How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

• Position: A SYMPOSIUM OF VIEWS - Global price of oil

Western experts have offered various explanations for Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions in recent years. Some suggest Putin has been merely reacting to NATO and EU enlargement. Others suggest the Russian leader has succumbed to a bout of irrationality, spawned by a desire to return to the "good old days" of the Soviet Union. After all, according to historian Stephen Kotkin, traditional Soviet geopolitical thinking always assumed that Western capitalism would eventually disintegrate.

Princeton Professor Harold James suggests Putin's actions are based on the rational assumption that in the wake of the global financial crisis and subsequent eurozone debt crisis, the West would lack the ability to take decisive action. This would provide Russia with a window to pursue a strategy of expanding its influence. Putin's bet was that Western policymakers and politicians would stumble in the effort to repair their economic and financial systems in the wake of the crisis. By deliberately exacerbating geopolitical tensions, Putin reasoned, the preoccupied West would look even more indecisive and weak. Of course, the Russian leader's actions have already risked a recession back home with the plummeting of the global price of oil, not to mention the economic bite of Western sanctions.

On a scale of one to ten--with one suggesting Putin is merely a delirious fool and ten a serious threat--how dangerous is Vladimir Putin to the West?

ILAN BERMAN

Vice President, American Foreign Policy Council

With the likes of the Islamic State's self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the running, the competition is stiff indeed. But it would be fair to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin currently ranks as one of the world's most dangerous men.

This might come as a surprise to some American policymakers, who believe that better Russian behavior is just a matter of time. After all, they point out, several rounds of Western sanctions in the past year have put a serious crimp on Russian business. More significant still, the plummeting price of world oil has sent the country's energy-dependent economy into a tailspin.

The results have been nothing short of catastrophic. Russia now teeters on the brink of full-blown recession. The Kremlin projects that capital flight--which topped $ 150 billion in 2014--may be as much as another $100 billion in the coming year. And foreign direct investment is withering. Reflecting these realities, credit agency Fitch recently downgraded the country's rating to just above "junk" status, projecting that economic growth isn't likely to return to the Russian Federation "until 2017," or even later.

But none of this has blunted Russia's neo-imperial outlook or its foreign policy adventurism. Instead, recent weeks have seen Moscow step up support for separatists in Ukraine's east, reinforcing them with additional high-tech arms and further military deployments. The crisis in Ukraine is now on the cusp of becoming a full-blown war.

To grasp why Russia has doubled down on aggression despite the mounting economic costs, it's necessary to appreciate Putin's increasingly precarious position. Russia's president is, in the words of journalist Masha Gessen, a "man without a face": a colorless bureaucrat who came to power because entrenched interests thought he could protect their political and economic equities. For nearly a decade and a half, he has done just that. But now, Russia's flagging economic fortunes are increasingly calling into question Putin's stewardship. Russia's president, in other words, needs a strategic "win," and preferably one that resonates with his view--shared by a broad swath of Russia's political elites--that the country's most important task is to rebuild a neo-Soviet sphere of influence.

Western inertia, meanwhile, is having an emboldening effect. U.S. military aid to Ukraine, already authorized by Congress, has yet to make it into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers. Although additional sanctions continue to trickle out, there can be little doubt that the White House has pulled its punches because it needs the Kremlin's assistance on other issues (most prominently, the nuclear talks with Iran). And while NATO is making new plans for a more robust Eastern European presence, chronic underfunding by its members means that, unless the Obama Administration foots the bill, such an expansion simply won't happen.

Balanced against all this, Putin has come to believe that he holds the strategic high ground. He likewise clearly thinks he can consolidate power at home by pressing his advantage in Ukraine (and perhaps elsewhere in Europe as well). And that makes him dangerous indeed.

STEVEN PIFER

Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine

On a one-to-ten scale, Vladimir Putin places at about an eight in terms of the danger or challenge that he poses to the West.

