What If Putin’s Not Crazy?

After providing a reasonably good characterization of what we’re being told by our news media and political leaders:

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Bret Stephens muses about the implications of their being wrong in his New York Times column. Noting that Russia’s prosecution of its war against Ukraine tracks pretty closely with what they did in Chechnya he counters:

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

It seems to me that there are a wide range of possibilities beyond “canny fox” and “crazy fool”. It seems to me that by far the likeliest explanation of what we’ve seen unfold over the last 30 days can be discerned by taking Putin precisely at his word. He views his aggression against Ukraine as putting down a civil war. That’s not crazy; it just stems from a completely different understanding and assumptions than those of our political leaders. That’s no more crazy than the Iranian mullahs’ conviction that U. S. intervention in the Iranian revolution was prevented by the direct intervention of Allah. It’s not what we believe but it’s not crazy, either.

I sincerely hope that the “conventional wisdom” is the fair dinkum or at least the part about Russian troops’ bungling and Putin miscalculating. The part about his being irrational not so much.

What if Mr. Stephens’s scenario is correct? What if some other scenario is? What worries me most is a hasty intervention after being surprised by events.