This is a follow-up post to the last section of Ukraine Post #2 on the need for Better Decision Theory.
In particular I want to think more about the following result and some resulting logic and examples. If that’s not relevant to your interests and/or you’re fine with it being hand-waved later when I build upon it, you can skip or skim this one. It is definitely the first-draft longer version of something shorter that I have not yet had time to write.
Your Nature versus Your Decisions
The gap here is huge, a 24% net swing (a change of +/- 12% approving).
There is the obvious partisan divide on approving of Biden’s decisions (despite almost all Americans on both sides agreeing with the core idea of backing up Ukraine). The gap is mostly across the board.
Commentators notice they are confused. These are the first three topline responses.
Explanations are indeed offered as well, with varying degrees of plausibility.
I think there is a big difference between ‘decisions’ and ‘how you are handling’ something, and this is the heart of the problem.
I interpret this as the public, despite not knowing such fancy words as ‘decision theory’ or any of the technical thinking involved, intuiting the need for better decision theory. This is one of those places where ordinary person intuitions and models actually do remarkably well, because the dynamics have always applied to everyday life.
Thus, they intuitively notice three things in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and then they adjust their answers for partisan bias) whether or not they are right about either of them.
Biden seems to prefer better outcomes that we prefer, to worse outcomes.
Given who he is, his/our preferences, the hand he was dealt and who people believe him to be, Biden has made good decisions.
Who Biden is and who people believe him to be (e.g. his expected preferences and decision theory) are serious problems that lead to worse outcomes.
One could of course disagree that the outcomes Biden wants, here or elsewhere, are to be preferred – I am not making a strong claim here even locally, and definitely not generally, beyond that one could plausibly model his preferences in this way.
One can consider the reversed case some people might make for Putin or Trump, if one didn’t want to defend the decisions made or their stated or revealed preferences. Not that you couldn’t mount a defense if you wanted to do that, but to point out you don’t automatically have to do this to defend them. One might claim that:
Putin seems to centrally prefer worse outcomes (for us anyway) to better ones.
Given who he is, his preferences and the hand he was dealt, and who we believe him to be, Putin has made poor decisions.
Who Putin is and who people believe him to be (e.g. his expected preferences and decision theory) are serious advantages that lead to outcomes Putin prefers.
Again, we’d like to think that we don’t take kindly to the things Putin has been saying and doing, and that we come together to foil the plots of those who choose to act as cartoon villains. That we punish people who visibly have the mafioso nature.
Instead, we reliably reward such villainy, and this is known, thus encouraging more villainy. Biden is widely believed to be ‘making good decisions’ given a framework and expectation that villainy will be rewarded, to make the best of the situation, but that expectation was necessary for there to be a war in the first place. People notice, and pointing this out in regular-person terms (e.g. ‘looking weak’) has been part of Republican rhetoric for a long time, in places both accurate and others that are both inaccurate and at times absurdly silly.
On top of that, there is a pattern that says that transgressors and those who destroy value will win and be rewarded, and thus gain power. Others will back down, will silence the opposition to avoid trouble and get rewarded by that future power, and let them do this. The power that comes to such villains comes from the expectation of their future power, which is based on others’ expected expectations. Thus the scene in many a show or movie, and the similar examples in real life, where the Big Bad walks into town or looks like they’re gaining traction, and all the Little Bad ones out there fall into line even though it never, ever ends well.
Looking at something’s potential future power causes that power to manifest here and now, thus causing that future power. Even if that future probability is very low, the penalty extracted is promised to be super high, so are you going to take that chance?
It is the essence of much of politics.
It is the essence of much of venture capital.
A Community I know has an excellent word for this. They call it a Basilisk.
Pick One
A great illustration of both sides of this is this prominent Twitter post by the President.
As a set of two decisions these are obviously correct decisions. We will defend every inch of NATO territory because to do otherwise collapses all of our commitments and leads to chaos, which would eventually force escalations anyway, so even if you don’t do it ‘on principle’ you do it anyway. And yes, of course, all the talk of a ‘no-fly zone’ or other direct confrontation with Russia is completely off the table for damn good reasons.
And yet, tons of people who agree with both of these positions absolutely hated the ‘decision’ to post this, and the mindset that would think this was an acceptable thing to post, mostly using variations of this argument.
I shared Nixon’s interpretation below of what Biden intended, but that doesn’t mean that’s what people saw.
Biden is being the ‘rational’ party here, doing the ‘right things’ and making the ‘right decisions’ but also can easily be interpreted as giving an invitation to be walked all over.
That’s especially true if you read it ‘as if you were Putin’ using some sort of Inner Putin. If we won’t fight a war in Ukraine, and indeed won’t ‘directly confront’ Russia period aside from NATO (even if we include other explicit defensive pacts like Japan), and if Russia assumes that only direct confrontation matters, then Russia is free to do anything at all that it wants in Ukraine, including things like massacre civilians, use biological or chemical weapons, or perhaps even nuclear weapons, in order to cower the Ukrainians into giving up.
And it also implies that if they continued to Moldavia, then Kazakhstan, then all the other non-NATO former USSR countries, again, so what?
Before the invasion began, Biden said explicitly we wouldn’t directly intervene but promised ‘severe consequences.’ Putin presumably interpreted this as mostly a bluff. Sure, there’d be some sanctions, but nothing he couldn’t handle. That was through some combination of:
Having the mafioso nature and thus doing always escalating against those who lack this nature on the assumption they always fold and are always bluffing.
Not being able to recognize the impact sanctions would have and thinking he was prepared because no one is capable of telling Putin the truth.
Not anticipating the scope of the sanctions.
Expecting a fait accompli to render the issue moot within a few days.
Assuming such things were inevitable either way.
(Maybe) Caring enough about getting Ukraine to not care.
(Maybe) Thinking threats of nukes would stop us from even doing that.
Given Putin already blew past one ‘severe consequences’ stop sign under false impressions and/or because he didn’t care, it’s a reasonable position to doubt he’d care about another one and treat this as a green light.
Or, more precisely, from the perspective of the mafioso nature, this is Biden explicitly pointing out the light is green, and such talk only reveals that this person is weak and always bluffing. Biden being Biden already made the light green, he won’t let stupid public opinion or political grandstanding force his hand when this much is at stake. Which is to his credit, but also it being common knowledge is a problem – it means Biden has destroyed his potential commitment devices.
Last time, I thought about the question: Why does the public support a no-fly zone? When it means NATO and Russia shooting at each other, and thus often leads directly to World War III?
