Leonid Brezhnev

The United States has done it again: reneged on a signed agreement. President Donald Trump has drop kicked the Iran Nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA).

Pragmatism is the most assured guiding force for good government. It is possible to run a government based on ideology or its close cousin, fanaticism, but rarely do such things end up being successful.
More often than not, the antithesis of pragmatism ends in failure.
The controversial 20th century British politician Enoch Powell once remarked,

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”.

In 1991 at a dacha in the middle of Belavezha Forest, three men conspired to end the Soviet Union in contravention not only of Soviet law, but against the stated wishes of the majority of Soviet citizens who just months earlier, voted in a referendum in which they expressed their desire to live together in a single state, the Soviet Union.

A recent poll asked Russians to name their favourite political era since the Revolutions of 1917. Unsurprisingly, the Putin era and the Brezhnev era are nearly tied with 32% voting for the Putin era and 29% favouring the Brezhnev era. The only reason for the slight gap is that many young Russians cannot remember the Brezhnev era first hand.