The Myth of “No Choice”
One pet peeve of mine in regards to history discussion is when a decision made by a leader, which on its face seems to be a major mistake, is presented as that leaders only option. I hear it in regards to Japan quite frequently. Japan had to attack British colonies in the South Pacific and had to attack Pearl Harbor. They simply had “no other choice” because they needed strategic resources. Well, why did they need strategic resources? Because they were in a major land war in China. Why were they in a war against China? Oh, because they FUCKING STARTED IT. If they ran out of resources in 1941, what horrible fate would have befallen Japan? They would have had to negotiate a cease fire with China. Boo frickin’ hoo.
Similarly, but less frequently, you hear about how Hitler had “no choice” but to attack the Soviet Union. Well, why did he have no choice? Because there were Jews and Slavs in the Soviet Union and he couldn’t very well kill all the Jews and Slavs in the world unless he invaded. Ooooooorrrr he could have just not. No one would have attacked Germany had they not rearmed and abided by the Versailles Treaty. Germany in 1942-1945 may have been at the front line of a war against the Soviet Union, but they would have been fighting side by side with the UK, France, and possibly the U.S. instead of against all of them. The problem is, if you take the desires of a dictator as inflexible and worth literally any sacrifice of lives and property to achieve, you’ve already bought into the dictator’s frame of reference of the world (Weltanschauung) and given it priority over reasonable sane ways of looking at the world.
Which brings us to today, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The most absurd justification for Putin’s aggression is geography. The argument goes, “the east of Ukraine is flat and so is eastern Russia, so if Russia doesn’t conquer everything east of the Fulda Gap that leaves them vulnerable to fast Panzer charges across the open plains.” World War 2 is over. No one wants to invade Russia. If Russia had no military at all apart from their nukes, still – no one would want to invade Russia. Maybe maybe maybe if they had no military and no nukes, I could see Georgia and Chechnya getting some kicks in, but how far would they seriously be able to advance? No one invades Denmark, despite it being flat. No one invades literally hundreds of countries around the globe that do not have defensible borders. Sacrificing tens of thousands of lives to move your borders a few miles is both sociopathic and bad geopolitics in the modern world.
NATO has never been a threat to Russia provided Russia never initiated war. The whole NATO expansion thing is a red herring designed to distract and intimidate. Without Russian aggression, NATO probably would have faded away a decade ago. Now with their invasion, Sweden and Finland will almost certainly join, and defense laggards like Germany are rearming as quickly as possible. It turns out, randomly attacking your neighbors causes them to form defensive alliances against you. Who knew? Certainly not Putin.
Russia is burning all of this goodwill, military power, soft power, etc to get a naval base in Crimea (that they literally could have just kept as normal by leasing it from Ukraine), but does the Bosphorus Strait not exist? If you hear someone talk about how this gives Russia a warm water port with access to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, no it does not. Crimea gives Russia access to the Black Sea and that’s it. Turkey gives Russia access to the Mediterranean and England gives Mediterranean countries access to the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar, both of which would be shut down in a WW3 scenario. Turkey right now shut down the Bosphorus, so all that warfare got Russia exactly zero additional naval access. Congratulations Putin, you played yourself.
Oil: the eternal black chalice of geopolitics. The Alsace-Lorraine of natural resources. Just like in the days of colonialism, it seems tempting to simple seize natural resources from other countries, but modern military operations are expensive. We don’t know the final tally of Russia’s military expenditure on the Ukraine war, but it is safe to say that between the losses of military equipment and sanctions, they have lost more than they could possibly get from selling all the natural gas in their newfound territory. Furthermore, greed is not sufficient to invoke “no choice”. If you murder your next door neighbor to steal his car, will a jury be convinced you had no choice but to steal it because it was really nice and you really really wanted it? But that same logic gets applied to dictators using military force to seize things from their neighbors and gets treated like they are just the victims of circumstance. Lastly, oil and natural gas are on the way out. Solar, wind, and other clean energy sources are advancing very rapidly so it is only a matter of time before the demand for oil and gas peter out. This green energy transformation will happen all the more quickly because of Russian aggression, so Putin hurt himself even from a profit maximizing sense in that he will likely not make as much from gas sales in the next 10 years as he would have had he not invaded.
Ethnic/cultural justifications. Oof this one’s a doozy. Pretty much every country in the world shares borders with other countries that have similar ethnicity and cultures to themselves simply by cultural diffusion and immigration over time. This is the same justification Hitler used to annex the Sudetenland and it’s been used by China regarding Taiwan and at other times throughout history. But it’s not a good justification, because if applied evenly, it would mean eternal war, especially when those groups that share culture are willing to fight and die to stop the aggressor from conquering them, as we see in Ukraine. How many dead Russians is it worth to add a single Russian speaking Ukrainian to the Russian Federation? Because we are seeing that question playing out right now in real life right now and it’s not pretty.
The historic borders argument is just as absurd. Borders have been in flux since the dawn of time. Europe has been eternally soaked in blood by men trying to gain territory under their control. If you look back far enough, you can justify almost any allocation of land today and taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean a war of all against all with no end.
So at long last we come to the real reason, domestic politics. Putin is better at being a dictator than I, or probably anyone reading this, could ever be. It takes a distinct skill set to survive and consolidate power in the most brutal political climate in the world. Russian history is littered with the corpses of men who couldn’t quite maintain their grasp on power and Putin has thrived for over 20 years, punching well above his weight geopolitically. Who am I to question whether his moves are good for him in terms of his own geopolitical survival. Until he gets assassinated or deposed, we’ll never know for sure. But the thing is, I don’t particularly care about debating that now. I do care about clearing out the weak arguments mealy mouthed Putin apologists use to pretend like what he is doing is justifiable or good for Russia. It is not. It is pure evil and it is bad geopolitics. Russia will be broken by this war, win or lose. Their military, economy, reputation, and diplomatic status have been utterly annihilated and it is all because of a conscious choice made by a single man. Stop pretending he had no other options.
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