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How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
All speculations about Putin’s plans being actually smart or reasonable or a part of some 4d chess master plan, must factor in the fact that, as it turned out, Russian military was in shambles, badly provisioned and making blunder after blunder especially when it comes to logistics.
Like if Putin’s so smart, then why is he unable to execute? One would expect the value calculations to be on basically the same level of competence: old man’s delusions weaved out of the lies of his sycophant inner circle.
"He took a gamble that didn't pay off" is not equivalent to "4d chess master plan."
It seems obvious that if the government had fled Kyiv, that would have negatively impacted the resistance from Ukrainian forces. There really wasn't a lot of ground left to give at key spots before kyiv fell, and if kyiv fell, then there's likely a quisling government there right now. If there's a quisling government in the historic capital, there would be more international opposition to support for the rump Ukrainian state lead by a government in exile. Without near unanimous NATO/EU support the Ukrainian resistance in maneuver warfare is DOA.
Playing aggressively isn't always a losing strategy just because you actually lost.
Playing aggressively is, however, a generally losing strategy in iterative social games where you're the weaker party more susceptible to catastrophic defeats undercutting future goals compared to the richer, stronger, bigger club whose main limitation is consensus. Underdog aggressors have to be successful every time, in order to catch up with accumulated power, but by the same respect every failure- or reversal- costs them more. Given that Putin and Russian narratives have repeatedly framed this not in terms of Russia-vs-Ukraine, where Russia is the overdog, but in Russia-vs-the-US/West/NATO, where Russia very much is the underdog, an aggressive under-dog strategy is high-risk, without corresponding high-rewards.
Putin is the worst of both worlds as a strategist, as he's an aggressive player who historically goes for low-risk options. In iterative strategy games, this is a bad option that gets worse over time, because it greatly increases the reputational costs that drive other people's decision-making against you, even as the low-risks that generally entail low-stakes mean that the gains are marginal. The reputational damage that Russia got in, say, Georgia in 2008 far outweighs the benefits of South Ossetia as a Russian-backed unrecognized state, and didn't exactly deter other post-Soviet countries from seeking closer ties to NATO/European countries, but it absolutely validated and strengthened the Russia-skeptic factions in other governments, who would get further empowered by further Russian opportunistic actions.
As a result of such past actions, there were no low-cost options in Ukraine, no matter how aggressive Russia chose to be. Aggression itself was the wrong play, as either Russia was going to find itself in an insurgency, or a (surprise surprise) conventional conflict, neither of which it was prepared to execute in a way where the cost-benefit would reward aggression.
Framing oneself as the underdog is not equal to being the underdog or even believing oneself to be one. Downplaying one's strength advantage is the default posture of the strong (or those imagining themselves to be strong), rarely wholeheartedly believed. American posture in the «war on terror» and this current «strategic competition with China» is often painfully disingenuous too; cheap mop-up operations disguised as struggle for survival of the valiant minority standing up to some looming civilizational threat. Ministries of War have been renamed to Departments of Defense for a related reason.
Every autocrat, according to his PR, «stands up to the globalist West» as a valiant underdog, to build up a sieged castle mentality, even West-friendly ones like Erdogan. Or Orban. It's clear from his actions, though, that he does not believe the West to be actively invested in toppling Orban, and fights for real mainly with the domestic opposition, being very much the overdog there. Now we see that Putin, likewise, tawked a great deal about the Western threat – but genuinely thought that the West won't care enough to maintain support in the event that Ukraine doesn't fold rapidly, that his lobbying in Europe is reliable, that this is a low-stakes war on a cheeky backwater, in and out for 5 days; that Western politicians are tawking about their commitments only to dupe the plebs, like he does.
It's important to realize which fight exactly you are in.
I don't think this is generally true. The late 20th/early 21st century West has the heroic archetype of "plucky underdog who defeats superior force through extreme physical and moral courage, ingenuity, and luck" which causes Western overdogs to falsely claim to be plucky underdogs in order to make themselves feel heroic. It also has a set of egalitarian instincts (one of the other consequences of which is vulnerability to wokeness) which make underdogs more sympathetic, other things being equal, therefore creating another incentive to claim to be the underdog. Everywhere else, "the nail that stands up and is pounded down" is a strong anti-heroic archetype and third parties are most likely to choose the side which is more likely to win. So the incentive is to signal strength, and people did.
Incidentally, the fact that the most broadly popular media franchise in the early 21st century West is actually the MCU suggests that normies prefer heroes who don't falsely claim underdog status and Han Solo didn't actually succeed in changing the basic rules of Story.
Don't MCU characters, superhuman though they are, often fight Avenger Level Threats? It's one of the reasons I hate MCU, it's clear that their opponents are monsters of the week, but the presentation is exactly that Avengers are desperate underdogs. There are weak antagonists (Ivan and some old man from Iron Man 1-2 etc.) but Ultron is an AGI; Dormammu and Thanos are ontologically superior to the cast, even to relatively strong heroes (i.e. not Hawkseye); there usually are gimmicks that make heroes even bigger fish in theory, some artifact or cosmic energy or whatever that blonde butch has, but the stakes are high, and villains often gloat, and boast of being inevitable, crushing maggots or something. So it is congruent with the underdog aesthetics.
I concede that there's more power-worship in non-Western cultures. But it's inconsistent. Russia stronk big can destroy the world, but also is bullied by the decadent, rich, plotting West surrounding us with military bases. Crucially, Russians think of themselves as «weak and bullied» in the context of Ukraine, not trying to annex an (assumed to be weaker) neighbor but bravely standing up to the oppressive West, allegedly swinging the nuclear baton in self-defense. China has a similar but more verbally assertive and less actually aggressive posture («whoever tries to humiliate us will smash his head against the iron wall of 1.4 billion Chinese people», then allows Pelosi to land), and thus both countries abuse anticolonial rhetoric.
I think consistent affirmation of one's collective power may be characteristic of somewhat less developed groups with surviving honor culture – MENA, LatAm, Turkic and perhaps all/most Muslim countries. @2rafa, what's your impression?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning
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