread among other nations and his political enemies for over 20 years?

Because Putin, with regards to his invasion of Ukraine this past month, screwed up royally.

The entire endeavor - spurred on by Putin's gaslighting over Ukraine's very existence and by his desire to rebuild a greater Russian empire - exposed both Russia and Putin for levels of incompetence and brutality that eliminated any respect that outside observers had of them. The political leadership under Putin failed to properly plan for the early days of the invasion, relying on a military force that proved to be under-trained, under-supplied, and way under any level of morale. As a result of those miscues, Putin appears to be doubling down on committing enough atrocities towards Ukrainian civilians in order to weaken their defiance into enough fear to make them surrender.

But that's not going to happen because Ukrainians already hated Putin - and they hated the Russian arrogance that treated them as second-class citizens under Tsarist and then Communist rule - to where they will never surrender to him.

In this, Putin had already failed as a Machiavellian figure. Despite all these years of him committing enough crimes - the blatant fraud, the wars against Chechnya and Georgia, the undisguised assassinations and attempts on his exiled critics, the success of manipulating the rise of populist Far Right governments across the western democracies, seizing Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in a border clash when Ukrainians overthrew a corrupt pro-Putin regime - to generate fear of him as a Prince, in just two weeks of stiff Ukrainian resistance he has been exposed as an arrogant bully. More clueless and desperate for violent victory than the rest of the world had realized.

It's gotten to where Putin is no longer feared, but openly hated. And not just among Ukrainians (who have obvious reasons right now). 

Hatred for Putin is something getting suppressed in homeland Russia, but the resentments among Russians are building up now that the overt corruption is exposing the once-hidden incompetence. And in spite of martial law and stiff penalties issued against protesting, a lot of Russians are risking all of that out of hatred for Putin (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Thousands of people turned out in cities across Russia this weekend to protest the war in Ukraine, risking arrest in a country where such demonstrations are illegal. Many of them were detained and some subjected torture as a result, according to an independent Russian human rights group.

Police detained more than 4,640 protesters in 65 Russian cities on Sunday, according to the monitoring group OVD-Info. It says more than 13,000 Russians in 147 cities have been detained at anti-war rallies since Russia first invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24...

Those may not sound like big numbers in a Russia with around 130 million souls, but each of these protestors are representative of hundreds of others who dare not risk the arrests. For now.

Based on a lot of the military assessments getting leaked to the press, the analysts experienced in these matters are suggesting that the Russian invasion is due to fail soon to both catastrophic loss of supplies and collapse of troop morale. It's not 100 percent a given, but all signs do point to at worst a prolonged struggle that Putin's ongoing propaganda efforts back home can't cover up.

Francis Fukuyama once wrote at the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War a little thing called The End of History, which made him a media darling when it came to talking about Russia vs. The West. So when he pens an online essay about "Preparing For Defeat," there's a reason to pay attention:

Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks...

The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north...

Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?...

The lies selling this war are going to pile up to where even Putin's hardest supporters will doubt his word, and the setbacks can well get bloody to where enough Russian families are horrified by the loss of their loved ones to set blame on leader Putin who led them to such a fate. Any respect Putin relied on to rule - that reputation as a strongman - is already out the window (metaphor intended) across the world, and that will eventually reach the eyes and ears of most Russians.

It's not that Putin could have ever ruled through Love. It is that Putin did a decent enough job early on to rule through Fear by burnishing his power to be the biggest kleptocrat, and by silencing a number of critics and rivals through assassination and brutality to enforce his strongman image at home.

But Putin isn't a strongman anymore. He's just another struggling dictator starting unjust wars just like all the other failed monsters of history.

It's terrifying that Putin's failure is going to cost so many innocent lives.