: The Russian Grand Strategy Guiding the Invasion of Ukraine #WorldNEWS We have been living in a golden age, what scholars of international relations call the “Long Peace. ” Since 1945, the

The Russian Grand Strategy Guiding the Invasion of Ukraine #WorldNEWS
We have been living in a golden age, what scholars of international relations call the “Long Peace. ” Since 1945, the world has fought astonishingly few interstate wars, and no total wars—where all restraint goes out of the window and every available weapon is used—at all.
In a way, this is surprising. As far back as historians can look, every major shift in the balance of wealth and power has set off massive violence—and we are currently living through the biggest, fastest shift of all time. In 1950, 3 of the world’s 4 richest countries were Western and just 1 was Asian; in 2022, 3 are Asian and just 1 Western. This is the mother of all shifts.
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But in another way, the Long Peace is not surprising at all. “War,” Clausewitz famously said, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means. ” Governments go to war when they think force will achieve their policy goals; they do not go to war when they think it will bring disaster. The threat of nuclear weapons since 1945 and of overwhelming American economic and conventional military superiority since 1989 have, so far, raised the costs of war so high that few governments ever want to pay them.
Yet interstate disputes persist, and so governments have found new ways to win them. Hence Ukraine. In the last 400 years, Polish, Swedish, French, and (twice) German armies have threatened or captured Moscow. Vladimir Putin was being perfectly serious in 2005 when he called the collapse of the Soviet Union, which pushed Russia’s front line 800 miles east from the Elbe, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. ” For 30 years, rolling the frontier back westward has been one of Russia’s top strategic priorities.
But with jaw-jaw not getting what he wanted and war-war looking far too alarming, Putin spent the first 13 years after his “peace enforcement” attack on Georgia in 2008 making war on his neighbors, yet not; invading them, yet not. “Ukraine,” he insisted in 2008, “is not even a state,” because Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. ” By this logic, his 2014 decisions to annex Crimea and support violent separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region constituted neither war nor an invasion. As late as February 21, 2022, he still seemed to be working from the same script when he announced that Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions were in fact independent countries. By firing rockets at Kyiv, shelling Kharkiv, and sending tens of thousands of troops across Ukraine’s borders, he was just being a good neighbor, helping the new statelets keep the peace and “de-Nazifying” Ukraine’s elected government.

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