Dr John C Hulsman is the Founder and Managing Partner of John C Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk firm. He is also a life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.
The lack of imagination of my fellow political risk analysts never fails to astound me. Every aggressive actor on the world stage is invariably seen as ‘crazy.’ In basic code, this simply means that we do not like them very much and that their goals are not the same as ours would be.
But name-calling revisionist powers serves a more debilitating purpose; it lets analysts and decision-makers alike off the hook. After all, one cannot fathom insane actions. No, far better to ignore what our rivals are doing, as in their lunacy their actions cannot possibly be explained.
Yet, as I wrote in a chapter in my last book about political risk, To Dare More Boldly, ‘Gaming Out Lunatics’ is actually a major component of the political risk job description. For as Shakespeare had it in Hamlet, there is almost always method to anyone’s madness. It is just a matter of thinking differently than we would in the western, democratic society that most political risk analysts are a part of.
This amounts to genuine analytical thinking, something you don’t see in the mainstream media overmuch these days. No, far better to say Putin is mad, hence he cannot be analyzed. This is worse than lazy analysis; it is a children’s fairy tale that leads to disastrous practical policy consequences.
For what Putin is doing in Ukraine is eminently explicable, if one knows a little Russian history. While his motivations may be alien to the average denizen of Westminster, this doesn’t mean they do not make perfect sense within the confines of his own specific, strategic culture. Since at least 2008, the Russian President has been generally trying to ‘Make Russia Great Again,’ through the old Tsarist gambit of ‘strategic depth.’
Far from being a product of Putin’s insane ramblings, this is a tactic that worked miracles against Charles XII of Sweden in the eighteenth century, Napoleon in the nineteenth, and Hitler in the twentieth.
This historically vindicated strategy involves Russia having a series of satellite allies in front of it, all of whom it is prepared to cede slowly as large invading forces from the west—determined to eradicate Mother Russia itself—move through these satrapies into the vast Russian steppes themselves.
Trading time for all this land slows the invaders down just enough so that winter, horrendous logistics, and the Russian army can decisively do their work. No, this is not madness on Putin’s part, but an eminently reasonable way to safeguard Russian great power status in our new era, from a West that the Kremlin loathes and fears in equal measure.
The Russian president has been at his strategic depth plan for almost 15 years now – though no one much noticed until he set off for Kiev in late February of this year.
In 2008, Russia cut Georgia down to size in a short, decisive conflict.
Likewise, in 2014 the Kremlin annexed Crimea, and took much of the eastern Russian-speaking Donbas provinces of Ukraine. The pliant Angela Merkel and her European allies did next to nothing in response.
Buttressing the bloodstained Assad regime in Syria during its civil war (commencing in 2015) left Russia in control of its longstanding naval base at Tartus and airbase in Latakia.
Serving as the peace-broker of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war of 2021 left Putin the dominant force in the Caucasus, just as supporting Belarus’s hapless tinpot dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, left the Kremlin with another supportive stooge.
So far, so good. But looking at any map makes it clear that Russia’s strategic depth plan simply will not work without Ukraine (vast and geographically central) as a firm Kremlin ally. Instead, Volodymyr Zelensky looked longingly to the West, in terms of Nato and EU membership, as a way to get away from his covetous neighbor.
This is the rationale for the present Russo-Ukrainian war. While one might well not agree with Vladimir Putin’s strategic conclusions, they are far from mad, and surely can and must be analyzed.
Saying that Putin has been rational does not mean he has been capable; there is no doubt that his initial plan to take Ukraine has been a counter-productive failure on its own strategic merits and a geopolitical disaster. We now know that Russia estimated it would take Kiev in two days and the whole of Ukraine (a country larger than France) in two weeks. What went so wrong?
First, his initial three-pronged blitzkrieg was too complicated; the Russian army had tried nothing so strategically complex since the fall of Berlin in 1945. Predictably, given that traditionally logistics and re-supply have been the bugbears of the Russian army, the unified assault quickly broke down.
Second, as was clear from his rambling monograph on the subject, the Russian President has never thought of Ukraine is a distinct nationality. As such, Putin never assumed Ukrainians would fight so long and so heroically for their country. But, in one of history’s ironies, by invading Ukraine (and letting Zelensky find his inner Churchill) Putin has done more to birth a unitary Ukrainian nation than anyone else.
Third, Putin simply didn’t think the West would get its act together and coherently economically challenge him. Yet this has surely happened. Russia’s economy has been dealt a fearsome blow, and its status as a parish nation with the West has been as dramatic as it has been surprising. For all these reasons, the first Russian strategic plan to take over Ukraine has met with ignominious failure.
