25th February 2022
There are two common errors in politics and human conflict.
One is to believe your opponents are caricatures – to assume that they are not rational.
The other is to believe there must be some reason in what your opponents do – to assume that they are actioning rationally.
The problem is knowing when you are making these errors in any given situation.
Take Putin, for example.
Some think he is currently being rational:
Is Putin a rational actor? Rebuilds military. Socks away a massive war chest. Neuters media. Then protracted but limited war in Crimea/Donbas to weaken Ukraine, probe NATO. Test weapons in Syria. Harden econ vs. sanctions. Preplan invasion, then unleash it. Yeah, pretty rational
— Jason Lyall (@jaylyall_red5) February 24, 2022
While others think he is unhinged:
I think it's safe to say now that Putin's speech on Monday was *the* turning point. That's when it became perfectly clear that there was no grand plan, no intricate game of top-level negotiations, nothing. Just one man's irrational obsession with something that's not his.
— Aleksandar Brezar (@brezaleksandar) February 24, 2022
At an early stage of this conflict, I saw some merit in the view that Putin was rationally acting to set up a ‘frozen conflict’ – as he had done in Georgia and Moldova:
Understanding Putin’s narrative about Ukraine is the master key to this crisis | Jonathan Steele https://t.co/T1tYe4EdHu
— Lisa O'Carroll (@lisaocarroll) February 23, 2022
Moldova, then Georgia, now Ukraine: How Russia built ‘bridgeheads into post-Soviet space’ https://t.co/RazHlGM2X4 pic.twitter.com/U5XHhkbn5w
— FRANCE 24 (@FRANCE24) February 22, 2022
But while that may have explained the initial parts of the current conflict, it does not explain the escalation to a full invasion.
And so we do not know whether (and, if so, how) what Putin is doing is rational – and whether there is any way to comprehend why Putin is acting in this way.
But what we do know is that this conduct – rational or otherwise – flows from Putin as an autocrat.
This is evidently his policy – and not one that is being pushed on him by others – and there is nobody in the Russian polity with any formal power to check him.
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Over at the outstanding Comment is Freed blog, the doyen of war and strategic studies Lawrence Freedman sets out what we know and do not know so far about the invasion.
It is exemplary commentary on an unfolding (and, for us, confusing) event and it is worth reading for its own sake.
But there is one passage that is worth considering on this here law and policy blog:
“At times in democracies we lament the flabbiness, incoherence, short-sightedness and inertia of our decision-making, compared with autocrats who can outsmart us by thinking long-term and then taking bold steps without any need to convince a sceptical public, listen to critics, or be held back by such awkward constraints as the rule of law.
“Putin reminds us that that autocracy can lead to great errors, and while democracy by no means precludes us making our own mistakes, it at least allows us opportunities to move swiftly to new leaders and new policies when that happens.
“Would that this now happens to Russia.”
The great thing about checks and balances (when they work) is that, well, they check and they balance.
In the United Kingdom, for example, prime ministers as different as Asquith, Chamberlain, Churchill and Thatcher have all been removed from office at a time of international tension or war.
Effective checks and balances mean that those with political power can always be prevented from exercising their power – and even removed from power.
And this accountability tends to improve the quality of policy and decision making.
As Freedman avers, in a democracy there are the means by which leaders can be replaced and policies changed.
In Russia – whether Putin is rational or not, and whether his policy is rational or not – there are no formal mechanisms by which Putin can feasibly be replaced or his policy halted.
So it does not matter much whether he and his policy are rational – whether there is some grand plan.
He is going to (try to) do what he wants anyway.
And so we come to the ultimate check and balance that all tyrants risk encountering, regardless of any constitutional arrangements.
The check and balance on Hubris that is often (but not always) provided by Nemesis.
Putin will not be the first (or last) dictator to overreach himself in trying to spread their power westwards or eastwards on the land mass of Eurasia.
The problem is that waiting for Nemesis can be like waiting for Godot – and sometimes it does not come in time, or at all.
And that is why, as Freedman implicitly suggests, conflicts are not a time to release leaders and their polices from any scrutiny – but a time where leaders and policies should be most scrutinised.
Would that this now happens to the United Kingdom.
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Well, it seems Putin has his mind on regime change in Ukraine to create a client state like Belarus, rather than dividing Ukraine into “pro” and “anti” blocks as at first seemed likely.
The wheel will turn. Putin will be 70 years old later this year, a month or so before Biden turns 80. Stalin died aged 74. (Zelenskyy, by the way, is 44: he has Jewish ancestors who were killed by actual Nazis. Lukashenko is 67.)
