Jay Reding.com

Time’s Man of the Year for 2007 is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It isn’t a bad pick (although I would have picked Gen. David Petraeus)—Vladimir Putin’s actions are most certainly of great import in shaping our world. The problem is that they’re not shaping our world for the better. Putin has been slowly but surely turning Russia into just another banana republic petro-state, and ultimately that course is not sustainable. Ss democracy in Russia dies, the potential for another wave of destructive totalitarianism grows.

The Time article plays into the idea that Putin just happened to amble into history and become President of Russia. This seems unlikely—more likely is that Russia is still being ruled by the same forces that ruled the country during the Communist age. Putin’s status as a former KGB agent and head of the FSB (the agency that took over from the KGB after the fall of the Soviet Union) serves him well when it comes down to doing the two things he does best: keeping Russia in line and ensuring that his political opponents cause him no trouble.

Putin is certainly a man with a mission:

Putin’s mission is not to win over the West. It is to restore to Russians a sense of their nation’s greatness, something they have not known for years. This is not idle dreaming. When historians talk about Putin’s place in Russian history, they draw parallels with Stalin or the Tsars. Putin, one can’t stress enough, is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it. “Putin has returned to the mechanism of one-man rule,” says Talbott of the Brookings Institution. “Yet it’s a new kind of state, with elements that are contemporary and elements from the past.”

And there’s plenty that could go wrong. The depth of corruption, the pockets of militant unrest, the ever present vulnerability of the economy to swings in commodity prices—all this threatens to unravel the gains that have been made. But Putin has played his own hand well. As Prime Minister, he is set to see out the rest of the drama of Russia’s re-emergence. And almost no one in Russia is in a position to stop him. If he succeeds, Russia will become a political competitor to the U.S. and to rising nations like China and India. It will be one of the great powers of the new world.

Unfortunately, it won’t stay there for long. Totalitarian regimes—and Russia is already authoritarian and sliding more and more towards totalitarianism every single day—tend not to last very long. There are no purges, no mass executions now, but Putin’s authoritarian state makes it far easier for either him or the next dictator to make it happen. Putin can steer Russia towards the right course, but it would mean more openness rather than less, and a willingness to sacrifice his rule for the benefit of Russia’s future.

Putin’s Russia is slowly sliding away from democracy and towards tyranny, and Vladimir Putin is responsible for that. He is a man whose vision of Russia as a strong state is compelling, but ultimately he is sacrificing the future of his nation for his own ends. The line between autocrat and tyrant is a thin one, and Putin is already skating the edge—and once Russia crosses that line once more, it may be even harder for it to recover than it already has been.

In a bit of good news, the voters of Venezuela have rejected Hugo Chávez’s attempt to amend Venezuela’s Constitution to allow him to stay in office beyond 2012. The official tally has the amendment losing by 2%—although some sources indicate that the actual margin was considerably larger.

Chávez has been trying to make himself into another Castro—a “President for life” with plenary powers over everything in Venezuela. Thankfully, he isn’t strong enough to do that without moving directly against the Venezuelan army and people, who aren’t about to let him seize power. So, Chávez has had to try and democratically take more and more power. This defeat signals that his plans aren’t working, and his attempt to create another Cuban-style “socialist” state are failing.

TigerHawk asks whether Spanish King Juan Carlos didn’t help in putting Chávez down a peg. At a recent meeting in Chile, Chávez went on a rant, which prompted the monarch to tell him “¿Por qué no te callas?”—or “why don’t you shut up?” Adding insult to injury, King Juan Carlos used the informal form of address, which is the sort of language one would use for a child. The line has become famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world, being used in everything from mobile phone ringtones to numerous YouTube videos. By publicly scolding Chávez, King Juan Carlos essentially put him in his place, turning him from the Bolivarian Revolutionary to just another gasbag.

It’s unclear what Chávez will do now—although there’s no doubt he’ll try to hang on to power as long as possible. He’s wisely choosing not to move directly against the results of the election, but that doesn’t mean he’ll take the results lying down. As long as Hugo Chávez remains in power, Venezuelan democracy is imperiled. Thankfully, not even Chávez’s machinations have been enough to prevent the people of Venezuela from casting their votes. So long as the people have political power in that country, Chávez will be kept in check. What will be crucial is ensuing that he cannot so erode democracy as to give himself the dictatorship cloaked in Marxist rhetoric that he so fervently desires.

Michael Yon has another wonderful dispatch from Iraq, following up on the story of how a group of local Iraqis are welcoming back Iraq’s Christian diaspora:

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

I constantly hear many people here in America and elsewhere keep saying that Iraq simply can’t be democratic. The line usually goes about how you can’t change 4,000 years of culture. That argument never sits right with me: is Iraqi “culture” synonymous with terrorism and oppression? Are Iraqis somehow unable to accept others? It always seemed a bit like the arguments used to justify racism in the Deep South: since part of Southern “culture” had been corrosive racism, how could we expect that to change?

