Great article. One of your best, IMO.

To get an idea of what a defeated Russia would look like, we only have to look at the mid 90s. Massive corruption and lawlessness and declining life expectancy. This is what lead to Putin in the first place.

Mid-90s Russia up until even only a few years ago was a business "wild east." I'm in the energy business for 30 years. Even prior to the war there was no way I'd make a contract there. Getting paid was a crap shoot, very often even for huge multinationals (I work with many).

Continuing on with how a destroyed Russia wouold look: We destroyed Libya because Gaddafi was "an evil dictator." How's that working out for the world? Open slave markets. Weapons shipped around the mid-east. Refugee crisis in Europe.

Take that result and multiply by 10-20 (rough size and population difference, respectively). Now add potentially 6000 nuclear weapons on the black market.

Noone in their sane mind can think a destroyed Russia in 2022 makes for a safer world.

We "destroyed" Germany after WWI. How'd that work out? We got Putin after 90s Russia. People constantly compare him to Stalin and Hitler, but Putin has never showed the sociopathic tendencies of a Stalin or Hitler.

Putin has been in power more than 20 years. No pograms. No death camps. No slave labor camps. No wars of expansion. No "othering" of "bad" ethnicities in Russia to enrich the "good" enthnicities.

Putin looks to me just like every other dictator in a resource rich country. We - the US - hate Putin because unlike "our" dictators/oligarchies, from Hawai'i to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to the Philipines to Iran to Bolivia, US multinationals are not the ones extracting massive wealth from Russia anymore (like we were when we loved Russia in the 90s).