Something weird is happening in the world right now.
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
If you take Vladimir Putin’s at his word—and
I know that’s a difficult to do—Russia did this because
Ukraine might have joined NATO otherwise,
and Russia has a core interest in limiting NATO expansion.
Yet on May 12, Finland’s prime minister and president announced
their intent to join NATO—precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine.
And just four days later, Sweden made the same announcement.
Russia’s alleged worst nightmare—NATO encirclement—is coming to fruition.
How could this have backfired for Putin so badly?
To better understand what is going on here, it will help to go back in time.
On April 7, 1954, President Dwight D Eisenhower introduced what became
one of the defining policies of the Cold War era.
Asked about the growing tensions in Vietnam and France’s struggles there, Eisenhower said that
“you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call
the "falling domino" principle.
You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one,
and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”
Thus, if Vietnam failed, then Laos would fall to communism, then it would Cambodia, then Thailand,
then Malaysia, after that Indonesia, and then it would spread to the Philippines, India,
Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and the rest of the world.
The theory turned real for Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy. Believing that Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev saw him as weak, Kennedy remarked that
"We have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place."
In other words, if the U.S. failed to intervene in Vietnam,
the Soviet Union might challenge U.S. interests elsewhere.
War in Vietnam was an opportunity to nip the problem in the bud.
This type of argument is commonplace.
It’s one of the reasons critics cite for why the US should not have withdrawn from Afghanistan.
It’s why Margaret Thatcher felt the need to fight over the Falklands
to protect the United Kingdom’s remaining imperial remnants.
It’s why central governments are loathe to give concessions to separatists
when more separatists wait in the wings.
It’s also why chain stores declare price wars when competitors enter a local market.
Or why the European Union wanted to hammer the United Kingdom during Brexit.
And it appears that Vladimir Putin is a subscriber to the theory.
If one domino falls into NATO, more will fall in line afterward.
To see Putin’s response in action, let’s go back to the summer of 2008.
After watching more and more former Soviet bloc countries join NATO,
Russia decided to draw a line in the sand.
With Georgia making overtures to the alliance,
Russia invaded on behalf of a couple of separatist regions.
Today, we are witnessing history repeat itself. Another former Soviet bloc country, another NATO
overture, another invasion, and another warning to countries thinking about doing the same.
The difference here is that now Finland does not seem to care,
and neither does Sweden.
You see, reputation isn’t everything. Like any other armed conflict,
wars meant to establish a reputation for toughness come at a hidden cost.
Fighting wars results in the death and destruction of your own military assets—assets
you could be using to coerce your next opponent.
Fight too much, and you will no longer have the ability to coerce your enemies,
reputation be damned.
This was the failure of the Spanish Habsburg Empire under Prime Minister Gaspar de Guzman,
who treated every challenge to the empire as a fundamental threat to their reputation.
Following that philosophy, Guzman fought wars against Bohemian rebels,
Then turned to the Dutch Republic,
Then meddled in Mantua,
And capped it off with conflicts with England and France.
But rather than deter future conflict, these wars drained
the Spanish Empire’s coffers. As a result, they began facing challenges internally:
First in Catalonia and Portugal in 1640
And then in Naples and Sicily seven years later.
To better ground the tradeoff, consider how separatists in Portugal
might think about coercing the Spanish empire.
The most Portugal could extract depended on what Spain estimated it could earn from war.
This has two components: Spain’s ability to win, and how Spain internalizes the costs of war.
Imagine that this white line represents what Spain expected to win by fighting.
To the left is Portugal.
And to the right is Spain.
Meanwhile, the area between the white line and this red line represents how Spain
internalizes the cost of lost soldiers, financial expenses,
and so forth, converted to square kilometers of territory.
Thus, the most Portugal could take from Spain is up to the red line.
Domino theory is focused on conveying that you internalize the costs of war at a low rate.
Thus, even if the original red line captured Spain’s true costs,
this new red line is what Spain might want to try to convince Portugal is true.
In turn, Portugal might take less from Spain to avoid triggering a war.