Under the current law, Putin could remain president to 2036, the year when he turns 84. No doubt he is in rude good health, but I wonder what if any plans he has for succession.
An excellent reminder to always work at keeping up a representative system despite the superficial allure of unity in the face of external stress. Or, for that matter, internal stressors (e.g., anti-social oligarchy).
Aside from the horror of this war itself I’m depressed by popular media’s strangulation of perspectives that help to understand its inevitability. Starting with Tsarist Russia sharing America’s notion of Manifest Destiny & the ludicrously dishonest reassurances after German reunification that NATO would not move further east. A pox on Putin *and* western leaders, I say.
”But while that may have explained the initial parts of the current conflict, it does not explain the escalation to a full invasion.
And so we do not know whether (and, if so, how) what Putin is doing is rational – and whether there is any way to comprehend why Putin is acting in this way.”
If you were a military man, (I am not) you would know that to invade the Donbas region, (or parts thereof) WITHOUT destroying Ukraine’s military capability would have been to put Russian soldiers lives at risk. He is destroying Ukraine’s ability to fight back so that (hopefully) this war will be short lived – well at least the hot part of it – and we can proceed to the cold part, where provided he is a rational actor, cooler heads will prevail. (Biden – paraphrase)Who does Putin think he is, declaring two regions of Ukraine to be two new countries? Well whatever he thinks he is, he now knows what Biden and NATO are – so – if nothing else he has learned something about us – us being NATO/the West/Free Liberal democracies/ I can’t remember the rest of the USA national anthem – but that doesn’t matter, Putin knows what he now knows….what that means for the future rests on DAG’s analysis of whether he is a rational actor, or a mad man – I wish to associate myself with the prior claim – but a bit of me is hoping I am right!
Thank you for sharing Professor Freedmans’s blog which I found fascinating.
RUSI expert on BBC news (excellent Ros Atkins programme) described Russian army reverting to the tactics of the 1990’s, in other words not all they are cracked up to be.
They are an invading army that shares friends and relatives in the enemy.
Suggestion elsewhere that Chechen fighters will be sent in to Kyiv for urban fighting.
Maybe I am wrong but I detect an air of acceptance in this morning’s newspapers. A sense that nothing effective will be done, that Ukraine is left to its own devices.
Perhaps this was all pre determined because the writing has been on the wall for a long time. So all we have is empty bluster from the West. I feel a bit ashamed.
I commend to those of you interested in strategy the writings of John Keegan who lectured at Sandhurst and wrote for the once authoratative Daily Telegraph. In The Mask of Command (1987 quand même !) he charts the relations of leaders to followers, from the leading by example of Alexander, through the distancing from the front lines of Wellington & Grant who still at times shared exposure to danger with their troops, to the distance from the front, both physical & psychological, of the WWI château generals, to our own post nuclear times, with much larger fronts and too great masses of information for a leader to comprehend.
This he fears may « persuade the strategist that he enjoys the tactician’s direct vision and freedom of action » which risks to « tempt the suprême commander into decisions which programmed and mediated information may, all desire to the contrary have made for him. It will also tempt him to act the tactician and- therefore- the hero…..The prospect is potentially catastrophic. » Keegan says that while Kennedy during the missile crisis resisted this temptation so that the pressure on Kruschov increased incrementally, Hitler did not.
But thank god, Hitler did not have the bomb. Given his current macho displays, it is at least possible, even likely that Putin in his bunker has lost the plot and will care not a jot if we all become rice crispies.
« Mankind needs not new hardware, but a change of heart. It needs an end to the ethic of heroism in its leadership for its own good and all. Herosim is an irrational and emotional response to challenge and to threat….it was also a splendid cloak for the bully, the tyrant, the ideologue and the fanatic… The traditional means of leading, by kinship, sanction or example now all fail. What is asked of a leader in the nuclear world is that he should not act, in any traditionally heroic sense, at all. One who does nothing, sets no striking example, says nothing stirring, insists in being different from the mass in his modesty, prudence and rationality, may sound no leader at all. But such, is the sort of leader the nuclear world needs. »
Post-heroic he calls it. We are not there yet.
Thanks, your thoughts are a good starting point.
I had read that Guardian article on ‘frozen conflict’ and was unconvinced that it was what was happening now. In my opinion those were an answer ‘for the now at the time’ and once Putin has Ukraine & Belarus firmly under Russian military occupation he will move to end those frozen conflicts and destroy any independence or indeed idea of nationhood in Georgia or Moldova apart from them being ‘Russian’ – especially since both border a Nato member.