Some of it is people not understanding that this is what a no-fly zone means, people simply see it as a Something therefore we must do it, or a Something that is more than whatever we’re doing but less than ground troops, or it’s something they remember us doing in other situations where something we didn’t like was happening. And I suggested that maybe many people don’t much care about living anymore or think the world is ending soon anyway or similar things, which is something I’ve worried about for a while now and really would like to understand better some time, the whole thing seems quite terrible and I don’t get why it’s happening.
On another level, one could also answer that the American public supports a ‘no-fly zone’ because decision theory. Handed down in the form of culture and instinct and system design rather than explicit theory, but with the same effect.
You want your leader to be capable of making good decisions. You also want your leader to have access to various commitment devices, and be able to credibly make threats that they will take actions that might from some points of view not strictly make sense.
It is the public’s role to play in the system to get angry, and to want to punish the offender, and demand that Something be done. Then if it didn’t work, demand Something more. The point of the public supporting locally dumb decisions is so that potential villains know that if they push too hard, not giving in to them stops being locally dumb from the perspective of public opinion, and starts looking locally smart, then looking locally necessary. This is a built-in, impossible-to-control push to escalate. It has limited authority, so when it’s sufficiently over the top stupid it can be ignored, but it matters. At a minimum, it is used to justify lots of other actions in lieu of the thing the public says they support.
This has worked in dragging us along farther and faster than the government ‘wanted’ to otherwise go, and in establishing that it will do that again in the future.
Yet it also means that the public’s job is to be unhappy with the situation, even if it supports the individual decisions, which again points back to the gap in evaluations.
In a way, we perhaps outsource the mafioso nature to this kind of distributed public and to social media and various other dynamics, thus allowing some benefits of the nature without bearing some of its costs. One problem with this dynamic is that it is easy for those with the nature to not notice this, and thus execute the wrong program (I originally wrote miscalculate, but this nature does not calculate).
This has a lot in common with Presidents being known to be rewarded or punished largely on the basis of whether conditions are improving or not and the state of the economy. The President doesn’t have that much control over economic conditions, but it is a physical world hard-to-fake measure of how things are going. Throwing the bums out when it looks bad isn’t all that accurate, but giving a bunch of weight to it is better than getting your process hijacked. This in turn leads to hijack by the dialectic, among other problems, but it’s at least a start.
Contrast that with the latest entry in people claiming that Trump said the latest candidate for the craziest thing he ever said, which slightly but importantly mischaracterizes a thing he did indeed say (45 second video).
The claim, from the Washington Post:
Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, suggested on Fox News Thursday night that Biden should respond to the invasion by personally threatening to obliterate Russia with nuclear weapons. He decried Biden as weak for failing to do so.
The actual thing he says that he would say is:
We (as opposed to Russia) are a nuclear nation.
We have built up a bigger, better
dicknuclear arsenal.We ‘don’t want to have to wipe out Russia.’
Note that he didn’t say that Biden should say that. He said he would have said it.
He knows Biden can’t say that. No one would take it seriously.
It would be like me walking into the local pizza place and saying “Nice pizza place you have here. Shame if something were to happen to it.” And the host would say thank you, I agree with your statement, would you like a table? Then either I would notice that didn’t work at all and leave, or I would enjoy a delicious pizza for Pi Day, leave a nice tip and go.
Trump has the mafioso nature in this sense. This allows his brain to generate the hypothesis that he should threaten to nuclear annihilation, that makes his threat plausibly more salient than his enemy’s threats, and that makes it thinkable to worry about whose dick nuclear arsenal is ‘bigger and better’ and causes the rubble to bounce additional times. And it automatically translates the words into the mafioso language.
Putin’s brain works the same way here. Worth noticing the previous clip also, where Trump claims Putin said he wouldn’t invade Ukraine while Trump was in office.
There’s always the question of what happens when two people with this nature face off. Sometimes there’s a fight (or war) and someone ends up injured or dead, but not that often. Thus, there’s usually some combination of looking into the future to see who would win the fight resulting in the future loser giving in now, thus establishing an efficient dominance hierarchy, and a general tendency to notice each other’s natures and thus conspire together against anyone lacking a similar nature.
If you divide the world into those having and lacking the mafioso nature, as those with this nature seem to often do, then it makes sense to align with those who have it against those who don’t. If you’re familiar with the background, one can compare and contrast this with the idea that those with the maze nature align with each other to increase what I call ‘maze levels.’ The dynamics are at least similar.
This all goes hand in hand. In order to speak this language and wield this leverage you need to provide overwhelming evidence that you have the mafioso nature, that you will endlessly escalate until confronted by a superior force that is also willing to endlessly escalate. The only known way to do this involves actually having the mafioso nature. That’s a problem, because then you’ll think in zero-sum terms and also make dumb decisions.
Pick Two
We would like the best of both worlds. It would be great to get someone who:
Wants things that are good and positive sum.
Makes smart decisions rather than dumb decisions.
Benefits from the belief you have the mafioso nature, or otherwise might limitlessly escalate or do something disproportional if provoked.
By default, you get one. You can sometimes get two. But three?
Alas, that seems to mostly be impossible.
There are two possible approaches to solving the obvious contradiction.
The first and most obvious is to pretend to make dumb decisions and/or to want bad things.
This has been tried, most notably by Nixon with his Madman Theory. Nixon was trying to pretend to make dumb decisions while instead make smart decisions. Yet his decisions led directly to his removal from office (and also he imposed price controls) so while I’m a big fan of the Richard Nixon Twitter account, I don’t think the real Nixon did a great job in the ‘make smart decisions’ department.
Trump and Putin are the other potential examples listed in the linked Wikipedia article, and those also seem like examples of people who made poor decisions.
It is a weird and potentially incoherent sentence to say that if I were Putin or Trump I would have been able to make importantly much better decisions. But put me in their shoes and I couldn’t actually play their part at all. No chance. My ability to see that many of their decisions are dumb goes hand in hand with not being able to mimic their general ways of being.
That does not seem like a coincidence. Such things are very hard to fake, and one who fakes them or learns to go through such motions usually Becomes the Mask. This is a central theme of the Moral Mazes sequence.
The much easier method of wearing a mask is that it isn’t, or is no longer, a mask.
The whole idea of Madman Theory is that from a traditional perspective you want people to think that you don’t mind bad things, and might make very dumb decisions.
