Vladimir Putin’s magic wand just cracked
This week President Joe Biden called out Vladimir Putin for being a murderer and an enemy of the United States. Putin responded by pulling his Ambassador and by making some vague empty threats of retaliation. The whole thing served to demonstrate just how much weaker Putin has become – and how easy it is for the United States to win the battle against Putin when the U.S. President isn’t a Putin lackey.
Yet we still saw some Nervous Nellie reactions from pundits at some major news outlets, cautioning that it might be a bad idea for Biden to dare challenge Putin. This is an almost stunning reaction, considering how badly the U.S. was damaged over the past four years by Trump’s constant caving to Putin, and how obviously necessary it is for the U.S. to stand up to Putin. So what’s the deal?
Gut feeling says that this comes down to what it usually comes down to: ratings. With Trump caving to Putin at every turn over the past four years, Putin kept getting what he wanted. So it became easy for the media to paint Putin as being an invincible villain, because nothing scares people into tuning in and driving up ratings like an invincible villain.
Putin’s dominance these past four years was almost solely a function of Trump being in office, and with Trump gone, Putin is particularly vulnerable. But that doesn’t fit with the long running and ratings friendly narrative of Putin being invincible. So in order to keep that narrative alive, the media has to frame Biden’s aggression toward Putin as being dangerous – because after all, Putin is invincible.
As always, the key is to be able to spot these kinds of ratings-driven nonsense narratives when you encounter them, so you don’t get sucked in by them. President Biden isn’t risking anything by challenging Putin. For one thing, Putin already interfered in the last two U.S. Presidential elections and hacked nearly every U.S. government agency, so it’s not as if caving to Putin was doing any good. And again, Putin is now at his weakest point in at least a decade. Now is precisely the time for the U.S. to go at him as hard as possible, in order to pressure the Russian oligarchs into ousting him.
