A war in Europe

For the first time since 1945, a full scale conventional war is underway in Europe. As unimaginable as that was a year ago, it upends long-held assumptions about peace, stability and the world order. For too long it had been assumed that economic integration and the benefits of stability, in addition to the deterrence of nuclear weapons, would keep the peace. That in part was the underlying rationale for the creation of the European Economic Community, now the European Union. Vladimir Putin has blown up that assumption. He has demonstrated what one individual in a position of power can do when they decide to discard the conventional play-book. Of the three possibilities I had envisioned, a limited incursion in the east of Ukraine, a slow incremental scaling up of hostilities and and full scale onslaught, the latter seemed to me the least likely; but that's where we are.   

The problem that the West must now grapple with is whether Putin is rational or not. It had been widely assumed that we was; that while he might appear unpredictable, as a means of keeping his enemies off balance, ultimately he would weigh the costs and benefits and reach the same conclusion envisioned by his game-theory adversaries in the West; that after all was the genesis of game-theory. 

Unable to rely on long held assumptions about the range of Russia's likely actions, we are now back in the position we were seventy years ago of being hard-put to predict Putin's next moves. He has threatened all-out nuclear war, a specter that had largely disappeared from everyone's thinking when the Berlin Wall fell. Suddenly that has re-entered the realm of possibilities. 

Graham Alison's analysis of the Cuban missile crisis is instructive. We should not necessarily treat countries as rational actors. What makes sense for Russia may be quite different from what makes sense for Vladimir Putin.  

We should however be thankful for small mercies; at least now there's an adult in the White House. Had Biden't predecessor been reelected, the prospect of two unpredictable, megalomaniacal leaders with delusions of grandeur, both with nuclear arsenals, one of whom is egregiously ignorant, is almost too frightful to contemplate.