On Russia and Risk

We need a different mindset

There have been many responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They include changing minds.

The clearest and most consequential collective mind-shift is in Germany. After decades of behaving as if international relations could always be satisfactorily handled by professional diplomats having polite conversations – keeping military spending to a bare minimum, refusing to send weapons to friends and allies, embracing energy policies which blatantly undermined security – Germany has done an about-face. It shipped weapons to Ukraine. It announced an immediate one-time boost to military spending. It promised to maintain a large and permanent increase. And it axed a second pipeline project that would have made it even more dependent on Russian natural gas. Germany is finally waking up.

Similar, if less substantial, shifts can be seen throughout Europe and the NATO alliance. There are even signs that Canada is rousing from its long, deep sleep.

“It is important for our military to be better equipped,” said the foreign minister Melanie Joly. “It is important because the world has changed. And we need to be able to face the new challenges.” Throughout the Cold War, Canada was a reliable partner in the NATO alliance, fielding a substantial military, but the end of the Cold War brought not only a peace dividend – reasonable cuts in military spending – but a sense that the military mostly didn’t matter. Military spending was cut radically then kept among the lowest rates of spending in NATO by successive governments, both Liberal and Conservative. In fact, the bottom came in 2014, under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when spending fell below 1% of GDP for the first time ever. The NATO target is 2%. If the government follows through on the minister’s words – a huge “if” – it would be a significant change for the better.

(Warning: The following paragraph is the editorial of a disgruntled Canadian. Picture an angry beaver at a lectern while reading this, or, if that sight is too frightening, skip the paragraph.)

Successive governments put the Canadian military on a starvation diet because they knew most Canadians were just fine with that. For decades, if you were to bring up the subject of increasing the military’s budget with Canadians – or worse, increasing taxes to pay for it – you would inevitably hear many people object on the grounds that we live next door to the world’s only superpower and the Americans will take care of any threat. It’s quite something to listen to people say, in effect, “why pay when we can ride for free?” not only without embarrassment, but with indignation, like it’s our right to ride for free. Nor do the people who think this way ever acknowledge that this tacitly diminishes Canadian sovereignty: If you leave your security to your powerful neighbour, your neighbour decides how and when that security is provided, and so, to that extent, your neighbour is sovereign, not you.

(End editorial: Picture the beaver walking off in a huff.)

For the record, I want to say I am a strong believer in the principle of collective security because -- as recent events have confirmed – military power continues to be a tragic necessity. Let me underscore the word “tragic.” Dwight Eisenhower was indisputably correct when he said, “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”  Our goal should be a world where not one cent is spent on weapons. But until we get there, a properly equipped military is essential in a world where some leaders are still prepared to use force to get what they want.

So, in my humble opinion, Germany’s shift in policy is not only overdue, it could be, in the long term, the most significant event this year – the moment when Germany finally got serious and became the leader and champion that Europe and liberal democracy need.

All the other shifts are welcome news, too. But I wonder how many officials really understand the lesson we should draw from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Consider Melanie Joly’s comments again: We need to better equip the military “because the world has changed. And we need to be able to face the new challenges.”

The world has not changed. Not truly.

One year ago – when the Canadian government was still mostly refusing to even sell weapons to Ukraine – Putin was in the Kremlin. Russia had the second-biggest military in the world. The conflict with Ukraine was on-going. The risk of war was real. A full-scale invasion may have seemed extremely unlikely. And maybe it was. But the risk was real.

Now that the invasion has come, what has changed? Not much: Possibility became reality. That’s it.

The Canadian government’s actions, and the minister’s words, betray a classic reactive mindset, both before the invasion and after: Don’t prepare. Wait and see. If something bad happens, respond to it.

That’s the reactive mindset. It’s misguided and dangerous. Want to see how dangerous?

Imagine that other NATO countries adopted the same policies as Canada toward Ukraine. If that had happened, Ukraine would have received much humanitarian and “non-lethal assistance,” to use the jargon, prior to the invasion. Its soldiers would have received some valuable training from NATO military personnel. But it would have received very little “lethal” assistance.

And Ukraine would have received none of the advanced, shoulder-launched, anti-tank and anti-jet weapons that are making a huge difference in repelling Russian attacks. Canada doesn’t have those weapons. They’re relatively cheap. They can be ordered off-the-shelf. But Canada never bought them. So even if Canada had been inclined to send the weapons to Ukraine, it had none to send.

Fortunately, Britain and Sweden jointly started developing a new shoulder-launched anti-tank missile called the NLAW way back in 2002. More fortunately, Britain bought and stored a large supply of these advanced weapons, and it gave thousands of them to Ukraine well before the invasion. Similarly, the United States gave Ukraine a large supply of Javelin and Stinger missiles to Ukraine. These are the weapons that gave Ukraine a fighting chance.

It is likely that if all the Western powers had applied a reactive mindset to the Ukraine file, the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have been the brief and victorious assault Vladimir Putin imagined.

So what’s the alternative? It’s a risk mindset.

