Who is the most influential human being on the planet? My vote goes to Vladimir Putin.

Putin has established himself as one pole in the great global debate of the era, the debate between authoritarianism and democracy. He has a coherent strategy to promote his authoritarian side of that debate. He’s able to humiliate and disrupt his democratic rivals at will and get away with it. He’s become a cultural hero to populist conservatives everywhere — in France, Italy, the Philippines and the Oval Office.

People are always saying that Putin is merely good at playing a weak hand. Everybody expects him to ultimately falter because Russia’s economy is so creaky. But his hand isn’t that weak. That’s because his power base is not economic; it’s cultural and ideological.

As Christopher Caldwell writes in Imprimis, Putin’s international prestige starts with the story he tells. He came to power, by his telling, after Western reformers nearly destroyed his country. Teams of American economists thought that if you privatized property correctly, the law and order and social cohesion would take care of themselves.

Social catastrophe followed. Russia’s average life expectancy fell below that of Bangladesh. The government went bankrupt. Members of the old Communist nomenklatura plundered the nation’s resources. Successive American administrations humiliated Russia on the world stage.