“Power is a drug that drives anyone who tastes it mad,” François Mitterrand once said.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
To this quote, Pascal de Sutter, professor of psychology at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, NATO expert and author of These madmen who rule us, to add: “Unless you have to be crazy to gain power? The author says that megalomania, paranoia, betrayal and madness are very common character traits in the high spheres of power. I won’t give an example here, but I’m sure you have plenty of images of deranged leaders going through your mind. Among the living, the author is interested among others in the cases of George W. Bush, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy.
Let us recall here that to Bush, we owe the horrible and mendacious war in Iraq and to Sarkozy, the Libyan catastrophe which destabilized all the countries of the Sahel, now confronted with the danger of jihadism.
For a very long time, says the author, the CIA has been profiling political leaders. Let’s say that after Hitler, the Americans had understood that it was important to get into the heads of their friends, like that of their adversaries, to better identify them and anticipate their actions in the event of a glitch. We analyze the speeches, dissect the non-verbal, dissect the facial expressions and study the gestures. We also question friends and adversaries to paint a reliable psychological portrait of the political personality. Pascal de Sutter went to meet American specialists on the subject and interviewed the world’s leading psychological experts to write this book devoted to the cranks who lead or have led nations.
I suspect that this need has increased since the election of Donald Trump. How many psychologists and psychiatrists have questioned the mental health of the former president of the United States, speaking of a narcissistic, vain, unstable personality, with incoherent ideas, etc. ? See this crackpot becoming president of the United States makes us realize that being crazy can really help get elected. Moreover, this week, if we are to believe the CNN channel, the American intelligence services say they are more interested than ever in the mental health of Vladimir Putin, whom Donald has never ceased to admire. Try to find on the web the images of the two generals who were at the other end of the long table when Putin mentioned nuclear weapons. I personally froze the scene to take a picture of the mixture of surprise and incomprehension of the two high-ranking soldiers when they heard the president recount having put the nuclear deterrent forces on alert. Their faces said, “We knew, Vladimir, that you were crazy, but not that bad. »
Even if his friend and first fan Donald Trump says of him that he is very intelligent, the disproportionate ego of Vladimir the megalomaniac has played a trick on him, because it will be very difficult for him to occupy Ukraine. The recent history of humanity teaches us that we cannot permanently occupy the country of a proud people who want to remain free and defend the land of their ancestors. Especially when the country in question is inhabited by 40 million people who value their culture, their traditions and their history. The example of Afghanistan should have taught Vladimir and dissuaded him from using military invasion to settle this dispute with the Western world.
Successively, the British, the Soviets and the Americans, who believed they could do in Afghanistan what Putin is trying to achieve in Ukraine, ended up leaving Kabul with their tails between their legs.
Bringing down a weaker government when you are a military power like Russia or the United States is relatively easy. It’s after that things get complicated. It is once the invading soldiers in the streets, with the neighborhoods that are home to militias who dream of killing them, that the horrors of the occupation really begin. During the second American invasion of Iraq, it took a fortnight of bombing to decapitate the regime and the sculpture of Saddam. America lost many soldiers and was forced to pack up years later.
This terrible war had caused more than 100,000 deaths. Without being a specialist in the matter, it is permissible to think that the same scenario awaits Putin in the event of a decapitation of the Kyiv regime. Could Vladimir keep Ukraine, whose people are so combative, under Russian control? In addition, with the heavy economic sanctions imposed on his country, if Putin’s war were to drag on, a large part of the country’s resources would be swallowed up there at the expense of services to its population. Russians are a resilient people, able to endure a lot, but when they get fed up, history has shown that they don’t do things by halves, including revolutions.
Could the ego of Putin the megalomaniac have prevented him from calculating what this type of war costs before launching his troops on Ukraine? According to some sources, if we combine the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, America would have spent some 6400 billion since 2001. The Afghan campaign alone would have cost more than 2300 billion to the American Treasury. Add to this immeasurable sum the fortunes spent by the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF), under the aegis of NATO, which at the height of their presence brought together many other nations, including Albania, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, United Kingdom , Sweden, the Czech Republic and Turkey.
To complete the accounting, we must also add the expenses of the UN forces which mobilized some thirty other nations represented by smaller groups of soldiers. This Afghan war has swallowed up a gigantic fortune. However, resistance fighters in the country ended up regaining power in the land of their ancestors. We all remember the chaotic departure of America and its allies from Kabul airport in 2021. An end to the campaign whose images are amusingly reminiscent of the fall of Ho Chi Minh City, also called Saigon.
Isn’t Vietnam another example reminding us that we cannot permanently occupy by force the land of a proud and patriotic people?
Imagine what humanity could have done with this sunken fortune in these clashes between the oversized, paranoid, unhinged egos and thirsty for power and domination that rule the planet. In this week when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that global warming is even faster than expected and that our room for maneuver not to burn the biosphere has become very narrow, imagine what what we could have done if there were more intelligent, sensitive, caring and empathetic people in the upper echelons of power. Let’s say that this report comes at a bad time, because unfortunately, even in these times when the bombs are falling on the innocent, the dependence on hydrocarbons is never far from the concerns. It even largely explains the tolerance of Europeans towards the excesses of Vladimir Putin. Even when the time came to sanction Putin’s Russia, we had to walk on eggshells and find a way to exclude hydrocarbons from the equation. That’s what it is!