So, he Kremlin has adjusted its tactics even as the overall strategy of dominating/dismembering Ukraine has remained the same. Like a snake realizing it cannot eat its prey in one mouthful, the Russian president has settled on a plan of taking smaller bites.
Making a tactical virtue of a necessity, the Kremlin has set about pounding away at the already partially-occupied Donbas region, using its superior artillery capacity to ‘win ugly’ – grinding the cities of the Donbas into dust even as the Russian army slowly, and with great losses, takes control of most of the two Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk (now almost fully under Russian control) and Donetsk.
By securing a contiguous land-bridge linking Crimea along the Sea of Azov (now a Russian lake) and Mariupol to the Donbas and back into Rostov-on-Don and Russia proper, Putin will be able declare victory to his worried people. The Russians can and will get this far – though it is hard to see them going much beyond this, given the slow pace of their already limited gains.
This will be the moment of maximum strategic danger for the West, since Putin is likely then to declare victory, stop offensive operations, and watch the West—heretofore so surprisingly unified—begin to bicker amongst itself as to what should be done.
For the dirty secret at the heart of the strategic matter is that the West is divided into three over medium-term Russia/Ukraine policy.
First, there are the irreconcilable rollbackers—the Ukrainian government itself and most of Eastern Europe (Poland and the Baltic states) plus the UK—who want to keep on fighting until the Kremlin is somehow pushed back to its pre-2014 borders with Ukraine, and Crimea and the Donbas are retaken.
The problem with such an aggressive policy is that none of these countries are actually paying the lion’s share of the bills (which will run into tens of billions of dollars) for such a utopian plan, nor do they seem to understand the ‘Kennedy Rule’ for avoiding nuclear war: nuclear superpowers only engage each other in proxy wars and never directly.
Imagine Russia, on its heels after the US bankrolled the rollbacker outcome over years, looking at its losses and calculating that America has broken this golden strategic rule. Rather than continuing to lose territory – and thus sealing the physical doom of his regime – it is more than likely that Putin would use tactical nuclear weapons at this point to stop his retreat.
All of this is simply beyond what the West must and should do in order to help Ukraine, which, it must be remembered, is a non-Nato ally and merely of secondary interest. For all these reasons, this view is unlikely to emerge as the dominant western policy, but it will make finding a common position devilishly difficult, as utopian cries of ‘selling out Ukraine’ will drown out more realistic positions.
The second Western grouping clusters around the Biden administration, and amounts to the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ clique. Like FDR in the late 1930’s-early 1940s, this grouping wants to give Kiev all aid short of war, while resolutely refusing to go along with the Rollbackers’ fevered fantasies about ‘No-fly zones,’ in which NATO pilots would have to be prepared to escalate the war, shooting directly at Russian pilots.
The Biden White House has been prepared to more than generously open its checkbook (America has given Ukraine more wherewithal to survive economically and militarily than the rest of the West put together), but not engage in anything that looks like entering the war.
The problem for this second group is that, with stagflation brewing and with the Democrats about to be thumped in the mid-term elections as Biden’s approval rating slides toward its worst numbers ever (Real Clear Politics has his approval rating at a miserable 38 per cent), it is an open question as to how long America will be prepared to give Ukraine all aid short of war, while America languishes in economic misery made worse for only a secondary interest.
The third Western grouping – the key Western European states of Italy, France, and Germany – want peace at almost any price, even if Ukraine is forced to sue for an armistice without reclaiming the whole of its territory.
A fascinating recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll found a majority of respondents in each of these three countries firmly wedded to ‘peace’ as the ultimate goal of the war, while ‘justice’ came a long way back as a strategic priority. A Western Europe on the front lines of the fighting, trying to on-the-fly re-jig its ruinous energy policy, and dealing with stagflation spurred on by vast energy price hikes brought about by the war, simply wants all this to go away, even if Putin’s adventurism is rewarded. Again, these economic factors outweigh for Western Europe whatever happens in second-order Ukraine.
To put it mildly, then, the Russian president now seems neither mad nor irrational. These three strains of Western thinking about Ukraine could not be more different. All Putin has to do is ‘win ugly,’ declare a unilateral cease-fire, and then watch the Western alliance unravel. It is up to us in the West to reach a realistic, common position regarding the war, quickly and quietly, in order to avoid the Russian trap that is about to be sprung.
