Cocaine Bear

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)

On Thursday critic David Sims published his review in The Atlantic of Hollywood’s newest monster movie, a film he didn’t much like. One problem, he wrote, is that he couldn’t find any useful metaphors in a story about a bear in the woods that becomes intoxicated and sets off on a rampage, killing everyone in sight.

Really? I can think of one.

A year on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most arresting fact about the war remains that it was caused by a single man’s intoxication. The Financial Times alleged this week that practically everyone in Vladimir Putin’s orbit, up to and including his own foreign minister, didn’t believe he would give the order to attack until the order was given. Maybe that’s a case of the Times’ Russian sources rewriting history to remove their own fingerprints from a project gone disastrously wrong, but the details about Putin getting lethally high on his own supply of propaganda jibe with years of Western analysis about what motivates him.

Why, listen to this promising, clear-eyed young Republican congressman assess the threat in 2017.

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