Rumors persist regarding the tenuous health of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and General Secretary Xi Jinping of China. While much of the world would consider their deaths welcome news, questions linger about who would replace them and in what direction they might take their respective countries. Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey says the demise of either leader presents unique challenges:

Let’s start with Putin. He is not crazy. He’s actually rational from the point of view of a Russian leader. The way they are crazy, or Putin is crazy, and from our point of view, is that he views death essentially as collateral damage in the forward march of history. It’s probably best described the way Stalin said it. He said, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

Pretty cold hearted, don’t you think? But Putin really has great faith in Russia and his legacy is all about the Russian nation; he puts it ahead of himself. 

He was, after all, a KGB agent putting his life on the line. He is worried about what is going to happen to Russia based on the current conflict with NATO. 

Secretary of Defense Austin and Secretary of State Blinken gave support to that idea, when a few weeks ago, he said it was “America’s objective to weaken Russia.” 

Now, that goes beyond calling for regime change or calling for war crime trials, because that’s personal.

Their positions — or their description of the American position — is that we not only want to bring Putin down, we want to weaken the country. 

So Putin’s goal is to stop the west from defeating Russia. And he — now that he has cancer — has an intense focus, because that will be the key to his legacy.

How will he do it? 

He’s likely to try and deter us by doing something we’d otherwise think unthinkable. It may be a nuclear weapon, it may be an electromagnetic pulse that freezes our electronics. It may be another one of their very powerful tools. For example, they’re number one in hacking. 

How about President Xi? 

You’d think someone who’s about to get a third term and power of the largest population on Earth would want to stay alive. But he’s refusing to go under the knife. He’s refusing to have an operation that might save his life. 

Remember, Xi controls things by fear not love. And what if he’s under anesthesia, he may feel that perhaps he is correct in not thinking he can control things. He has a communist precedent to look at in Stalin. 

So we have increased geopolitical uncertainty from the health of these two world leaders. But it’s a different variety. In Putin’s case, the risks come from the possibility of a destabilizing action. In Xi’s case, it prevents decisions from happening that might lead to a unified global action to stabilize.