If Putin is a thug, what is Erdogan?
by Don Hank
A
reader forwarded an email exchange between him and a friend who repeats
the refrain that Putin is a “thug.” The reader wanted to know how I
would answer this friend. I responded as follows.
Western commentators and politicians like to call Putin a thug, based on suppositions and suspicions.
However,
when we evaluate human character, since no one is perfect, the
conclusion cannot be absolute. To be valid and fair, it must therefore
be relative – relative, that is, to other people who are their peers. In
this case, to make the evaluation relevant and useful, we would have to
compare Putin with a comparable peer or peers among Western allies – in
analogy to the use of a control group in scientific studies. Otherwise,
if Putin is no more a thug than a US ally is, it would be unfair to
Putin and a clear cut sign of Russophobia to call Putin a thug but not
others who exhibit similar or worse behavior. But Russophobia is racism,
and racists is not who we are – or are we?
Since
we are living in the here and now, the only fair evaluation would be a
comparison with a comparable peer, say, Turkish president Erdogan, whose
country is a NATO member. If we could demonstrate that Putin is more of
a thug than Erdogan, then we could perhaps validly call Putin a thug.
In other words, to conclude Putin is a thug would be to conclude that Erdogan is not a thug, or at least that he is significantly less of a thug, since our elites never call Erdogan a thug.
After
all, evaluations of foreign leaders are made to assemble useful
pragmatic evidence for use in forging foreign policies vis-a-vis the
foreign leader in question. It’s a matter of national security.
In the case of Putin, perhaps the most important issue is:
Can we trust Putin enough to cooperate with him, say, in Syria?
Let us just examine this one issue to keep it simple.
Now
the internet is awash with reports that Erdogan, via his son Bilal, is
buying and selling Syrian oil stolen by ISIS. While complete
verification is not yet possible, it is nonetheless certain that there
is a thriving oil smuggling business in Turkey and it would be
impossible for this to be going on under Erdogan’s nose without him
knowing it. A very well-documented report is here: http://www.
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