Michael Veltri discusses the physical fighting skills of President Vladimir Putin in the context of an offer of combat from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare:
Wittes’s premise is that Putin’s martial arts prowess is largely a matter of propaganda and public relations imaging. As he writes,
Martial arts videos of Putin litter the Internet. So do shirtless images. He tangles with endangered species and supposedly wrestles bears. But for all his displays of the crudest forms of masculinity, Putin only fights people who are in his power, whom he can have arrested, whose lives he can ruin. And I think they’re all taking falls for him. In fact, they’re not really fighting him at all.
Though his Lawfare post is limited in its claims about Putin, Wittes has not always been careful in his descriptions. In at least one social medial post, he called Putin a “fraud”—an idea that then got picked up in the Washington Post in a story about the challenge.
I’ll leave to others the task of evaluating Wittes’s political point about Putin’s use of martial arts for propaganda purposes. For present purposes, let’s focus on gaming out the fight. How would Wittes fair in a fight with Vlad?
Some interesting videos are interspersed, making the point that Putin was once a full-blown KGB agent. Veltri finishes with this:
If I thought Wittes were actually serious, I would urge him—as I do anyone contemplating a fight—to avoid it. I would urge Wittes instead to continue wrestling bears at the National Zoo shirtless from time to time instead.
Does shirtless imply a certain extra dose of manliness?
