Thread by @BretDevereaux

One of the arguments I'm seeing essentially amounts to "why doesn't NATO just act like Putin - just flagrantly lie, ignore potential Russian escalation and act crazy and unpredictable."

And the answer is, "because we're not Russia and operate under different constraints." 1/

That's not, "we have to be the good guys" or "we have to be rational because Putin isn't" or anything like that.

We have different systems of government that operate under different ideologies with different processes and that imposes different constraints. 2/

So why not lie a bunch and threaten crazy things?

Putin can do this because he is an autocrat whose support relies on just a handful of key supporters. He can lie to everyone else, including his own people, and remain in power. 3/

But the USA and the other NATO states are to some degree democracies (caveats for Turkey and Hungary).

While democracies can do small things covertly, any kind of major action requires building consensus among a host of stakeholders. 4/

At the very least, you have to rally dozens of key politicians in each of the 30 member states. In practice most of those key politicians have one eye on their constituents and aren't going anywhere without popular support.

Hard to keep big secrets in that environment. 5/

Consequently, while politicians do of course fib a lot, there is a level of contempt for the truth they generally don't feel they can engage with - and that same level of contempt is where Putin lives basically 24/7. 6/

The same goes for 'unpredictability' - threatening to do something 'wild' doesn't generally work for democracies because it isn't credible, because anyone can see the popular support isn't there.

Whereas Putin is a dictator who *can* just invade another country on a whim. 7/

In a more complex sense the problem comes back to Andre Beaufre and his 'false note' (discussed in this week's post: acoup.blog/2022/03/11/col…)

Humans have a status quo bias and deterrence is all about predictability within the status quo. 8/

Consequently the sort of actions that carry big costs in indirect strategy are not morally bad actions, but actions which break with the state's stated 'logical thesis' - not because they are bad, but because the shatter that status quo predictability. 9/

But precisely because of that status quo bias, that means that dictators pay less of a strategic price, for instance, for brutal repression than liberal democracies do.

Putin intentionally targeting civilians does not force a sudden, wrenching reassessment of the status quo. 10/

But NATO doing so absolutely would - it would infuriate their publics, and tarnish their international reputations in a way that it simply doesn't have that reputational cost for Putin because he has no humanitarian reputation to lose.

Status quo bias. 11/

You can see this pretty clearly looking back at the Cold War - most of the shady stuff the United States did remain permanent black marks on its record.

The generally much worse stuff the USSR did provokes less comment...because it was a brutal autocracy so of course it did. 12/

In the end that means that the liberal democracies play by different rules than the autocracies: their ideologies and democratic institutions compel them to be more cautious, more predictable, more committed to human rights and more wary of direct escalation. 13/

On the flipside, those same institutions tend to correlate with vibrant, technologically advanced, productive rich societies that as a result have the reputational and economic capital to crash the Russian economy in just a few weeks. 14/

It *sounds* like a terrible disadvantage to have to at least solidly pretend to be the white-hat in all of this, but then you look at the USA's comically long allies list & remember that Putin's best allies are Belarus & Syria. Even China is at best a fair-weather friend. 15/

Given that the liberal democracies triumphed in both world wars and the cold war and currently hold the upper hand now, it seems to me at least that the constraints they work under are at least not a crippling disadvantage. end/