President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
There are so many themes, plots, and subplots within this text that it is difficult to distill the work, but the main argument is that the U.S. Air Force incrementally developed an atomic air strategy from 1945 until the strategy fell apart after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kaplan’s narrative relies heavily on this event to sever the interconnected pieces of atomic strategy and air strategy once the popular imagination began to view atomic weapons as unusable.
As they have since antiquity, geopolitical factors will continue to shape and constrain world affairs in our digital age. Emerging technologies will only up the ante—as underscored by global debates on Huawei’s involvement in the roll-out of 5G, and China-US trade disputes over data localization. Applying a geopolitical lens to events like these will be an essential first step to crafting good strategy to respond.
