Russian strongman Vladimir Putin finally did it, launching a full-scale assault on Ukraine from three directions, along with missile attacks on airbases throughout the nation and cyberattacks on its infrastructure.
Particularly in our modern age, wars of aggression rarely work out well for the aggressor. Conflicts escalate, drag in additional nations, new factions arise, and things generally spiral far out of control. Where the aggressor saw — and thought they could get — a quick a decisive conflict,
Germany tried to conquer Europe twice in the first half of the 20th Century, and the Germany of 1945 was a lot smaller — and less powerful — than the Germany of 1900.
Just sayin’.
So why did Putin give the order to do the thing I honestly thought he wouldn’t do — and how do I (and the rest of the world) avoid making a similar miscalculation in the future?
I didn’t entirely discount Putin starting a war. Last month I noted for PJ Media readers that Russia had sortied six amphibious assault ships — a significant fraction of Russian naval power. That flotilla posed a direct threat to Ukraine’s major port at Odessa, and I’ve seen at least one report (who knows, at this early stage, if it’s true) that Russian troops have indeed landed there.
“That’s the major reason why a full-scale Russia vs. Ukraine war suddenly looks more likely than ever,” I wrote back then.
Still, I figured that most likely, Putin was bluffing, merely trying to destabilize Ukraine.
The late, great historian Donald Kagan might have known better.
In his must-read 1995 book, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Kagan agreed with Thucydides (the ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War) that wars are almost always begun over “honor, fear, and interest.”
Everyone understands fear and interest, but honor — maybe better understood as prestige — is often underappreciated as a cause for war.
Honor drove the decision for Athens to go to war with the Spartan League in the Peloponnesian War that would eventually destroy Greek power. Honor drove Britain’s decision to go to war in 1914, making a continental war into a truly global conflict — one Europe has yet to fully recover from and seemingly never will.
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Honor might be what drove Putin to start the largest war Europe has seen since 1945, and his reckless decision could cost Russia — and the world — greatly.
Russian honor, it seems obvious now in retrospect, was on the line in Ukraine.
As I’ve written often here at VodkaPundit, when the Soviet Union ceased to be in 1991, NATO should have thrown the world’s biggest victory party — enough drunken revelry to cover two continents. The next day, NATO should have dissolved itself. We’d have maintained strong diplomatic and military ties with our friends in Western Europe, but a defensive alliance with no one to defend itself from is a contradiction in terms.
But NATO endured and, like any bureaucratic machine, relentlessly expanded right up to (and in the Baltic States, inside of) the borders of the old Soviet Union.
We fed right into Russia’s age-old paranoia.
Ill-considered as NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was, dangling NATO membership in front of Ukraine — a birthplace of Russian culture — was a serious blow to Russia’s national honor.
Let’s be clear about something, though.
Just because a nation’s honor is at stake, or perceived to be at stake, doesn’t necessarily make them the good guys or provide a genuinely honorable reason to launch a war of aggression. Putin is a thug and a kleptocrat with decades of bullying and aggression toward’s Russia’s neighbors.
But the West in general, and this country in particular, failed to take into account — despite one historical example after another — the tiny, war-inducing matter of national pride.
In looking at how wars start, always take at least one long glance at how honor plays a role. In looking at how to avoid a war, look at how even your diplomatic actions might offend the other country’s honor.
The West failed to do that, and now war has come to Europe again.
