6. Homo Theoreticus: Putin as Rational Actor?
Is Putin really a first-class strategist, as Mearsheimer contends?
Mearsheimer really admires Putin. He had a chance to observe him up close at the Valdai Discussion Club at an event held in Sochi, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. The Valdai Club is a regular forum for the some of the main movers and shakers in Russia and its overseas friends to talk about the state of the world. Vladimir Putin is a regular attender.
This admiration is reciprocated. They like Mearsheimer at the Valdai Club, even making him a laureate of the club in 2019, and contributing financially to his most recent book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy.
Here is Mearsheimer’s assessment of Putin, based on observing him up close:
It was clear to me – and I think to all the others who were at the conference – that Putin is remarkably knowledgeable and has first-rate analytical capabilities, coupled with real command presence. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but there was no doubt in my mind that he is a first-class strategist and that the West is dealing with a formidable opponent.
The very quintessence of a rational actor, it would seem. Naturally, someone of such strategic perspicacity would be unlikely to make a major blunder, surely (well, Mearsheimer does allow that it can happen, occasionally). And, sure enough, Mearsheimer contends that Putin’s action in invading Ukraine was completely rational. Here is what he says in How States Think, after providing his definition of rationality:
So what is “rationality” in international politics? Surprisingly, the scholarly literature does not provide a good definition. For us, rationality is all about making sense of the world—that is, figuring out how it works and why—in order to decide how to achieve certain goals.
It has both an individual and a collective dimension. Rational policymakers are theory-driven; they are homo theoreticus. They have credible theories—logical explanations based on realistic assumptions and supported by substantial evidence—about the workings of the international system, and they employ these to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it.
Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by robust and uninhibited debate. In sum, rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from a deliberative decision-making process.
Therefore:
All of this means that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was rational.
Rational, and also correct—recall that Mearsheimer’s signature offensive realism theory is both descriptive and prescriptive, so for him actions that conform to offensive realism are appropriate, even righteous in a peculiarly Measheimerian sense.
It is argued in other chapters that offensive realism is a very bad theory, crudely likening state interactions to colliding billiard balls, with the internal features of states and their leaders held to be of little relevance. The theory is a poor predictor of the consequences of actions and can lead to dangerous and sometimes crazy policy prescriptions.
Mearsheimer contends that “theory-driven thinking is the hallmark of rationality”. To be a rational actor, a leader or policy-make needs to be a homo theoreticus. This is no doubt true in the sense that a policy maker needs to have some kind of mental model of how the world works. But a theory that purports to be all-encompassing in some sphere can easily congeal into a dogma. This is what seems to have happened in Mearsheimer’s case.
Bear in mind that the book from which the above quotations were drawn was published in September 2023, by which time it was palpably obvious to just about everyone, except perhaps Mearsheimer, that some huge errors of judgement were made on the Russian side about the capacity of the Russian forces, the likely strength of Ukrainian resistance, and the nature of the international reaction. A huge part of Russia’s military capacity has been lost during the war, including over 300,000 casualties and over 4,000 tanks and armoured vehicles as of March 2024.
Consider: Russia’s stated rationale for the invasion, apart from the ludicrous stuff about rescuing the people of the Donbass from “genocide” being perpetrated by Ukrainian drug addicts and “Nazis”, was concern about the growing NATO presence close to Russia’s borders. As Mearsheimer claims “this was a war of self-defence aimed at preventing an adverse shift in the balance of power.”
But what has Putin wrought? His behaviour prompted Finland and Sweden to overturn longstanding policies of military non-alignment and apply for NATO membership—in the case of Sweden dating back two centuries to the Congress of Vienna. In both countries, popular support for NATO membership went from small minorities to substantial majorities following the invasion.
Both these nations, though small in population, bring substantial added capacities to the alliance. Finland can rapidly mobilize an army of up to 280,000 in wartime conditions. Sweden has a substantial defence industry that produces high quality combat aircraft and brings unique expertise in anti-submarine warfare.
As some Russian commenters have complained, Sweden and Finland joining the alliance will turn the Baltic Sea into a “NATO lake”, with the potential for Russia’s main seaport, Saint Petersburg, being isolated in the event of hostilities. Moreover, Finland’s inclusion brings the NATO boundary into close proximity to the Kola Peninsula, where a large proportion of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons are deployed.
