Ah we're back to blaming the West for Putin's genocidal charge across a sovereign nation?
Nobody is to blame except Russia.
If Synder is a spanner then you're the whole toolbox.
The blame the West shoulders comes from securing the ability via NATO to station forces right on Putin's doorstep. Plenty of people worth listening to (even if they aren't always right) pointed this problem out for two decades. It's a long-term threat to Russia's security, as technological progress continues to improve both the speed and accuracy of strategic weaponry. We may not have a reason to station forces there now, but it doesn't follow this will hold forever. It's also a maxim of military planning that adversaries must be assessed in terms of capabilities, and not intent, because the latter can change in a hurry.
(If there is anyone out there who still thinks that NATO had anything to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, consider this: invading Ukraine made Russia far more vulnerable. If Russia actually feared NATO, invading Ukraine would be the last thing it would do. Russian leaders are perfectly aware that NATO will not invade Russia, which is why they can pull troops away from the borders of NATO members
Norway and
Finland and send them to kill Ukrainians.)
That's just not how this works. It's a very unsophisticated way of interpreting what happens to capabilities after a state elects to use force. Dr. Snyder falls into error because as a historian, his day job involves reviewing events we all agree happened in the past. This is what happens when experts step outside their area of expertise and start talking about things they don't fully understand. If Dr. Mehmet Oz is a chest cutter at Columbia, you probably shouldn't take what he has to say about nutritional supplements all that seriously.
Russia knows that NATO almost certainly will not invade, but that risk is never zero. Dr. Snyder has fallen into Tversky and Kahneman's cognitive trap of assuming that risk is, in fact, zero because the risk is very low. It's best to think about this problem as Putin playing a long-term game to best set up Russia for an East-West conflict he must believe is coming one day. Invading Ukraine took on some risk now, with the intent of improving his position on the board later. There's a good chance he also was looking to pick up a large domestic political win, to better secure his grip on power.
Unfortunately for Putin, the ease with which Russia knocked over Crimea probably helped convince him that systemically flawed internal estimates of the balance of capabilities were accurate. He didn't understand problems within his military the West had known about for decades. As observers over here, we didn't understand just how bad those problems were. The result was that both Western observers (whose broad consensus was that Russia would win, but that it could be far more costly than expected) and Putin's inner circle (who believed Russia would win quickly and with ease) were wrong about what would in fact happen when conflict broke out. None of us correctly assessed the degree to which Russia's capabilities have been degraded by this war.
These information gaps are why we think about these issues in terms of balance of probabilities, not certainties. Putin started the war due to a misperception resulting from poor information, and as it turns out both the rationalists and the psychological scholars in the conflict space agree war never happens without one. If both sides knew who would win with certainty, they settle their differences at a conference table instead. This is one way of explaining the reason for the democratic peace proposition. Open societies are much more likely to accurately assess internal and external capabilities, as well as the political risks faced by both sides, and come to agreements that both sides can agree are consistent with the present situation.
Dr. Snyder may come back and make assertions about what leaders think in the moment about international conflict after he reads the risk management literature in economics and the conflict literature in political science. I remain interested in what he has to say about the historical process by which democracies became tyrannies in the last century. He holds his present appointment at Yale because he has done good work in that area.
www.forbes.com
