Shock and confusion have been the leitmotif of Western responses to Vladimir Putin’s military moves in Syria. This certainly isn’t the first time the West has been flummoxed. Western political thought on Russia over the past two decades presents a cavalcade of failures of analysis and prediction. The most pathetic was the failure to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union; Western leaders even tried to prop it up when it began to unravel. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his “Anticipations of the Failure of Communism,” pondered why the expert community had been so sure that the Soviet System...