Henry Kissinger was my professor at Harvard, back in the early 1960s. The biggest thing I remember from many courses with him was his statement that Americans excel in our capacity for self-criticism, including exploring our weaknesses. What we aren’t good at is assessing the vulnerabilities of our adversaries.
This is a thought that would resonate with Natalia Arno, founder of the Free Russia Foundation, an organization that advocates for democracy in Russia. In her view, Putin has an unending collection of weaknesses, and we in the West aren’t giving these weaknesses enough attention.
If you were to talk with her, one of the first points she’d bring up is her view that the West has the false perception that Russians don’t want or deserve democracy. “This is, of course, not true,” she states. “The Putin regime keeps people from expressing their true views, and they do it using fear, propaganda, and jail. I know of a case where a woman made an anti-Putin comment on Facebook and ended up with a 20-year jail sentence.”
In her view, a strong and secure regime doesn’t have to use these techniques. She points out that while under the dictator Stalin there were millions of…