‘Dumb decisions’ is also shorthand and imprecise. What you want is to display very specific types of patterns and tendencies. You want a reputation for making a particular kind of locally dumb decision, in order to get those around you to engage in the behaviors you want, in ways that imply you’ll do this even when the logic behind it stops applying. To some extent this is about controlling their incentives, but to a grater extent it’s about controlling their perception of their highly localized incentives and scaring them into some combination of doing or not doing even things they think you might care about or might in the future care about, combined with a general paralysis and fear of doing anything at all they weren’t told to do.
This creates a non-local incentive to want nothing to do with them, to make such a person to go away, for you to not have power or especially power over those you care about.
It also is a Basilisk, as discussed above.
In practice, I think this approach is hopeless.
It does not work. You don’t get people pretending to make dumb decisions. You don’t get people who can make locally dumb decisions with a global purpose, and whose overall decisions are smart.
What you get are adaptation exercisers. The type of person who acts like Putin gets rewarded, so someone with that kind of decision theory and decision process and way of being is what you get, and that person keeps getting trained on further hill climbing around that set of behaviors. This set of behaviors is then incompatible with many types of action and decision that would very much help such a person’s cause, but the selection process that got them ahead not only does not sufficiently care about that, it views such abilities with suspicion since they are Bayesian evidence this is the wrong type of person.
The mafioso playing the role of a mafioso who can actually do high level nerd stuff like maintaining complex operations (or that cares about good things, or even any neutral things) does not win because of it, they lose because of it due to the reactions of others, and this more than makes up for the advantages of being able to do the nerd stuff, so it gets trained out of them if it was ever there to begin with.
If anything, the opposite is trained – conspicuous lack of such abilities. The need to avoid both motive ambiguity and beyond that character ambiguity requires a maximally strong stance against such things, a deliberate botching of such things.
Which, of course, leads to dumb decisions.
Pretending to want bad things rather than good things is a potential alternative approach. Politicians and others do sometimes pull versions of this off, pretending until they are in position to do a Heel Face Turn, although more often they pretend long enough to stop having principles.
On top of that, if you pretend to want bad things, this in practice usually leads to also having to pretend to make dumb decisions, or else your story won’t be believable. Refusing to make dumb decisions is a lot like refusing to cause bad outcomes. It blows your cover. So now you have two problems.
Pick Three
The second possible approach is to shift who is rewarded for who they are and what they are expected to do.
To do this, you need to create what I call The Good Equilibrium where the type of people who benefit from what they are, are the types of people who make smart decisions and want good things.
Such an equilibrium can absolutely beself-sustaining, in the right context.
The link above talks about Chris Pikula, who was central to moving Magic: The Gathering high level competition to The Good Equilibrium. This must continuously be fought for – it is a Republic if you can keep it – but we did in fact keep it, and it was pretty great.
We had a lot of big advantages that helped us do that, such as:
Heavy nerd stuff and complex operations were central.
Dumb decisions were a big liability.
An authority could kick offenders out.
Cooperation and creation were inherently necessary to success.
Bad actors could not credibly threaten to do much damage.
In theory, one could extend this to the world stage. And in theory, that theory is kind of being tested right now by The West.
On the margin, this test has absolutely failed, and we will continue to reward cartoon villainy. Even if Putin loses and is forced to make peace on Ukrainian terms, he still did much, much better at his goal of conquering Ukraine or his broader goal of reconstituting the Russian Empire than he would have done if he had not threatened nuclear escalation, inflicted civilian casualties, imprisoned protesters and the opposition, gone in heavily for propaganda and otherwise played his role, on top of the advantages such plays have internally in maintaining control of the Russian Federation.
A central reason this plan failed, in my model and to the extent it has indeed failed, is because the same process that leads to the actions we are rewarding is indeed incapable of accurate information flow, incentive alignment, complex operations, avoiding corruption or generally not making dumb decisions.
The central feature of escalatory strategies is that if they seem like they are working, they will continue to escalate until confronted.
Someone who is not playing such a strategy could choose a good time to stop escalating, before one is confronted, and take the win. But those whose adaptation executions are centered on escalation lack this ability. The two go hand in hand. You see this with lots of similar patterns, whenever someone ‘gets away’ with things, such as when players cheat at Magic: The Gathering. It’s no different. At each stage, the person whose character says ‘cheat’ will think they of course should cheat a little more, eventually even if the circumstances are quite risky, up until they are finally caught. ‘Looking the other way’ to avoid confrontation only postpones it.
The invasion of Ukraine also required physical-world success. Wars are proof of work, invasions are not abstractions. Shapes had to be rotated.
The same type of process has been winning control of various surrounding countries and then adventuring into Ukraine for many centuries now, and they’ve learned not to take kindly to it, which also helped a lot.
So in all these ways, the same characteristics that allowed the invasion of Ukraine to happen also prevented the attempt from being set up to succeed. So the plan failed (assuming it indeed failed).
Pick an Exit
In the decision theory model presented here, the important thing in situations like the one we are in is to be the type of decision algorithm that responds to threats of escalation, and to actual escalation, with confrontation.
Yet it must be noted that in most confrontations in my life, I do the opposite of this.
There are certainly times when I respond to confrontation and escalation with confrontation and escalation, including times when I’m looked at as dumb or crazy for doing so. I’ve burned quite a bit of value rather than put up with those who said they were altering the deal, and to prey that they do not alter it any further. I’ve turned down deals that were in my interest to take because they were ‘not good deals’ or not ‘fair’ all the time.
And I do think a lot about incentive alignment of my actions in various contexts, and take it into account.
So yes, sometimes I practice what is suggested here.
But in plenty of other contexts? Not so much. Not big on confrontation.
This requires an explanation. Why the difference?
The first big obvious difference is that mostly I am not playing iterated games with the same players unless I want to do that. If someone exploiting you leads to them learning to exploit you even more, that’s a strong reason to avoid being exploited. If someone only gets to exploit you once, and it’s an isolated exchange, that’s less worrisome.
You do still need to worry you’re part of a pattern that encourages that type of action.
One good response, when you’re not forced into repeated interactions, is simply to let them ‘win’ the current exchange through such tactics, but then to walk away and never interact with them again, and when asked about them to speak ill.
This does not work so well if you are one of a limited pool that is forced to interact – a prison, a community of nations, or even somewhere with costly exist like middle management of a corporation or a small town or family. Then you have the problem of reputation, both with them and observers, and of things continuously getting worse.
Exit is thus a big deal. If there is reasonable exit, then extractive and escalatory strategies don’t dominate in the long term because playing them changes the pool of future opponents towards other extractive and escalatory strategies.
