There's something in the water of autocracies that infects their nations with gratuitous quagmires. Russia, of course, is no stranger to autocracies: Under the tsars, under Stalin, and now under Putin, there have been no internal countervailing powers that could stop their leaders from inflicting horrendous pain on their own people.

In theory, that's not how the United States is supposed to work. Going to war, our Constitution flatly says, is up to Congress. Even when it has been up to Congress in recent decades, as it was in a de facto way in Vietnam and a de jure way in Iraq, we've opted for wars of choice with disastrous outcomes. Under Donald Trump, however, not only was our war of choice in Iran decreed solely by our autocratic president, but that president never bothered to make even a semi-serious case for that war to his fellow Americans.

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In Russia, Putin believes that the court of public opinion can be indefinitely blocked from convening. Critics have been jailed, leaders of a potential opposition murdered, and public access to the internet severely curtailed. Though he plainly yearns for such powers, Trump can't dispose of American public opinion so violently. Instead, he employs his allies to take over as much of the media as they can, keeps congressional Republicans marching in lockstep with him with threats of primary challenges, hires prosecutors and agency heads to indict and assail his critics (no plausibility required), and also contests certified election results that go against him (again, no evidence need be--or can be--adduced).

But it's Trump and Putin who are the only real agents of their own undoing. By their very nature, delusional autocrats hired fearful or besotted (or both) underlings, whose job it is to nod obediently when their bosses start wars they cannot end.