Three Things #11: Mar. 27, 2022
More on Russia and Ukraine in the context of complexity, negotiation, and long-term thinking
With the benefit of a bit more hindsight—and a lot of reading articles and listening to podcasts over the past few weeks—here are a few more thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine situation, and geopolitics more generally. I’m way outside my comfort zone here as I’m not an expert on any of these topics and might very well be wrong, but I feel that they’re important enough that it’s good to have an opinion, and to discuss these topics openly, honestly, and with humility.
Thing #1: It Ain’t Simple
People these days have a a frustrating, unfortunate tendency to try to reduce everything, no matter how complex or nuanced, to tweet length. Since you cannot fit them into a tweet, complexity and nuance have both sort of been canceled. It seems like the only stories worth sharing anymore are sensational, black-and-white tales of good-and-evil—and stories that don’t fit that mold are nevertheless forced into it.
The Russia-Ukraine war is a perfect example of this. The tweet-length version that’s been repeated across mainstream and social media runs something like the following: Putin is insane and bloodthirsty and evil and has decided on a whim to invade Ukraine and will stop at nothing as part of a megalomaniacal drive to restore the former glory of the Russian Empire. #FuckPutin and #CancelRussia.
There is, of course, some truth to this version of the story: Putin is a megalomaniac and he does have aspirations to restore a Russian empire. We don’t need to speculate on the latter, he’s told us himself.
But the full story is of course so much more complex and nuanced. There’s the long history of Russia, Ukraine, and their complex relationship. There’s the history of NATO, its expansion, and how and why Putin feels threatened by it (he’s told us this, too, as early as 2008). There’s the history of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin. There’s the Soviet-American relationship, how the USSR imported vast amounts of scientific and industrial know how from the USA, and what happened in Afghanistan. There’s Yeltsin and how Putin came to power under curious circumstances and, of course, Chechnya and Georgia. There’s the history of the Baltic and other NATO frontier states and their respective relationships with Russia. There’s the question of sanctions, and the history of their application and the question of whether and how well they work. There’s the Russia-China relationship. There’s the question of European energy security. There’s everything that’s happened over the past decade or two in Ukraine: the color revolutions and the Maidan Uprising, Yanukovych and how he was deposed, how Zelensky came to power and his unpopularity (prior to this war). There’s the Russian invasion in the east of Ukraine that started eight years ago and the capture of Crimea. There’s the question of nuclear weapons: the Russian stockpile, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the game theory. There’s the broad history of great power conflict and brinksmanship and what dictators like Putin have done in the past when pushed to the brink.
One would need to understand all of this to have even a basic understanding of the current situation, and this is still just the tip of the iceberg. Geopolitics is complex and intricate and not for the faint of heart (or those short on time).
I find it frustrating that most of the analysis I see doesn’t get any further than “Putin bad man, cancel Russia.” What Putin is doing is undeniably heinous. But that doesn’t excuse us from the obligation to put ourselves in his shoes and attempt to understand his motivations. On the contrary: the more heinous one’s actions and the greater the global risk, the greater the onus upon us to understand them and their motivations.
It took a few weeks of digging until I found good material that helped me begin to understand the big picture of what’s really going on here, including the historical and culture context. Without this context you might not be aware, for instance, that there were many warning signs over the years that such a conflict was brewing, warning signs that until very recently were largely ignored or scoffed at by the West.
If we want any chance of avoiding the worst case outcome, if we want any chance of peace, we need to take a much more nuanced, less naive stance. And that starts with doing our homework to properly understand the context, and talking about all the facets of the situation openly while embracing complexity and nuance.
For more: Research the topics listed above for context. Point out others that I surely missed!
Thing #2: Speaking the Same Language
“What we've got here is failure to communicate.” - famous line from Cool Hand Luke
The first rule of negotiation is making sure that the right parties are at the table. Who’s the right party? The right party has the authority to negotiate. The right party is also a rational actor capable of negotiating in good faith.
The second rule of negotiation is that both parties must be speaking the same language. It means that the parties must understand each other, but it also means that they must agree upon some basic terms and ground facts for negotiation to have a chance at success. The most successful negotiation always starts with agreement on common ground: the set of facts, beliefs, ideas, principles, and goals that the parties have in common.
Ukraine and Russia have been negotiating for weeks already, and Putin has also had bilateral talks with leaders from a few other countries such as Israel and France. But these talks aren’t getting anywhere. And I think one reason is that these basic rules of negotiation aren’t being adhered to.
For one thing, Vladimir Putin is not a statesman, he’s a strongman, in other words, a thug. His interlocutors aren’t used to dealing with thugs. His values, his aims, and his means of achieving them are all totally different from theirs. For this reason, the two groups aren’t talking to each other so much as talking past one another. For example, Putin clearly thinks nothing of inflicting brutal, large scale violence on civilians—it’s far from the first time he’s done this. Whereas statesmen and women want peace and prosperity, Putin may care more about things like saving face, flexing power and authority, and loyalty.
