America needs to stop treating Putin like a supervillain

But here’s the thing: The best response to Putin is not to try to do the opposite of everything he says or to try to frustrate him at every turn. Instead, we must look at every specific situation and deal with that situation on its own terms.

Take, for example, what’s happening in Syria. As disgusted as you and I might be at Putin’s actions there, it remains the case that now Russia holds most of the cards in the country, and that some version of the Assad regime is the only plausible alternative to an Islamist dictatorship. Maybe at the beginning of the war some non-mythical moderates could be cobbled together to run the country in some vaguely ethical way, but Assad and Putin (and Iran) killed all those guys (or they radicalized out of disgust) and now all that’s left is Assad, al Qaeda, and ISIS. The ship has sailed.

Similarly, Russia’s increasingly reckless cyberattacks against Western institutions must not be allowed to stand. President Barack Obama always refused to make Putin play a price for his attacks, which led to him only increasing the pace of the attacks. Russia must pay a price for cyberwarfare high enough that it will deter it from further actions. In particular, Putin depends on his oligarch clique for power; putting financial and personal pressure on his allies so that they make him understand that his self-aggrandizing stunts only hurt them seems like a clever thing to do.