Putin is a loser. Treat him like one.

Two weeks ago, Tucker Carlson made the claim to British broadcaster Jacob Rees-Mogg that Russia’s economy dwarfs Britain’s. It doesn’t. International Monetary Fund figures show Britain’s output is about $4.3 trillion and Russia’s about $2.8 trillion — 60 percent higher. 

Carlson’s claim reflects a tendency by some to treat Russia and President Vladimir Putin as powerful. That feeds a faulty policy instinct: that Putin is a peer to be bargained back into the club. The record says otherwise. 

He inherited a country smarting from the collapse of the Soviet empire and, after a brief hydrocarbon-fueled recovery, set it on a path of stagnation, isolation and self-inflicted decline. The invasion of Ukraine did not reverse that trajectory — it locked it in. Putin’s Russia is weaker, sicker, poorer relative to its rivals, and increasingly a vassal to Beijing.  

There is little to be gained from cultivating Putin, as he has demonstrated by deploying disinformation to stoke divisions in the West, and with his support for Iran against U.S. forces and our allies’ energy infrastructure. 

The right policy is to treat Putin like the loser he is.  

Putin is running Russia’s resource-abundant economy into the ground. Real GDP growth since 2013, prior to the invasion of Crimea, has been an anemic 19 percent, compared to 34 percent for America. Massive spending on the futile war against Ukraine saw GDP growth above 4 percent in 2023-2024, but that artificial boom has stalled; growth slumped to 1 percent in 2025, and forecasts for this year are worse.

Moscow plans to spend a record $200 billion on defense in 2027, about 35 percent of federal spending, while the........

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