It’s time to really think about life after Putin and Xi

The news that Vladimir Putin has cancer has grown increasingly widespread in the last few weeks. And added on to that was news that General Secretary Xi of China has a brain aneurysm. 

Well, why bother talking about other folks health, especially those two? I don’t think there’d be a lot of tears shed in America, when either of them passes from the scene. They’re just not nice people. But it does have important policy implications. 

The US bureaucracy in determining policy has become slow and bureaucratized. And the thinking about how to handle this is deep down in the bowels of the of the Deep State probably hasn’t penetrated up and won’t, until a crisis occurs. 

This means we ought to be doing more thinking about what may happen if either passes from the scene. 

Let’s start with Putin. He is not crazy. He’s actually rational from the point of view of a Russian leader. 

Russian leaders going back to Catherine the Great, have believed that expanding the Russian state is the way to defend the homeland, they need territory for defense. In fact, it was Catherine the Great the time we signed the Declaration of Independence, who annexed Ukraine into Russian territory. 

The way they are crazy, or Putin is crazy. And from our point of view, is that he views death, essentially as collateral damage in the forward march of history. It’s probably best described the way Stalin said it. He said, “a single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” 

Pretty cold hearted, don’t you think? But Putin really has great faith in Russia and his legacy is all about the Russian nation, he puts it ahead of himself. 

He was after all, a KGB agent putting his life on the line. He is worried about what is going to happen to Russia based on the current conflict with NATO. 

Secretary of Defense Austin and Secretary of State Blinken gave support to that idea when a few weeks ago, he said it was America’s objective to weaken Russia. 

Now that goes beyond calling for regime change or calling for war crime trials, because that’s personal.

Their position or their description of the American position is that we not only want to bring Putin down, we want to weaken the country. 

So Putin’s goal is to stop the west from defeating Russia. And he – now that he has cancer, he has an intense focus, because that will be the key to his legacy. How will he do it? 

He’s likely to try and deter us by doing something we’d otherwise think unthinkable.

It may be a nuclear weapon, it may be an electromagnetic pulse that freezes our electronics. It may be another one of their very powerful tools. For example, they’re number one in hacking. 

So the result of Putin’s cancer should be, we should expect something is going to happen in the next few months. 

How about President Xi? 

Well, with a brain aneurysm, you can die at any moment as soon as the aneurysm bursts. Xi is going to be elected to a third term as General Secretary of the party this fall. 

You’d think someone who’s about to get a third term and power of the largest population on Earth would want to stay alive. But he’s refusing to go under the knife. He’s refusing to have an operation that might save his life. 

Remember, Xi controls things by fear not love. And what if he’s under anesthesia, he may feel that perhaps he is correct in not thinking he can control things. He has a communist precedent to look at Stalin. 

Stalin in 1953 had a stroke, the Russian leadership let him linger in pain for five days. He ended up dying in a pool of urine If you can imagine one of the most powerful leaders of the 20th century. They didn’t want him around forever. And that was the path of least resistance. 

I’m sure Xi has that in the back of his mind. The good news is Xi is likely to be risk averse in that environment, not doing foreign adventurism.

The bad news is that Chinese decision making is going to be frozen. If you don’t know who the next leader is going to be, what kind of decision are you going to make just in case the new leadership doesn’t like it? 

So we have increased geopolitical uncertainty from the health of these two world leaders. But it’s a different variety. In Putin’s case, the risks come from the possibility of a destabilizing action. In Xi’s case, it prevents decisions from happening that might lead to a unified global action to stabilize.