Explode? Shouldn't
When recently I was asked "Will there be a war?" I answered: "I don't know, but what's worse, even those who sort of make decisions don't know." The background to this was the endless reasoning of experts - professional or not. Some said that "this is not in the interests of the Russian elites," others tried to unravel the insidious strategic plan. However, the only sense of such reasoning is complacency. We like to think that power is a rational actor, that its actions are logical and subject to a plan. We are also capable of rational thinking - therefore, we can somehow understand and predict what is happening, even being cut off from sources of information.
But in reality, there is no smell of rationality and predictability. Power, especially autocratic and command-and-control, follows two great principles: SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up), FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond Any Repair or "All Recognition"). That is, either "hooray, we all pissed off", or "fuck, we all pissed off." Any complex plans go to hell already at the moment of the idea, and what happens is incomprehensible even to the participants in the events. And, when everyone here tries to keep their rational interest, the overall effect in the end turns out to be irrational.
Are you saying that escalation is not beneficial for Russian elites? Maybe so. But the problem of collective action still remains: everyone will sit silently realizing that it is not beneficial for them, but no one will dare to object first. In psychology, this is called differently: "the spiral of silence" or "a trip to Abilene." But yesterday the faces of some of the grandfathers from the Security Council expressed the essence. They read something like "why didn't I jump off this titanic ten years ago", but the lips at the same time cheerfully reported on the full and comprehensive support of the chosen course.
The staging of yesterday's meeting is, it seems, Emir Kusturica's first test task as director of the Theater of the Russian Army. Of course, the sketch with Naryshkin was especially successful[1]. When your head of foreign intelligence is in a state of "mom, where am I?" and does not know whether we are annexing the neighboring territory or simply "recognizing" - this is a good reason to think about how everything that happens is really "planned". The appeals of the "heads" of the LDNR, recorded, recorded on the 16th, a multi-day burned-out theater on the border with performances like "two Ukrainian DRGs and one war elephant were destroyed", a senseless ostentatious "evacuation" make one think about the same. If some serious plan exists here, then it is being carried out in the most general terms, but in reality a "creative mess" reigns.
Summing up, here is an unpopular thought for you today: power is not a rational beginning and not even a cunning villain in a dark tower. Power is a monkey with a grenade, which itself does not know what it will do in the next moment. Therefore, nothing is finished yet and different developments are possible. And the ancients were not fools at all when they preferred to predict the outcome of the war by the guts of sacrificial animals. In the case of such crises, this is the most effective method of analytics.
Mihail Pojarsky 2022-02-22