In Ukraine itself, there was little public support for joining NATO before Russia annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbass in 2014. This turned around dramatically after these events, sharply increasing again after February 2022, with support for NATO rising above 80 percent by February 2023 (see chart below). Ukraine even had a constitutional provision prohibiting the stationing of foreign forces on Ukrainian soil or the joining of military alliances that was only rescinded in December 2014.
Opinion polls showed that before 2014 public sentiment toward Russia was generally positive, with extensive cross-border ties of family and friendship. Since Putin’s invasions, this has been replaced by a burning hatred of all things Russian on the part of most Ukrainians that is likely to persist for generations, in a state that now has one of the most powerful armies in Europe. The invasion has led to a consolidation of Ukrainian’s sense of national identity, irrespective of ethnicity or language.
Quite an achievement for someone Mearsheimer thinks is a “first class strategist.”
But let’s turn to the decision-making process in Russia that led up to the invasion. According to Mearsheimer, rational states aggregate the views of policymakers in a process marked by “robust and uninhibited debate.” Fair enough. But In How States Think, he contends this condition was met in regard to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Is he serious? What is his evidence? Here is what Mearsheimer says:
Nor does Putin appear to have made the decision for war alone. When asked whether the Russian president consulted with his key advisers, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov replied, “Every country has a decision-making mechanism. In that case, the mechanism existing in the Russian Federation was fully employed.” All of this is to say that the Russian decision to invade most likely emerged from a deliberative process.
That’s it. That is his evidence. Notice that he says the Russian decision “most likely emerged from a deliberative process.” Well, there obviously had to be a deliberative process, even if it took place solely in Putin’s head. But in the quotation above from his book Mearsheimer stipulates that it should be a process that allowed for “robust and uninhibited debate.”
Did it occur to Mearsheimer that maybe, just maybe, Lavrov was not being fully candid in his answer? The unreality of this “realist” is often mind-boggling.
In fact, even Putin’s closest associates, including Lavrov, were kept in the dark about Putin’s intentions until the eve of the invasion on 24 February 2022. Here is how Farida Rustamova of the BBC’s Russian service described the demeaner of Putin’s advisers days before the invasion. Recall that two days before the invasion there was a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council to rubber-stamp recognition of the independence of the phony Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”:
As a former security officer, Putin always wants to take everyone by surprise… We saw this during an emergency extended meeting of the Security Council three days before the war. The stammering of Foreign Intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin, the disorientation of the deputy head of the Kremlin administration, Dmitry Kozak, and the anxious face of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, were more than eloquent.
The most influential people in Russia sat in front of Putin like schoolchildren before a teacher who suddenly announced a test. And this meeting after all wasn’t even about the war, they discussed only the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.
Check out the video below of this farce of a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council. Sergey Naryshkin, the bloke with probably the best take on sentiment within Ukraine of all those present, is clearly terrified as he tries to raise some reservations. The Spanish newspaper El Pais added some revealing colour to this story by pointing out that the broadcast, presented as if it were live, was what is termed a “fake live stream”, with a delay to fix anything untoward. So, the retention of the Naryshkin scene was intended to compound the poor man’s abject humiliation, pour encourager les autres.
Rustamova went on to quote a source close to the discussions describing the reaction among the officials: “They carefully pronounced ‘p——ts.” The missing word is pizdets, which roughly translated means something like “a complete and total stuff-up.”
She noted that “according to her source the mood in the corridors of power is altogether not rosy, many are in a state of stupor.” Another source told her, “Nobody is thrilled, many understand that this is a mistake, but out of duty they come up with rationalizations for themselves in order to make it work in their heads.”
Further colour as to the nature of these deliberations is provided in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine by Nina Khrushcheva, great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, nowadays a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York:
On February 21, during a nationally broadcast Security Council session, the president’s closest confidants seemed completely in the dark as to what the Donetsk and Luhansk recognition would entail. Naryshkin, of the Foreign Intelligence Service, stumbled over his words as Putin demanded an affirmation of support for the decision. By the end of this exchange, Naryshkin appeared to be trembling with fear. Even Patrushev, a hardcore conservative Chekist, wanted to inform the United States of Russia’s plans to send troops to Ukraine—a suggestion that went unanswered.
For a decision as consequential as the invasion of a neighboring country, it is remarkable how many organs of the state were out of the loop. Economic institutions were caught by surprise—when Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Russian central bank, tried to resign in early March, she was told to just buckle up and deal with the economic fallout. The military didn’t seem to be aware of the entire plan either, and spent months moving tens of thousands of troops around the border without knowing whether they would be asked to attack.