Imagine an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
(Quick refresher: Each round, players choose Cooperate or Defect, if both Cooperate each gets $2, if only one Defects they get $3, if both defect each gets $1). Then you play more rounds. Each round, assuming no correlation between your choice and their choice, you do better playing Defect, but long-term you want to get to where both players always Cooperate and make $2/round, or do better.
Doing better means something like sometimes defecting, but getting your opponent to still always cooperate because if they don’t you’ll defect even more and it will be worse. That’s the essence of much escalatory strategy.)
Now change it by allowing exit. After playing each round, each player then chooses S (Stay) or L (Leave). If they choose stay, they play again with same player. If they choose leave, they get another random person who chose leave as their new partner.
You don’t need any advanced decision theories to know that if both players Cooperate, both players will almost always pick Stay. If both players pick Defect, it seems almost always one or both will choose Leave. If it’s one of each, it depends, but if either player Defects a bunch of times in a row they’ll be getting a new partner for sure, cause there’s nothing to lose. Any threat to go super hard on someone is met with a ‘bye then.’
You might still be able to do slightly better than $2/round, if you offer something like only defecting a small percentage of the time, and the number of total rounds is limited or scoring has a discount rate.
But mostly what happens is, the cooperators pair off with each other. All other players keep bouncing around the pool until they change their ways. A few very unlucky cooperators do very very badly, but most do well, and all the defectors do poorly.
Suppose now we introduce some exit fee to choose Leave, and notice how the dynamics change as it rises.
In most of life the fee for exit isn’t zero, but it mostly is also not so large, at least at first. So anyone who interacts with me has an actual incentive to cooperate and create value. Some do not realize this, but that’s fine, because we’ll find them out quickly.
Another difference is that observed decisions are different here than unobserved decisions. That is a strange sentence to write, because what’s the point of taking advantage of unobserved decisions if you tell everyone what you did? Now suddenly you’ve been effectively observed. That’s no good. I thought about it, and realized that in my case it was fine, because I’m sufficiently robust about caring about being sure I am not rewarding bad actors, and because the details about exactly when and how I decide what to do need not be included.
I talk about this in my old post on Privacy. This is the importance of privacy of your state of mind, your plans and your intentions. There are many times and places where it is beneficial to be open about what you are doing. Sometimes, yes, absolutely tell them what you won’t do. Other times, don’t, and let them wonder, maybe intentionally even don’t be so sure yourself.
Most people can afford to be somewhat less careful in this particular way. And we all have to choose some actions which are not incentive compatible, or would not be robust to someone fully understanding our decision policy. This is real life, not some future AI scenario against opposition that sees your source code. If you’re fully and completely unexploitable, you are being insufficiently exploited.
I would, of course, love to write about a whole bunch of particular ways one can profitably be exploitable, but there are obvious reasons why one cannot, on the public internet, do this. A shame.
The other reason, of course, is that humans cannot fully optimize, and we cultivate particular habits and become our masks. When I had to run a company and constantly deal with these questions in practice, it was super stressful, and I very much did not enjoy these aspects of the job. That doesn’t mean I would never do it again, but I would do it with my eyes open, and because the job was too important not to do.
Yet some of this is simply not being able to fully execute correct strategy in practice,again because humans have characters and emotions and limited compute and lose their nerve. I enjoy playing poker, and I’m not bad at playing poker, but I’m better at playing poker in theory (although still not professional level or anything) than I am in practice, because I am often capable of finding plays abstractly more easily than I am capable of pulling the triggers in practice. Of course, I could be wrong about that – perhaps I think I think a good game, but actually it would blow itself up.
Another way of viewing all this is that one only needs the mafioso nature when forced to deal with the mafioso nature. It is common advice, when being sent to prison, to be told to display aspects of this nature as a form of self-defense, because exit is no longer an option and thus the dynamics involved will dominate. There are also times in regular life when one must deal with such agents, and exit is not a good option – there’s too much at stake or they’ve made it impossible. At that point, one needs to respond in a sort of kind, or even better establish that you would do so, a doctrine of escalate-to-de-escalate. Whereas most of the time this is unnecessary.
Conclusion: Pick a Policy
The Mafioso Nature, and the dynamics involved in it, seem more and more important to fully understanding the world, both for Russia and in the world more generally, as I explore these concepts more, which is why I’m willing to explore it at this length. I also want to understand better how it fits in with the Maze Nature, and other similar dynamics. Is it all one thing, or not? I don’t yet know.
The central puzzle is how to design a response to such problems.
My last Ukraine post talked about various policies we might collectively adapt (for some value of ‘we’) in places like energy or immigration or regulation or taxation, that would be wins if we could have such policies. One response I got that seems valid is to point out that our society is mostly incapable of having policies as thought about in this way. There’s no mechanism to implement this sort of thing.
When we want to ‘pick a policy’ for the kinds of things discussed here – to have a better decision policy – it’s even worse. Democracies have deep difficulties making even ordinary credible commitments of limited and well-defined scope, let alone the kinds of things discussed here. What we have are various dynamics that lead to various things in ways others can hopefully predict and model, and react to in ways we hope to like.
And of course a lot of this has been driving home that character is fate. These things are difficult to fake, so one must choose character and then accept the resulting fate – there mostly is no ’present as having the X nature and do X-style things when it’s good but secretly have the Y nature instead and use Y-based processes that are better. What you perhaps can do instead is construct and have the Z-nature (or Y-prime-nature) that has the necessary characteristics and can handle the necessary dynamics, because it’s thought it all through and built a better model. The only way out is through. Sometimes that involves incentive manipulations using things outside your control. This problem is not new, and we have developed various dynamics to defend ourselves against it.
The alternative is to allow the future to belong to men like Putin.
Zelenskyy knows that a No-Fly-Zone is both untenable tactically, and impossible politically. Surely, he knows all the arguments against, and also that it wouldn’t even work. Yet he keeps repeating it.
Of course, for Ukraine the war is already there, whether or not it will be called WW3 in the history books, so he has everything to gain and nothing to loose from draging NATO into the war at this stage. (Except that WW3 would presumably be vastly more destructive, especially for Ukraine if it becomes it’s first/major battleground. But the logic still holds.)
