A superbly sinister Reagan campaign ad from 1984 shows a bear stalking through undergrowth. Over the drum of a heartbeat a gravelly voice warns: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear?”

In recent days the West has decided to approach the bear and flex its muscles. Over the weekend the foreign secretary Boris Johnson pulled out of a long-planned meeting with the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and called for more punitive economic sanctions. Sir Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, made the statement that Russia was “by proxy... responsible for every civilian death last week”. Yesterday the foreign ministers of the G7 met to agree a demand that President Putin withdraw military support from Assad. Tomorrow Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, goes to Moscow to deliver a “clear and co-ordinated message” that the Kremlin must toe the line.

The new approach is to square up to the bear: challenge Russia explicitly; demand a climbdown. Given that Moscow has failed to oversee the elimination of President Assad’s chemical weapons this is, of course, perfectly reasonable. Whether it will be successful is another thing. I fear this approach won’t work, because it does not pay due care to the critical thing: the psychology of the man who is Russia.

To talk of psychology in the field of international relations may seem lightweight to some. Experts in foreign affairs prefer the hard-edged lexicon of strategic interests to the fluffy language of feelings. But thinking on geopolitics too often forgets the human beings at its heart: their fears, insecurities and vanities. In a country where there are checks on power, the psychology of the leader matters less. Their emotional edges will be blunted by layers of process. In a system like the Kremlin, however, where the leadership is absolute, the mindset of the man matters profoundly. It should be factored more carefully into the western approach.

Humiliation, pride and status anxiety are central themes of the Putin story. A telling detail: as a teenager he was disturbed to see his peers developing faster, growing taller — so he took up judo to keep his “place in the pack”. Anything to avoid the humiliation of being slight, small, pushed around. Give me the boy and I’ll show you the man: the one who joins deep dives into Lake Baikal, discovers “ancient Greek urns” in the Black Sea, shoots an endangered tiger with a tranquilliser dart, rides bare-chested on horseback. Every adventure is staged to assert status, to keep his place at the top of the pack. Meetings with other leaders reek of power play and status anxiety, such as the notorious bilateral with Angela Merkel in which he introduced his labrador to a German chancellor known to fear dogs. Afterwards Merkel remarked: “I understand why he has to do this — to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness.” These absolutes emanate from Putin: nothing is less bearable than humiliation, nothing more important than pride.

David Fuller's view

If this psychological profile is correct, and it makes sense to me, I think there is little chance that Putin would join other European nations, turning G7 into G8 once again. Even if he did join, he would most likely stay in character until told to leave as happened previously.  After all, Putin is the man who described the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the last century”.  He also said in 2004 that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man”, although they now call it the FSB.  

Here is a PDF of Clare Foges article for The Times.