As these things go, it's not awful, even though the author admits being brought up on "the French Nietzsche," one of the more appallingly confused fabrications to have attached itself to the philosopher. (Later, the author describes Deleuze as key to "the French Nietzsche," which is unfair to Deleuze!) The essay is partly a review of Sue Prideaux's book, but the author is sufficiently ignorant to not recognize the problems in her biography. Perhaps tellingly, towards the end, the music critic writes:
Whenever I feel bewildered by endless interpretive skirmishes over the philosophical Antichrist, I return to Alexander Nehamas’s “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” which appeared in 1985 and retains a commanding place on the near-infinite Nietzsche bookshelf. Nehamas, a Greek-American thinker steeped in classical studies, essentially made a virtue of Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Nietzsche. The contradictions in Nietzsche’s writings cohere, Nehamas writes, if we look at him as a literary figure who worked within a philosophical context, and who crafted a persona that functions as a literary character of novelistic complexity.
This is actually a somewhat unfair gloss on Nehamas's book (which does not make "a virtue of Bertrand Russell's dismissal of Nietzsche"), but it is true, as I wrote long ago, that Nehamas's book (which, recall, appeared in 1985),
By contrast, Scott Sagan, a political science professor at Stanford, here presumes (but does not argue for) the "Putin is a madman" view, and its alarming implications. (Thanks to Jeff McMahan for the pointer.)
This is a context in which it pays, as Nietzsche says, to remember that objectivity and knowledge may emerge from having "one's pro and contra in one's power, and...[shifting] them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge." So reading these two different perspectives on Putin and Ukraine, what can we conclude?