But fighting to convey resolve also reduces your ability to win future wars,
which shifts the red line back toward Spain.
If the power loss is bigger than the reputation benefit, then you shouldn’t fight.
This is the strategy Great Britain adopted
toward the end of the 19th Century.
In 1895, Venezuela and Great Britain got in a dispute over an area with gold deposits.
The United States under Grover Cleveland demanded that Britain respect
the original 1835 border or face an intervention. Britain complied.
The reason was that Britain wanted to reserve
their military strength for more important matters.
Three years later, those important matters surfaced.
France challenged Britain over Fashoda, an important strategic position along the Nile River.
Britain stood firm—something that would have been difficult to do
if it were also fighting a war in the Americas. France backed down.
Indeed, once you factor in the potential loss of power, it’s possible that the most resolved types
of a state would want to not fight. That way, they save their strength for the more important battle.
In that case, less resolved states can stay out while still maintaining face.
After all, doing so mimics what the most resolved types would do on their own.
And that takes us to Putin’s miscalculation today.
Putin thought he could bully Ukraine and send a message to the rest of the world.
Any other potential NATO partners could look at Georgia in 2008
or Ukraine right now and conclude that pivoting toward NATO is just
not worth the trouble. Except the war has proven to be a strategic nightmare.
The Kyiv feint failed to bait Ukraine into making itself vulnerable elsewhere in the
country. Russia has made small gains in the east and built a land bridge to Crimea.
But now they are facing Ukrainian counterattacks. With trouble managing their supply lines,
it is unclear whether Russia will be able to maintain those gains for the long term.
Putin’s message has been sent loud and clear: he does not want more states joining NATO,
and he is willing to pay a high price to stop it. Classic domino theory stuff.
But the mess in Ukraine appears to be gaining shades of the Soviet war
in Afghanistan from the 1980s.
Putin might not want Finland to join NATO, but the invasion of Ukraine has been draining enough
that there may be little that Russia can do to counteract it.
Except perhaps turn off Finland’s lights. But that’s not much of a deterrent.
There is a second problem that should keep Putin up at night,
though it will be a while before we can observe how much it might affect Russia.
At the end of World War II, the United States knew
that its marriage of convenience with the Soviet Union was going to come to an end.
They also knew that the Soviet Union was working on a nuclear weapon.
If ever there were a time to eliminate Stalin,
this was it. But there just wasn’t any domestic interest in fighting back-to-back conflicts.
Harry Truman wanted to keep the U.S. war-ready, but his policies got the
Democratic Party smoked in the 1946 midterm elections. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom,
Winston Churchill was interested in the same thing.
Yet voters dumped him for Clement Attlee even before victory in Japan.
This phenomenon is known as war exhaustion. And it is the long-term bane of fighting for reputation.
You fight so hard to establish that reputation
that, by the end, you no longer have the stomach to do it elsewhere.
For example, the United States lost so many lives and so much political capital in Vietnam
that more large-scale entanglements became politically untenable.
It even led Saddam Hussein to think that he could get away with invading Kuwait.
“[W]hat will [the Americans] do if they engage in a fight?” He once asked his advisors.
“All they can do is bring their airplanes and start bombing: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
(Saddam really liked his booms.)
So what? Nothing will happen.”
The irony here is fantastic. The U.S. fought a war in Vietnam to establish a reputation that might
deter future challengers. Yet the fighting in Vietnam directly caused deterrence failure here.
Turning back to today, if the war lasts indefinitely,
it’s possible Russian citizens will lose their willingness to continue in foreign entanglements
regardless of the country’s capacity to do so.
That’s basically how the Soviet war in Afghanistan ended.
At that point, the NATO floodgates will only open up further.
It’s not just Finland
It’s not just Sweden
But it’s also potentially Georgia
And Ukraine. And seemingly less likely countries
like Austria
Or Moldova.
In short, fighting to build a reputation comes with some underappreciated downside risks,
as Putin is currently learning.
I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you did,
please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.