Russian mad man story...

is hard to reconcile with the first rule of politics; no man rules alone.

My approach to understanding political actions is to look at the incentives across the system as a whole. I don’t know much about the system in Russia or Ukraine—its history and the evolution of incentives of different players. I can’t add any insights here.

But the “mad man versus the civilised world” story seems a little too clean.

The throne looks omni…