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determined autocrats like Vladimir Putin.
    Every time Putin cracked down in Russia, or even when he interfered with neighboring nations, the West had the opportunity to push back. Instead, at every turn Putin was rewarded with even closer ties to the world’s leading democracies and, more importantly, with greater access to their lucrative markets. It is impossible, of course, to say with certainty that Putin’s course toward dictatorship would have been altered or prevented by a strong stand by the free world. But I believe it to be so.
    Putin is not an ideologue. He and his cronies accumulated tremendous wealth, and the threat of not being able to enjoy it freely in the West would have been a very serious threat. Unlike their Soviet predecessors, Putin and his allies are not content with a late-model ZIL limousine and a nice dacha on the Black Sea. They want to rule like Josef Stalin but live like Roman Abramovich, the close Putin buddy who spent his riches buying a famous English soccer team and yachts the size of soccer fields. Putin’s oligarchs travel the world and keep their wealth abroad, and this gives Western governments real clout if they have the courage to use it.
    That was even more the case early in Putin’s first term, when he was still testing what he could get away with. Like any born autocrat, Putin respects only power. He takes a step, looks around, sniffs the air, and then, if there are no negative consequences, he takes another step. With each advance, he gains more confidence and becomes harder to stop. Muted expressions of concern from diplomats and foreign ministers are the greenest of lights to someone like Putin. Such chatter is in fact designed to be meaningless in his interpretation. After all, if the United States were truly concerned it would do something instead of just talking about it while doing nothing.
    The appeasers’ motives range from ill-advised optimism about Putin’s true nature to cynical political careerism that sees a belligerent and energy-rich Russia as too difficult a problem to deal with. It was easier for many Western leaders to pretend there wasn’t a problem in Russia than to admit it would be difficult or impossible to solve it. Then there’s a separate category for those leaders like Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhardt Schroder, men for whom cooperating with Putin was literally business as usual.
    Despite the attempt to rebrand the method as “engagement,” the smell of appeasement is impossible to mask. The fundamental lesson of Chamberlain and Daladier going to see Hitler in Munich in 1938 is valid today: giving a dictator what he wants never stops him from wanting more; it convinces him you aren’t strong enough to stop him from taking what he wants. Otherwise, goes the dictator’s thought process, you would stand up to him from the start.
    The warning signs about Putin’s nature and intent were plentiful. His rise to power was aided by his brutal response to the 1999 apartment bombings, terrorist acts that many still suspect to have been a Reichstag-style provocation. (But unlike the Reichstag, there was actual blood spilled.) Carpet-bombing and torture of civilians across Chechnya were presented as part of the global war on terror, which was a complete fabrication. Later, Putin’s contempt for the value of human life was confirmed in two hostage situations, the first in 2002 when federal troops using a still-unspecified gas killed many dozens of hostages in the Nord-Ost theater standoff in Moscow. The second came in 2004, when security forces using military weapons demolished a school full of child hostages in Beslan, resulting in the deaths of hundreds.
    The Kremlin’s rapid subjugation of the Russian press was, along with a rise in oil prices of over 700 percent by 2008, the biggest reason behind the perceived success of the regime of Vladimir Putin. Very early on in his first term as president, Putin learned that control of the Fourth Estate was essential