This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The question in the headline has no answer, at least for a couple reasons:

• It is impossible to know the next steps of a despot political leader who has no ethics, morals, or scruples.
• And, that said, I am not close enough to the war in Ukraine – nor do I want to be – so I rely on news from the front compiled by reputable journalistic outfits.

I post this, even as the U.S. Congress has listened on-line to an urgent appeal from Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy for more help from the
West.

 

[As far as I can tell, this is the first time in history that a war leader, at the very time of war, has appeared virtually before a spell-bound Congress.]

Writing for the New York Times a day before Zelenskyy’s address, Peter Coy postulated that there are three reasons why Putin could decide to fight on in Ukraine, even though, so far, the war he started has not gone as well as he predicted.  For this blog, I give Coy full credit.

He started his analysis with this summary:  “The bloody invasion of Ukraine has been a disaster for President Vladimir Putin, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to give up.”

The three reasons he might forge ahead:

1. First is the sunk cost fallacy.  Professors of economics and business administration admonish their students to ignore costs that have already been incurred — i.e., sunk — in making decisions.  What’s done is done, after all.  You should make decisions based only on future costs and benefits and not throw good money after bad.

But people don’t always think so logically, especially in times of war. They want to fight on to justify the blood that has already been spilled. Otherwise, the fallen troops will have died in vain, the argument goes.

We can’t see into Putin’s mind — no doubt a scary place — but it’s easy to imagine that the losses he and Russia have already suffered weigh heavily in his decision making.  Can his entire military campaign have been in vain?  That would be a hard pill for him to swallow.

• A second idea that might lead Putin to fight on doesn’t have a name that Coy knows of, so he calls it the “golden spike theory.”  The golden spike was a railway spike driven in 1869 in Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory to complete the first transcontinental railroad, joining the segments coming from the east and the west.

The railroad was mostly useless until that final connection was made, after which it became immensely valuable.  Similarly, Putin may be thinking that just another few weeks of fighting will be enough to subdue Ukraine.

• A third reason Putin might fight on is that, however unlikely the prospect of success, the cost of a loss for him is too high.  This is called “gambling for resurrection.”  In finance, the board of a company or bank that’s at risk of going bankrupt might gamble for resurrection by pouring money into a risky scheme that stands even just a small chance of keeping the company out of creditors’ hands, figuring it has nothing to lose by trying.

Let’s say Putin realizes he’s in deep trouble.  Russia has become a pariah state.  His reputation, not great to begin with, is blackened.  And if he achieves nothing, he faces the risk of being overthrown by his own security and military elites.  He may feel, then, that he has little to lose by fighting on.

Coy adds that, for negotiators who are trying to stop the war, the challenge is to know which, if any, of these factors is motivating Putin’s murderous campaign.  In fact, it may be all three – or, who knows, something else.

Plus, Coy concludes, “You don’t have a clearly defined game, and you don’t have symmetric information.  And the cost of getting it wrong can be incredibly high.”

That cost – for Ukraine and for Russia, not to mention the rest of the world — is growing by the day.  It appears that Putin doesn’t care, even as his armies bomb maternity centers and evacuation routes.

Killing innocent civilians doesn’t bother the Russian dictator, just as was the case with Hitler in Germany. 

My hope is that the cost for Putin, at some point, will outweigh the supposed “benefits.”

And, with credit to the Washington Post, I close with this last paragraph:

“President Biden has been consistent throughout the Ukraine crisis on three rules of American engagement:  The United States will impose devastating sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine.  It will make sure Ukraine has weapons to defend against an invading Russian force.  And it will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power.”

Good for the president to find the best answers, not the magic ones, which don’t exist.