There may be a lot of reasons Putin changed Russia’s Syria policy, but showing up Obama is probably

[bemildred]

not one of them

In the Thunderdome of political narcissism that is the U.S. presidential election, it is perhaps unsurprising that the first question pundits asked when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s withdrawal from Syria is, did Obama just get played again? (Actually, maybe it is surprising. Obama’s a lame duck. Who cares?)

Yes, as Politico and others reported, the White House appeared not to know that Putin was about to declare his Syrian mission “accomplished.” Yes, the White House also didn’t know that Russia was about to start bombing Syria in the first place. And yes, Washington was caught “off guard” by Russia’s intervention in Crimea. Whether you see Putin as particularly good at keeping secrets or the CIA as particularly bad at uncovering them is a matter of taste. To see any of this as being about Putin “playing” Obama, however, is a fundamental failure of analysis.

Ever since the part of Washington that doesn’t get paid to think about Russia woke up to the fact that Russia still matters to the world, there has emerged something of a cottage industry of pundits, columnists and “thought leaders” peddling exclusive views into Putin’s mind. It’s a lucrative business, predicated, like most snake-oil operations are, on a bit of truth and a bit of falsehood. The truth is that Putin matters, perhaps unusually so: Very few states at Russia’s level of development, sophistication and importance seem to be so captured by the political will of a single man. The falsehood is that we can know anything about how Putin thinks: Of all of the high-security facilities in Russia, Putin’s cranium is the one to which we have the least access.

Serious analysts looking to overcome this problem and provide insight into why Russia does what it does — and what it might do next — are left with two options. One is to fit Russia into the various frameworks of international relations and foreign policy analysts. The best of this can be insightful, to be sure. For example, some analysts have shown that there is a robust relationship between oil prices and aggressive behavior by oil-rich autocrats. Whether you can use a theory based on average annual oil prices to predict the beginning and end of a five-month war like Russia’s intervention in Syria (to say nothing of Russia’s five-day intervention in Georgia in 2008) is questionable, but it’s a pattern of international relations worth noting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/21/there-may-be-a-lot-of-reasons-putin-changed-russias-syria-policy-but-showing-up-obama-is-probably-not-one-of-them/