It’s Time to Beat Putin at Poker and Call His Bluff
Earlier in April, Jason’s article It’s Time to Beat Putin at Poker and Call His Bluff was featured in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Putin’s disordering leadership style cannot be understood through the metaphors of chess or martial arts, but by viewing the current confrontation between the West and Russia as a game of televised poker – ‘[Putin’s] opponents should diagnose his tendencies, psychological weaknesses, and favoured strategies. They must also discern the logic of the game that he is playing and then beat him at it’.
From Jason’s perspective, Putin is not a neo-Stalin looking to recreate the Soviet Union (as Jason discussed in his recent book review of Martin Van Creveld’s I, Stalin), but acting as an unpredictable macho dictator who has made an aggressive bet that the West must call. If the West continues to misunderstand the stakes and dynamics of this poker game, American and European leaders will encourage further bluffs by Putin and fail to incentivize negotiations.
Read the full article here.
