An utterly ignorant subtitle. He has no idea what an autocracy feels like, since he's never been to one.
Musso-mini Trump was an autocrat without an autocracy, which is why he was so frustrated.
Autocracy is limitless coercive state power wielded by an autocrat who commands obedience from all subordinates. Those of us who respect the English language feel an aesthetic revulsion at this kind of misuse of terminology.
Psychobabble and the language of therapy never overthrew an autocrat. Geopolitical conflict isn't a therapy problem. It's a battle between irreconcilable opposites. Putin is just the center of a global axis of authoritarian kleptocracy that includes Xi Jin Ping, Duterte, Erdogan, Orban, Trump and his fascist MAGA cult.
In the Prigozhin Affair, Putin Is the Big Loser and Biden the Clear Winner
"Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat in the United States, described it in Haaretz this week: Biden understood from the start that Putin "is the epicenter of an anti-American, antidemocratic, fascist constellation that needs to be defeated, not negotiated with."
Tim Snyder correctly diagnoses both of these faux-realisms as a kind of neo-colonial narcissism that refuses to see the war as about Ukraine and not about us:
The imperial framework…is very important to help us sort out some things that are happening….of who is the victim….we have trouble seeing somebody else besides ourselves as the victim and that that is a typical post-imperial pose that you are always the victim. The Russians take this I believe to an extreme that they are the victims in the Russian-Ukrainian War….we just don't understand that but I think all post-imperial powers have that tendency and one of the ways this has taken shape is the notion that this is really about us because there might be a nuclear war so when Putin has spent you know these last 15 months with all this nuclear bluster it is a way of telling the French, the Germans and the Americans that the war is not really about the Ukrainians, it's really about you and not just that you should be afraid but you should be thinking about yourselves and if you think about yourself only in a typical post-imperial way then of course you're not going to be thinking about the Ukrainians you're going to be thinking about how to stop the war and so on. I think this is a very conscious strategy and the reason why I'm mentioning it is that it bears directly on what just happened so this whole story which I think has been quite wrong-headed about how well we can't push Putin into a corner because nuclear war. I mean there are a lot of reasons why I think that's nonsense but we've just seen what happens when Putin is pushed into a corner we just saw it he runs he runs away and he writes a check we have now seen it now we know and we shouldn't overlook that especially because the peril that Putin was just in in Russia is categorically greater than any peril on the Ukrainian battlefield there was no Ukrainian territory which is more important than the Kremlin. So we have now just seen what Putin does gets on a plane writes a check changes the story now we know so we don't have any excuse to talk about how this war might be about us."
