Noam Chomsky has had a remarkable career, but he's really old and was never anywhere within shouting distance of the political center. Neither is Current Affairs, for what it's worth. His argument seems to be that Putin's belligerence is effectively an act of God, and that our only choice from now until eternity is to submit to it. Dr. Chomsky's childhood was apparently so long ago, he's forgotten that appeasing a bully only ever makes him worse.

For the record, no country is capable of making another country's citizens resist an invasion to the last man. Look what happened to the army in Afghanistan. Despite what Russian state TV is telling you, Ukrainians want to fight far more desperately than the rest of the world wants them to. They all grew up learning about the Holodomor, for one thing. And that was true even before Putin razed a bunch of their major cities and killed tens of thousands of people. The US is just providing weapons—many of them old and Soviet-made, no less—to a people desperate to protect themselves from what they clearly see as a fate at least as bad as, if not worse than, death.

Nothing about this is inevitable. The world works however the people in it want it to work. We can build a better one, or we can all decide that we're OK repeating the endless brutality of the past. The West has (imperfectly, sporadically) chosen the former since the fall of Nazi Germany, and the result, despite all the missteps, has been an unprecedented era of global peace and prosperity. Russia was welcome to join this fraternity in the 90's, but instead was consumed by corruption and mob rule and retreated inward to misguided nationalism and xenophobia.

It seems to have been forgotten in Russia that the Soviet Union was a disaster, and its primary victims were its own citizens. Stalin murdered tens of millions of his own people. It promulgated a culture that installed bloodthirsty dictators who were almost as bad in dozens of countries, and whose ideology was so ineffective that it led to devastating famine in many communist countries. It gave us Chernobyl. For all the talk about hating Nazis, the USSR (and, increasingly, Putin's regime) much more closely resembled Nazi Germany than any country you'd recognize nowadays, except maybe China or North Korea. Soviet vassal states all voted to leave the USSR by >80% margins the second the regime collapsed.

Russia is hell-bent on being recognized as a great power, but there's little to substantiate that claim. The country has been hollowed out economically by seemingly endless and endemic corruption. It turns out the military is only really good at committing war crimes. Russia's two greatest military victories—a point of great national pride—are both seen by historians as much more akin to enemy self-owns than great acts of brilliance or might. Its intelligence agencies have likely been the single most destabilizing force in world politics over the last hundred-plus years, dating back to the Tsars. Many of the most persistent and idiotic conspiracy theories—e.g. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the CIA creating AIDS as a weapon to use against Black people—are literally fabrications of Russian intelligence programs. Your dictator deliberately creates refugee crises around "enemy" countries with the aim of exploiting their compassion and generosity to cause political unrest. And you're either one of the only countries brazen enough to regularly carry out state-sponsored assassinations, or the only ones sloppy enough to keep getting caught. You even cheat at the f--king Olympics.

Case in point, here's a list of Russian oligarchs who have conveniently decided to commit suicide after killing their families in the last two months: https://www.newsweek.com/every-russian-oligarch-who-has-died.... It's amazing how many of them have fallen from tall buildings over the years, too.

You're right, as long as Russia has a bunch of nukes, they'll be treated with a certain amount of deference. But don't conflate fear—which Putin wields very effectively—with respect, which will never, ever be earned on the world stage through this kind of behavior. You can't butcher and threaten your way to esteem. It's a lesson Xi could stand to learn as well.