The specter of elected despotism

Melik Kaplan, politico.eu

How Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan beat us at our own game.

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Excerpt:

[Russia's president] Putin and [Turkey's president] Erdoğan could go to war over Syria. They are, however, aligned against the Western model in their methods and in the endless bogey-invoking of outside forces. We know the phenomenology: it’s time to recognize the “ism,” diagnose the symptoms and evolve a counter-process as we did in the Cold War. The much-maligned U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry and his highly media-literate deputy, Richard Stengel (a former editor of Time magazine), is re-embracing public diplomacy as a major weapon in the West’s arsenal by dramatizing such issues, as in the Cold War. Europe would do well to follow suit. ...