Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, the usual “experts” keep telling us that we need to create an “offramp” so that Putin can end his disaster. The latest are the House progressives urging President Biden to enter direct negotiations with Putin, with the hope that a peace agreement that saves Ukraine and creates a framework for Ukrainian sovereignty and security going forward. Yeah—Putin will surely agree to that if Slow Joe just rings him up.
Time to recur to Churchill, whose diagnoses of the character of dictators in a 1937 article in Colliers applies just as well to Putin today:
To relax their grip may be at the same time to release avenging forces. Dictators and those who immediately sustain them cannot quit their offices with the easy disdain—or more often relief—with which an American President or a British Prime Minister submits himself to an adverse popular verdict. For a dictator the choice may well be the throne or the grave. The character of the men who have raised themselves from obscurity to these positions of fierce, dazzling authority does not permit us to believe that they would bow their heads meekly to the stroke of fate. One has the feeling they would go down or conquer fighting, and play the fearful stakes which are in their hands. . .
Economic and political ruin may stare them in the face, and the only means of escape may be victory in the field. They have the power to make war. They have the incentive to make war; nay, it may well be almost compulsion.
UPDATE: No sooner do I finish up this item and schedule its publication than the House progressives withdraw their letter calling for Biden to negotiate directly with Putin, blaming a “staff error” for releasing it (sure), and saying it had been months in the making, blah, blah, blah. I suspect they got an angry call from the White House asking why they were making the Biden Administration look bad two weeks from the election.
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