Who's Next? & Other Fallacies

Russia is not two years away from invading the Baltics, no matter which expert baselessly asserts it.

European politicians and commentators are obsessed with the idea that Russia will attack again. Every few months there are headlines about a new expert who predicts that Russia will attack one of the Baltic states two years from now, or two years after the war in Ukraine is over. History does not suggest that is true. Russia has not attacked NATO members, only prospective members, and since the fall of the Soviet Union Russia has attacked Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine in 2022. Both the suggested timeline and the target for a new Russia war do not line up with how Russia has acted in the past. Why do newspapers keep printing these warnings, and are they realistic?

The first question is simple to answer, it is because such a warning is dramatic and likely to sell papers and get clicks. Not to say that they are clickbait, there is always a real expert to quote, and there is news value in that perspective. But there is also a political point to alarm about further Russian aggression from the European military establishment. As I have detailed ad nauseum on the blog, NATO is essentially rudderless in the 21st century as there is no USSR to stand united against. By making alarming claims about which country is next on Putin’s list, and when that war is likely to break out institutionally pro-NATO militaries and think tanks are trying to construct modern Russia as the same level of threat as the old USSR was.

If NATO has no common enemy then it has no reason to exist, and if there is no NATO then most European countries have to throw out up to 75 years worth of strategy and institutional knowledge. Furthermore, if NATO goes kaput then countries will have to start worrying about each other again, and if your neighbour is a potential military threat then a common currency, customs union, and free movement of capital and people becomes a risk. Now suddenly, the EU might also be endangered. Much simpler to just dress up Russia to fill the USSRs shoes.

In reality though, Russia is not an existential threat to Europe, and especially not to Western and Southern Europe. Current military technology favours the defender which has meant that the much more populous and richer Russia has had serious issues conquering its smaller neighbour despite Ukraine’s lack of defensible terrain. At the current pace it would take Russia until 2048 to get to Kyiv, and it would be next millennium by the time Madrid or London falls.

Russia will not undertake a string of wars of conquest for the simple reason that the defender’s advantage makes that unrealistic. If military technology makes a leap which makes modern state on state conflict more like the manouever warfare of world war two than the trench warfare of world war one then anxieties about future aggression are warranted, but until then we should not be worried.

I also think that Russia will not have to declare another special military operation next time it wants to dominate a weaker neighbour. As I wrote in a post trying to grapple with why Putin invaded, having a long and bloody war only bolsters Russia’s reputation. Putin is crazy enough to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his citizens’ lives for what Marko Papic calls the “West Virginia of Europe”. There are millions of Russians and Ukrainians to vouch for his callous bloodthirst. Do you really want to call his bluff? Or would you rather back down and give him what he wants?

I don’t write this to trivialise the military threat from Russia, it is a Great Power and it will have a lot of say in the future of Eastern Europe because of that. It could win an existential war with any one of the European states and has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is clearly dangerous. But it is not irrational, and the world has been proven to work differently to how European leaders thought it did since Russia invaded Ukraine. The response should be to see the world as it is and not to simply use old models long since outdated as crutches and analytical shortcuts. The Cold War has been over for decades, and recognising that fact is long overdue for European militaries and think tanks.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about Zelenksy's White House meeting here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

---

I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

---

Cover photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson