Putin Master Strategist - , Donald Trump and his advisers disagree on how to approach Vladimir Putin. Although Trump tweeted that "[everything] is going well between the United States and Russia" and hopes for "permanent peace," his advisers are keeping their assessment of Russia's policy.
Indeed, Putin has confounded and confounded US presidents and their advisers, intelligence analysts and academics since his unlikely rise to power. He has been portrayed variously as a novice chess player, a reckless businessman, a business-minded politician and a street gangster.
Putin Master Strategist
Joshua Rovner and Michael Kofman disagree about the logic and clarity of Putin's grand design, and whether one can be said to exist. "Putin is a bad strategist," Rovner wrote. "He does not understand the relationship between military violence and political goals," and the "ham-fisted" seizure of Crimea, among other things, "almost destroyed" Russia's chances of returning to superpower status. Kofman disagrees, Arguing that Putin is playing a weak hand - as the leaders of a "regional power in the structure behind" - with some skills. It is too early to judge the final success of his challenge to the international system that depends on the rules, but Putin has made progress on this issue and appears safe at home. According to Kofman, the Russian leader understands the process perfectly. The real problem is that the United States does not understand Putin.
Putin Is On A Personal Mission To Rewrite Cold War History, Making The Risks In Ukraine Far Graver
In an effort to cut through the chaos, we're analyzing every word that President Putin has ever said on major foreign policy issues — from big data to the troubling problem of human intelligence.
We use a technique known as code analysis. This approach has its origins in the US government's efforts to understand Bolshevik behavior after World War II. Soviet philosopher and theorist Nathan Leites concluded that the regime was based on laws and political imperatives rooted in their ideology and revolutionary experiences: the Bolshevik code of conduct. Alexander George saw that the method could be useful beyond the isolated case of the Bolsheviks. Recently, the technique has been modified into a powerful technique for analyzing the content of public speech using a computer algorithm.
In its modern form, code analysis is the dissection of images of power and control that leaders use to talk about the political world. Leader statements about other actors and their approach are classified as hostile (punishments, threats or objections) or cooperative (pleas, promises or rewards). By collecting a large number of these statements, the method produces a reading - of how the leader expresses his beliefs about international relations. The purpose of public speaking is to reveal, at least to some extent, the world as it exists in the mind of the speaker.
To enable the analysis, we collected Putin's foreign policy speeches and interviews from the Kremlin archive. Our analysis, based on over a million Putin speeches, is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive study of the Russian president to date.
Putin's Strategy Is Far Better Than You Think
We found something surprising: On most foreign policy issues, Putin is a competent world leader. To reach this conclusion, we compare Putin's rhetoric with other states of his time: on the one hand, leaders of great powers - such as Xi Jinping, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel - and on the other, leaders of rogue states - like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmood Ahmadinejad. We note that superpower leaders talk about international politics differently than rogue state leaders, and find that Putin talks (and thinks erratically) more like a typical superpower leader than a rogue leader.
Except for one thing: his obsession with control. Putin talks about his and Russia's control of events to an unprecedented degree, and scores often exceed the usual level of other political leaders. All politicians want to stay in charge, and all citizens want to think of their country as shaping international affairs, but Putin represents the worst case.
While reviewing biographies for our research, we became aware of a theory developed by Mary Elise Sarotte, Ben Juda and Fiona Hill, which suggests that Putin's first-hand view of the collapse Soviet power in East Germany left forever. imprint on your worldview. According to a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, he was threatened by East German anti-government mobs and was surprised that Soviet power was not used to protect the KGB building: "I felt then that the country [Soviet Union] no longer exists. come. That you are gone. It was clear that the group was sick. And he has an incurable disease – paralysis of energy.” We are convinced that avoiding a similar paralysis of Russian power is the main purpose of Putin's international strategy.
Although our methodology does not produce a direct measure of strategic competence—and thus we cannot conclusively conclude the Rovner-Kofman debate—we can say that Putin's strategy appears to be broad and multifaceted. We see little evidence that Putin is a brilliant chess player with a coherent grand plan. Rather, he is an unashamed lover. Our data supports the view of Gleb Pavloski, Putin's long-time partner, who said, "Putin is good at strategies. He has a vision. But there is no strategy in between."
Russia Isolated In Its Postimperial Phantasm
Those who see him as a great scientist argue that he has always been hostile to NATO - a true reflection of how a Russian leader should think about the military alliance of a rival entering his sphere of influence. Indeed, we note that his recent public speech about NATO and Western countries in general is hostile.
But this is a recent development resulting from the crisis that led to the release of former President of Ukraine and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych. In the early to mid-2000s, when its economy was booming during the oil boom, it showed a relatively cooperative attitude toward NATO, the United States, and the European Union. In short, our analysis supports the views of Russia experts such as Michael McFaul, Kimberly Marten, and Lilia Shevtsova—that Putin is an opportunist who uses Western rhetoric to meet John Mearsheimer's strategic goals. who sees Putin as a master philosopher often through an anti-NATO worldview.
So what? First, we believe that the systematic analysis of public discourse is a useful technique that provides a wealth of open-source knowledge that can provide a reading of the disturbing behavior of unintelligent leaders. But our method has inherent limitations. If Kofman is right, then the West's confusion about Putin has been the result of taking his statements literally - a mistake we have confused in our content analysis. Putin's comments, Kofman argues, "are not official declarations of policy, but rather [play] a role in supporting whatever strategy is pursued." While we do not agree that public speech is solely or primarily misleading information, it is important to remember that our data set almost certainly contains misleading speech and excludes transcripts of private communications and recordings of activities. secret. He just admitted the obvious: there is no single way to understand the thinking of a world leader that is sufficient for his own. There is still work to be done to integrate multiple intelligence sources and apply policy judgments.
Despite this, Putin's analysis has political implications. First of all, he has acted as the wisest and most powerful leader of his time. To raise your hand and announce it in public is to ignore your norm, or in other words, to promote the virtue and cooperation of the cultural leader. Second, our data show that Putin's approach varies from topic to topic. It should be possible to work with him on some policies, such as the fight against ISIL (his rhetoric on terrorism is incredibly violent and brutal), while others are divided. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's comments at the Senate confirmation hearing - that the United States should cooperate with Putin based on mutual interests and otherwise be firm on security - seem to be fundamentally correct.
Hiltzik: Western Sanctions Threaten Putin's Economic Ambitions
Finally, given the centrality of control over Putin's institutional political experiences and its evolution in his general rhetoric, it is important to note that the breakdown of authority and threats to his own power are Putin's red lines. On the other hand, this shows that one must be careful about any activities that seem to be against the basis of one's authority. On the other hand, if coercive diplomacy is needed, Putin's fear of losing control is the sharpest stick with which to stab him.
Stephen Benedict Dyson is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. His research areas are political leadership, foreign policy analysis and political presentation in popular culture. It is the author
PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He has research interests in international relations theory, foreign policy and military technology. Over the years
Product strategist, master strategist, strategist, seo strategist, innovation strategist, business strategist, finance strategist, ux strategist, tax strategist, marketing strategist, content strategist, digital strategist
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