Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedStanley McChrystal: belief
20 Oct 2021 Conversations with Tyler Stanley McChrystal on the Military, Leadership, and Risk
“If we think of Russia as having been prostrate at the end of the Cold War, and we viewed them as a beaten former superpower, they are trying to get back on the national stage.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Stanley McChrystal
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 20 Oct 2021
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…How well do we understand the probabilistic and risk thinking of the Russian leadership? That’s actually easier to understand because, in that case, you can focus it almost in the mind of Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t represent all Russians, but for the last 20 years, he’s been a pretty good proxy for where the Russian psyche has been since he captured their imagination, starting with Chechnya. If we think of Russia as having been prostrate at the end of the Cold War, and we viewed them as a beaten former superpower, they are trying to get back on the national stage. Now, they have far worse cards to play than China for the future. They’ve got a real demographic problem. They’ve got other issues, but the reality is, in the short term, they’ve got some aspirations to be powerful in the Mideast, to be powerful . . . Look what they’re doing with natural gas this winter with Europe. They’re going to play the cards they’ve got more aggressively than we might expect them to. So, in your mental model of Putin, he’s not risk-averse. He’s willing to suffer great personal loss if there’s some chance of creating chaos and furthering Russia’s place on the world stage.…
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