On the Origins of the Ukraine War

Evaluating Putin's motives for going to war.

On the most recent All-In Podcast, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis get into a heated argument around the origins of the war in Ukraine. Sacks argues that the US and its allies are culpable by provoking Putin through eastward expansion of NATO, where Calcanis says it's due to the deranged imperial ambitions of Putin. I felt the need to write this post to propose legitimate counter positions to Sacks’ take on the origin, because Calcanis did a poor job. I know that neither of them are professional geopolitical strategists… but hey, neither am I.

For the full exchange see here from 1:35:00 to 1:45:00.

The goal is not to determine who started the Ukraine War (it was Putin), but why he did so in the first place. The chief reasons proposed are security and imperialism.

Security

Sacks is echoing the point of University of Chicago IR scholar John Mearsheimer. The “offensive realism” school of international relations, of which Mearsheimer belongs, believes that nations maximize their relative power in order to maximize security. Or, said another way, “survival mandates aggressive behavior.” Therefore, Russia’s security (or lack thereof) is what drove them to action.

With this context, Mearsheimer claims that the war in Ukraine is ultimately the fault of the US for threatening Russian security through eastward expansion of NATO. This has directly led to Russia taking action for purposes of national defense. Imagine if the Mexican government aligned with Russia and received Russian weapons: the US would likely take decisive military action too. By not denying NATO membership to the former Soviet countries, especially Ukraine, the US and Europe bear the ultimate responsibility of provoking Russia, who has valid security concerns.

For a long read outlining the Mearsheimer position, see here.

For a long read countering the Mearsheimer position, see here.

This theory is certainly possible, Putin may have felt threatened by NATO expansion. However, it's also equally plausible that he would have invaded Ukraine even if NATO hadn’t expanded, because… security.

Russia does not have mountains or ocean barriers that deter attackers from its key Western cities. The only natural defense is its cold winters, which have a mixed record of effectiveness. Russia has been invaded a lot in the last ~200 years, to name some popular examples: Napoleon's invasion, the Crimean War, World War I, and World War II.

Russia’s best option to prevent invasion is to place large swaths of land (also read “countries”) between itself and its perceived enemies. Moscow was highly secure as the capital of the USSR, with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and the Caucasus acting as a barrier for invasion. Russia’s motivation today is to drive these countries towards complete political alignment with Russia (like Belarus), or take them by force (Ukraine/Georgia). This argument ultimately says that since the fall of the USSR, Russia’s primary goal is to expand its border to better protect itself, irrespective of what the US does. This is roughly the view offered by Peter Zeihan in his 2014 book The Absent Superpower.

The countries apart of the USSR

 To really hammer this point home, since 1812, Russia has been involved in 12% of all global conflicts, which is double the next highest (USA) with under 6%. Russia has been aggressively fighting for its security long before NATO.

https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1204746091696140288?s=20

We now have the Meirsheimer vs. Zeihan theories, that both say that Russia acted for reasons of security, but one says it was the fault of the US, and the other says it would have happened anyway. 

For more on arguments countering the Meirshiemer theory, see this thread:

Paul Poast @ProfPaulPoast

I disagree with John Mearsheimer on the causes of the Ukraine-Russian War. Instead, I think...and stay with me on this one... Offensive Realism offers a better explanation. [THREAD]

Imperialism

The other motive for Putin’s invasion is imperialism, which is what I believe Calcanis was trying to say. This thesis would dictate that Putin feels the need to invade Ukraine from a divine or historical sense to reunify the Russian Empire. This reason can exist separately from either security theory mentioned above.

There is rhetoric espoused by Putin indicating this may be the case. First, he has referred to himself as Peter the Great, the 18th century Tsar who grew the Russian Empire and turned it into a modern European power. Peter is literally the definition of an imperial leader, so it's easy to see why publicly associating with him could lead one to believe this war is one of imperialist ambitions. Second, Putin has spent a lot of time talking about why Ukraine shouldn’t exist as a separate country from Russia, which doesn’t exactly scream “security concern.”

Peter the Great (1672 - 1725)

Why would he bother talking about Peter and Ukraine’s viability as a separate culture, if his primary concern was security? It's possible that this is just propaganda for internal or external reasons, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Putin’s imperialist ambitions could be caused by a deep sense of obligation for Russia and its people, or it could stem from a desire to get “the Great'' appended to his name in the history books. We will likely never know. All we know is that it could be a reason for the invasion.

Conclusion

We have now gone over three potential motivators for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: security concerns over NATO, security concerns in general, and imperialism. The purpose of explaining these was not to prove why one is right or wrong, but to show that they are all plausible. In reality the true motive is likely a combination of the three.

But why does this matter?

Depending on Putin’s motives, our policy responses should change. If the sole reason for invasion was NATO expansion, then maybe NATO expansion was a bad idea. If he was going to invade key former USSR states anyway, then perhaps it would have been better to push for more NATO expansion. 

Additionally, understanding the motives of countries and despots will help us deal with them in the future. Either way, it's important to apply nuance to geopolitics and social science, because despite the name… it’s not a science.