Putin is right to feel threatened, I’ll give him that. But it isn’t a military invasion he’s afraid of. NATO prevents him from re-establishing the USSR. That’s bad, because what he fears, and should fear, is that the neighborhood of countries he can dominate and bully will get smaller. That could mean his grip slips and he’s disgraced, in prison, or dead. Sucks for him.
NATO wouldn’t exist if it didn’t represent people with a more or less shared view of what a society is supposed to be that is fundamentally different from what Putin wants. That’s enough to guarantee conflict, whatever alignment of the countries around him you start with. Maybe we were always going to end up here.
The best we can hope to do is minimize the damage he does. How to do that when he can threaten the end of the world is the hard part.
Just accept that there is no good course of action that has a 0% chance of nuclear war. (The only way to have 0% chance of nuclear war is to let Putin do whatever he wants, now and forever, which should be completely off the table.) Once you stop trying to do the impossible, I think the options become much clearer.
The thing that despots truly fear is democracy. This is true in Chine, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, and is increasingly true in the good ole US of A as well. What’s odd is that democracy is losing ground globally which makes Putin’s power grab at this moment in history especially stupid and irrational. He could have just entrenched himself in unchallenged, undemocratic power and partnered with other global despots.
It’s bad for us because he’s putting us to the test but I’m not sure it is stupid or irrational, given his goals. Risky, for sure, but he’s gambled big and won consistently, why wouldn’t he go for it again?
Edit to add: It does look like he fucked up this time but he benefits because we want a way out of this too. This must have seemed to him like as good a time to go as he was ever going to see, with divisions between NATO countries and internally within countries too. It’s been his enterprise to exacerbate those divisions with the point being that he can do just this kind of thing and get away with it.
I agree with this observation, but I don’t think that makes his moves “rational”. That would be like thinking that martingale betting systems are “rational”.
that’s what mikhail khodorkovsky said. he thinks putin just lost interest in anything domestic, and instead thinks he’s personally fighting with the west
I think that Putin’s behavior can be modelled as rational from a social scientific perspective, rather than using “rational” in an informal or colloquial sense. When I talk about a political actor being rational, I am almost always using the former rather than the latter.
Ummmm wtf at BillHaywood ban. He was stoking discussion, didn’t seem to be trolling or anything just presenting a view that was away from the mainstream? Wasn’t a Russian bot troll lol.