We instinctually ascribe political and strategic genius to the authoritarians of the world. One American commentator described Putin as a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy. But anyone that acts as a tyrant over the people of their country, and causes the pain and suffering of a war, is no genius, writes Yaron Brook and Elan Journo.

No death toll can truly capture the devastation that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and their ilk inflicted upon the world. The engineered Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor), the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields of the twentieth century should have taught us to evaluate dictators properly. But, depressingly, many politicians and intellectuals persist in misreading dictators.

SUGGESTED READING How the West got Russia and China Wrong By Aaron Friedberg For example, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was rising to power, he found admirers among Western intellectuals. In 1979 Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, dismissed concerns about Khomeini’s political vision of Islamic totalitarianism. Falk suggested that “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third world country.” That’s not been the experience of Iranian women who are brutalized and jailed for failing to wear hijab; nor of gays executed by public hanging; nor of any Iranians who value their freedom; nor of any of the victims of Iranian-backed Islamist terrorism.