The Terrible Truth So Many Experts Missed About Russia

[Caliman73]

7. The expectation from experts is that leaders will follow "norms".

It is the same thing that plagues Democrats here in the US with regards to the rise of an ever more radical right wing / Republican faction.

The expectation is that people will follow the normal rules of engagement that have held together, the peace, or the stability of nations / foreign relations, for the past century or decades.

When you have people who are willing to "cheat" or simply forego how people customarily relate to one another, then you have this surprise. It is the same reason that people get so shocked when confronting psychopaths, who simply "do not care" about the damage they cause. We expect people to have some form of empathy, some form of self restraint because if we all operated on the level of a Putin, Right wing GOP, or psychopaths, then we would eventually have chaos and the only thing that would matter is the projection of force.

As it stands our veneer of "civility" is relatively thin. It does not take very much to push us into a "survival mode" where our more "animal nature" takes over. We have many among us, and disproportionately in positions of power, who operate under those mores.