Dr John C Hulsman is the Founder and Managing Partner of John C Hulsman Enterprises, a global political risk firm. He is also a life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.
The lack of imagination of my fellow political risk analysts never fails to astound me. Every aggressive actor on the world stage is invariably seen as ‘crazy.’ In basic code, this simply means that we do not like them very much and that their goals are not the same as ours would be.
But name-calling revisionist powers serves a more debilitating purpose; it lets analysts and decision-makers alike off the hook. After all, one cannot fathom insane actions. No, far better to ignore what our rivals are doing, as in their lunacy their actions cannot possibly be explained.
Yet, as I wrote in a chapter in my last book about political risk, To Dare More Boldly, ‘Gaming Out Lunatics’ is actually a major component of the political risk job description. For as Shakespeare had it in Hamlet, there is almost always method to anyone’s madness. It is just a matter of thinking differently than we would in the western, democratic society that most political risk analysts are a part of.
This amounts to genuine analytical thinking, something you don’t see in the mainstream media overmuch these days. No, far better to say Putin is mad, hence he cannot be analyzed. This is worse than lazy analysis; it is a children’s fairy tale that leads to disastrous practical policy consequences.
For what Putin is doing in Ukraine is eminently explicable, if one knows a little Russian history. While his motivations may be alien to the average denizen of Westminster, this doesn’t mean they do not make perfect sense within the confines of his own specific, strategic culture. Since at least 2008, the Russian President has been generally trying to ‘Make Russia Great Again,’ through the old Tsarist gambit of ‘strategic depth.’
Far from being a product of Putin’s insane ramblings, this is a tactic that worked miracles against Charles XII of Sweden in the eighteenth century, Napoleon in the nineteenth, and Hitler in the twentieth.
This historically vindicated strategy involves Russia having a series of satellite allies in front of it, all of whom it is prepared to cede slowly as large invading forces from the west—determined to eradicate Mother Russia itself—move through these satrapies into the vast Russian steppes themselves.
Trading time for all this land slows the invaders down just enough so that winter, horrendous logistics, and the Russian army can decisively do their work. No, this is not madness on Putin’s part, but an eminently reasonable way to safeguard Russian great power status in our new era, from a West that the Kremlin loathes and fears in equal measure.
The Russian president has been at his strategic depth plan for almost 15 years now – though no one much noticed until he set off for Kiev in late February of this year.
In 2008, Russia cut Georgia down to size in a short, decisive conflict.
Likewise, in 2014 the Kremlin annexed Crimea, and took much of the eastern Russian-speaking Donbas provinces of Ukraine. The pliant Angela Merkel and her European allies did next to nothing in response.
Buttressing the bloodstained Assad regime in Syria during its civil war (commencing in 2015) left Russia in control of its longstanding naval base at Tartus and airbase in Latakia.
Serving as the peace-broker of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war of 2021 left Putin the dominant force in the Caucasus, just as supporting Belarus’s hapless tinpot dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, left the Kremlin with another supportive stooge.
So far, so good. But looking at any map makes it clear that Russia’s strategic depth plan simply will not work without Ukraine (vast and geographically central) as a firm Kremlin ally. Instead, Volodymyr Zelensky looked longingly to the West, in terms of Nato and EU membership, as a way to get away from his covetous neighbor.
This is the rationale for the present Russo-Ukrainian war. While one might well not agree with Vladimir Putin’s strategic conclusions, they are far from mad, and surely can and must be analyzed.
Saying that Putin has been rational does not mean he has been capable; there is no doubt that his initial plan to take Ukraine has been a counter-productive failure on its own strategic merits and a geopolitical disaster. We now know that Russia estimated it would take Kiev in two days and the whole of Ukraine (a country larger than France) in two weeks. What went so wrong?
First, his initial three-pronged blitzkrieg was too complicated; the Russian army had tried nothing so strategically complex since the fall of Berlin in 1945. Predictably, given that traditionally logistics and re-supply have been the bugbears of the Russian army, the unified assault quickly broke down.
Second, as was clear from his rambling monograph on the subject, the Russian President has never thought of Ukraine is a distinct nationality. As such, Putin never assumed Ukrainians would fight so long and so heroically for their country. But, in one of history’s ironies, by invading Ukraine (and letting Zelensky find his inner Churchill) Putin has done more to birth a unitary Ukrainian nation than anyone else.
Third, Putin simply didn’t think the West would get its act together and coherently economically challenge him. Yet this has surely happened. Russia’s economy has been dealt a fearsome blow, and its status as a parish nation with the West has been as dramatic as it has been surprising. For all these reasons, the first Russian strategic plan to take over Ukraine has met with ignominious failure.