In this way Putin and his Western counterparts inhabit two very different realities. Putin’s Russia—as he knew it in the past, as he sees it today, and as he’d like it to be in future—is nothing like the free societies of Western Europe and North America that he’s dealing with. One is backwards-looking, increasingly authoritarian, and in decline; the other is messy but overall free and democratic, forward-looking, and optimistic.
I think the real, core issue here is that Ukraine has been steadily drifting out of the former world, i.e., out of Putin’s and Russia’s orbit, and into the latter, freer, Western orbit. Putin sees a free, democratic, Westernizing Ukraine as a threat in the same way that China views a free, democratic, wealthy, successful Taiwan as a threat: it’s a thorn in his side, and a great, shining counterexample that gives the lie to his nationalist propaganda.
Negotiations should continue because they really are the most likely path to finding a peaceful resolution to this crisis. But unless and until Russia is able to bring a better interlocutor to the table (palace coup, anyone?), one who speaks with not only Putin’s authority but also a rational, constructive worldview and a real desire for peace, I won’t be surprised if they continue to stall.
And the alternative? Maybe you cannot really negotiate with a thug. Maybe, just maybe, conflict with Russia is inevitable and the West will need to confront Russia sooner or later. If conflict is inevitable, sooner might be better than later. This is a scary possibility but it’s something we should consider and evaluate rationally.
For more: Read this opinion piece by Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Thing #3: Consider the Long Term
In a crisis there are two modes of analysis: the emotional and the rational. The emotional tends to come first. Like most people, my initial gut reaction to the conflict in Ukraine was emotional: it was a feeling of disgust and horror at the images and stories coming out of the country, and an intense feeling of anger and hatred for the perpetrators. This feeling is useful insofar as it generates attention, focuses minds, helps us understand the gravity of the situation, and establishes empathy with the victims, but in order to consider the long term we have to switch into a more rational mode of analysis.
The long term goal, clearly, should be enduring global peace and prosperity. Of course it’s not trivial to figure out how best to achieve that, but the risk in a new crisis is that we adopt tactics today that are driven by emotion and might feel satisfying in the short term, but actually make things worse over the long term. In other words, the question is, can we pass the geopolitical marshmallow test?
After an initial spasm of disgust, anger directed at Putin and Russia, and sympathy and hope directed at Ukraine, the West seems to have settled into a pattern of behavior. Broadly, that pattern involves applying sanctions that are as harsh as possible onto Russia and prominent Russians, isolating the country as much as possible, while providing both arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but not engaging militarily with Russia directly. On the face of it this seems like a reasonable, rational strategy, but what is its aim? Isolating Russia politically and economically is partially intended as punishment for its actions in Ukraine to date, and partially as enticement for it to normalize and end the conflict (since reduction of existing sanctions is a bargaining chip to be used in future negotiations).
The thing is, as I suggested in the previous section, Putin’s worldview is not the same as that of his interlocutors and he’s pretty clearly not deterred by sanctions, even those that are extraordinarily broad and harsh by historical standards. In fact, as in many cases of despots and dictators before him from Iran to Cambodia, he uses sanctions to his advantage by spinning them to the Russian people as examples of the West’s hatred of their country. This doesn’t mean that the sanctions won’t be effective—they very likely will be, and will have the effect of deepening Russia’s political and economic isolation. We’re already seeing early signs of this in energy markets.
In fact, the risk is that sanctions work too well. But what happens when a great power, like Russia, is pushed to the brink, even further than it already is? What happens when, two or five or ten years from now, the country is in even more dire straits than it already is and is truly on the brink of collapse socially and/or economically?
I fear this outcome more than almost any other: accelerated destabilization of Russia leading to further, even more high stakes brinksmanship down the road. This is an eventuality that brings us closer to the brink in terms of nuclear war, World War, and overall total annihilation than we’ve been in a very long time, maybe ever.
How do we avoid such an outcome? As distasteful as it may feel at the moment, it may not be best over the long run to totally isolate and impoverish Russia today, i.e., to turn it into a version of North Korea that’s much bigger with a lot more nukes. We should not be cutting ordinary Russians off from the modern world. On the contrary, we should be doing everything in our power to strengthen and build bridges to Russia’s educated, globalized middle class, to show them that there is another path forward for their country, while continuing to apply sanctions on Putin and other Russian leaders and oligarchs. We may not want full, ordinary relations and full economic engagement, but we may also not want total disengagement and isolation. Cancel culture types might not sit well with this one, but it’s best over the long run.
For more: Read this opinion piece by John Mearsheimer. Read up on the history of great power politics and the long-term consequences of isolation and brinksmanship. (History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes.)