June 29, 2023
Prediction in perilous, as Yogi Berra taught us. If we had any doubts, they should have been dispelled by the opera bouffe confrontation between Putin and Prigozhin, one that if staged would have been panned as lacking verisimilitude (which makes it barely plausible that it was in fact staged, adding to the uncertainty).
By Gregory F. Treverton
Note: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA, Inc.
My own record as seer is hardly unblemished: my former colleagues in intelligence watched the numbers of Russian troops around Ukraine grow and concluded that this was no show of force. It would be all-out war. I, though, made the rookie mistake, asking myself if I could imagine any reason why Putin would undertake a major invasion. I couldn’t think of any. But I’m not Putin.
At this point, prediction is all the harder for two compounding reasons. One is the “terror of threes.”[1] Scientists have known about the chaotic potential of moving from two forces to three at least since Isaac Newton, and no parent who has had a third child will doubt that potential. It is reflected in our social life in the old phrase “two’s company, three’s a crowd.” The war in Ukraine has become a triangle—Ukraine, Russia, and the US-led coalition. Adding to the potential chaos is a fourth party, China, half-in and half-out of the war.
The second compounding—and confounding—factor is that the three have all framed the war as existential. All seek to “win;” none can afford to lose. All have proclaimed maximalist objectives. Ukraine seeks the return of all its territories, not just the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts that Putin proclaimed as part of Russia in September 2022 but also Crimea, which was “donated” to Ukraine by Russia in 1954 when both were parts of the Soviet Union.
For his part, Putin has railed against NATO expansion since the early 2000s. He described the fall and breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century.”[2] The clearest foreshadowing of Putin’s intentions in Ukraine was the article published by the Kremlin on July 12, 2021, and ostensibly written by him, in which he argued that Russians and Ukrainians were one people.[3] I joked that if the Biden administration sometimes behaved as if it were still 1992, with the United States as unipolar power, Putin seemed to think it was 900, when Kievan Rus gave birth to Russia. Surely it came as a surprise to Ukrainians to find they weren’t a country!
But Putin’s fixation with Ukraine is clear. Ukraine cannot not join NATO in any way; Putin fought a war in Georgia in 2008 to make sure that country did not join. Yet there also seems more than a tinge of fear in Putin’s approach to Ukraine: If the country were tolerably democratic, visibly Western and reasonably successful, that might risk a contagion in Russia itself, another “color revolution” of the sort that is Putin’s greatest fear.
More recently, Putin made the existential threat clear. Last February, he said that “the West never stopped trying to set the post-Soviet states on fire and, most importantly, finish off Russia as the largest surviving portion of the historical reaches of our state… The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, ‘Russia’s strategic defeat.’ What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all…this represents an existential threat to our country.”[4]
For its part, the United States, has drifted into expansive, virtually existential, goals. As President Biden said: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.” It must end in “strategic failure.” Washington, he emphasizes, will stay in the fight “for as long as it takes.”[5] In the process, the anti-Russia coalition has turned the war—unwisely in my view—from an effort to punish aggression and defend sovereignty into a Manichean struggle between light and dark, democracy versus autocracy. It is notable that most would-be democratic states in the Global South—and at least one in the north, like Israel—have refused to sign up for that crusade.
Looking ahead, only Ukraine’s course seems predictable. So long as it is able, it will continue fighting and dying for its maximalist goals. The other two sides of this “terror of threes” are up for grabs. The grand hopes for Ukraine’s spring, now summer, offensive set it up to fail from the beginning. When it does, will the coalition’s support begin to unravel, not least in the United States, especially if a MAGA Republican wins the presidency in 2024?
For his part, small wonder that Putin sees US language, military support to Ukraine, and sanctions against Russia as an existential threat. In that, he is right: the strategic victory Biden evokes would almost certainly be the end of Russia as a major power, perhaps even as a unitary state: hence the frequent references to 1917 and the collapse of Czarist Russia, then the Provisional Government. Faced with that prospect, who knows how Putin might react. Unfortunately, the default prediction is that the outcome will be chaotic. Surely that would be the result of a Russian nuclear escalation, and perhaps not in Ukraine. Nor could the end of Russia be other than chaotic.
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Gregory F. Treverton was Chair of the US National Intelligence Council until January 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor. |
[1] William J. Broad, “The Terror of Threes in the Heavens and on Earth, New York Times, June 27, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/science/3-body-problem-nuclear-china.html
[2] “Putin deplores collapse of USSR,” BBC News, April 25, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4480745.stm; Kattie Sanders, “Did Vladimir Putin call the breakup of the USSR ‘the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century?,” PundiFact, March 6, 2014, https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/06/john-bolton/did-vladimir-putin-call-breakup-ussr-greatest-geop. The English version from the Kremlin archives uses the word “disaster.” The Associated Press translation substituted “catastrophe.”
[3] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
[4] Vladimir Putin, “Presidential Address to Federal Assembly, February 21, 2023, http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/70565
[5] As quoted in Karen De Young, “An Intellectual Battle Rages: Is the U.S. in a Proxy War with Russia?” Washington Post, April 18, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/18/russia-ukraine-war-us-involvement-leaked-documents
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