Yet he isn’t asking NATO to send troops, or bomb Moscow, or even to shoot down Russian planes; He asks specifically for the No-Fly-Zone. Repeatedly. It’s a vague but plausible-sounding request, that is abstract enough and hard enough to understand and far-mode enough that lot’s of people who wouldn’t call for WW3 will rally around this one, oddly specific, completely misplaced strategy as their rallying cry. I think the point is specifically what you bring up: To have the masses call for something the leaders of the west can’t and won’t do, meaning 1; that they have to scramble to do everything else that they CAN do to compensate, and 2; their own voters are giving them all the political leverage they need to pull it off, both domestically and geopolitically (“it” being everything short of WW3). I don’t think Zelenskyy expects to ever get that one specific thing, but he’s here to win the war, not to “close the skies” specifically.
Idk, just a thought.
One person that comes to mind with all three properties—at least going by results—is Trump. I know people disagree with 1. and 2. but you can’t go by superficialities (and the media narrative) here. The U.S. arguably resolved ISIS and NK (mostly thru 3) and made peaceful steps in Afghanistan and Israel thru—what I take is 2. Strengthening Israel and weakening Palestine is against egalitarian narratives but good in the long run if you look at the lives of Muslims in Israel today. Thus the result is 1. No superficially “peaceful” president could do that. For all his awfulness (see 3), he was making average Americans’ lives better, and he is no racist or such—even Scott Alexander has to give him that.
Trump wants things for himself and his clan, but he does know that he has to deliver. I’m not sure Biden is going for that.
I also must point out that Trump presided over Operation Warp Speed, and if it accelerated vaccine development (which seems very likely to me) this easily overrides everything else Trump did in terms of life saved.
Tl;dr:
I agree that “Biden’s past reputation” vs. “Biden’s present decision-making” is the most natural interpretation of the polling results.
Mafiosi don’t have the market cornered on credible use of force.
Reputations can be repaired, and I think Biden and NATO are in the process of repairing theirs. Part of that involves shoring up support at home for the measures they are taking.
Dissuading or destroying Russia’s capacity for future invasions with sanctions and arms deliveries probably won’t work against China.
Trump is not a credible “mafioso.”
Taken literally, nobody can ‘endlessly’ escalate. All the nukes in the world can’t wipe out humanity, for example.
More moderately, either military and economic resources, or the willingness to use them, can be the bottleneck to escalation.
Russia’s bottleneck for escalation, relative to the USA, was and is resources, not willingness to use them.
The USA’s bottleneck, relative to Russia, is willingness to use military resources, not its military resources. This is not just because of the character of its leaders or population. It’s also because its inclination toward positive-sum, smart decision-making has made it wealthy.
Sanctions, arms donations, and Ukrainian resistance are undermining Russia’s military resources further. They’re likely to undermine Russia’s willingness to invade other countries in the future as well.
I don’t think that this same reasoning applies to China, as some have suggested. The USA doesn’t dominate China’s economy, and a sanctions war would be far too damaging for both sides.
If Biden or NATO is coming in for criticism, it’s because they failed to establish in advance of the invasion of Ukraine a reputation as actors who were capable of such swift, heavy sanctions and arms deliveries. Now, they’re establishing that reputation. But there is no retroactive prevention.
What I don’t understand are some of the comments criticizing Biden’s current messaging for “green-lighting” invasions in other countries, or viewing Trump as having a reputation for mad-doggery that could have checked Putin before he wrecked Ukraine. This is getting political, but I’ll try to keep this as clinical as I can.
First, Biden’s messaging has to be taken in the context of everything else he’s doing. Part of maintaining a reputation for strength is showing that you’ll use that strength, and Biden’s doing that. Another part is showing that you can maintain that strength. How you go about this depends on the political system. Biden’s a fairly unpopular American president facing elections and another year and a half before he faces potential replacement. About 50% of Americans support sanctions even ‘if’ they raise gas prices, and part of getting continued support for what he is doing is by being explicit about what he’s not planning to do.
Second, one of the defining features of the Trump presidency was his positive comments toward Putin, and even as this invasion started, his references to Putin as ‘smart.’ There were also lingering concerns that Putin had some sort of shadowy leverage over Trump personally, perhaps as a result of Trump’s business dealings in Russia. Trump was also seen as an isolationist, and the measures we’re taking in Ukraine depend on international cooperation. I don’t find it credible that Trump would or could have projected a counter-escalatory “mafioso” image that would have dissuaded Putin from attacking Ukraine.
The fact that he didn’t do so during Trump’s presidency is some evidence against this perspective, as is the fact that Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Then again, as long as we’re playing 3D chess, why not play 4D chess? Let’s say that Putin thinks Trump was a poor leader who was bad for America’s economy, politics, and stature in the world. Perhaps Putin refrained from putting Trump in the position of having to respond to an invasion of Ukraine, and then attacked during Biden’s presidency, precisely because he wanted to make America more likely to re-elect Trump. This would be consistent with Russia’s track record of psychological warfare.
Third, let’s assume that many political pundits are operating on simulacra level 3. From that point of view, the “Biden’s green-lighting Putin” is most naturally interpreted as partisan signaling. Indeed, if the people making this criticism were actually operating on simulacra level 2, they’d probably not want to make that criticism in a public forum, where their dissent and reputation-undermining speech will damage Biden’s credibility further. It would be strange if suddenly we were experiencing a wave of simulacra level 1 behavior among political pundits on Twitter.
I think you got it backwards—China is much more vulnerable to trade disruptions than Russia. China is not self-sufficient in agriculture and energy, neither does it have sufficient naval power or allies to protect its vital trade routes. It has 10 times the population of Russia which is a huge burden, not asset. While comprehensive sanctions and embargo against Russia will cause living standards to drop, China would literally starve.
I see this conclusion as a corollary of my big-picture belief that today’s world is by and large overpopulated (Russia is an exception), and that this fact is being obfuscated by short-term concerns like the inverted age pyramid.
China may be far less self-sufficient in energy and agriculture than Russia, but simultaneously able to exact higher costs on the USA and Europe if it came to a battle of sanctions.
Consider that just as enacting a no-fly zone in Ukraine would mean shooting down Russian planes, interfering with China’s trade (beyond denying access to ports of countries allied against China) would mean sinking Chinese ships. Which means war. I’m considering scenarios in which the USA and Europe would seek to sanction China without resorting to attacking China directly.
Agricultural products and energy are commodities that China would be more able to acquire from countries less aligned with the USA. They’d have all sorts of goods that the USA and Europe had just refused to import to offer in exchange.
