(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Here’s an alternative view of the standoff over Ukraine between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the West. Perhaps Putin deliberately created a crisis in which everything is possible at once, and stays that way. Right now, he can invade and not invade (with a perfect poker face, he denies that he intends to). He can escalate and de-escalate; pose as aggressor and victim.
Let’s call these mutually exclusive but simultaneously possible scenarios strategic “superposition” (you’ll see why in a moment). Putin, with his KGB-trained mind, realizes that hacking perceptions in this way gives him power. As long as everything remains possible and no scenario can be excluded, he retains the world’s attention.
Which he definitely has. The great powers and their diplomats are doing little else besides shuttling between meetings with or about him. Stock markets and energy prices are seesawing based on his latest utterance or gesture. Entire countries — most obviously Ukraine — are holding their breath as everything from the life plans of individuals to the investment projects of companies is in effect suspended.
But how long can this superposition of possibilities last? At some point Putin has to make a move. And then another. Ukraine and the West, provided it can stay united, will react. Things could go well for Putin, or not. This should cause him anxiety. His power may already be at its peak, with the only trajectory hereafter being down.
The situation brings to mind a famous thought experiment in physics called Schrodinger’s cat. It was named after Erwin Schrodinger, a Nobelist who, in a conversation with Albert Einstein, tried to disprove an argument in quantum mechanics. This was the notion that subatomic particles can exist in a superposition of different states at the same time — a bit like an army simultaneous invading and not invading.
So Schrodinger imagined a cat in a box that also contains a speck of something radioactive. As soon as that substance decays, it triggers a blast that kills the cat. But the radioactive particle is in superposition, meaning it simultaneously does and doesn’t decay. So the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.
This is absurd, which is the point. And so is Putin’s permanent superposition of attacking and not attacking, infiltrating (in cyberspace and elsewhere) and not infiltrating, sabotaging the international system and claiming to only want to redesign it. For starters, you can’t park an invasion army of more than 100,000 troops near a border in perpetuity; you eventually have to use it, or withdraw.
The West, by contrast, has so far made little use of tactical ambiguity. In a different potential conflict, between China and Taiwan, the U.S. has since the 1970s been deliberately unclear about whether it would defend the islands from a mainland attack. In the standoff with Putin, however, NATO and its members have already in effect ruled out a military reaction to an invasion of Ukraine.
That leaves only a range of softer measures for them to threaten with. These range from slapping sanctions on oligarchs to cutting Russian banks off from international payment systems and burying a new gas pipeline between Russia and Germany in the sea unused. These are rather obvious instruments and, therefore, for Putin, quantifiable. He could estimate the cost, and still decide that snagging Ukraine is worth it.
Meanwhile, Putin is doing everything to increase ambiguity ever more. Anticipating Western sanctions, he’s mused about taking additional “military-technical” steps. It’s anybody’s guess what those might be. He’s been in contact with the leaders of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, and his cronies have dropped hints that he might station Russian nukes in Latin America, evoking the specter of a Cuban Missile Crisis Redux.
Putin the KGB man obviously relishes the anxiety he’s causing in much of the world, believing that fear always redounds to his power. But his game is breathtakingly cynical and dangerous. In effect, he’s put a cat in a box, then stuffed it with a Geiger counter, a radioactive particle and a detonator.
For the time being, the world is wondering whether or not this setup explodes, and Putin loves it. But he’s forgetting that the cat could turn out to be not Ukraine or NATO but him.
More From This Writer and Others at Bloomberg Opinion:
- Can NATO and Europe Count on Germany Against Russia?: Andreas Kluth
- Russia’s Winter Generals Have Yet to Show Up at the Gas War: Javier Blas
- Putin Is Only Pretending to Be Crazy on Ukraine: Eli Lake
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."
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