Putin is a monster but he is rational in two definitions of the concept.
Firstly he is rational in that he is not impulsive but a cold calculating thinker – just like serial killers. Very rarely is he seen to be publicly angry and in a chilling account I read a couple of years ago about his silencing of all dissidents in Russia I remember clearly that accounts all said he never speaks of the opposition in public but you know you are marked for death when he uses your name in public and that it is never said in a raised voice just quietly introduced into what he is saying.
Secondly he is ‘rational’ inside his politico-religious’ framework and this is very well described today in an excellent article in the Guardian by Michel Eltchaninoff a French academic who is editor-in-chief of Philosophie magazine and a specialist in the history of Russian thought. He is the author of Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/25/putin-mind-words-russia-victimhood
I have read most of what Russia experts such as Timothy Synder and Oliver Bullough have said about Putin & the Christo-nationalism (with a large does of white nationalism) he espouses but the essay in the Guardian is a masterful precis.
Those brought up in western liberal-thought with its secular social-democratic ideals have a very hard time even grasping that others play by a very different rule book and are deadly serious about killing off western liberalism.
In such a system launching a war and killing thousands is in Ukraine “freeing” them from ‘Godlessness’ and they are convinced they have ‘Gods blessing’ because ‘he has told them’. Timothy Snyder wrote that Putin really believes he is a man to bring Russia to its ‘destiny’ as the guiding light of the Christian world.
On a personal note perhaps I’m more sensitive about this coming from Northern Ireland which really is very different from England which is almost entirely secular or where people of the established Christian faith wear it lightly.
I’m from an extended multi-generational fundamentalist Protestant family spread across NI but also for 3 generations in the US and Canada (where they are all just as fundamentalist) and I can say hand on heart that you won’t understand Ulster Unionists unless you accept that at its most basic its a religious belief system that has constructed a complex politico-religious mythology that says God intends NI to be a permanent Protestant homeland. You may think its incredible but senior DUP leaders have and still will, say this openly today. So the fact that the NIP is the law of the land means nothing as it is in their belief system a work of the Devil and not Gods will.
However, the other important fact about NI is that not all Protestants are Unionists much as the Unionists like to claim.
So when Jeffery Donaldson repeatedly says ‘no Unionist supports the NIP’ he is trying to push those in GB to accept a falsehood that the entire Protestant community are Unionist. They are not and in fact today it’s only a minority that are Unionist and they are overwhelmingly older. I see this in my family where the 18-36 yr demographic is far less sectarian and consider themselves as Northern Irish or even Irish and not Unionist nor British and also they are also far more secular and socially liberal.
It’s this social change and also the fact that the Catholic community are now at numerical parity and soon will be a majority that is driving the increasing hysteria in Unionist politics and threats of violence which the most extreme would justify as doing Gods will.
The upcoming NI Assembly elections on May 5th will be tense.
So you see right here in NI the same ‘type’ of a supposedly God inspired ideology as pointed out by Michel Eltchaninoff is at work in Russia and indeed the US.
I always read everything you send. & I have them saved for later if I haven’t read them. I go through them and read them. But mostly I read them as soon as you send them. Greatly valued. Appreciated. Thank you.
Clare
As I read this post, in particular the exploration of whether Putin is acting rationally or not, I was reminded of the “Knights and Knaves” logic puzzle, as coined by Raymond Smullyan in his 1978 work, “What is the name of This Book?”
The puzzles he sets out exist on a fictional island, populated by knights – who always tell the truth – and knaves – who always lie. In one test, the reader is given a challenge:
there are two doors, one knight and one knave. Behind one door lies freedom, behind the other door, death. The reader is allowed to ask one question of either the knight or the knave, but the question must be something that can be answered with only a “Yes” or a “No”. The reader must pick the knight or knave, ask their question, then step through the door.
The correct solution is to address either of the knight or the knave and ask, “If I were to ask your colleague if it was safe for me to go through your door, what would they say?”
The answer is to take the *other* door than that given, because the answer combines two elements – a lie from the knave and a truth from the knight.
We can adapt this thought exercise with the question, “Is Putin rational but faking irrationality to throw the west off guard, or is he irrational and thus his actions are natural, but having the effect of throwing the west off guard.
Up to a point, it does not matter. It is not relevant whether his irrationality is genuine or faked, only that he is behaving in an irrational way and must therefore be treated as irrational.