In 2002, when Britain and Sweden started developing the NLAW that has been critical to Ukraine’s survival, Russia was a fading power with a dilapidated military. Britain was at war in Afghanistan and would soon be at war in Iraq but those were wars against technologically unsophisticated insurgencies and the need for a powerful new weapon capable of knocking out modern tanks was nowhere on the horizon. In 2002, if someone had suggested these weapons were required because one day large columns of modern Russian tanks would be blitzing across the plains of Ukraine, they would have been laughed at. Or committed.

The same was true a decade later, in 2012. That year, when Mitt Romney called Russia “our number one geopolitical foe,” the Obama campaign saw it as a major gaffe and used it to portray Romney as yesterday’s man.

Don’t let hindsight bias fool you. What is unfolding now was not easily foreseeable. Even after Russia’s seizure of the Crimea, the idea of NATO getting eyeball-to-eyeball with Russia felt far-fetched and was treated accordingly by many (including the government of Canada). At the time of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, I noted that the probability of World War Three had risen from almost zero to something still small but worryingly higher than one percent. There was much rolling of eyes. I’m sure the eye-rollers will have forgotten now – that’s how hindsight bias works – but the fact remains that history mostly surprised us.

As it has so many times before. And as it will in the future.

That’s the risk mindset.

Human foresight is extremely limited. If you prepare only for foreseeable dangers, you will be caught unprepared. Guaranteed.

The obvious objection is that the array of bad things that could happen is nearly infinite and we would bankrupt ourselves if we prepared for them all. And that’s correct. So we have to make judgements about what we should prepare for and what we can cut from the list. That demands probability judgments about things we cannot forecast: Alien invasion is a real possibility but the probability is surely so low, and the cost of preparing so high, that we have no choice but to take it off the list. That’s an easy one for illustration purposes. There are lots more that are much harder.

I won’t attempt to analyze all the threat humanity faces here because it’s Saturday morning and I have things to do. Let me just suggest three principles that should inform a risk mindset.

First: Beware Tunnel Vision. When we look into the future, we see that a certain range of change is possible within the next five minutes. Over the next five hours, the range is wider. Over five days, wider still. And so on. By the time you get to years, the range of change is immense. Over decades, the range challenges human imagination. If you were to plot that on a graph, it would look like a cone, hence it is sometimes called the “cone of possibility.”

As a general rule, when people look ahead and imagine the range of possible futures, their field of vision is far too narrow. They think they’re being expansive and broad-minded. In fact, they have what I call “temporal tunnel vision.” (I’ll write lots more about this in future.)

It is absolutely critical that we push back against the tunnel walls and see a much broader range of possible futures. If we don’t, we’ll scoff and dismiss many things – like the return of the Russian tank to Western nightmares – that we should not. And we will suffer for it.

Second: Prefer Adaptability to Specialization. “Preparation” can mean foreseeing a specific threat emerging in a specific situation and preparing for it, or it can mean foreseeing a general risk that could manifest in any number of variations and preparing for that. Because our foresight is so flawed, we should have a heavy preference for the latter.

Britain’s development of the NLAW in 2002, and subsequent stockpiling, is a good illustration. Nobody had to forecast in 2002 that several years later oil prices would soar, injecting new life into the sickly Russian bear, and that the cautious and calculating Vladimir Putin would get increasingly aggressive and embark on a dangerous bid for territorial expansion involving modern battle tanks thrusting into Western allies. They just had to foresee that any aggressive attack, by anyone, anywhere, would require heavily armoured vehicles, and Britain would need a cheap, light, scarily effective weapon to stop it. So if Britain were to develop and stockpile that weapon, it would be prepared for a huge array of possible futures. That’s good value for the preparedness dollar.

Pandemic surveillance is another good illustration. You don’t need to foresee the emergence of a potential new plague, here or there, at any particular time. You only need to know that there is, each and every year, a low probability of some fresh horror emerging somewhere, sweeping the planet, killing millions of people, and costing trillions of dollars to contain and clean up. You don’t even need to know whether the plague will be viral, bacterial, or fungal. You just need extensive monitoring so you can pick up signals as early as possible. And you need to maintain the capacity to swiftly move in and contain outbreaks. Again, that reduces risk across a vast array of possible futures. That’s money well spent. (You also need leaders who understand that no matter how long it has been since the last outbreak, the funding for this monitoring and rapid response must never be cut, no matter how tempting that may be when other, apparently more pressing matters arise. This may be the bigger challenge. See, for example, the cuts inflicted on pandemic monitoring by American, Canadian, and other governments prior to the Covid 19 pandemic.)

And that brings me to the third and final principle: Pool Risks.

What does the military have to do with healthcare? Most people would think not a lot. We mentally divide them, and many others, into separate categories. We deal with them as separate issues.

But think of it in terms of risk.

Whether I’m killed by a virus or artillery doesn’t matter to me. Either way, I’m dead. Risk is risk. Many risks are so bad we need governments to deal with them. Governments do that by taking money out of the collective wallet. There’s only one wallet, so money spent dealing with one risk isn’t available for others.

Is it sensible, then, to make decisions about risks as if they are entirely separate and independent? I would suggest not. And yet that’s how governments typically tackle them.

A risk mindset would do things very differently.