Meanwhile, a significant chunk of the USA’s living standards and technology infrastructure depends on imported Chinese goods. If the USA decided to sanction China, it would be a more severe blow both to ordinary people’s standard of living and a threat to the USA’s technological dominance than any impacts we’re suffering from sanctioning Russia. This limits our ability to sustain any such embargo, both because it would be unpopular and because it would cause problems to the interests of the US state.
So it’s not so much that the USA can’t hurt China with sanctions in theory, but that in practice, it has less ability to impose and sustain them. Or that China would have to commit a much more serious violation of US interests to motivate such sanctions than anything comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is my model, and I’m interested in updating the particulars (and altering the model if the facts disagree with it), if you have more specific information! Thanks for the point about China’s agricultural vulnerability. It’s a fact I was unaware of, even though the fact itself doesn’t seem to be evidence against the argument I’m advancing.
Civilian ships are not heavily armed. They can be stopped without violence; it’s called a naval blockade.
They most definitely can’t. China represents one fifth of world population; there is no viable replacement at this scale that doesn’t also rely on maritime transport, which is why a huge population is a vulnerability.
I think these statements are backwards. The US initiated a trade war with China as a response to threats to our technological dominance, and together with the pandemic has led to our current period of rapid economic de-globalization, the effect of which has been the fastest re-industrialization in the US since WWII and record-low unemployment numbers since normalized relationship with the PRC. All of which is past and present tense, i.e. not even a prediction. Neither is it partisan talking points; the course has stayed pretty much the same under both Trump and Biden.
A lot of the things you wrote run contrary to the general impression I have of the situation. (Admittedly, I haven’t been paying very much attention to the situation, but still...)
It seems really obvious to me that this is the kind of measure that would be perceived as a clear escalation? It doesn’t really matter whether you’re sinking the ships or just blockading them; if you’re actively making moves to prevent unaffiliated vessels from other countries from navigating international waters, that seems like a pretty central example of “aggressive military action”, and would almost certainly invite retaliation in kind. Given that, is there some interpretation of this quote that isn’t as insane as it sounds?
That definitely sounds wrong to me. A cursory look reveals that the top three producers of wheat in the world are China, Russia, and India, in that order; collectively these three countries account for ~40% of the world’s wheat, and the trade relations between said three countries have been quite clear for a while now, but have especially crystallized over the last few weeks. China in particular shares land borders with both India and Russia, which minimizes the need for “maritime transportation”, especially with Russia’s recent forays into the Arctic. As for energy, here are the rankings for oil and natural gas, for which the amount of procurement in non-US-aligned countries is (again) substantial, with Russia once more leading the charge in both categories.
At least at first blush, this seems like it cuts pretty hard against your core claim. It’s certainly possible that a more sophisticated analysis might reveal complicating factors, but if so I’d ask what specifically you think those complicating factors are, and how they overturn the case outlined above.
I don’t think you’ve done a good job establishing causality here. It’s all well and good to post unemployment numbers, but without something tying those numbers to the trade war, it’s not clear to me what the right conclusion to draw actually is. This is doubly true considering that the source you posted actually shows approximately constant unemployment from 2017 onward (discounting the obvious blip in 2020), which means the timing doesn’t match up to the trade war started by the Trump administration.
I’ve also seen sources claiming that the trade war lost rather than created jobs on net; here’s an example of an article from January 2021 asserting exactly that. Given this, I think it’s an open question whether things like trade wars (or other forms of deglobalization) are more likely to hurt or help; and for what it’s worth my instinct is definitely on the “hurt” side more than the “help” side. Once more, if you have a sophisticated argument for why this isn’t the case, I’d love to hear it.
It seems like Russian and Chinese psyops have really managed to subvert the narrative here in the West. Suddenly, economic sanctions and blockades are seen as “escalation”, “aggressive military action” and “insane”. But blatantly invading peaceful countries minding their own business and murdering tens of thousands of people? That’s just “defending our security interests”, and somehow it’s all NATO’s fault anyway. The funny thing is you would usually expect this sort of double-standard word games from the dominant power, not from the runner-up. In the end, all the world’s military might is worth nothing if one has no spine.
India is also the second largest grain consumer in the world, and is effectively neutral with regard to import/export. India’s net grain export amounts to ~400,000 tons, while China imports nearly 10 million tons. That is assuming China’s domestic production remains constant, which it most definitely will not because agriculture is a heavily industrialized sector. Oil and gas aren’t just for keeping the lights on, they’re vital in the production and distribution of food.
That land border between China and India by the way? It’s the friggin’ Himalayas; the most impassable terrain on the planet. Trade flow through there is utterly negligible. Disputes over that very border is also the root of frosty relationship between the two countries since the 1960′s, ironically, which brings me to the next point: Why in the world would India come to China’s aid? Aside from Pakistan (which is China’s closest ally), China is the rival India is facing on the world stage. If anything, India is more likely to be the one doing the blockade.
Russia doesn’t look much better. Sure, there is the Trans-Siberian railway, but it is already running at capacity, and it still is pitiful compared with maritime trade (~1%). There is a good reason why maritime powers have ruled the world for the last 500 years. The oil pipelines going from Siberia to China isn’t even connected to the rest of the Russian pipeline network, which why all the recent talks about China supplanting Europe as Russia’s main energy customer is nothing but hot air at least in the short term. Thousands of kilometers of pipelines through Siberia isn’t built in a day. Looking at the mid term though, it could go either way. Maybe trade ties between China and Russia will deepen, or there could be a regime change pushing Russia towards the West, or Russia may collapse altogether as a nation and descend into internal ethnic conflicts. It’s anyone’s guess depending how this war with Ukraine goes.
So, I did say in my previous comment that my analyses were merely surface-level, and it was entirely plausible to me that “more sophisticated” analysis would overturn them… but unfortunately, after reading your comment, I have to say: more sophisticated analysis this is not. To begin with:
Fundamentally, a “naval blockade” is an activity wherein one country’s ships engage in physical interference with another country’s ships. In general, physical interference is viewed as an escalatory move, and physical interference backed by the threat of physical violence even more so. That a sufficiently tense standoff could become a casus belli follows from this fairly directly (and, in fact, such an outcome is not without historical precedent).
I don’t consider the above logic particularly difficult or subtle; nor, it seems to me, is this line of argument anywhere addressed in the above quote. Instead, I see what looks to me like a series of gratuitous tu quoque arguments, many of which impute to me positions which I at no point even gestured toward in my previous comment, much less endorsed.
