A crowded stage of strongmen
Some days the news reads like a casting call for aspiring autocrats. One leader muses about a united Ireland in a way clearly meant for ears across an ocean, not across the Irish Sea. A kingdom in Uganda buries one king while a secret son contests the next. Six men are extradited for running romance scams that hollowed out lonely bank accounts. Power, deception, inheritance — the oldest human stories, freshly dressed.
Amid all this noise, a newspaper devoted to noticing dictatorship early has to ask an unfashionable question: whose danger is mostly theatre, and whose is not?
Rhetoric versus capability
Here is my honest answer, offered not as insult but as assessment: of every strongman currently on the world's stage, Vladimir Putin is the one whose capability I fear most.
Not because his speeches are the loudest — they are not. Not because he courts cameras the way some do. But because he is the one who has already done the thing that others merely gesture toward. He ordered a war of conquest against a neighbouring democracy and has sustained it for years. He commands the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. He has shown, patiently and repeatedly, a willingness to weaponise what looks unweaponisable: gas pipelines, power grids, grain ships, even the ordinary trust that a train will stay on its rails.
Others posture. He has practiced.
A world still willing to convene him
This week, leaders of the BRICS bloc met in India, explicitly framed as a counterweight to Western dominance. It is a useful reminder that isolation is not automatic; it has to be built and maintained, and much of the world is still willing to sit at a table where Moscow has a seat.
One need not believe every drone over the Red Sea or every disputed derailment in Europe is traceable to a single desk in the Kremlin to notice the pattern such incidents rhyme with: a world where critical infrastructure — a pipeline in Saudi Arabia, a rail line in France, an island off Yemen — can be disrupted quietly, deniably, and the disruption itself becomes a kind of leverage. Whoever is behind any single act, the method has a teacher, and everyone at that BRICS table has studied under him.
Why this fear is useful, not paranoid
Fear, used well, is not paralysis. It is prudence with its eyes open.
The wise response to a proven capability is not louder condemnation — Moscow has heard plenty and shrugged. It is unglamorous persistence: keep supporting the democracy that was invaded, for as long as it asks. Keep hardening the pipelines, grids, and rails that everyone depends on and no one used to think about. Keep the door to any summit clearly marked — trade is not the same as legitimacy, and a seat at a table is not an amnesty.
And keep asking, at home, a Socratic question worth repeating: when our own leaders speak admiringly of strongmen, or muse aloud about territorial arrangements meant for foreign audiences, are they rehearsing a habit they would recognise in Moscow if it wore a different accent?
A standpoint, not a shrug
This newspaper does not glorify violence, and it does not believe democracies win by imitating the tactics they oppose. But naming danger honestly is different from shouting it. Between the theatrical autocrat and the demonstrated one, a free press owes its readers clarity about which is which.
My standpoint, then, is simple: fear the one who has already shown what he will do with power, more than the ones who merely enjoy talking about it. That fear, properly used, is not weakness. It is the beginning of the vigilance democracies need to keep.