There’s something in the water of autocracies that infects their nations with gratuitous quagmires. Russia, of course, is no stranger to autocracies: Under the tsars, under Stalin, and now under Putin, there have been no internal countervailing powers that could stop their leaders from inflicting horrendous pain on their own people.
In theory, that’s not how the United States is supposed to work. Going to war, our Constitution flatly says, is up to Congress. Even when it has been up to Congress in recent decades, as it was in a de facto way in Vietnam and a de jure way in Iraq, we’ve opted for wars of choice with disastrous outcomes. Under Donald Trump, however, not only was our war of choice in Iran decreed solely by our autocratic president, but that president never bothered to make even a semi-serious case for that war to his fellow Americans.
Autocrats don’t have to be delusional, of course, but by the very nature of autocracy, they tend to staff themselves with aides who affirm and aggrandize their autocrats’ power and fail to challenge their bosses’ worldview. Putin surrounded himself with staffers committed to his project of restoring Russia to the role of supreme Orthodox counterweight to the louche West, in control once again of all the territory where the tsars once reigned supreme. He believed that retaking Ukraine would be a matter of weeks, or even days, and no one in his inner circle would or could say that he might be wrong. If the generals not in his inner circle had misgivings about the probability of a cakewalk to Kiev, they weren’t going to be general for very much longer.
As to Trump, none of his lackeys dared tell him that Iran might not crumble if we joined Israel in going to war on the regime, and while our top generals did issue some muted demurrals, none dared say, “No way.”
As a result, Russia appears stuck in a bloody stalemate from which its forces have made virtually no advances for the better part of a year, while Trump appears stuck in a war that he cannot end. Israel keeps attacking Lebanon, and Iran still blocks the Strait of Hormuz. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies at the beginning of the year estimated that the number of Russian soldiers killed, wounded, or missing since the war began was 1.2 million. The number of U.S. casualties in our war on Iran is relatively tiny so far—just 13 fatalities according to the Pentagon—but that will rise if Trump concludes that getting a deal with Iran requires boots on the ground (as Republican war hawks keep arguing).
Today On TAP
This story first appeared in our free Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
Which doesn’t mean, of course, that his war is without consequence here in the States. We have few grieving widows, parents, and orphans, but we have tens of millions of our fellow citizens trying to get by under the highest rate of inflation the nation has seen in years, rising in tandem with the price of oil and gas.
In Russia, Putin believes that the court of public opinion can be indefinitely blocked from convening. Critics have been jailed, leaders of a potential opposition murdered, and public access to the internet severely curtailed. Though he plainly yearns for such powers, Trump can’t dispose of American public opinion so violently. Instead, he employs his allies to take over as much of the media as they can, keeps congressional Republicans marching in lockstep with him with threats of primary challenges, hires prosecutors and agency heads to indict and assail his critics (no plausibility required), and also contests certified election results that go against him (again, no evidence need be—or can be—adduced).
But it’s Trump and Putin who are the only real agents of their own undoing. By their very nature, delusional autocrats hired fearful or besotted (or both) underlings, whose job it is to nod obediently when their bosses start wars they cannot end.
