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Putin’s War: Attack of the Institutional Transvestites
Russia is dressed as a nation-state and Putin as its president. But their institutional undergarments differ utterly from outer appearances. The Russian kleptocracy Putin heads is a nuclear-armed mafia with a flag. Russia is the HQ of a loose global alliance of kleptocratic institutional transvestites — mafias and family businesses with flags — that Trump tried to get America to join: Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey, Duterte’s Philippines, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, MBS’ Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahrain. Insecure kleptocracies cannot cohabit with rule of law democracies on their borders.
The threat of the good example explains Putin’s war on Ukraine, just as it explains the American-sponsored coups against democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Allende’s Chile in 1973, the 1980s’ war on Sandinista Nicaragua and Salvadoran rebels in the 1980s. Putin is claiming for Russia an eastern European version of the USA’s Monroe Doctrine, but without the geopolitical buffer of two oceans and next to the world’s most powerful alliance, NATO. A bad geopolitical bet.
Kleptocracy and threat of the good example hegemony restoration explains Putin’s failed dictator repair and rehab service in Belarus in 2020 and Kazakhstan in 2022. With the first Belarussian operation completed, Ukraine is…
