Putin is no genius and dictatorships have nothing on democracies
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still in its early stages, I think it is safe to say that things are not going according to plan for Putin. According to US estimates, more than 7,000 Russian soldiers have already died in action, including a few generals. To put that in perspective, that is more than the combined number of US soldiers who died in the entirety of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Morale among some Russian soldiers is very low and some have quit fighting altogether. Many of the soldiers are conscripts with no fighting experience. Some apparently had been told they were just doing a training exercise and had no idea they were going to war.
Despite years of upgrading its military capabilities, the invasion of Ukraine has been thoroughly botched on almost every level. Everything from logistics to supplies to anticipating how much Ukrainian resistance there would be was wrong in Russia’s planning efforts. Putin has put two of his top intelligence officials under house arrest, conveniently ignoring his own failings, because that is what dictators do.
It is clear that there is no popular demand in Ukraine to be ruled by Russia. As much as it is good to see Ukrainians putting up so much unexpected resistance, one downside is that Putin may resort to using missiles and reducing entire cities to rubble as well as using chemical weapons. He may even consider using nuclear weapons if he gets desperate enough. No matter what happens though, I am hard pressed to see how Putin or Russia come out better off from all this.
If Russia does manage to conquer Ukraine and take over the entire country, nobody there will support them. They will continue to face resistance in the form of an insurgency, which will be well supplied and financed by the West. Economic sanctions will continue to be imposed on them and if Putin commits enough atrocities, maybe, just maybe, there will be a willingness in Europe to cut off Russian oil and gas even though it would cause them serious economic pain. If that happens, Russia’s already comatose economy will be all but dead, effectively making them a giant North Korea.
I am not going to speculate about the odds of any of that happening because I have no clue and I do not think anyone does. There are plenty of people out there who know vastly more about what is going on than I do who could probably make educated guesses, but they would be just that. Guesses aside, Russia is undoubtedly going to suffer, and has suffered, immensely from what Putin has done. At best, Russia will successfully conquer a country that has no strategic value, i.e., no natural resources or geographic advantages, and whose people hate them while being expelled from the world economy. That is a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one.
Democracy > dictatorships
As regular readers of this blog know, I am a big believer in democracy and promoting it abroad, albeit within limits. I believe in democracy not just for political and moral reasons like the freedoms it gives people, but for utilitarian reasons, too. What we are seeing happen with Russia should be a death knell to the idea that dictatorships are inherently better planners and more effective at governing. To paraphrase one of the best drummers of all time, the idea of Putin being a strategic genius and master planner has worked out like a lead balloon.
When looking at how badly Russia’s invasion has gone, it shows just how much dictatorships can be prone to screwing things up. In fact, the very nature of dictatorships makes them especially vulnerable to unforced errors and basic mistakes that accountable governments are incentivized to avoid. Democratic governments are not perfect by any means, but because they are elected and accountable, they have a greater incentive to get things right. Strongly related to that is that during the planning and strategy phases of decision making on any matter, democratic governments are subject to scrutiny and criticism. Even when they decide on what they are going to do, criticism and scrutiny does not end. That is not how things work in Putin’s Russia or any dictatorship.
Putin is the one who calls the shots in Russia. Nothing significant happens without his approval and once he decides on something, he only allows others to tell him what he wants to hear. Anyone who says otherwise is arrested if they are lucky. That kind of setting all but guarantees that there will be groupthink and sycophancy.
In the absence of criticism and scrutiny, an idea will go unchallenged no matter how badly flawed it is. The fact that nobody can challenge an idea does not make its flaws disappear. All it does is sweep them under the rug. It is only after an idea is carried out that its flaws become apparent and by then it is too late to do anything about them. We have been seeing that happen in real time on a daily basis during the last three weeks and will likely continue to in the weeks and months (years?) ahead.
It may be a long time, if ever, before we find out for sure, but I can imagine there are plenty of people in the Russian military and intelligence worlds who were aware of the many potential problems of invading Ukraine. I am sure many of them were concerned that the Russian military had serious limitations and many of their soldiers were not ready for primetime. Unfortunately, because Putin is a dictator who can have them imprisoned or executed, they stayed silent. The world is much worse off because of it.