So, he Kremlin has adjusted its tactics even as the overall strategy of dominating/dismembering Ukraine has remained the same. Like a snake realizing it cannot eat its prey in one mouthful, the Russian president has settled on a plan of taking smaller bites.
Making a tactical virtue of a necessity, the Kremlin has set about pounding away at the already partially-occupied Donbas region, using its superior artillery capacity to ‘win ugly’ – grinding the cities of the Donbas into dust even as the Russian army slowly, and with great losses, takes control of most of the two Russian-speaking provinces of Luhansk (now almost fully under Russian control) and Donetsk.
By securing a contiguous land-bridge linking Crimea along the Sea of Azov (now a Russian lake) and Mariupol to the Donbas and back into Rostov-on-Don and Russia proper, Putin will be able declare victory to his worried people. The Russians can and will get this far – though it is hard to see them going much beyond this, given the slow pace of their already limited gains.
This will be the moment of maximum strategic danger for the West, since Putin is likely then to declare victory, stop offensive operations, and watch the West—heretofore so surprisingly unified—begin to bicker amongst itself as to what should be done.
For the dirty secret at the heart of the strategic matter is that the West is divided into three over medium-term Russia/Ukraine policy.
First, there are the irreconcilable rollbackers—the Ukrainian government itself and most of Eastern Europe (Poland and the Baltic states) plus the UK—who want to keep on fighting until the Kremlin is somehow pushed back to its pre-2014 borders with Ukraine, and Crimea and the Donbas are retaken.
The problem with such an aggressive policy is that none of these countries are actually paying the lion’s share of the bills (which will run into tens of billions of dollars) for such a utopian plan, nor do they seem to understand the ‘Kennedy Rule’ for avoiding nuclear war: nuclear superpowers only engage each other in proxy wars and never directly.
Imagine Russia, on its heels after the US bankrolled the rollbacker outcome over years, looking at its losses and calculating that America has broken this golden strategic rule. Rather than continuing to lose territory – and thus sealing the physical doom of his regime – it is more than likely that Putin would use tactical nuclear weapons at this point to stop his retreat.
All of this is simply beyond what the West must and should do in order to help Ukraine, which, it must be remembered, is a non-Nato ally and merely of secondary interest. For all these reasons, this view is unlikely to emerge as the dominant western policy, but it will make finding a common position devilishly difficult, as utopian cries of ‘selling out Ukraine’ will drown out more realistic positions.
The second Western grouping clusters around the Biden administration, and amounts to the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ clique. Like FDR in the late 1930’s-early 1940s, this grouping wants to give Kiev all aid short of war, while resolutely refusing to go along with the Rollbackers’ fevered fantasies about ‘No-fly zones,’ in which NATO pilots would have to be prepared to escalate the war, shooting directly at Russian pilots.
The Biden White House has been prepared to more than generously open its checkbook (America has given Ukraine more wherewithal to survive economically and militarily than the rest of the West put together), but not engage in anything that looks like entering the war.
The problem for this second group is that, with stagflation brewing and with the Democrats about to be thumped in the mid-term elections as Biden’s approval rating slides toward its worst numbers ever (Real Clear Politics has his approval rating at a miserable 38 per cent), it is an open question as to how long America will be prepared to give Ukraine all aid short of war, while America languishes in economic misery made worse for only a secondary interest.
The third Western grouping – the key Western European states of Italy, France, and Germany – want peace at almost any price, even if Ukraine is forced to sue for an armistice without reclaiming the whole of its territory.
A fascinating recent European Council on Foreign Relations poll found a majority of respondents in each of these three countries firmly wedded to ‘peace’ as the ultimate goal of the war, while ‘justice’ came a long way back as a strategic priority. A Western Europe on the front lines of the fighting, trying to on-the-fly re-jig its ruinous energy policy, and dealing with stagflation spurred on by vast energy price hikes brought about by the war, simply wants all this to go away, even if Putin’s adventurism is rewarded. Again, these economic factors outweigh for Western Europe whatever happens in second-order Ukraine.
To put it mildly, then, the Russian president now seems neither mad nor irrational. These three strains of Western thinking about Ukraine could not be more different. All Putin has to do is ‘win ugly,’ declare a unilateral cease-fire, and then watch the Western alliance unravel. It is up to us in the West to reach a realistic, common position regarding the war, quickly and quietly, in order to avoid the Russian trap that is about to be sprung.