The clue, should the west need to know, would be to present him with military problems and watch his response. If he acts irrationally there, perhaps in a way that secures a short-term victory but includes falling for a longer-term strategic trap, then we might infer that he is, indeed, irrational.
If, as I suspect, he does not fall for such subterfuge, then we can safely conclude that he is both rational and extremely dangerous.
If I had to choose, I’d bet on rational and dangerous. He’s been in power far too long to be making schoolboy errors.
This time last week not many people knew who Zenensky was.
Thanks to Vladimir Putin he is today an international star.
Decapitated or not this will not change.
In this there is hope.
The more I think about this, the more I’m persuaded that in Putin’s mind this conflict is not primarily about NATO, or a land bridge to the Crimea, although doubtless those play a part. It’s about wheat.
We’re told the Russian forces encircling Ukraine, and converging on Kviv are not enough to hold the country indefinitely. So all that activity is presumably mainly intended to pin down and occupy the Ukrainian forces while Russia consolidates its hold on the eastern and especially south eastern region, which is their primary concern. That is where most of the wheat is grown.
Why would Putin especially want all this wheat? Well obviously mainly to export to China and India, whose populations I believe are still creeping up, certainly India’s (not sure about China) These countries future dependence on “Russian” wheat will, I imagine Putin calculates, make them less inclined to challenge Russia, for example the Chinese with their border disputes.
At the end of 1990s Putin became the leader of Russia by staging his first KGB style military operation – bombing Moscow apartment buildings to gain popularity and re-start the war in Chechnya. Putin killed his own innocent civilians, hundreds of Russians in order to boost his popularity and gather more war support. The US, EU and NATO should have seen his true face then, but decided to ignore Putin’s Chechnya war crimes and welcomed Putin to red carpet meetings and Bush even declared his trust in Putin. This further emboldened Putin who had suppressed all democratic processes internally in Russia and has successfully become a dictator and tyrant.
Putin’s first test run to settle his political goals with military adventures and military operations was in Georgia in 2008. In August 2008 Putin attacked Georgia’s Samachablo and Abkhazian regions and successfully annexed territories of a sovereign country. What did the US and EU do? Obama administration decided to do reset policy with Russia – greatest mistake of President Obama and Angela Merkel, who kept closest relations with Putin and did not want to upset Putin. Russia was not even hit with bare minimum of sanctions for conquering Georgia’s two regions.
This further encouraged Putin to find more military solutions to his political issues and goals. As Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili said “Ukraine, Crimea will be the next!” the EU leaders laughed at him. In 2014 the new reality sets in – Putin did order and conquered Crimea and Eastern Ukrainian regions. At that time the Obama administration and Angela Merkel received first reality check from Putin, but they made the second greatest mistake with Putin: They set bare minimum of sanctions, did not punish Putin for violating the international laws and let him get away again!
This has turned Putin into a strong dictator backed by US dollars and EU Euros for the Russian energy exports and every time barrel of oil went above $100, Putin fired rockets and ordered military adventures. In Syria Putin had committed number of atrocities against civilians and used chemical weapons. What consequences did he face? Absolutely nothing, verbal condemnation by the international community.
And now we are in 2022. As the barrel of oil shot above $100 and Putin ordered massive invasion of Ukraine, suddenly the world woke up to new reality. However, the reality was established during the 1990s when Putin planned and executed the Moscow apartment bombings, the US/EU/NATO decided to ignore the warning signs and tried to welcome Putin into the international community.
What is happening now in Ukraine should be the wake up call to the entire world. The post World War 2 international system & the world order has been shattered to pieces and international law had been completely ignored without any consequences by Putin again and again.
What Ukraine needs is the world to come to terms with reality: Putin has to be defeated and the establishment/elite power structure of the Kremlin has to change. Before this happens, the Ukrainian military MUST receive all necessary lethal defensive and offensive weapons as well.
The Ukrainians need to have anti-air capability to shoot down incoming missiles and airplanes from much higher altitudes, so the S-300/S-400 systems will be much welcome, however this is not enough. The Ukrainian army needs those MIG29s to enforce its own No Fly Zone, since the western powers are too scared to face Putin over even a limited No Fly Zone over humanitarian corridor. So lets give this power to the Ukrainians?
What the Ukrainian side needs is Patriot missile systems as well and anti-artillery systems: radars, locators and smart artillery systems from the US.
The above-mentioned weapons systems would have an immediate impact on the ground and will change the formula on the ground by giving Ukrainians much needed upper hand to control the air and protect the civilians from the #1 major killers: incoming artillery shells and missiles.
Slava Ukraini! Glory to Ukraine!