The Strongman’s Power Trap
In Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have ignored unwritten rules against harming those they replace or remove from power. Without such rules, a strongman can never relinquish his own power voluntarily – a consideration that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan must now bear in mind.
https://prosyn.org/bWDOon8
MOSCOW – Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he was forming a 400,000-man national guard that would report only to him, many Russians wondered why a new military force was needed. After all, Russia’s army was supposedly back: Putin had equipped it with new toys, and even arranged for two small wars – in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine, starting in 2014 – to prove it.