Yeah, Yeah, Autocracy ...

 ... my ass. For cretins from the butt-hurt Atlantic. 

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Foer, go to your office, take your degree from Columbia University off the wall and place it in the nearest public restroom as a last resort toilet paper for a person with a sudden onset of diarrhea, because this is the only worth of all of the American "liberal" journalists'--in fact, totalitarian fanatics--degrees which provide zero awareness about pretty much anything. Do not write about something you have no clue about. Find a decent McDonald's near you--they may take you there as a janitor and even that could be too much for your "expertise" level.