International security

PUTIN’S STRATEGY IS FAR BETTER THAN YOU THINK

Is Vladimir Putin a strategic genius or not? In a recent War on the Rocks article, the scholar Joshua Rovner comes down hard in the “not” camp, arguing thatPutin is a terrible strategist and laying out the ramifications of his strategic incompetence for the United States and its NATO allies. This is another salvo in a long-running debate between competing Western narratives of Russia: an alarmist position perpetually worried that “the Russians are coming,” and a dismissive one that believes Russia is a giant Potemkin village destined to fall apart as a result of self-defeating behavior.