What will Putin do? The question sits on the tip of every tongue, and if you’re the worrying kind, causes neurons to fire in a fusillade at 3 a.m. The elaborations of this question that interest me are whether Putin knows what Putin will do, how much we know about what will drive his decisions, and crucially, whether or not he calculated pre-launch the worst possible outcomes of his venture into Ukraine. The consensus at the moment among the foreign policy cognoscenti is that he thought it would be easy, or at least, not quite so hard; that the people of Ukraine would welcome him as a liberator, or even if not, roll over quickly. That he didn’t figure on the unified response of the West because he perceives the West as being in the later stages of decay, to be supplanted soon enough by the Eurasian dragon imagined by Russian political theorists like the mysterious Aleksandr Dugin (aka ‘Putin’s Rasputin’).
This conjecture seems a little facile to me. Russia has a long and labyrinthine history of world-class counterintelligence, and however isolated and sycophant-ized Putin is, it’s hard to believe he did not factor the possibility of global pushback. The analogy with 1938 was hanging out there like ripe fruit. The world needs both villains and heroes, and he knows this. And after Afghanistan, it’s equally hard to believe that the Russian high command did not game out the odds that the invasion would actually foment Ukrainian nationalism (though they certainly may not have figured on Volodymyr Zelinsky becoming an international media star). I won’t pretend to know what the experts know, but I’ll make my own conjecture for the purpose of this piece—that Vladimir Putin is playing a very high-stakes game, and knows he is playing a game, and that he bet on the fact that he would draw the West into the game, and that the West would either fold (thus confirming its infirmity) or overplay its hand badly.
If Vladimir Putin does indeed see this as a game, then we need to consider game theory, but as applied to poker rather than chess. Jason Pack, a pro gambler and theorist writing in New/Lines says, “…diplomacy and business contain elements of imperfect information (ital. mine) that…incentivize bold and unpredictable aggression. Poker, in particular, involve(s) an iterative element of making certain moves to feel out your adversary’s response…” Game theory, which came of age in the 1950s, makes predictions about the behavior of “rational actors” engaged in some form of competition, and is widely used in the field of economics as well as in the analyses of military strategy. (We will learn soon enough whether or not Vladimir Putin is a “rational actor,” but I’ll assume for present purposes that he hasn’t gone off the deep end yet.) You may have seen the film A Beautiful Mind, a cinematic account of the life and crack-up of John Forbes Nash, the Nobel prize winning American mathematician who pioneered the study of what are called non-cooperative games, i.e., games with winners and losers. The famous “zero-sum game” is an example, and this is the kind of game that Putin would appear to be playing, since cooperative games, as I understand the term, operate under some mutually agreed upon rules. It’s all greatly more complex than this and gets quickly and deeply into higher mathematics, but this will suffice for now. The interesting question for me is whether Putin sees this particular game as truly zero-sum, or as an opportunity to redraw our inner map of the world, all for the sake of an ascendant Eurasia: the Soviet dream reconfigured. In pursuit of that greater goal, nuclear strikes might just be seen as bigger chips.
One of the most famous puzzles posed by game theory is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which illustrates how and why two nominally rational players might opt for a strategy that is in neither’s best interest, mainly because they lack information about the other player’s intent. It’s a kind of Schrödinger’s Cat of gameplay. Two prisoners are charged with the same capitol offense, as well as a lesser charge, but the state lacks the evidence to convict on the major charge without either a confession or a eyewitness testimony. Both are in solitary confinement and can have no communication whatsoever. The D.A. offers each of them this choice: finger your partner for both crimes and walk away free, or remain silent and serve a maximum of one year on the lesser charge. Clearly, the odds favor silence, but this is not how the game usually plays out. Lust to win the game defeats rationality (not to say loyalty), each player rats the other guy out, and both of them end up doing long time for the same crime. Is this suboptimal outcome the result of a defect in human reasoning?
Now consider the dilemma when the stakes are not a prison sentence but nuclear war. In the case of Ukraine, the equivalent for Putin of getting off scot-free, of raking in the entire poker pot, is not “winning the war.” It’s remaking the world. Winning the war would probably not be worth nukes. Remaking the world might be. This is where Aleksandr Dugin and some of the other radical theorists in Putin’s circle come in. Dugin, who was once what writer Gary Lachman calls “an anti-Soviet punk” has in his maturity concocted something he calls “the Fourth Political Theory.” Political theories 1, 2 and 3 are 1) liberal democracy; 2) communism; and 3) fascism, as practiced in Nazi Germany. By beginning with democracy, Dugin conveniently dismisses the political theory that drove civilization for close to three millennia (historians may differ on the timeline): divinely ordained monarchy, or autarchy, possibly because that’s essentially what the Fourth Political Theory is a version of. With (some) apologies to Mr. Dugin and his very fat books on the subject, it’s a mash-up of the first three, topped off by a quasi-messianic Eurasian Manifest Destiny. Dugin is not crazy. He’s Russian, and there has always been a strain of fanaticism (some of it very compelling) in Russian thought. His diagnoses of what ails consumerist Western society are often right on the money, but his prescription would take Russia back to the age of the czars and birth a “multi-polar” world based in large part on a definition of nation that is explicitly racial and ethnic. There are quite a lot of people out there who find this attractive, many of them in the United States, and Putin may have been counting on them to rally to his cause, or at least not to actively oppose it. In this, he seems to have miscalculated, and that takes us back to game theory.
What will Vladimir Putin do now that the stakes are so high? Will he make the rationally preferable prisoner’s choice, hold his cards and stay silent, and settle in the end for something akin to Israel’s gains in the Seven Day War, perhaps firm dominion over Crimea and the Donbas? Or will he make the non-cooperative choice and attempt what might once have seemed impossible: making the West the villain by provoking it into a nuclear error? Having been successful in influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Brexit, and with well over one-hundred years of Russian mastery of the art of disinformation at his back, from the Okhrana, the Czar’s notorious secret police, to Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Checka, (predecessor of the KGB), to today’s troll farms, Putin can claim with some authority the he is the inheritor and master of a craft that can turn right into wrong and up into down.
Game theory can account for non-cooperative strategies, and even for non-rational actors. I’m not sure it can account for men who see the world while standing on their heads and have become oblivious to the fact that the blood is rushing into their brains.
But here’s the thing that gives me reason for some hope. In an observation that has rattled my mind ever since the period following the election of Donald Trump. Peter Theil, the billionaire PayPal founder and believer in transhumanism—of whom I’m no fan—said that what the media did not understand about Trump’s followers was that they took him “seriously, but not literally.” I’m not sure that Vladimir Putin entirely buys the ideological and metaphysical snake oil that some of his high priests are selling. He’s a street fighter, an “outer borough guy” like Trump, and utterly, brutally pragmatic. He may think, as Trump did about Christian nationalism and dominionism and even the Pro-Life Movement, that it’s a useful way to maintain his cult, and thus, his power. And if power is ultimately what determines Putin’s moves, then he may have to nod to the odds, and in the end, cop to the one year sentence. Let’s hope so.