Much has been written to explain the Russian war against Ukraine. As I have mentioned in this blog, most of the explanations or justifications revolve around the geopolitical antagonism of Russia and the West, and especially the U.S. Geopolitics enters the picture when the equilibrium of power between rivals is disturbed and creates a fear of being overrun in the calculations of the slipping rival.
The upset of the equilibrium can be caused by the faster economic or military advancement of one of the rivals or changes in the world order that offer spillover advantages to one of the rivals. That’s why, geopolitical powers, in general, favor the proliferation of states that opt for a similar social, economic and political order. That was the case of oligarchic Sparta and democratic Athens that I wrote about in a recent post.
The balance among rivals can be also upset by the relative economic decline of one of the rivals. Sustained and prolonged deterioration of the economy degrades a state’s domestic prosperity and social tranquility and most importantly the means to keep its military parity with a rival. Economic failure was one of the suggested causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In their book “Balance: The Economics of Great Powers” Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane make a very strong case for the importance of fiscal strength as they look at the decline of several superpowers from ancient Rome to Great Britain.
So, it is interesting to ask whether any of the factors that may disturb the equilibrium of power appears to have played a role in explaining Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That is, if geopolitics has been used in this debate so much, let’s take a closer look at it. So what I aim for in this post is to sketch a thought process that raises some worth-noting doubts against the strict geopolitical argument.
Turning first to the military balance, I find its explanatory importance rather weak. First, Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Second, the threat from its immediate European neighbors has been nonexistent. Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian energy has signified thus far more willingness to cooperate than to antagonize Russia. In fact, European states have been accused, and not without reason, for underfunding their military budgets. Third, though a serious military force, NATO has never made any consequential threatening moves against Russia. Although, Russia loathes America’s military presence in Europe, it is extremely unlikely that the U.S. would start a hot war against Russia without the acquiescence of its European allies, which have proven to be anything but warmongering. Fourth, Russia went through an extensive modernization of its armed forces and years of armed conflicts in Chechnya and Syria, should have boosted its war readiness. Finally, the domestic political mood in the U.S. prior to the invasion of Ukraine was definitely against any more foreign military interventions after the exhausting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What about the economic balance? Admittedly, the Russian economy has remained relatively undiversified and heavily dependent on the extraction industries of oil, gas and minerals. And its model of favoring an oligarchic structure saps entrepreneurial dynamism from the economy. Although far behind in aggregate economic numbers, Russia has, nonetheless, made progress in closing its economic gap with the US and Europe. Using World Bank data and real GDP per capita (in constant 2017 dollars) I found that the Russian real per capita GDP rose from 29% to 43% of the U.S. real per capita GDP between 2000 and 2019. (But it has lost ground versus the real per capita GDP of China.) Therefore, in terms of one of the most meaningful measures of economic power, it is Russia that has gained economic ground, not the U.S.
However, something else has happened in the periphery of Russia that has become a perceived threat to Russia. This is the move of most of its former European territories (like the Baltic states) and allies in the Warsaw Pact (Hungary, Poland and others) toward democratic liberalization. This would not have mattered if Russia had itself successfully transitioned towards democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But after ten critical years were wasted by Russia (with help from the West), twenty more years of rule under Putin have turned Russia inward, illiberal, if not outright autocratic, and hostile to political ideas and economic development not controlled by the regime. In addition, the traditional hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church against western culture has played its own role in this state of affairs.
Russia is not unfamiliar to this pattern of not heeding the demands of the times. Before the Tsarist regime was swept away in the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had failed to follow Western Europe in the exploits of the new capitalist order and instead kept its peasant and workers in a state of serfdom. In the 1980s when the Western economies were reforming their inner workings and putting the foundations of a new global economic order, the Soviet regime failed to heed China’s bold switch to the market economy while retaining its communist system.
It seems to me Putin is falling into the same trap. Unwilling to tolerate a more open and democratic society and tethered to business oligarchs he prefers to align himself with like- minded leaders like Syria’s Assad, Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko. But in the crucial European periphery Russia has seen its old parts and allies to turn toward western-style democracy. It is useful to note that Belarus and Ukraine along with Russia were the initial constituent members of the Soviet Union. It is plausible, therefore, to argue that after facing the very real possibility of losing Belarus to a pro-western opposition, Putin decided to rather not face this possibility in Ukraine, even if this meant a devastating war.
My argument, therefore, is that the persistent clinging of the Russian national narrative to the notion of an imperial nationalism and the inability of successive Russian regimes to adjust to a changing world may better explain the war against Ukraine than any serious disturbance of the military or economic parity.
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