When the German political scientist Carlo Masala started working on If Russia Wins: A Scenario, an international bestseller that was translated into English and published in the UK last year, he wanted to challenge Europe’s conventional wisdom about Russia’s war against Ukraine. As he saw it, too many people were clinging to the belief that Vladimir Putin could be assuaged by some form of territorial compromise, “and then everything will be over and we can probably go back to normal.” That approach was dangerously complacent, he told me in a recent interview from his office at the University of the...