Thank you for the insight.
I have no doubt Putin and many of these world dictators are horrible people capable of atrocious things, especially against their neighbors and own people. The problem I have is many in the US, based on what is told to us by the media, imagine these dictators as cartoonish villains literally ready to blow up the entire world on a whim, when rational people know the reality if much more complicated than that. Take North Korea for example. Way too many people mistake the Kim families saber rattling as actual unprovoked threats and get anxiety attacks every time they pop off with some insane sounding statement. Looking at it objectively, this is an isolationist country doing everything it can to preserve itself. You can recognize that Kim is a horrible leader but also acting fairly rationally based on the position he is in. If he weren’t developing nuclear weapons and threatening to rain hell upon America and South Korea, we 100 percent would have taken him out already. This is not defending his actions, obviously, but understanding our enemies motivations. He’s been very quiet ever since it’s been generally accepted that they have nukes now, that’s no coincidence. I just wish we were better educated on world affairs so we could look at these things under a more international lens and not just “bad man say bad thing, must destroy bad man.”