Russia's regression

Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin died in a plane crash along with nine of his deputies on Thursday. No one was particularly surprised. Prigozhin's plan crash looks very much like a carefully planned assassination by the Russian military, in all likelihood ordered by Putin. Prigozhin had risen to prominence as Russia's dictatorial president, Vladimir Putin, came to rely increasingly on the Wagner group mercenaries to do the work the regular Russian army was seemingly unable to.

The more Putin relied on Prigozhin's men in Ukraine, Prigozhin's influence and leverage grew. Prigozhin's increasing frustration with what he saw as the incompetence of the leadership of the regular army led to his demands to replace top Russian military leaders in June and ultimately to his failed coup.

While Prigozhin's demise isn't surprising - after all disposing of political opponents is precisely what autocrats do - what was, at least until yesterday, was the fact that Prigozhin appeared to have reached a deal with Putin. Yet what we now know, assuming the assessment is correct, is that Putin was merely biding his time. The supposed deal was never one on which Prigozhin should have relied.

It has been suggested that Putin liked "revenge as a dish served cold". Yet there seems a more pragmatic reason for his delay in exacting retribution. By lulling Prigozhin into a false sense of security, allowing him to travel back and forth between his self-imposed semi-exile in Bellaruse and Mother Russia, he found an opportunity to eliminate not only Prigozhin but all his top lieutenants at the same time. That not only disposes of the charismatic Prigozhin but neutralizes any potential threat from other Wagner Group leaders who might have shared Prigozhin's aspirations for power.

The other surprising aspect here is that Prigozhin never seemed to have seen this coming. Thinking he could challenge Putin's leadership and get away with it seems the height of hubris. Putin's enemies have been assassinated all over the world. Flying back and forth to Russia was a flagrant challenge to Putin's stature, one that he simply could not tolerate.

Looking forward two things seem clear. The first is that Putin's hold on power, at least for the moment, is more secure. The fate of Prigozhin and his top lieutenants will make others who might have thought to challenge or even disagree with Putin far less likely to do so. The second is that there are only two ways in which Putin's hold on power will end; with a coup or if he dies on the job (although the two are not mutually exclusive).

Causality is not always bidirectional

Causality is often not bidirectional. In many cases causality runs in one direction only with changes in A leading to changes in B but not vice versa.  China appears to be a case in point.  It has been generally assumed by economists that democratic free market economies function more efficiently and therefore generate more wealth than centralized command and control economies.  In the 1990s that reasoning was turned on its head and many political scientists assumed that the corollary would also hold; that greater economic prosperity and freer markets would lead to an inevitable transition from a centralized political system to a decentralized democratic one.  The quarter century since that view came to prominence has shown that in China at least, market liberalization and greater personal wealth do not lead to democratic reform.  When relationships are not simple and dyadic (A->B, B->A) but are the product of many different mechanisms one cannot assume causality runs both ways.      

Trump vs. the Establishment

A legal pundit on The News Hour yesterday suggested it was never a good idea to antagonize the judge in a case in which you are the defendant. That may be the case for mere mortals but not Trump.  He believes, and with good reason, that the normal rules don't apply to him. If you color inside the lines you are indeed constrained by the rules and norms most of us take as given. But Trump has learned from experience that if you ignore the rules a range of possibilities open up not all of which end in tears.

What the News Hour pundit seemed not to realize is that insulting the judge and disparaging the legal system may hurt Trump's legal case, but helps his political campaign. And since his fate belongs less in the hands of the legal system and more in the hands of the electorate, insulting the judge and not playing by the rules seems like a pretty good strategy.       

Now it's down to us, the electorate

Donald Trump was indicted for what to a lay person looks like an attempted coup. Nothing in America's political and constitutional history has been more serious. 

Many have argued that the fact that he was charged shows that the judicial system has held even under the most sever stress it may ever had have to endure. That may be so, but despite the compelling evidence and care in selecting how to charge Trump, the outcome for the country still hangs in the balance. 

A decision tree is illuminating here. The first branch deals with whether Trump is able to delay the trail until after the 2024 general election. The next two branches are the same except order depends on whether or not his delaying tactics were successful. The two branches are the outcome of the trial and the outcome of the general election.  

The decision tree can be simplified since the two right sets of branches (election outcome and trial outcome) are the same except that order of their application depends on the outcome of the leftmost branch.  For the moment, assume that the probabilities of winning in court and winning in the general election are the same whether the upper branch or the lower branch obtain. The model is then completely insensitive to the likelihood of the trial being delayed past the election, depending, along both "delay" and "no delay" branches, only on the combined probabilities of an election win (or loss) and a win (or loss) in the courts. Given that the first branch only flips the order of the subsequent branches, the tree can be reduced to:

Interestingly even if the trial were an open and shut case, with 100% certainty of a conviction, Trump's odds are still good, depending solely on the likelihood of his being reelected.  That's why winning the presidential election is so important for him.  In essence, his best route to freedom is by being elected. 

While the simplification depends on the assumption that election outcome is unaffected by the trial outcome on the lower branch ("no delay") it is worth noting that Trump's many indictments and his two impeachments have had no decipherable adverse impact on his electoral changes, nor popularity on the right (or for that matter his unpopularity on the left).  Similarly, one would hope that his trial verdict would be unaffected whether or not her were to be elected.

His fate therefore depends almost entirely on the electorate; they cannot put him in jail but they can certainly keep him out of jail. Even if his conviction were absolutely assured, his accountability rests with the American people.  This, then, is the ultimate test of America democracy.