Stop saying Putin plays 3-D chess, he’s just a maniac with a clock
In August 2014, I bought a car. At the time, I was earning a generous salary, commuting relatively short distances, and had no children to drop off at soccer practice. The list of potential vehicles was therefore extensive, and as a lifelong BMW enthusiast, I almost purchased my first luxury sedan.
Before pulling the trigger, however, I opened a spreadsheet and did some math. A luxury vehicle generally requires premium fuel and though gas wasn’t exorbitantly expensive at the time, $10 extra per week adds up. Then I looked at projected insurance payments. Annual costs were shown to be 60% higher than the costs of insuring a non-luxury vehicle. Excise tax on the luxury vehicle spiked by $1,000 and this was all before I began to factor in routine maintenance costs. Needless to say, I opted to purchase a non-luxury hybrid vehicle with exceptional reliability ratings.
Friends were quick to mock the decision, but I wasn’t concerned about the car I was driving in 2014 or even 2015, there was a longer event horizon I needed to consider when I made the purchase. My salary was sufficient at the time, but I wasn’t exactly tenured. Who knew what the future would hold career-wise? Fuel prices declined in the short term, but inevitably rose over the years. What if we moved? What if I began commuting longer distances? There were all kinds of indicators that buying a luxury vehicle was unwise in that moment and, as it turns out, I left my job the following year to pursue an entrepreneurial dream and began commuting to an office that was nearly two hours away.
Was I playing 3-D chess when I purchased the car at the dealership? Of course not. I just knew that time existed beyond the third quarter of fiscal year 2014.
The same year I purchased my vehicle, Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea, a region of southern Ukraine along the Black Sea. It has been suggested that Putin’s actions were, in part, intended to assess the response of NATO countries. Sanctions were imposed, and thus Putin began an effort to “sanction-proof” the Russian economy, most notably by creating an alternative to SWIFT with China, because he knew that when he inevitably invaded Ukraine in the future, sanctions were the likely course of action to be taken by the west.
It's unlikely that Putin’s efforts to mitigate any harm to the Russian economy from western sanctions will be effective, which is all-the-more reason why we need to stop claiming that Putin is somehow smarter than other world leaders or, what is likely Putin’s favorite claim, that he “plays 3-D chess.” He doesn’t play 3-D chess and he isn’t always the smartest guy in the room, he’s just a delusional autocrat who understands how time works.
Think about the time horizons we have sadly become accustomed to. When you invest in a company by purchasing its stock, or better yet, when you invest in the market by purchasing shares of an index fund, you can receive updates by the second on any price fluctuations. Investing in the S&P 500 after a bad day or even over a bad month may invite ridicule and condemnation. But investing in an S&P 500 index over ten, twenty, or fifty years is just common sense. All of a sudden, friends will label you an “investment genius” when they look at your future returns. The only thing you needed to know, however, was how time worked – you didn’t even have to pick any stocks!
This is all to say that Putin clearly fantasized about last week’s invasion for a long time. As Russia expert and former National Security Council member Fiona Hill woefully observed in a recent interview with Politico, Putin has "been carefully seeding this terrain... We’ve been at war, for a very long time."
But the decision to invade Ukraine has been a disastrous one thus far, not to mention an egregious violation of human rights. The west has rallied and is standing firm, NATO will further expand, European arms are flowing into Ukraine, and the Russian economy could very well collapse. His calculations in Crimea in 2014, and subsequent meddling in US elections, and "seeding of the terrain," were no more part of an elaborate 3-D chess game than my negotiations were at the dealership.
We need to stop our immediate, short-term-only focus. The second quarter of this year is far less important than the second quarter of 2027 or 2032. It’s crucial that we expand our time horizons, if not for our own benefit, so that we can at least stop being impressed by a tyrant who murders people when he loses a game of checkers.
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(This is, ordinarily, where I plug my book. But given the context, I don't feel it is appropriate to be marketing a product from this crisis. Instead, I encourage everyone to read Fiona Hill's interview with Politico, free link below.)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