Putin’s clandestine operation was even hidden from other clandestine operatives. Leaders of the FSB department responsible for providing the Kremlin with intelligence about Ukraine’s political situation, for instance, didn’t fully believe that an invasion would happen. Many analysts had confidently argued it would be against Russia’s national interests.
Comfortable in the assumption that a large-scale attack was off the table, officials kept feeding Putin the story he wanted to hear: Ukrainians were Slavic brothers ready to be liberated from Nazi-collaborating, Western-controlled stooges in Kyiv.
Robust and uninhibited debate indeed!
Mearsheimer appears not to have noticed any of these reports, preferring to rely on Lavrov’s assurance that a proper deliberative process had taken place. The trouble with that—aside from the fact that it is just stunningly naïve—is that it seems that Lavrov himself was well and truly out of the loop. The Russian foreign minister out of the loop, on a decision to invade a country? Surely not! But, it seems, he was.
In February 2023 the Financial Times (FT) published an article titled How Putin Blundered into Ukraine—then Doubled Down, based on interviews with six longtime Putin confidants, people directly involved in the war effort, as well as current and former senior officials.
Here is how it described Lavrov’s involvement:
At about 1am on February 24 last year, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, received a troubling phone call … The decision caught Lavrov completely by surprise. Just days earlier, the Russian president had polled his security council for their opinions on recognising two separatist statelets in the Donbas, an industrial border region in Ukraine, at an excruciatingly awkward televised session — but had left them none the wiser about his true intentions.
Keeping Lavrov in the dark was not unusual for Putin, who tended to concentrate his foreign policy decision-making among a handful of close confidants, even when it undermined Russia’s diplomatic efforts. On this occasion, the phone call made Lavrov one of the very few people who had any knowledge of the plan ahead of time. The Kremlin’s senior leadership all found out about the invasion only when they saw Putin declare a “special military operation” on television that morning.
The FT article provides an account of a meeting on invasion day of Putin and several dozen oligarchs at the Kremlin, who were all gobsmacked. As one attendee put it “everyone was completely losing it.” Apparently one of the oligarchs spotted Lavrov exiting another meeting, and asked how Putin could have planned such an enormous invasion in such a tiny circle, to which Lavrov replied:
He has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.
The article describes how, with the Covid-19 pandemic, Putin’s circle of advisers became ever narrower, with even top officials required to spend weeks in quarantine before getting a personal audience.
And, as his choice of advisers suggest, Putin was becoming increasingly obsessed with his historic mission to restore Russian greatness: “He really believes all the stuff he says about sacrality and Peter the Great. He thinks he will be remembered like Peter,” according to a former senior official.
All nonsense, says Mearsheimer, relying on nothing more than Lavrov’s assurance that the Russia’s decision-making process “was fully employed”, from which the professor infers “the Russian decision to invade most likely emerged from a deliberative process”, no doubt one in which his requirement for “robust and uninhibited debate” was fully satisfied.
Additional insight into Russia’s deliberative processes was provided by Boris Bondarev, who was a counsellor to the Russian mission to the UN until he resigned and defected, along with his family, in protest at the invasion in May 2022. In an article that appeared in the November/December 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine he described how over the years cables and statements from the mission increasingly echoed back to the Moscow leaders what they wanted to hear:
… eventually, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries; it was our own leadership. In cables and statements, we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness and demolished the West’s arguments. We had to withhold any criticism about the president’s dangerous plans. This performance took place even at the ministry’s highest levels. My colleagues in the Kremlin repeatedly told me that Putin likes his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, because he is “comfortable” to work with, always saying yes to the president and telling him what he wants to hear. Small wonder, then, that Putin thought he would have no trouble defeating Kyiv.
This highlights the utter absurdity of Mearsheimer’s claims that the internal nature of regimes has little bearing on their decisions in the international sphere.
Scholars who have studied “personalist” regimes dominated by a single dictator have found they exhibit markedly different characteristics to regimes, even one-party dictatorships, where decisions are subject to at least some scrutiny within the leadership circle. Typically, personalist dictators are more prone to risky, dangerous, ill-considered actions based on inadequate information fed to them by terrified sycophants anxious to avoid saying anything the dictator doesn’t want to hear.
