alt Hacker NewsI'm an historical materialist. That means I don't believe religion, ethnicity or political philosophy ever drives international conflict. It's always, always, always material interests. Those other things are just an excuse, something to rile up the populace into supporting the government and dying on the front line.
So some think Duginism and a Greater Russia is driving Putin's expanionist activity in Ukraine (including Crimea and the invasion in 2022). I don't see it that way. It's using the Russian diaspora as an excuse for expansion, similar to what Hitler did in Austria and the Sedetenland. But the interests are material.
Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).
But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine. Bush and Biden both made offhand comments about it but countries like Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders. And Putin knows this. So there's some historical revisionism going on to say that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO. I personally think he would've done it anyway.
The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea and that's what Sevastopol is. Ukraine cut off the water and it's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain that holding so Russia has captured what's essentially a land bridge to Crimea and plans to hold on to it until the West gets bored.
I believe that Putin arguably overplayed his hand by buying European silence on the matter with natural gas dependence.
The US however spends a ton of money and military force and political will projecting power into, say, the Middle East. Is that in the US sphere of influence? No. The US is also a net energy exporter now so you can't even blame securing oil as an excuse for it.
The US isn't operating in a deeply insecure fashion. Instead, they're simply extracting wealth from all over the world for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
I guess where the US is insecure is in that no system other than neoliberalism can be allowed to exist and prosper because it might cause the populace to revolt. The existence of the USSR actually forced to the US to give Americans something so they didn't revolt. This desire means that any quasi-socialist nation gets starved with sanctions and couped to maintain this illusion.
And the US's big problem is they can't bully and starve China in this way.
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Overall some great points here, but some don't make sense.
> The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea
Russia already had several other ports on the Black Sea, so it's not clear to me why they'd need to invade Ukrainian territory to get one extra.
> Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders.
They've already voted three other Russia-bordering countries into NATO. They were practically falling over themselves to add Finland (along with Sweden)[1]
> The process in the Bundestag was "extremely fast," DW's political correspondent Nina Haase said.
> Haase said, citing unnamed sources, that Germany had intended to become the first country to ratify the accession, but other countries were faster. "But nevertheless, the signal remains the same... [Germany] is firmly behind the idea of Finland and Sweden joining NATO," she added.
You make the point that the US is insecure about any other system being successful, I think there's a case to be made that Russia similarly couldn't tolerate a prosperous democratic Ukraine sitting right next door and embarrassing them. You could also argue that, materially, Ukraine has natural resources that Russia just wants to steal.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-approves-finland-and-sweden-na...
Eh, I don't think that is really a consistent, useful model. It's not that material interests are irrelevant, but ideological alignment even at the most Machiavellian level constrains what's possible, if not outright defining where lines are drawn. You can't ignore how politics happens within countries when looking at how they interact with each other.
> But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine.
Agreed on all points but this. This is just factually wrong. Ukraine formally declared its intention to pursue NATO membership which was accepted by the NATO council.
The most significant early push occurred at the Bucharest Summit (April 2008). Ukraine (along with Georgia) requested a Membership Action Plan (MAP) - the standard preparatory program for aspiring members. NATO's declaration welcomed Ukraine's aspirations and stated that "these countries will become members of NATO". Ukraine's parliament repealed its non-bloc status and amended its constitution to enshrine irreversible pursuit of NATO (and EU) membership as a national goal. Then, NATO officially listed Ukraine as an aspiring member.
In the Vilnius Summit, NATO even declared that "Ukraine’s future is in NATO" and its path is "irreversible".