Under Putin's leadership, we have seen Russia in 2014 violate the cardinal rule of the post-war European security order: states should not use force to take territory from other states. In March, Russia illegally seized and annexed Crimea. It followed that by supporting armed separatism in eastern Ukraine--providing funds, leadership, and heavy weapons--and ultimately intervening with regular Russian army units.

Moscow has shown no readiness to implement the September Minsk ceasefire agreement or negotiate seriously to achieve a political settlement. By all appearances, Putin seeks to create a frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine as a mechanism to pressure and destabilize the Ukrainian government.

Putin may well pose a challenge to European security beyond Ukraine. He claims a legally dubious right to defend ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, regardless of their location or their citizenship. It is not clear what this means for NATO/EU members such as Estonia and Latvia, each of which has a significant ethnic Russian population.

Moreover, his security narrative has a strongly anti-NATO tone. The second half of 2014 saw an increasing number of provocative Russian actions, including the kidnapping an Estonian security officer, a major spike in the number of Russian military flights near NATO countries, and other military saber-raffling.

NATO thus should take steps to ensure that Putin understands that the Alliance will defend its member states and their territory.

Mitigating the challenge posed by Putin may be his miscalculation of the costs of Russian aggression against Ukraine. Crimea has proven an economic liability. Putin grossly underestimated Western readiness to respond with serious economic sanctions. Coupled with the plummeting price of oil, these have done significant damage to the Russian economy. Capital flight in 2014 totaled $150 billion, Russian officials now project that the economy will contract by about 5 percent in 2015 (others predict a larger drop), and inflation plus the falling value of the ruble are dramatically reducing Russians' purchasing power.

Putin may be gambling that the European Union will not continue to support sanctions. That would appear a risky bet, particularly in view of the strong leadership shown by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. An economy in recession will leave Russia in a weaker position to pursue its objectives in Ukraine and otherwise challenge the West.

DALIBOR ROHAC

Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute

Vladimir Putin has demonstrated time and again that he is a threat to the peaceful international order in Europe. While the West might not have to fear a full-blown military confrontation with Russia, Putin's regime has been singularly successful in orchestrating and sustaining localized, hybrid forms of conflicts in neighboring countries in order to expand the Kremlin's influence.

The annexation of Crimea and the war in the east of Ukraine, orchestrated by the Kremlin, are not one-off aberrations or blips. As my colleague at the Cato Institute, Andrei Illarionov, wrote on numerous occasions, the plans for the conflict were in existence for years, as illustrated by the leaked military plan of the Russian general staff from 2008, entitled "Operation Clockwork Orange,'' and a whole series of books and radio and television programs that openly discussed the possibility of a future war against Ukraine. Neither was the change of government in Kiev in February 2014 the real trigger for the Russian intervention, which started in July 2013, when sanitary and trade barriers started to be imposed on Ukrainian imports into Russia, tipping Ukraine's economy into recession in the second half of 2013.

Besides organizing hybrid conflicts which become frozen over time--as we have seen in Abkhazia and South Ossetia--Putin is keen to leverage the existing energy ties that make Central and Eastern Europe largely dependent on imports from Russia. He has also developed close connections with Europe's populist and nationalist movements, such as France's National Front or Austria's Freedom Party.

What is Putin's endgame? It is not just about Ukraine. As revealed by his oft-cited pronouncement about the downfall of the USSR being the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, his motives are fundamentally revisionist and aim to restore the Kremlin's sphere of influence from the Cold War era. There are good reasons for why the leaders of Baltic states are alarmed at increasingly brazen manifestations of Russia's military might and attempts to create artificial ethnic divisions, using the countries' Russian-speaking minorities as pawns.

Many outside observers also fail to appreciate the role played by the difference between Russia's political institutions and those in other post-communist countries--not to speak about the developed West. The autocratic nature of Putin's regime makes outward aggression an appealing tool to strengthen his hold on power. An external enemy, whether...