Column | Where does this war end? And more stupid questions

I’m full of stupid questions about the course of the war in Ukraine and the problem is that I don’t trust the experts. That mistrust is just evidence based. Experts structurally overestimate their expertise, especially when they have to estimate the probability of a future event. In his book range David Epstein describes how Cold War psychologist Philip Tetlock asked experts about their predictions about economic and geopolitical developments in the United States and the Soviet Union. It didn’t seem to matter exactly what area they were experts in, how many years of experience they had, or whether they had access to classified information. “They were bad at short-term forecasting, long-term forecasting, in every domain. When they said something was virtually impossible, it happened 15 percent of the time. When they said it was fixed, in a quarter of the cases it didn’t,” Epstein writes.

Even now, experts are making estimates about the course of the war and once again they are fulfilling the promises: in February researcher Haroon Yilmaz wrote on Al Jazeera that Ukraine would not be invaded because Putin would realize that such a raid was doomed to fail. Four months ago, experts advising the German government concluded that the Russian gas supply via Nord Stream 2 no greater risk on Russian energy blackmail. Now say military experts that the chance of deploying nuclear weapons on the battlefield is very small.

So it will probably happen soon. And that raises a lot of new stupid questions. Such as: where the hell lies the way to the end of this conflict? Now the Netherlands is supplying another swath of anti-aircraft missiles in response to missile attacks this week on Kiev, among others, which were Putin’s response to the attack on the bridge between Russia and Crimea. Which must have been another reaction to some crime.

Ask Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin to how this conflict ends and her answer is simple and logical: when Russia withdraws from Ukraine. We can do the bad guy don’t let it win. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen says in her State of the Union: „Putin will fail.” But what does that look like? A humiliated Putin? A Failing Nuclear Power? Does he just pull back with his tail between his legs?

I remember from the history lessons about the First World War that Europe went into sleepwalking. Where no one de-escalated at all, not even with that horribly endless battlefield in sight. In an article in The New Yorker about how wars like this keep going on in Ukraine, it was recalled how, four months after the start in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second already concluded that the war could not be won at all. Nevertheless, the fighting continued for four more years.

The last world war was eighty years ago. We are the generation that grew up under a threat of war that was never repaid. A prediction made by me ten years ago about the possibility of another war on our territory was met with derision by the experts. The same happened with the outbreak of the corona pandemic. We were also quite surprised by that. After all, we had been terrified ten times in a row after a new virus outbreak.

Also read: Bowing to Putin is no longer an option

Now a new generation is learning what’mutually assured destructionAs we face yet another credible nuclear threat, it strikes me how little fear about it I see around me. Are we crisis tired? Do we trust the experts? Can we not imagine after all these years that such a nuclear attack actually becomes a reality?

Stupid question number so many: how far will the western world go with that mutually assured destruction? Bee news hour I hear the experts respond evasively to the Western response to the deployment of a nuclear weapon. Elsewhere, I hear suggestions that we bomb the Russian fleet to destruction and further humiliate Putin. I hardly dare to ask, at the risk of being laughed at again: but what is the next step of escalation?

Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.