A recent contribution (Trichotomy Men) to Straus News unfairly tars with the same broad brush three extant world leaders – Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin. While Trump is an unhinged malignant narcissist and Netanyahu a genocidal psychopath, placing Russian President Vladimir Putin in their dismal company is emblematic of an outdated Cold War mentality coupled with lazy groupthink. Moreover, it demonstrates a profound ignorance of the Russian state in general and Putin specifically.
Vladimir Putin arrived on the world scene following the Soviet Union’s dismantlement, when Russia had been ravaged by the free market economics of Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago boys. Presided over by the drunken fool Boris Yeltsin, the wealth of the Soviet Union was pillaged by Western corporations and greedy oligarchs while whole industries collapsed and millions died or sank into poverty.
Much to the dismay of the Western ruling elite, Putin reversed these dire conditions by renationalizing Russia’s key defense and energy industries, neutering the parasitic oligarchy, and investing in economic and social policies that revitalized and vastly improved the material living conditions of ordinary citizens. All this he achieved not by exercising some fictional dictatorial powers but by working within the legal and constitutional framework of the federal republic of Russia, with its constituent head of state, prime minister, two houses of parliament, various high-level expert committees, and multiple political parties.
Putin’s adroit political and financial management has restored Russia’s superpower status and transformed Moscow and other cities into gleaming modern metropolises whose people embody a spirit of dynamism, prosperity, and optimism that once was the hallmark of the United States. In 2025, Russia’s debt-to-GDP ratio was a mere 14%, with a total debt of an almost trivial $310 billion. Ours was 137%, with a total debt of an astounding and frightening $39 trillion.
Rather than acknowledge Putin’s successes, Western governments and their compliant mass media instead relentlessly and falsely portray him both as a corrupt authoritarian and a cartoonish supervillain, a Lex Luthor-like character bent on world domination. Such crude caricature is beneath contempt. If we are to be honest, President Putin deserves not calumny but admiration and, indeed, emulation.
Frank A. Brincka
Wantage
