For all the legitimate focus on rising U.S.-Chinese tensions, this summer's sleeper surprise for the West is more likely to emerge from Vladimir Putin's Russia.
In the past, when matters have seemed sour for Moscow, Putin has turned to adventures abroad to solidify his domestic control.
At the same time, the weakness of his demographically aging, economically ossifying Covid-hit country continues to grow in the wake of lower oil prices. The World Bank projects a 6% decline in Russian GDP in 2020 in a country that already had 12.3% of its population, or 18 million people, below the poverty line.
So should one be watching for a surprise of the sort of the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008, the seizure and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war from 2015 to the present, or more electoral and disinformation activity in Europe and particularly around U.S. elections this November?
Some analysts say Putin's appetite for such an adventure has run its course. That's unlikely, however, until he experiences more painful pushback than he has thus far from the United States, Europe or others. A powerful new book by Financial Times correspondent Catherine Belton, "Putin's People," "demonstrates how the future president made full use of KGB methods, contacts, and networks at each stage of his career," writes Anne Applebaum in a review of the book in The Atlantic.
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