This is how it was ending before the push for EU/NATO membership of former Soviet states - a long slow disintegration into independent states run by emergent tycoons and kleptocrats propped up by new markets. For instance, a global mining company promises investment in a region if they can get a new government with favorable policies for them. The old Russian plutocrats get a piece of the business and everybody’s happy.<p>Now it’s different. Putin’s regime may not survive this crisis, but regardless, ‘the west’ has once again become a threat to all Russians, and the next regime may be a response to that. I’ll accept any recent example of a interventionist war-driven regime change as evidence against this prediction. A nationalist Russian Federation is a lot more dangerous to us than a kleptocracy.<p>The press loves to characterize Putin as a madman. Same with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Ghaddafi and every other flashy dictator with expensive tastes. This is just stupid. Their thinking is more like an overpaid CEO than fundamentalist zealot. That makes them predictable and controllable. You don’t know what will come with the next regime. Even if you remove all animosity and nationalism, there’s still going to be a fight over resources. Putin had an entire state military apparatus to use against his people to secure those resources for himself. We do too, but the cost will be much higher.<p>Putin was willing to sell his country just for a little bit of luxury and personal security. I’m not saying that was a good thing, but it was a structure that we knew how to deal with. The military and economic posture to effectively deal with radical populism may be very different. Pontificating on this subject has been all the rage among military theorists since Huntington’s thesis, with trillions spent on the assumption that we knew what we were doing. Now we learn that we didn’t get it quite right.<p>There’s a lot I don’t understand about the doctrine that guides ‘the west’, and I’m not necessarily skeptical, just uninformed in some ways. I’d like to understand the threat model we are operating under, and the basic strategy to control those threats. Or maybe it’s economic opportunity we are after. For whom? What does the world look like in their best vision of it? Do the nations and people that oppose ‘the west’ have an accurate view of that, or has it been unfairly demonized? Somewhere there is either a legitimate clash of interests, or a severe miscommunication. Perhaps we ought to commit to only killing each other over the former, and keeping track of exactly what that is. Somehow I doubt that wars could be sustained in that circumstance.