The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, from 2009 with President Obama's first term. The focus has been eclectic ... the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally summarizing the potential impacts of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. -----------
(Biden POTUS's economic sanctions in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine are brilliant, from the framework of threatening Putin's personal wealth and potentially damaging Russia's national economy. Biden's response has also been effective in its swift response and breadth, especially its application in stages ... as if designed by a psychologist's advice to parents of an acting-out child.)
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Putin’s disinformation campaign is bluntly threatening as if he just doesn't care about the 'rules' of superpower diplomacy.
Putin misbehaves this way while he whines about not getting the proper respect Russia (him, personally) deserves as a superpower...while he threatens to push his nuclear button toys if he doesn't get his way...even though no one is threatening to invade Russia's borders... and as he violates those borders to terrorize democratically elected governments.
Putin is getting away with these insane disconnects because he ‘knows’ his threats of nuclear ‘acting out’ stymies the West from giving back to Russia its own punishments.
Putin displays a deadpan public countenance while he destroys cities, tortures and mass-graves civilian populations, and ignores ‘rules’ of engagements, all showing he feels no need to excuse or cloak his satanically self-anointing, brutal, cruel, cynical behavior.
In words, Putin behaves like a traditional autocrat in the style of Stalin, who he openly admits is his guiding mentor for foreign policy ... and personal conduct.
Any country or belief system that blocks Putin’s targets or objectives is to be eliminated in the style of Stalin - with excessive, overpowering cruelty. The crueler, the better to prevent future rebellion.
And Putin’s objectives are openly stated — to recover the land and hegemony Russia ‘lost’ in 1991 with the breakup of the USSR, even to recover east Germany, the Baltic states, Finland, and even Poland. These pronouncements should terrify the now proudly sovereign nations.
The West is faced with Putin’s hate and fear of democratic self-determination that resulted in the freeing of Balkan and Baltic states from Russian hegemony — Putin will not stop with his long game of reversing that history.
And now, after 20-some years of total control over Russia, Putin has very good reason to fear the consequences of his autocratic rule - he is aware that rebellion will no doubt target him personally as its first target.
When you can’t ‘win’ a war with incompetent military strategy, inadequate self-cannibalized equipment, and even your own troops don’t support your purpose, just brutalize, torture, and kill civilians…and do the same with your own troops. (Russia’s Ukraine invasion is a mirror of its WW2 behavior, even to accompanying and threatening its own troops with ‘corrective’ political units (the KGB in WW2, now, the FSB).)
The West’s response should be as direct and harsh as Russia’s but without targeting civilians or even shedding blood if possible, but still as a goal, … like it is doing with recent economic sanctions on Russia…and especially on the oligarchs, who Putin has joined up with, with little disguising, to economically rape and pillage his own country.
(Biden POTUS's economic sanctions in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine is brilliant, from the framework of threatening Putin's personal wealth as well as damaging Russia's national economy. And it is brilliant in its swift response, its breadth, and especially its application in stages ... all as if desigend by a child psychologist's advising of parents of an acting out child.)
As for the West’s response, note Russia’s appeal to its successful maneuvering a proxy leadership into America’s government ….Donald Trump’s first steps as POTUS was to attempt to lift economic sanctions placed on Putin’s Russia resulting from its earlier land-grabbing cruelties in Georgia and Crimea. Trump continues to support Putin and Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
The overview —there is little chance Putin will (rationally) compromise over his Ukraine invasion.
But, if Putin’s invasion of Ukraine isn’t stopped, he will proceed to destabilize other border democracies by the same formula — claim vested partial land ownership by population kinship, orchestrate political and civil destabilization from that platform, support insurrection then invasion and finally re-annexation in the face of a paralyzed West.
Putin has to be stopped cold. THERE IS NO REASON A COUNTRY (RUSSIA), WITH A GDP LESS THAN ITALY’S IS BLACKMAILING THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY TO BEND TO THE WILLFUL CRYING OF AN AUTOCRATIC (AND PERHAPS PSYCHOPATHIC) DICTATOR.
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