Putin has carefully calculated the odds. Right now, they’re in his favor.

What does Vladimir Putin want? It’s a question Washington finds hard to answer because we Americans rarely put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Two important essays, by Dmitri Trenin in Foreign Affairs and Eugene Chausovsky in Foreign Policy, provide some clues. Both suggest that the Russian president has stayed in power since 1999 not by being a reckless gambler but rather by being careful, even rational.

Trenin points out that Putin has watched four waves of NATO expansionism since he took power. His military incursions have usually been reactions to events rather than grand initiatives of his own. In 2008, the response followed Georgia’s decision to retake the separatist province of South Ossetia. In 2014, it came on the heels of the Maidan uprising in Ukraine that drove President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. Putin’s one significant military intervention in an area that is not historically part of Russia’s core security sphere — Syria — has been limited, mostly using Russian air power.

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