It appears that, thank god, I was wrong about a two-headed move on Ukraine and Taiwan.
So then what, exactly, is going on?
Here are the theories I've heard from experts I follow (mostly via my carefully curated "Must-Read" Twitter list)
A little-reported nugget:
Georgia - 2008/ Ukraine - 2022. Putin did not even have to write a new decree. pic.twitter.com/MGnroOo4Ta
— Alona Shkrum (@Aly_shkrum) February 21, 2022
It appears he's trying to reassemble something more or less like the old USSR one chunk at a time, moving slowly enough that the rest of the world isn't quite moved to shoot him in the face. Doing what he feels he can get away with.
After all, he's done unthinkable things (Crimea, Skripal, false-flag apartment bombings) and we haven't hurt him badly for it. He's emboldened to take further well-chosen, well-spaced, carefully-tuned steps, and this is the latest. He sees a weakened, divided West, and surmises that he can get away with it.
He also wants his pieces well positioned in case his minion is reinstalled to the oval office in 2024. And even if the latter chokes on a cheeseburger before then, bets are hedged via Tucker Carlson - avidly demonstrating his slobbering synchronization with Putin's agenda on prime time TV - positioned as the standby Republican candidate.
One opportunistic step at a time. Doing what he feels he can get away with. I once won a ping pong tournament, as an extreme underdog, that way.
Rattled by Putin's speech yesterday, which was apparently completely unhinged, some smart people are thinking he's gone nuts.
This comes up a lot during the tortured ravings that are his mid-atrocity trademark. Back in 2014, when he launched his Crimea operation, Angela Merkel told Obama, after her phone call with Putin, that "she was not sure he was in touch with reality."
He's not crazy. Just because someone's blathering doesn't mean they're nuts. For one thing, sometimes there's benefit to being seen as nuts (anyone remember Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who wandered around Little Italy in an unkempt bathrobe?).
If your intentions are evil beyond all plausible deniability, there's no sense trying to spin it plausibly. But you’ve got to say something, so you offer ridiculous credo that domestic "patriots" can latch onto, which also serves the purpose of dirt thrown into the eyes of onlookers.
You'd think Americans would, at this point, be familiar with the tactic of the "bullshit tornado". Putin is deliberately confusing foreigners who have way more of a stake in established order and crisp rationality than he does. He's zestfully screwing the world, while we consider his perspective and try to "negotiate". Hilarious!
Kookie rantings and ahistorical pretext are an autocrat's stock in trade. Think of Kim's impenetrable juche dogma, or Hitler's credo of Lebensraum. That crap's never meaningful, never reality-based, nor does it need to be. It's empty fluffy complication for your enemies to waste time and energy trying to parse. The bullshit tornado somehow still has its uses, so using it tactically is crazy like a fox.
The Soviet Union planted the seeds of its own destruction when it invaded Afghanistan; a step too far in their hegemonic momentum. Putin, trying to Make Russia Great Again (and cling onto power), is similarly overreaching.
This is a middle ground between the "Scheming Incrementalist" theory and the "Madman" theory. And it's surely right (there's no denying the guy's hubris). But it's not really a theory.
The smartest observation about Putin goes way back: he's terrific at tactics but has no gift for strategy. You need to destabilize something, or smother something, or crack heads, he's your guy. A true KGB man, he can cagily pull off missions, but overarching gameplans - big, stately, visionary thinking - are beyond his ken.
So, yes, he'll overreach, either now or later. But so long as he gets another twenty years or so without being shot in the head in a ditch like Saddam, he'll chalk it up as a win. Big flowery aspirations are always window-dressing, pretext, and/or rallying cry for his MRGAs. Like Trump, he's all about getting to tomorrow via feral desperation, canny leveraging of power, and the superpower of shamelessness. That's all he does; all he knows.
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