I will be blunt: this is not virtuous epistemic behavior, especially on a site such as LW. (Yes, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is bad; no, that has nothing to do with whether imposing a US naval blockade on China’s maritime trade would be a safe move. I am amazed I have to clarify this.)
There look to be a number of strange assumptions in this paragraph. To start with, the latter half appears to take as given the notion that China will begin running out of oil and gas at some point (why? how?), and uses this premise (which is nowhere justified or even further discussed in the entirety of the remaining comment) as a starting point to argue that its domestic grain production would be affected.
The first half, meanwhile, seemingly takes for granted India’s 2018-19 export numbers, while ignoring the fact that India has always had a large surplus of grain relative to the amount exported—a surplus which is only growing as time passes. The reason, then, that India’s export numbers have not grown alongside its production surplus is that it has managed to capture relatively few foreign markets, with its main customers being far smaller neighboring countries such as Bangladesh. If new markets open up, India has more than the necessary supply to increase its exports drastically; and, in fact, producers are already gearing up to do so.
Starting once more from the bottom rather than the top: India’s trade relations with China have always been decent, geopolitical rivalry notwithstanding. The notion that geopolitical concerns would prevent producers from going where the money lies is itself a strange one; not long ago, for example, India explicitly refused to mirror Western sanctions on Russia despite significant pressure to do so, and have since signed several additional trade agreements with Russia—and on the China front, they hosted a visit from China’s foreign minister less than a week ago, right after declining a similar visit from a UK delegation. And, considering both countries’ participation in BRICS, it seems like utterly wishful thinking to believe that India would refuse access to China’s wheat and grain markets should they become available, much less that they would impose a naval blockade against said country.
The point about the Himalayas, on the other hand, is well taken; it’s true that trade along those routes is mostly negligible (although I wouldn’t count it as anything close to assured that things will remain that way, if circumstances necessitate otherwise). However, the issue is largely moot, as reliance on a land-based trade route would only be required, again, if a naval blockade against trade between India and China were imposed, and that argument remains as ridiculous as it was when it was first put it forth.
You’re absolutely right that critical infrastructure isn’t built in a day, but it’s that precise fact that allows one to get a read on what countries’ intentions are before those intentions become a physical reality. And in point of fact, Russia is breaking more ice in Siberia, a move whose purpose can only point in one direction. It seems to me that, short of a full regime change in Moscow (which itself seem to me like wishful thinking), closer relations between China and Russia are basically an inevitability; and given that that’s the case, the Western sanctions against Russian exports can only benefit China, who gains the leverage to purchase those exports at a large discount. I don’t see how you argue otherwise—literally, as in: you do not argue otherwise, anywhere in your comment that I can see.
Concluding Thoughts
That’s it for the object-level points. On a higher level, though: I want to note that it’s not clear to me what you’re trying to argue anymore. A lot of the things you wrote read like… well, to be blunt, it reads like like what you’re really trying to express is “yay US, boo Russia / China!”—which would explain why, for example, you brought up Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, apropos of nothing, in a discussion about whether physically blockading Chinese trade vessels would be a good idea.
And, like, if that’s what you want to express, then… great? I share those sentiments too: obviously it’d be a great outcome if the morally better countries triumphed by default, because the nasty authoritarian countries imploded due to worse management / demographics / whatever. (Or because the US exercised its magical capability to impose maritime trade blockades on near-peer powers without retaliation.) But if you let that sentiment leak into your object-level analysis, I don’t think the results will be all that pretty.
It sounds like one important crux here is the capacity of the USA to block China from international maritime trade with willing trading partners, without doing anything China would consider an act of war.
My expectation is that if China was in extremis, facing the threat of starvation, that they’d use their navy to escort their civilian transport ships. If the US tried to blockade China from transporting food from, say, Africa, China would use its naval escorts to put the USA in the position of “fight or get out of the way.” After all, as you say, China would have their back to the wall.
Meanwhile, the USA would be viewed as using their military to attempt to enforce the starvation of 1.5 billion people. That seems unlikely to fly in America, unless China’s behavior was widely viewed as being on par with the Nazis or North Korea.
Along with low unemployment, the US is also facing high prices for all sorts of goods. This is the basic tradeoff predicted by the collapse of globalization, and the principle of comparative advantage says that limiting trade is fundamentally net negative-sum. The US decision to pursue a trade war with China is controversial among economists. Maybe tariffs hurt China more than the USA. But they also hurt both economies in a way that undermines their standing relative to the rest of the world.
So it seems we also have some fundamentally different views on the net impact of globalization, as well as the USA’s ability to prevent China from engaging in trade with willing partners without an act of war.
Against the US Navy? In the Indian Ocean? Good luck.
It seems like you’re treating conventional forces—nay, any strategic asset at all including sanctions and blockades—as pure deterrence, and therefore we’re out of luck as soon as our adversaries calls the bluff. That’s not how any of this works.
It flew in 1940 against Imperial Japan, and it flew again in 2022 against Russia. We’re not talking about sanctioning China out of the blue here, but as a retaliatory measure against an invasion of Taiwan. In this context China absolutely is on par with Imperial Japan.
Your argument only works under the naive assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable, which is approximately true within functioning states with state monopoly on violence, but falls short in the context of international politics. When your intellectual property gets stolen or your capital gets stuck in China, what authority are you going to appeal to?
Your wording is a little to imprecise and abstract here to be easily debatable, in particular the phrases “as pure deterrence” and “we’re out of luck.”
My model here is based on this post. In its terminology, I am saying that threatening to blockade each others’ maritime trade (as opposed to embargoes) would be a ‘false note’ in the logical thesis of their maneuvers, because it would risk escalation of direct conflict over a prize that’s not worth the risk for either of them. I don’t think that either country would even threaten it, because it would undermine their credibility.
This doesn’t at all mean that the United States is helpless to watch China invade Taiwan, just as it has not been reduced to a state of helpless passivity as Russia invaded Ukraine. Conventional forces can be used for interior maneuvers to indirectly compete with adversaries within the window of freedom of action. There are things the USA can do with its conventional forces that allow it to compete with China, including specifically over the status of Taiwan, without crossing a red line.
Japan was engaged in a war against the United States. Russia is not being blockaded, and it is specifically blockades that I am arguing the United States would avoid. The United States is not embargoing food shipments to Russia, as far as I am aware, and of course if it did, Russia could still attempt to import food from a country that’s not imposing sanctions. Russia is also a major agricultural producer, so I think it is not correct in any sense to say that the USA is using its military to impose starvation on Russia.