The Iraqi people keep proving their critics wrong. They say that democracy can’t take in Iraqi culture: yet Iraq had a larger turnout in their election than most American elections that don’t involve death threats against voters. We keep hearing how Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites hate each other and can never get along: yet most Iraqi tribes and families were mixed Sunni and Shi’ite before al-Qaeda began their brutal campaign of divide and conquer. We keep hearing about how Iraq will inevitably become a fundamentalist Muslim state: yet here we have Iraqi Muslims in a Catholic Church asking their Christian friends to come back home—for they will protect them.

Pictures like the ones that Yon brings from Baghdad remind me of the why I’m proud to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq. I am offended by those arguments precisely because I see them as being tinged with a subtle yet corrosive racism: the argument that Iraqis can’t be free and democratic because of “culture” diminishes the notion that human rights are universal and innate. The arguments that Iraqis can’t be free because they haven’t “earned” their democracy diminishes the unimaginable suffering and the incredible bravery of many Iraqis. Even though these arguments are usually made without the intention of being arrogant, they ultimately are arrogant: they suggest that somehow we in the West are better than the people of Iraq. That we’re evolved enough to support democracy and the Iraqis are not.

We live in a sheltered culture of comfort, and yet we have the audacity to criticize people who have faced 30 years of utter tyranny followed by 4 years of terrorism. If any of us were to walk in the shoes of a typical Iraqi, would we be willing to do what they have done? We can barely get off the couch on Election Day, no less face terrorists who threaten to kill anyone who votes. Would we be as brave? Is our commitment to our democracy as strong as theirs?

The Iraqis have suffered greatly, but ultimately they are building a better future for themselves. Far from being a backwards culture doomed to fundamentalism and sectarianism, the people of Iraq demonstrate, hidden from our view, that their belief in democracy and freedom may sometimes be greater than our own.

The niece of Benazir Bhutto explains why Bhutto’s return is not a positive development for Pakistan:

Perhaps the most bizarre part of this circus has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt, the twice-disgraced former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. While she was hashing out a deal to share power with Gen. Pervez Musharraf last month, she repeatedly insisted that without her, democracy in Pakistan would be a lost cause. Now that the situation has changed, she’s saying that she wants Musharraf to step down and that she’d like to make a deal with his opponents — but still, she says, she’s the savior of democracy.

The reality, however, is that there is no one better placed to benefit from emergency rule than she is. Along with the leaders of prominent Islamic parties, she has been spared the violent retributions of emergency law. Yes, she now appears to be facing seven days of house arrest, but what does that really mean? While she was supposedly under house arrest at her Islamabad residence last week, 50 or so of her party members were comfortably allowed to join her. She addressed the media twice from her garden, protected by police given to her by the state, and was not reprimanded for holding a news conference. (By contrast, the very suggestion that they might hold a news conference has placed hundreds of other political activists under real arrest, in real jails.)

Ms. Bhutto’s political posturing is sheer pantomime. Her negotiations with the military and her unseemly willingness until just a few days ago to take part in Musharraf’s regime have signaled once and for all to the growing legions of fundamentalists across South Asia that democracy is just a guise for dictatorship.

Bhutto was ejected for Pakistan for massive corruption. She was growing rich at the expense of the Pakistani people, and there’s little reason to believe that all her noble words about democracy aren’t just a way of getting her hand back in the cookie jar.

As reprehensible as we find the idea of Musharraf’s emergency rule, we have to consider the alternatives. Benazir Bhutto was in power when Pakistan was providing support to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. She was kicked out of the country for corruption on a massive scale. It is uncertain that she could hold the country together in the face of rising Islamic extremism.

Pervez Musharraf, for all his flaws, has promised that there will be elections in January. He appears to be preparing for a crackdown on the al-Qaeda infested regions of Waziristan and the restive territories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. He has already worked towards reducing tensions with India over Kashmir.

As a general principle, what Musharraf is doing is wrong. Democracy should be a key principle of American foreign policy. However, we cannot ignore the reality that Pakistani democracy could lead to nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist groups—or even a government willing to provoke India into a nuclear exchange. The level of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan could lead to a government more like Hamas than we can accept.

Musharraf, unfortunately, is the devil we know. We should be pushing him to end his emergency rule as soon as practicable, and to treat his people with respect and only minimize civil liberties as much as absolutely necessary. We should push him to help develop civil society in Pakistan and ensure that the Pakistani government does not succumb to the same endemic corruption that ended Bhutto’s government. However, looking at the situation in Pakistan, we have to consider that right now Musharraf’s interests are closely enough aligned with our own that to lose Musharraf would be to lose a stabilizing force in the region.

If all this reeks of realpolitik, that’s because it is. However, democratic idealism has its place, but not at the potential cost of a nuclear war in Central Asia. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for our foreign policy problems, which is why we must show flexibility in dealing with the Musharraf regime. We want a democratic Pakistan, but that must not mean allowing a Taliban-like regime to possess nuclear weapons. In this case, it is better to go with the devil we know rather than the one we do not.