In contrast, there is absolutely no way, no how something like that would happen in a democracy. For example, the potential problems in the Russian military and pitfalls of invading Ukraine would have been made very clear publicly long before any invasion happened. At worst, officials in a democratic government could resign and go public with their concerns if they felt they were being ignored and would not have to worry about going to jail or being executed. If soldiers in the US military were being lied to by being told they were just going on a training exercise, that would be found out very quickly. The same is true if there were major problems with military technology and supplies.
This is not to say democracies cannot screw up a war. Invading Iraq certainly comes to mind. Still, there are massive differences between the invasions of Iraq and Ukraine. In the US, there were large protests against the war in Iraq before it happened and nobody was arrested for it. Those who opposed the war were able to make their voices heard. That is because in democracies, people can protest against their government without worrying about imprisonment.
I would also add that while invading Iraq was not justified, Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator and one of the worst people in the world. His being overthrown was nothing to be upset about even though it should not have happened. In contrast, Ukraine is a democratic country that is being invaded by a dictatorship. That alone makes any equating of the two invasions completely false. For any American tempted to equate the two, please do not be a useful idiot.
Americans had the opportunity to hold their government accountable for the invasion of Iraq even though they chose not to. That alone makes the US nothing like Putin’s Russia. Enough people in the US believed that the invasion of Iraq was not disastrous enough to elect a new leader. Bush won because of that, not because he was a dictator who jailed or killed his opponents, in sharp contrast with Putin.
Democracies have a free press that is decentralized and reports on the government’s activities at all levels, whether government officials like it or not. Democracies have protections for whistleblowers who report wrongdoing in the government. Those two things by themselves guarantee that if anywhere near the kind of screw ups Putin committed were being done by a leader of a democratically elected government in the run up to an invasion, it would become publicly known very fast.
Despite the heavy toll invading Ukraine has taken on the Russian military, ordinary Russians are largely unaware of it.* That is because they can, by and large, only hear what Putin wants them to hear. Since the war started, Putin has massively increased censorship of media coverage of the invasion. Hopefully, he will not be able to keep them unaware of what is going on for much longer, but this also illustrates why democracies are so much better than dictatorships. The media coverage of the occupation of Iraq is a case study in how different democracies are from dictatorships when it comes to media coverage and leadership accountability.
When the insurgency in Iraq was raging and the US death toll was climbing, I remember hearing about it every day. When it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction, it was widely reported. The post-war planning that wasn’t was also widely reported as were the massive screw ups by the Coalition Provisional Authority. The same was true for the abuses that happened at prisons in Iraq. While some in the US government may have wished that information had not come out, there was nothing they could do to stop it. The same would have been true for any other democracy in a similar situation.
It is true that in democracies people can still feel pressure to not speak their minds. While that is generally a bad thing, it is not because they are afraid of being imprisoned or fined. That distinction is critical. Private forms of censorship are frequently bad and harmful, but they are lightyears away from the force of government being used against someone.
Private actors can cause plenty of damage in their efforts at censorship. That has sadly happened quite a bit recently, including in many left-wing circles where people used to care about free inquiry and being open to hearing new or different ideas. Still, private actors cannot put someone in prison nor can they fine someone or take their property. Governments can do all those things. Democracies do not allow governments to do those things without due process and without providing a legitimate justification for it, i.e., simply not liking what someone said is not a legitimate justification.
If all else fails and leaders still do awful things, democracies give people a chance to hold them accountable. A leader who misleads their country into a war or screws up royally in planning one can be voted out of office or even removed from it. Whether people decide to do that is another story, but they have the option. Russians do not have that option with Putin. Those who try to run against Putin in Russian “elections” tend to have a very hard time staying alive, just ask Alexei Navalny. In democracies, political opponents and critics of the governing party(ies) do not get sent to prison for it, let alone mysteriously fall to their deaths or get poisoned.
Democracy in my view is superior to dictatorships on every level. Morality alone is more than enough to get my unwavering support. Even looking past morality and the desire for people to be free to choose their leaders, democracy still comes out on top when looking at results. By any metric, the countries with the highest living standards are democracies. The countries that are the most developed and prosperous are virtually all democracies. The countries that are the most peaceful are democracies. In fact, two democracies have basically never gone to war with each other. I do not know that democracy causes all those things, but it is almost perfectly correlated with them and that is good enough for me.
*If you have not watched it already, please watch this video from Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is around nine minutes long and worth every second. It is addressed to Russians and has been put on a social media platform that has not yet been banned by Putin. I do not know how much of an effect it will have, but I hope it reaches as many Russians as possible.