Commentary
-
Our commentary partners will help you reach your own conclusions on complex topics.
The news that Vladimir Putin has cancer has grown increasingly widespread in the last few weeks. And added on to that was news that General Secretary Xi of China has a brain aneurysm.
Well, why bother talking about other folks health, especially those two? I don’t think there’d be a lot of tears shed in America, when either of them passes from the scene. They’re just not nice people. But it does have important policy implications.
The US bureaucracy in determining policy has become slow and bureaucratized. And the thinking about how to handle this is deep down in the bowels of the of the Deep State probably hasn’t penetrated up and won’t, until a crisis occurs.
This means we ought to be doing more thinking about what may happen if either passes from the scene.
Let’s start with Putin. He is not crazy. He’s actually rational from the point of view of a Russian leader.
Russian leaders going back to Catherine the Great, have believed that expanding the Russian state is the way to defend the homeland, they need territory for defense. In fact, it was Catherine the Great the time we signed the Declaration of Independence, who annexed Ukraine into Russian territory.
The way they are crazy, or Putin is crazy. And from our point of view, is that he views death, essentially as collateral damage in the forward march of history. It’s probably best described the way Stalin said it. He said, “a single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”
Pretty cold hearted, don’t you think? But Putin really has great faith in Russia and his legacy is all about the Russian nation, he puts it ahead of himself.
He was after all, a KGB agent putting his life on the line. He is worried about what is going to happen to Russia based on the current conflict with NATO.
Secretary of Defense Austin and Secretary of State Blinken gave support to that idea when a few weeks ago, he said it was America’s objective to weaken Russia.
Now that goes beyond calling for regime change or calling for war crime trials, because that’s personal.
Their position or their description of the American position is that we not only want to bring Putin down, we want to weaken the country.
So Putin’s goal is to stop the west from defeating Russia. And he – now that he has cancer, he has an intense focus, because that will be the key to his legacy. How will he do it?
He’s likely to try and deter us by doing something we’d otherwise think unthinkable.
It may be a nuclear weapon, it may be an electromagnetic pulse that freezes our electronics. It may be another one of their very powerful tools. For example, they’re number one in hacking.
So the result of Putin’s cancer should be, we should expect something is going to happen in the next few months.
How about President Xi?
Well, with a brain aneurysm, you can die at any moment as soon as the aneurysm bursts. Xi is going to be elected to a third term as General Secretary of the party this fall.
You’d think someone who’s about to get a third term and power of the largest population on Earth would want to stay alive. But he’s refusing to go under the knife. He’s refusing to have an operation that might save his life.
Remember, Xi controls things by fear not love. And what if he’s under anesthesia, he may feel that perhaps he is correct in not thinking he can control things. He has a communist precedent to look at Stalin.
Stalin in 1953 had a stroke, the Russian leadership let him linger in pain for five days. He ended up dying in a pool of urine If you can imagine one of the most powerful leaders of the 20th century. They didn’t want him around forever. And that was the path of least resistance.
I’m sure Xi has that in the back of his mind. The good news is Xi is likely to be risk averse in that environment, not doing foreign adventurism.
The bad news is that Chinese decision making is going to be frozen. If you don’t know who the next leader is going to be, what kind of decision are you going to make just in case the new leadership doesn’t like it?
So we have increased geopolitical uncertainty from the health of these two world leaders. But it’s a different variety. In Putin’s case, the risks come from the possibility of a destabilizing action. In Xi’s case, it prevents decisions from happening that might lead to a unified global action to stabilize.
-
Biden’s EV math just doesn’t add up
In March, the Biden administration issued a new directive requiring U.S. automakers to cut the average carbon emissions of their fleets by almost 50% before 2032. That order is one component of President Biden’s larger goal to cut total U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. A primary method for reaching these goals will involve…
-
President Biden just isn’t cool
For some Americans, politics is only about policy, while others prioritize core values, ideas, aspirations or beliefs. Still, for others, politics may be a reflection of culture, where voting serves as a symbolic act to proclaim cultural group identity. But for some Americans, who they vote for and support is more of a popularity contest,…
-
Federal Reserve policy should be more restrictive
The American economy is booming, with high GDP growth, record-low unemployment, and wage gains for median workers. Over the past few quarters, U.S. economic growth indicators have consistently outperformed official projections. But the U.S. Federal Reserve recently conceded that its policies might be too restrictive, hindering the full potential of the U.S. economy, which the…
-
Celebrate tight labor market, but don’t cut interest rates
While President Joe Biden has been celebrating U.S. economic success, many Americans are still unhappy about the economy. So who’s right? The most recent jobs report for February showed that while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9%, job gains were higher than expected, with the total coming in at 275,000 versus the expected increase…
-
Social and economic class will define 2024 election
Following in the footsteps of FDR, Democratic support in the past hundred years has drawn largely from working-class individuals, labor unions, and civil society organizations. Republican support, conversely, tended to rely upon larger corporate donations and the support of high-income individuals. In 2024, these traditional roles are evolving, and the new reality of campaign finance…
Latest Opinions
-
Biden uses NFL draft ad to try to connect with young voters
-
Powering pot: Energy for US cannabis industry could electrify 13.5M homes
-
Allies plan for Trump to have more control over interest rates
-
FDA: Bird flu found in 1/5 commercial milk samples, suggests greater spread
-
China permanently deploys warships to second overseas base
Popular Opinions
-
In addition to the facts, we believe it’s vital to hear perspectives from all sides of the political spectrum.