Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Neither. If you look back at his illustrious career from bombing residential buildings across Russia, the Chechen war, all the meddling in Europe, wars in Georgia & Ukraine, and lending a hand in other conflicts, he's neither crazy nor senile. He's continuing with his modus operandi but is being more arrogant about it from all the wealth he amassed and his "success". He feels he can whatever. Is that madness? May be. But the modus operandi is the same it's been the past 30 years.
+1. I don't think he is crazy at all. His maneuvers make complete sense if you look at things from his perspective. Google "The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia".
Agreed. Also, it does not matter if he is crazy or not in whatever definition we’d like to use. He’ll continue to do what he does until someone stops him. Is labeling him crazy some sort of plea for empathy? Sorry, he gets none from me. Whether he’s a mean dog or a rabid dog, put the man down. Now.
It does matter whether he is "crazy". If he is truly nuts, that raises the prospect of WW3 and a nuke exchange. It limits how we can use conventional force against him, because his trigger-point for launching nukes could be quite low. But if his thought process for invading Ukraine was rational, then the risk of WW3 is low (but not zero), and we can be more aggressive in our use of conventional warfare against him. And yes, while it may be difficult for an American to understand, there are indeed rational lines of thought that could have lead him to invade Ukraine (just as one could perhaps make a rational argument for our invasion of Iraq). There are also irrational thought processes that could have led Putin to invade Ukraine. My sense is that he is rational and clear-headed, and he is motivated by an extremely deep distrust of the West. We are also motivated by a deeply engrained distrust of Russia. I do not believe that either his distrust of us, or our distrust of him, is "irrational". Each side has valid reasons to distrust the other.