Quick Question. Why Are We Still Staring into Putin's Eyes?

Politicians and pundits alike think they are mind readers. Not in general, of course. But certainly when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin. President Bush and Senator McCain did not boast of seeing a friend and a foe, respectively, in, say, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s eyes. Donald Trump does not say that he understands men like Chinese President Xi Jinping and can therefore promise that the two will get along famously. But the inner workings of Putin’s mind, and predictions based on it, are fair topical game.

Putin is expected to speak at the UN General Assembly this weekend. Politicians and pundits have not waited to hear what he has to say, measuring it against what he has said before, or against the facts as they are in Russia and the ever-worsening situation in Syria (the likely topic of his speech). Instead, they have allowed this tendency of staring into Putin’s eyes for answers to trickle into their assessment of the situation in Syria, and of Russia’s role in it. If analysis is based primarily on mind-reading and eye-gazing, it will lead to a simultaneous mystification and over-simplification of Russian affairs, and, ultimately, to poor policy.

Russia, long a backer of the Assad regime, is building its military presence in Syria, arriving, according to US officials, by fighter jet at an airfield, which it developed, and which it subsequently sent surface-to-air missiles to defend. According to some US officials, Russia is expected to soon start bombing Syria on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, although it is unclear whether this move is to protect Syria from ISIS or Assad from the Syrian rebels.

Russia’s reassertion of itself into this issue has inspired two things: First, an announcement by the United States that it is open to limited talks with the Kremlin (this it made only after reminding Russia that it is ultimately weakening itself--a point it has made before, and one that seems to mean very little--and admitting that it does not understand Putin’s “true motivations”). And second, a déluge of pieces predicting what Putin really wants in Syria.

Based on these articles and commentaries, we now know that Putin sees Syria as a way to get into the West’s good graces. Or is it that he’s reinstalling himself as a great power against the West, which is what he really wants? Wait, no, he’s biding his time. Or maybe he’s planning a gamble.

We do not know which, if any, of these things are true (although they collectively cover most possible outcomes). Here is what we do know:

We know that Putin does not want a non-Western leader overthrown by Western powers, as was the case in Libya, and as he has said he feels happened in Ukraine (the president of which, it should be noted, is, in the minds of some, a Western leader). This could be because Putin fears his own forced removal, or it could be because he does not believe it is the place of Western leaders to insert themselves into other countries’ political affairs. And we know that this is a stance that Putin has held firmly for years. It was Russia that claimed that Syrian rebels, not the Assad regime, were behind the use of chemical weapons around Damascus in 2013, and that worked (and wrote) tirelessly to keep a US-led coalition from intervening militarily.

We also know, however, that Putin views terrorism--specifically of the Islamic extremist variety--as a threat not just to international order and stability, but to Russia itself. He came to and consolidated power in no small part by repressing violence brought on (or so it was claimed) by Islamic extremism in Chechnya. He was famously the first foreign leader to call then-President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. After the 2013 Boston bombings, he condemned the ethnically Chechen Tsnarnaev brothers in the strongest possible terms--while implying that terrorists do not have a nationality beside terror, and that, if they do, it is surely not Russian. And yet we know that the violence in Syria is indeed turning Russians, like many others, to terror: In June, ISIS established its northernmost state in Russia’s North Caucasus, and a large portion of ISIS’s foreign-born fighters who have joined in both Iraq and Syria are from Chechnya.

We know that ISIS in the North Caucasus is not Putin’s only domestic problem. Putin has gone from the leader who promised stability and prosperity to one who presents himself as a war leader, keeping his country safe by surviving sanctions and an ever-deepening recession and burning foreign food. We know that Boris Nemtsov, a leading opposition figure, was shot dead in the street several months ago. We know that this past weekend saw a protest of 500 (including famed figure Alexey Navalny) “for turnover of power” in Moscow.

We know that, although he has said he will step down, in line with the Russian constitution, by 2024 (even if one excludes his years as Prime Minister, he will have ruled Russia for twenty years), that Putin does not want to turn over power, and that he has proven quite adept at doing what he feels he needs to do (imprison oligarchs; arrest activists; take Crimea) to keep it.

And we know that whatever Putin does decide to do--and, for that matter, what he decides to say at the United Nations next week--will result from a mix of these factors. But that, ultimately, is all we know. And there is a difference between analyzing these factors, which we know, and Putin’s internal musings, which we do not.

Or, to put it another way: Talk of what’s in a man’s eyes makes for a soundbite. Not for sound, biting policy.