More Than Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ukraine
By Walter Nicklin
Something “bad” happens: The peaceful transfer of power is contested by the leader of “the world’s oldest democracy.” There’s yet another school shooting. Russia invades Ukraine.
To explain the unexplainable, we seek comfort in understanding. What’s “shocking” then becomes “not surprising.” The most comforting explanations are ones that conform (no matter how contorted) with past assumptions. Those past assumptions are just another expression of a point of view.
When a point of view is defined by time past — not the angle of vision from a particular place — that’s history. At another (later) time, it becomes revisionist history. And so on. Thus there can never be a true — that is, fixed and constant — explanation. In the meantime, here is how I find the Ukrainian war being explained.
1. It’s not a war at all; it's a “special military operation” to reclaim what is rightfully Russian. Ukraine is not a real country. It was part of the Soviet Union and, before that, the Russian Empire. Putin is simply acting in the glorious tradition of Peter the Great.
2. Power politics. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” So judged Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. The postmodern French philosopher Michel Foucault, however, argued that power only exists when there is resistance.
3. Putin equals Hitler. As the human brain is wired to spot patterns, it’s natural that 2022 Ukraine conjures up 1938 Sudetenland. Both German and Russian aggression was fueled (and justified) by resentment and grievance after “losing,” respectively, World War One and the Cold War.
4. It’s NATO’s fault. In this so-called realist approach to foreign policy, all great powers are entitled to “spheres of influence.” When another great power intrudes upon this sphere, as with NATO expansion eastward, it is a provocation that must be addressed. As Cuba is to the U.S., Ukraine is to Russia.
5. Get-real realpolitik. That Russia invaded Ukraine proves the efficacy of NATO. Had Ukraine actually joined the alliance, arguably Russia would never have risked an invasion.
6. National character. If Russia were not an authoritarian state but instead a liberal democracy, it would never have invaded another country. But didn’t the United States unilaterally invade Iraq in 2003? To counter accusations of hypocrisy, U.S motives (unlike Russia’s) were putatively justified as idealistic — to turn Iraq into a democratic beacon for the Mideast. But Peter the Great can be an ideal, too.
7. The international system. Though the world’s biggest country in terms of geographic territory, Russia’s economy ranks only as of the 11th biggest — and just the 5th largest in Europe. Invading Ukraine provides the last opportunity to make Russia great again — the dying agony of a petrostate. Declining powers are always the most dangerous.
8. Conspiracy theories. Hunter Biden’s laptop. The U.S. President’s son got money from a Ukrainian business…. Paul Manafort got even more money from Ukraine…. Hillary Clinton cheered on the Maidan protest toppling the Russia-backed regime…. Withholding aid to the pro-Western Ukrainian regime was the cause of Trump’s first impeachment…. Connect the dots.
9. Proxy War. When U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says weapons supplied to Ukraine are meant to “weaken Russia,” then Ukrainian fighters could be seen as surrogates. Putin has also sometimes framed the war as “against the West.”
10. Crazy Putin. “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man…I am an unattractive man.” The protagonist in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground “would purposely do something perverse… simply to have his own way.” Rational explanations miss the point
11. Military-industrial complex. The supply-side theory in economics can also help explain war. The ever-increasing supply of weapons means an inevitable increase in demand for these weapons in war. Witness the enormous amount of military hardware now being shipped to Ukraine.
12. Empire. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria gave up their dreams of empire years ago to pool sovereignty into a new supranational entity called the European Union. Instead of trying to integrate into this grand European project, Russia retaliates with fierce nationalism and brutal imperialism.
13. God. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in explaining the horrors of Soviet oppression, said: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Putin claims to remember God (the Russian Orthodox version at least) and says his “special military operation” is “righteous.” Yet horrors persist.
14. Human nature. The story of Cain versus Abel is universal and never-ending. Slav versus Slav. Murder as suicide. War is inevitable. If not Ukraine, somewhere else. Everywhere else — the entire planet, in fact — as the war in Ukraine accentuates our self-destructive reliance on fossil fuels.
All of the above are premised upon causality — that time is linear, with the past as prologue to the present. But what if war is so multi-causal, the variables so complex, that origins can never be truly determined, and outcomes might as well be random? All we can do is watch and try to understand but never can. Shit happens. Of all human activities, outcomes in war are the most stochastic.
