Is Putin a rational actor?

This post engages in some armchair psychology speculations, so let's set something straight at the start. No one knows what goes on in another person's mind, and people often make ridiculously confident statements about what is going on in Putin's (or in other world leaders' whose mental states are worth speculating about). But from someone's actions in the past, we can construct an idea of the personality that would have made those actions most likely, so we can predict his future ones with some certainty. Not only we can do it but we are forced to as well, to be able to reason about other people in our everyday life, and putting "based on his previous statements...." before every sentence would be a chore. But it's still worth reminding ourselves about this every now and then. Sentences like "Putin believes that ..." below are to be interpreted with this in mind.

In the last two decades and in the common mind, Vladimir Putin has grown to be the ten feet tall geopolitical strategist of our time, referred to variably as Judo or chess master of realpolitik, the shrewdest poker player, or just plainly the savviest schemer of this age's great power games. 

This picture never sat well with me - to be more exact and honest, not since at least the mid-2000s. Mostly because the admiration for a bloody despot was just a bit too eager. I've heard too many "well, he is a bad man, but you have to give it to him that ... blah-blah" with serious faces. Give credit where it's due and all, but at least make an effort to conceal the guilty pleasure when you're saying it.

But even setting personal taste aside, up until the annexation of Crimea, Putin's foreign policy was purely reactive with a single driving principle: whatever the US would like, do the opposite. And if time allows, do some disruption in the EU. Georgia is floating the idea of joining NATO? Invade it. Obama declares Assad must go? Prop him up. The US is suspicious of China? Let's make friends with it. North Korea threatens to develop nuclear weapons? At least be ambiguous about it. Brit idiots want to break out of the EU? Let's help them. Putin didn't do anything statesmanlike that would have benefited Russia in the long term. He made no attempt to diversify its economy, root out the corruption, turn the immense brainpower of its people into a scientific and technological powerhouse, build a net of allies among Western powers, or integrate it into Europe. 

The only thing he's been successful at is to thwart American interests and undermine European unity wherever he could. And for that, I think he gets more credit than his fair share because he has been fighting an asymmetric war. The asymmetry manifests in many ways. The means he can and is willing to take and the restrictions under which he operates are very different from the framework Western leaders have to work in. 

Putin at home is not accountable to anyone. There are no other parties to make deals with, no electorate who can send him packing. The leaders of the West have voters to please, allies to comfort, limited time in office to act, conflicting visions of how they should tackle Russia. Should Europe build its own military alliance or continue to rely on NATO? Should it isolate Putin or build economic ties with Russia that it will value enough to restrain itself? Can a leader try to wean Europe off the Russian gas by relying on nuclear plants or the citizens will punish him for it? The European Union is a diverse, pluralistic political system, with countless conflicting actors and interests, and thus is almost unable to stand up as one for anything. It doesn't even need to have in its ranks the Orbans of the world - who willingly do Putin's bidding - to be dysfunctional. It's a pity that it does. To a much lesser extent, this is true for America as well - because it's a democracy. Russia so far has thrived on Western division. 

Those are the constraints on one side and the lack of them on the other. What about the means? Instead of direct confrontation, Russia has financed far-right parties overall the West, meddled in elections, launched cyber-attacks, spread misinformation on every medium. This warfare has two major advantages. It has a very high benefit/cost ratio and the West won't and can't retaliate in kind.

Sowing division and literal destruction are much easier and cheaper than building and repairing things. Writing a computer virus (which Russia's state-backed hackers are very good at) costs a fraction of what an anti-virus software does. The damage of sowing distrust in society is harder to monetize, but for a state, it costs peanuts to heavily influence a foreign electorate from social media in a matter of months, whereas restoring faith in public institutions can take decades. Looking at Brexit, Donald Trump, or Hungary, Russia has been very successful in its malign endeavors. 

The other part of asymmetry is that these tools - viruses to crash the health care system, financing neo-nazis, spreading lies - are not so available for the West. Western politicians won't paralyze Russian citizens' hospitals or let them freeze by shutting down the electrical grid or bomb Syrian civilians to force a destabilizing flow of refugees upon Europe because they are not sociopathic murderers like Putin or the Kim dynasty. They won't spread lies about Putin's corruption, because it doesn't need exaggeration and also because the Russians have a much higher level of tolerance for that than voters do in the West. They can't effectively sway public opinion, because public opinion affects rigged elections much less than fair ones. They won't finance violent, xenophobic neo-nazis because the base of Putin is built upon them.

All things considered, Putin has waged a very successful hybrid war against the West. But his actions don't require brilliance, only competence and malign intentions. Having said that, it's undeniable that competence (and malice) he had. Up until now, he has won all the military operations he ever launched. The wars in Chechnya and Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, or propping up the Assad regime, all went the way he wanted.

But his war against Ukraine, so far at least, seems irrational. Even ignoring the unprecedented unity and decisiveness the West has reacted with - which neither Putin nor anyone else could have foreseen -, or the poor military planning behind it, it was clear from the get-go that it will leave Russia a poorer country and an international pariah, regardless of the outcome. Almost every political pundit and even military expert in the public had predicted that it was just a bluff. And yet, it wasn't. Why did Putin start a totally unnecessary and unprovoked war?

I think at the core of the issue is a mutual misunderstanding between Putin-like people and modern Westerners ("West" or "Westerners" is used as an umbrella term for modern liberal democracies, wherever they are geographically). Putin is an anachronistic creature of the 19th century - the 19th century of Russia. He, with a long line of his compatriots before him, thinks that Russia is a great nation with a destiny. The defining traits of a great nation in our eyes are the prosperity and freedom of its citizens and its technological prowess. In Putin's eyes, those are the military might and the territorial extent. And great nations have the right to rule over lesser ones. In the West, this way of thinking had once been natural, then been fading since the Enlightenment, and has become truly distasteful after the Second World War - to the degree that we find it hard to believe that someone can think this way today.

Putin, on the other hand, can't believe that others don't think like that. The liberal international order, national sovereignty, international law - in his mind, these are just slogans, lies, building blocks of the American ploy to dominate the world. The USA defeated and shattered the Russian Empire (which at that time lived in the form of the Soviet Union) in 1991, but after decades of humiliation, Mother Russia is on the rise again. Extending her over Ukraine by this logic is just a natural move of an empire to reassert its former place in the world and restore its traditional territorial integrity. And if Putin thinks of himself and Russia as a great leader and great nation on their way to meet history, then economic sanctions and international loathing will matter little. This is another way in which the asymmetry favors Putin.

And in this mental framework, his decisions may be uncharacteristically rash and poorly thought through, but in the grand scheme of things not irrational. 

With one glaring exception. It doesn't matter which century you imagine yourself into, that doesn't change the fact that Russia is situated right next to another empire, which is exactly as xenophobic, insecure, and nationalistic as Russia, but with an upward trajectory and ten times as many people. If Putin really understood the interest of Russia, he would have his land integrated into the Western military alliance as tight as he could and prayed that one day it will be enough. And on that day, that will eventually come, the Chinese will say something along these lines: "Tovaris. You know, there is this huge land of yours just right across our border. It is full of natural resources. As luck would have it, alas, our land doesn't have much resources. But it has people, around 1,5 billion and growing. Speaking of which, you guys are around 140 million and shrinking. So our idea is that we will move in, and you will give way with a polite smile." Russia and China, despite the recent bromance of two ugly guys, have been historical enemies. In the Cold War, they came very close to nuclear confrontation. And the Chinese won't share the Western squeamishness about bloodshed and hurting the citizens when they want to punish their leader.