The Putin regime is a personalist autocracy, par excellence, with gravely flawed decision-making processes the impact of which is all too apparent in its behaviour towards Ukraine.
Reportedly, Lavrov has tried several times to retire in recent years, only for Putin to refuse him each time. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment!
In How States Think Mearsheimer draws a distinction between strategic rationality and goal rationality. The former involves rationally deciding the best course to achieve a specified goal, while the latter is concerned with rationally choosing the right goal, or goals.
Judgements about the right choice of the goals of state policy, it should be obvious, depend on the moral stance of those making decisions, or in the case of leaders devoid of moral scruples, whatever else shapes their priorities. Some might argue the preeminent goal should be the peace, harmony and prosperity of the world. Others might see the survival of humanity in the face of existential risks as the overriding priority, while others might see the preservation of a particular type of civilization, such as democratic Western civilization, as the predominant concern.
Then are the more mundane concerns, like working to ensure the population of a state enjoys high living standards, personal liberties, and an all-round good quality of life. Still others, probably most, see all of the above considerations as important, though they may attach different relative weights to each of them.
At least, such goals should figure largely for any state actors (leaders and other decision-makers) who think moral considerations matter. As we know, there are world leaders who appear to be untrammelled by such scruples and who have an overriding concern with preservation of their personal power and the survival of a regime that they control, or the more kleptocratically inclined who want to enjoy maximal perquisites of office for as long as possible.
For others, their main concern might be to create a distinctive legacy, to cement their place in history. Which takes us into Vladimir Putin territory—a leader who, getting on in years, and long ago sated with the rewards of kleptocracy, has since 2012 developed a preoccupation with how he will go down in history.
Vladimir the Great sounds good, doesn’t it—though that title has already been taken by Saint Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of Kyiv, who introduced Orthodox Christianity to the territory he controlled. Sainthood is probably off the table. Maybe Vladimir the Terrible? Putin might be happy with that one.
Which brings us to a fundamental point: states, as such, don’t decide anything. The people that rule them, and make state policies, do. In democratic countries, the people who vote in elections, or demonstrate in the streets, get a say as well as those who wield financial, media, or cultural power.
In the discussion of goal rationality in How States Think, however, Mearsheimer treats states, those colliding billiard balls, as if they possess agency in their own right—in effect, he anthropomorphizes them. They have motivations, and a will to live so strong that their cardinal motivation is state survival: “we begin by noting that although rational states invariably have many goals, they rank survival as the most important.”
What about if the leaders and population of a state decide to terminate its existence to be absorbed into another state in order to enjoy greater freedom, prosperity and opportunities, as when the GDR, the old East Germany, ceased to exist in 1990 when its five states voluntarily opted to join the Federal Republic of Germany following the first free elections on 18 March 1990.
A state losing the will to live, slashing its own wrists! Inconceivable, says Mearsheimer:
It makes little sense to argue that in order to maximize their wealth, states would voluntarily go out of existence by merging with other states since this would put an end to the state whose wealth is supposedly being maximized. Unlike business firms, which exist to make money for their owners, political entities exist in order to exist. Amalgamation into a new entity, which can be an attractive option for a firm, is thus off the table for states.
A few counter-examples spring to mind. What about the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, which was approved by the parliaments of both countries. Scotland surrendered its separate statehood in pursuit of economic security and material assistance. What about the thirteen colonies that voluntarily opted into the federal structure of the United States of America? Or the countries that partially surrendered sovereignty to become part of the European Union?
“Political entities exist in order to exist”, sayeth the Great Realist. What does that even mean? Does it mean anything? Maybe Mearsheimer has something deeply philosophical in mind. When asked about this, ChatGPT came up with the following:
When asking if an entity can exist simply in order to exist, we're delving into the realm of metaphysics and the philosophy of existence. There are a few ways to approach this question. From a teleological standpoint, which looks at the purpose or end of things, one might argue that some entities exist for the sake of their own existence. This perspective often applies to discussions about the universe, life, or consciousness, suggesting that some aspects of reality might inherently possess a purpose, even if that purpose is self-referential.
As ChatGPT says, one might argue an entity can exist for its own sake, but to sustain the point one needs to put forward at least one argument, or at least an explanation of what one has in mind.
Memo to realists: In the real world, political entities, including states, exist until the people that comprise them, or at least their main movers-and-shakers, no longer want them to exist. Nation states do not have a life urge all of their own.