Maybe the debate over whether leaders make a difference, or whether instead they are just pawns on a chessboard is as old as human history. Or maybe it goes back just a couple of hundred years. What’s true in any case is that on this issue U.S. Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Russian President Vladimir Putin are on the same side. They each believe that heroes, leaders, can change history. And they each believe this is a role they personally are destined to play.
Since January 6, 2021, Cheney has taken the position that personal agency matters. She told one interviewer that we all have a duty to “recognize that we can influence events.” She told another that “elected officials have to make a decision about whether we are bystanders or leaders,” calling it “irresponsible” to act as “though our institutions are self-sustaining, because they are not; it takes us, it takes people, to do that.”
That Cheney has talked publicly and emphatically about the importance of individual responsibility is in keeping with her behavior. Almost alone among Republicans she has chosen to stand against former President Donald Trump. And almost alone among Republicans she has played a prominent if not dominant role on the January 6th committee. The woman is putting her money where her mouth is.
Putin is doing the same. Agreed: the consequences of what he is doing to prove his point and the consequences of what she is doing to prove hers are at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Cheney is trying to save democracy while Putin is trying to destroy it.
Still, the same underlying leadership principle is undergirding what both are choosing to do. Cheney talks about the importance of the individual. Putin compares himself to his hero, Peter the Great, who was nothing if not a supremely powerful leader who bent history to his will, largely by expanding the Russian empire and transforming it into a major European power.
Inevitably, the war in Ukraine has become, somewhat, normalized. Most days the story does not any longer, at least in the United States, lead the news. Americans have gotten used to the death and destruction in far-away Ukraine, they, we, have gotten used to the millions of Ukrainian lives demolished and disrupted. Important however to remember this is called “Putin’s War” for good reason. It is his war. It was he who decided to invade, and it is he who is continuing relentlessly to batter Ukrainian towns and cities while he sits far away, presumably comfortably, in the Kremlin.
Both Liz Cheney and Vladimir Putin will go down in the history books. Though their legacies will be diametrically opposed, each will forever be remembered for acting on what they believed to be true. That human agency matters and that they alone could make a big difference.