The First World War, it is often said, was a war that no one wanted but just happened, unforeseeably triggered by an assassination of an unimportant royal in the periphery of Europe.
(One of the best books on this subject is Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August.”)
Is it possible to predict wars? The “Good Judgment Project” (profile here; website here), started by three University of Pennsylvania professors (i.e., it has roots in academia), uses a methodology that seeks to harness “the wisdom of the crowd,” the notion that many minds are more likely to be right than one (details here). Juries are based on this principle.
The GJP’s “superforecasters” — people with a good track record of predicting the future — slightly lean toward Russia invading Ukraine. Vox says (here), “in the past, they’ve outperformed intelligence analysts who have access to classified data,” although that’s not saying much. So, I’ve heard, do dart-throwing monkeys.
“The truth is that understanding interstate war, and war in general, is really, really hard, and the attempt to develop rigorous, testable theories about when such wars break out and why is still in its infancy,” Vox says. Don’t hold your breath. Similar efforts have been underway to predict the stock market for over 100 years, and that’s still in its infancy, too.
Probably the better part of valor here is to say nobody has any damned idea and stop there. Parenthetically, if Putin does invade Ukraine, it won’t be an accidental war; it will be with malice aforethought, akin to the difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.
But since his intentions are still somewhat obscure (for another few hours, anyway), what I’ll do here, instead of trying to read his mind, is list some of social scientists’ theories, and then you can take your pick:
Offensive realists “think every state wants to achieve at least regional hegemony and will fight to maintain it.”
Defensive realists “think every state’s core drive is for survival.”
Democratic peace liberals (aka “Pollyannas”) “think the liberal values and open communication of representative governments prevent war.” (For proof of this, they point to the fact the democracies don’t fight each other.)
Constructivists “emphasize that what counts as international security varies from time to time and place to place.”
Not mentioned in the Vox article, but on my personal list: Putin’s ego. Think I’m kidding? Here’s a prediction: After parking 150,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, and spending weeks negotiating with the West, the chances he walks away with nothing to show for it are zero.
Kennedy understood this when bartering with Khrushchev to avoid war over Cuba: Khrushchev got a face-saving U.S. promise to never invade Cuba (which the has U.S. kept) and withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
Khrushchev was sacked anyway, by a Politburo that saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a humiliating defeat for Russia. Putin is well aware of that history. And so far Biden and NATO have offered him far less.
Here’s a thought: Russia promised in 1994 to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty. If Putin breaks the promise (he already has, to some extent), then maybe we should invade Cuba. That might break the GOP’s stranglehold on Florida and its Cuban expatriates.