Anne Applebaum, a neocon and leader in a succession of British information war or “disinformation” operations, is out on The Atlantic on Sept. 11 with a column demanding that no country now talk to or deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his representatives, because he will soon be out of office. Applebaum sees no danger whatsoever in the changing war situation, but only “victory” over Putin’s Russia. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/ukraine-victory-russia-putin/671405/ )
The Atlantic calls Applebaum simply “a correspondent” and Wikipedia says she’s “an American journalist,” but Applebaum has spent most of her time in the U.K. or Poland since leaving Yale in 1986. She has written for The Economist, the London Spectator; run a British intelligence program called “Arena” at the London School of Economics to combat Russian “disinformation” and then moved it to Johns Hopkins SAIS; and in 2014 created a “democracies vs. autocracies” program called “Democracy Lab” with Foreign Policy magazine. She is called a pioneer on defining “fake news” and “disinformation.”
The core of Applebaum’s long and triumphalist Atlantic column is this: “And when Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away. When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.”
And then this expert in “democracy vs. autocracy,” buffaloed by the fact that Putin is an elected President, says the danger of this imagined outcome is that there’s no reliable autocratic succession process (like, say, the accession of Charles III on the death of Elizabeth II?) “Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin.”
What a shame, Ms. Applebaum, many nations have no royal succession to hope for!
