The Putin Doctrine: An Alternate Reality Filled with War, Famine and Heartbreak

The 'Axis of Evil' is pushing this world to a brink

Courtesy of Variety 

In 1983, when Ronald Reagan viewed the made-for-TV, instant-classic film The Day After at Camp David with his wife Nancy, he took to his diary and expressed a creeping sense of gloom and depression. In his second term, together with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, detente was made real, and missiles by the thousands were removed and moth balled. 

The world had stepped back from the threat of nuclear war, and the rest is with what we are still living today — the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed not because most of the world was against it — which it was — but because of the rampant corruption and theft at every layer of the Soviet system. By the time of the collapse, the Soviet economy was actually making negative technological progress — it was going backward, and the only ones who could be blamed were the citizens of the Soviet Union. 

Putin’s New World Order 

The Soviet system, as history has shown, was incapable of self-correcting because the corruption had so rusted the hinges and framework that when the pressure of reforms was placed on the weakened body, the whole thing came crashing down. The 1990s, as hard as they may have been at the microeconomic level for Russians, were actually able to refresh the system by strengthening democracy and civil society. 

When Putin took over, the money began flowing at a rate Russia had never known. The country turned the corner from the 1998 default to a rapidly emerging economy in the mid-2000s. Confident of his place at the table and that the world was hooked on Russian energy, Putin began to push for more of a say in the menu creation. As he pushed, with elbows on the table and a mouth full of food, the world pushed back. 

Putin’s view, and the same one that ended up collapsing the Soviet Union, was that the leader of a country was supposed to regard the country’s wealth as his own. The rights of the people were never to interfere with the personal enrichment of the leader. So long as the countries of the former Soviet Union were corrupt and abusive to their people, Putin was a contented overseer of this new post-Soviet reality. This became the “Putin Doctrine.”

However, we have seen that many countries in the post-Soviet space did not agree with Putin’s contract. This refusal to go along with Moscow is manifested in the war in Ukraine. The Putin doctrine has been on display in Russia’s support for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. It has been on display in the murders of Russians who oppose Putin. The murders take place all over Russia and the world. On more than one occasion, Putin has ordered his agents to kill Russian citizens who strayed on U.K. soil.

The Putin Doctrine 

China, Syria, Iran, and dopey North Korea are joining Putin in his corrupt and dangerous ambitions. Three of these winners threaten almost daily to either nuke the world into the Stone Age or, as Iran warned today if Israel didn’t stop bombing the Gaza Strip, to “start an earthquake” of bombing.

Characterized by human rights abuses, these authoritarian states, working to unite the world’s impoverished and developing nations against the U.S.-created liberal democratic policies, have little to offer the oppressed peoples of those nations but everything to show their murderous and sick leaders. There isn’t a single country that any of the Axis of Evil nations supports that could be considered democratic or at least humanistic. 

The world in which Putin’s Russia is a leader is one where murder is when dealing with the opposition. It is a world where innocent citizens can be arrested and locked away for decades simply because their opinions contradict the dictatorship’s. It is a world where education at every level has to be aligned with the views of the controlling party and where truth is always what the leader says it is.

Thanks to Trump’s four years, Russia, Syria, China, Iran, and North Korea grew stronger and more emboldened. The antics of Trump and his fascist movement demonstrated to those dictators how fragile and even hypocritical our call for democracy is. While U.S. policy before Trump was to always push for human rights, under Trump, we began to toe the line of the dictators mentioned above. Trump openly threw our security forces and the United States under the bus countless times while siding with the leaders of this Aix of Evil.

How often did we hear him say when U.S. policy was to criticize the crimes of Russia, “You don’t think we don’t do the same thing?” Such comments from the president of the United States are treasonous, but of course, the right-wing machine accepted them and even applauded him for his honesty. Trump empowered every dictator on Earth, and that is why today, we are in a period of unrelenting war and rising fascism: The United States, from 2016 to 2020, gave Putin and his little club of cowardly losers the green light to do whatever they felt like doing.

It is no coincidence that after the nightmare of Trump and January 6th, the fascist tide led by Putin, Xi, and others is rising so fast — including in the United States. Donald Trump and his rabid, goofy, dangerous followers are part of the Putin Doctrine. 

The United States, under the leadership of Joe Biden, has to prevent the biblical plague that Putin has wrought on the world. There is no good that Russia under Putin offers anyone, and even less good Iran, China, Syria, and North Korea offer anyone. These four countries must be defeated at every turn and rejected in their views on every issue. 

As George Kennan said in the famous “Mr. X” article: When the Soviet Union pushes out, we must push back. Every time they exert force, they must be must with force. They must be contained. 

And so it remains today: At every turn, the civilized world must contain Russia, China, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. They cannot be trusted and are not responsible members of the League of Nations. They must eventually be overcome.