Future historians will wonder how Russia was able to intimidate the most powerful military alliance ever. The answer lies in psychology

Donald Trump deserves credit for forcing a real debate, but his starting point of the peace proposal was catastrophically wrong Credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP

Mark Brolin

26 November 2025

How did the weakest Russia in modern history manage to push the entire Western world onto the back foot? How can an exhausted regime that poured everything into conquering a smaller neighbour, yet managed to seize only a fraction of it, end up dictating the tone of “peace” talks? These are the questions that should have framed the Trump-Putin plan from the start.

Donald Trump deserves credit for forcing a real debate. In a few days, Europe has discussed Russia, Ukraine and security more seriously than at any time since the invasion. But the starting point of the Trump-Putin proposal was catastrophically wrong. Rewarding an aggressor with stolen land and disarming the victim is not something the leader of the free world should even contemplate – unless it is absolutely necessary.

It is not.

Those who think otherwise are stuck in a Cold War mental model in which Russia is still a superpower. As I’ve argued previously, it has not been for decades. Today’s Russia is a collapsing petro-kleptocracy slipping backwards on almost every metric of power. Putin wildly overreached in Ukraine and is bluffing about his staying power. Wartime bluffs are normal; what is not normal is how eagerly the West has believed this one.

For years, we have treated the Kremlin as if it were Barad-dûr – a dark tower with mystical force. In reality, it is a bunker of paranoid propagandists: Europe’s last surviving specimen of 19th-century despotism. The “magic” holds only because we keep projecting strength onto a system held together by fear, inertia and self-serving mythology.

Here Steven Pinker’s brilliant new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… is remarkably relevant. Pinker explains how power often rests not on what people believe, but on what they believe others believe. Autocracies survive by pretending that everyone else thinks the regime is formidable. Once it becomes common knowledge that almost nobody truly believes this – despite all the smiling-dictator posters – the spell dissipates.

What keeps that spell alive outside Russia is our own cognitive and institutional negativity bias: the reflex to overestimate threats and underestimate opportunities. Bureaucracies have incentives to keep the Russian monster alive (a “Russia desk” secures a bigger budget if Moscow remains a “superpower”), and media audiences reliably reward Darth-Vader narratives over the reality of a brittle, bumbling autocracy.

Layer onto this a persistent reluctance, especially on parts of the political Left, to admit an uncomfortable fact: top-down bureaucracies, even when tidy on the surface, cannot compete with the messy, trial-and-error brilliance of capitalist democracies. That is incidentally why the United States consistently outperforms the EU – and why cartoonishly despotic Russia remains stuck in the economic minor league.

Biases like this have shaped Western thinking for over 20 years. Future historians will wonder how a regime of unelected thugs, with an exhausted army that poured everything into failing to conquer a smaller neighbour, managed to intimidate Nato, the most powerful military alliance in history.

On a practical level, the answer will be painfully obvious: a European cocktail of Russian-gas dependency, military disarmament and dangerously complacent free-riding on America’s defence capabilities. These will be remembered as the prelude to the war – and so will the staggering failure to heed the warnings from Poland, Ukraine and, ironically, Trump in his first term.

More fundamentally, however, the past decade has followed the oldest script in politics: the schoolyard bully triumphs not because he is strong, but because everyone else is too easily spooked by the bluff.

But at last, the sand is shifting. European resistance to the draft 28-point peace plan has been far stronger behind closed doors than in public. Ukraine has solid allies in the US Congress. And Washington is already walking back some of last week’s worst provisions. The final settlement will not be pretty – that train departed long ago – but it can still be made far less dangerous.

The strategic bottom line:

• Trump has raised the stakes for Ukraine and Europe by hinting that US support may vanish without a deal. That has certainly concentrated minds – but only in Kyiv and Europe. For Russia, the incentive to compromise has fallen; if Team Putin believes US support may crumble, of course it will prefer to fight on.
• It is long overdue to raise the stakes for Russia. How? By Europe promising sustained support to Ukraine even without a peace deal – and mean it. Authorise immediate long-range strikes in response to the ongoing Russian drone attacks. Keep up the pressure on the Kremlin’s oil machine: Russian crude is now trading at deeply discounted levels – reflecting growing credit, logistics and sanction risks. This price collapse inflicts a slow bleed on Kremlin revenues, a burden a war-bloated petro-state will struggle to sustain indefinitely. Make it clear Russia will never get a better deal – and mean that too. Only then will Moscow negotiate seriously.
• Do not discuss serious Ukrainian disarmament. Peace without deterrence, when Putin is next door, is not peace – it is a pause.
• Freeze the lines if necessary. Time is not on Russia’s side. A frozen line today does not mean a frozen conflict forever. Think Germany, not Korea.

This all becomes a no-brainer once the West updates its picture of Russia’s real strength. Treat a collapsing kleptocracy like a superpower, and you shrink yourself – as has happened not only in Europe but also in Washington. Treat Russia for what it truly is, and you win.

Mark Brolin is a geopolitical strategist and the author of ’Healing Broken Democracies: All You Need to Know About Populism’