Vladimir Putin is both a figure of the past and a man of his time. He suppressed dissent while flooding social media with disinformation that radicalized not only Russians but communities around the world. He disrupted the international system by taking advantage of the obstruction it afforded him.

He enriched his circle by selling commodities to the West while lambasting its immorality. He was at the vanguard of autocrats who claimed power through democracy only to dismantle it. Putin has long been a source of these pressures, simultaneously dragging us back into the darker recesses of history while capitalizing on the vulnerabilities of our present moment. How could this many nationalist autocrats emerge in so many different places, working from such a similar playbook? How much more strain could a creaky international system bear before it broke? How could problems be solved, wars avoided, and democracy defended when truth and objective reality were becoming so flexible, with people locked in different closets of information? How much longer could the pressures build before an explosion? These forces are not unique to Russia they are all around us, and have left us in an unsustainable situation.

This post is excerpted from Rhodes’s recent book. New technologies facilitated the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation on a mass scale, so that it’s hard to tell where Putin’s invented pretexts end and his own motivations begin. The creation of national-security states veiled the machinations of governments while providing endless justifications for defensive aggression. The corruption that enriched kleptocrats isolated them from accountability, engendering cynicism and apathy within societies. The backlash to globalization, consumerism, and cultural homogeneity sent strongmen in search of an updated brand of identity politics. Yet despite its historical echoes, the war also feels like the product of the peculiar circumstances of our post–Cold War era. Perhaps it is no coincidence that at precisely the time when living memory of World War II is fading away, humanity has failed to heed the lessons of our worst history. And in many ways, the tolls of the war-cities reduced to rubble, civilians caught amid armies, refugees moving en masse across European borders, threats of nuclear annihilation-recall the circumstances that shocked world powers into creating an international system to prevent another world war. Putin’s efforts to reconstitute empire and “protect” Russian speakers beyond national borders tap into currents of history running deep underneath our collective experience. Europe’s largest invasion since World War II is a logical outcome of Vladimir Putin’s dominance of Russian politics in the 21st century, a reminder that grievance-based ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism lead inexorably to conflict.

After the fall ben rhodes