With all the money going into the Ukraine war and other ventures since Putin came to power, I imagine there’s a lot of stuff he could’ve done to make the world a better place and Russia a formidable world power.
He would have stepped down in 2008 per constitutional limits.
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Almost every single country with an extraction-based economy is either a dictatorship or a failed state. The single exception is Norway, which discovered oil after it was already an advanced democracy. A country with natural resources does not need to invest in its human capital, or worry about democracy.
Russia’s natural resources are its curse.
The Netherlands is also wealthy because of their natural gas.
So it is definitely possible to not be a dictatorship, and a good Putin would make it so.
The Netherlands is absolutely not wealthy because of its natural gas. The Netherlands is a manufacturing center, a farming powerhouse (it’s literally the world’s number 2 food exporter). It was Europe’s original trading empire. Today it contains the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley, with world-class universities and the super-high-tech ASML. It’s been a wealthy country for centuries because it has invested in its people. The natural gas is an anecdote.
