Two leaders with much in common
It is shocking to me how much Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have in common these days: Both see themselves as great strategic chess players in a world where, they think, everyone else knows only how to play checkers. And yet both completely misread the world in which they were operating.
In fact, they misread it so badly that it looks as if each is not playing chess or checkers but rather Russian roulette — all by themselves. Russian roulette is not meant to be played alone, but alone they both are.
Putin thought that he could capture Kyiv in a few days and thus — at a very low cost — use Russian expansion into Ukraine to forever blunt European Union and NATO expansion. He might have gotten close but for the fact that his isolation and self-delusion resulted in his getting his own army wrong, Ukraine’s army wrong, the NATO allies wrong, President Joe Biden wrong, the Ukrainian people wrong, Sweden wrong, Finland wrong, Poland wrong, Germany wrong and the European Union wrong. In the process, he’s made Russia into an energy colony of China and a beggar for Iran’s drones.
For someone who has been at the top of the Kremlin since 1999, that’s a whole lot of wrong.
Netanyahu and his coalition thought they could pull off a quick judicial coup, disguised as a legal “reform,” that would enable them to exploit the narrowest of election victories — roughly 30,000 votes out of some 4.7 million — to allow Netanyahu & Co. to govern without having to worry about the only source of restraint on politicians in Israel’s system: its independent judiciary and Supreme Court.
Interestingly, at the first formal meeting of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, in December, he listed his government’s four priorities: blocking Iran, restoring personal security for every Israeli, addressing the cost of living and the shortage of housing, and widening the circle of peace with surrounding Arab states. He didn’t mention upending the courts, apparently hoping to slip it past the public.
Wrong. A vast majority of the Israeli public got it immediately and responded with the largest public backlash to any proposed legislation in the country’s history.
The opposition is now throughout Israeli society and beyond: Netanyahu got his army wrong, his technology start
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