Which specific part of my argument “only works under the assumption that rules are absolute and unbreakable?” Please base your rebuttal on specific quotes.
Global trade certainly entails precisely the risks you describe, but that is a risk that businesses can plan for, mitigate, and price into their products. The point of globalization is removing the legal barriers to businesses figuring out how to do so.
We are certainly seeing that this may come with externalities, short-sightedness, and national security problems that the market’s ill-equipped to handle. However, this to me is an argument for some sort of regulatory nuance, not a full-scale rollback of globalization.
As a note, my current level of interest in engaging with you further is low. This is because of imprecision in your language, what I perceive as falsehoods and misrepresentations of history (in the “Imperial Japan/Russia” quote), and non-specificity in how your rebuttals tie into the specific content of my posts. If your approach is the same in future replies, I will probably skim the response and them move on from this discussion.
How would you do a naval blockade without violence? If you’re not willing to fire on or board (by force) blockade runners, then what stops them from just ignoring your “blockade”?
Unless the crew takes up arms, I don’t see why boarding blockade runners involves violence. Armed resistance is just plain stupid from the perspective of the crew as there is no hope of winning.
With a billion people to pick from, do you really think China would be unable to crew a ship with people willing to resist boarders despite the likelihood that they would die in the resulting violence?
They only need one such ship to test the blockade, and demonstrate that its enforcement is an act of war.
And then what? Incite outrage on social media? Protest at the UN? It’s important to remind ourselves from time to time that beyond the social reality, there is also a physical reality where if the oil stops flowing, it stops flowing.
Your claim was that a blockade could be imposed without violence being involved. I think that claim is clearly false, as it seems you now admit.
You’re now claiming that it doesn’t matter if violence is involved. But if that’s the case, why did you think it was relevant to claim that violence wouldn’t occur?
Obviously, it does matter. After the US kills the crew of a Chinese merchant vessel, China will have no problem justifying sinking any US warship that gets close to a Chinese ship, whereas if merchant ships had just not tried to run the blockade, out of fear, sinking US warships would seem like China was starting the war.
And of course China can sink the US warships. Surface warships in today’s world are only good for show, and for intimidating poorly-armed parties. Perhaps the US would then resort to sinking Chinese merchant ships without warning using submarines or cruise missiles? Do you see how maybe this isn’t really an ideal approach...?
Ok, I think I’ve seen enough internet arguments to know where this is going. Getting your opponent to “admit” stuff, old yet familiar tactics. Thank you for making me realize my error, and taking the decision off of me.
Goodbye LW, it’s been fun but we’ll both be better off without one another.
The universal trouble is that long-term, flexible and ‘ethical’ strategies always seem to get trumped by
short-term unethical power strategies (i.e., the mafioso type)
short-term amoral selfish/corrupt behaviour (i.e., iron law of bureaucracy, disaster capitalism)
It’s easier to build than to destroy or steal, sadly
Can you explain what sort of algorithm for an iterated prisoner’s dilemma you’d describe as “always escalating?” Because my interpretation doesn’t seem like it would do well.
A simple example would be: If opponent plays CC last two rounds, play C with p=0.9, d=0.1, if at least one D, defect.
If you simply want to max returns vs. that you play all Cs.
I wouldn’t really call ZD agents “endlessly escalating”, and that one seems like an exploitative ZD agent. Maybe something like “line-toeing” agents would work better? Or just call them exploitative.
P.S. If anyone felt Zvi’s post confused them because they vaguely remembered that co-operation sort of pops out of sensible decision theories, I’d recommend reading the literature on “zero determinant” agents (they can enforce linear relationships between their and their opponents payoffs in iterated prisoners’ dilemma). I think these sorts of agents are more of a problem in CDT? (or EDT? I don’t know, I’m tired). Anyway, here are some good papers on the topic, even though Zvi basically goes over the main results in the post anyway.
Also interesting is that ZD agents do better by exploiting (their score dominates opponents) humans in the manner described in the papers if you provide long time scales, and tell the human their opponent is a robot. Humans will go along with this, as the theory says, but not if they think their opponent is human. In assymetric situations between humans, extortion tends to be pretty frequent their opponent is human.
I don’t know if you touch on this elsewhere, but I wonder what the relationship between the mafioso nature and psychopathy is. They seem fairly similar, but e.g. psychopathy is often hidden by psychopathic charm, used to manipulate people ‘nicely’, whereas it seems the mafioso nature’s effectiveness comes from others knowing you have it and believing your threats.
If psychopathy is an evolutionary strategy, keeping it hidden presumably means people don’t avoid/kill you. Or maybe psychopaths only keep it hidden until they get powerful enough that they are fairly safe, then reveal it in order to issue credible threats like a mafioso. (E.g. some dictators.)
After thinking a bit more about the issue of welcoming Russian immigrants and deserters at this point in time, I discovered a major weakness in this policy option:
First of all, if mass emigration of skilled Russian citizens becomes a genuine concern to Putin, he could always close the borders. Emigration is a gradual process that can be stopped at any point.
Second, no matter how passionately one argues for the rationale behind such a policy, on the surface it still looks like rewarding the people of a country for their government’s aggression. While the imagery of Russian deserters chilling on the beach of some tropical paradise might look enticing to Russian soldiers still fighting in Ukraine, it would also be insulting to Ukrainian civilians who were turned back at the border and told to go back and fight for their country.
Putin could also easily plant agents amid these immigrants that could conduct terrorist attacks in the EU. Now I don’t doubt he has the ability to do this anyway, mass emigration or not, but the narrative would be a completely different one in this case. This is political ammunition for opposition parties in the West to attack incumbents for this “failing” policy of welcoming Russians in particular, which will quickly devolve into a debate about broader immigration policy, which is a very sensitive issue to begin with. It would greatly weaken the rare unity the West has achieved lately, and it would also distract Western audience from the war in Ukraine itself.
Of course, conducting terrorist attacks in the EU would not exactly make Putin popular here in the West, but that’s hardly a concern for him right now. Public opinion in the West can’t be shifted any more against Putin in a useful manner anyway, and the radicalization of some people in response to such attacks will only lead to irrationally lashing out against ordinary citizens of Russian origin, which would just fuel more division and polarization. And sowing division is all Putin wants.
There are ways to mitigate this problem. Keeping a low profile would shield incumbent EU politicians from much of the blame, but then communicating to Russian soldiers the option of deserting to the EU in a believable manner becomes a challenge. Even better would be to convince non-Western countries to take up such political refugees, but it’s hard to see what’s in it for them.