Mark Galeotti's new book, We Need to Talk About Putin—subtitled “How the West Gets Him Wrong”—is a sharp, short effort that gets Putin (mostly) right. Galeotti stresses that his book—more of a long essay, really—is not an academic study. In fact, it's a rather playful work as a whole. At the start, Galeotti lists a “cast of characters” with short descriptions of each one of them, as if he were starting a Shakespearean tragedy, or, in some places, a farce. Indeed, Galeotti himself appears as a minor character in the play, sitting at dinner at a famous Moscow restaurant and listening to an unnamed Russian official explain Putin to him. It's a clever narrative device that nevertheless sets up a mystery of its own. But more on that later.
Overall, Galeotti's main argument is simple: Not everything that is going on in the world plays into Putin's hands, or is even to be blamed on (or credited to) him. Not every Western setback is part of some complex Russian strategy. Indeed, the Kremlin draws psychological strength from the misunderstanding of its enemies. “By acting as if Russia is a great power, Putin hopes to persuade everyone else either that this is true, or at least that it's not worth trying to challenge the idea,” Galeotti writes. As David Kramer noted in our pages recently, this is exactly how Putin manages to do as much as he does, largely unchallenged.
The bluster alone is not sufficient to be effective. The hot rhetoric must be matched with the illusion of strategic genius. Galeotti points out that, on the contrary, both in his personal life and on the world stage, Putin is a judo black belt but not a chess grandmaster. “He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but has not predetermined a path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather than on a careful strategy,” Galeotti says. “[T]his helps explain why we are so often unable to predict Putin's moves in advance—he himself doesn't know what he'll do next.”
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