Ukraine - A mad and bad dictator invaded! But is that really all there is to say?

An economic warfare perspective

You don’t have to like Putin or in any way try to defend his invasion of Ukraine to ask if there are other elements to the genesis of this war that are worth looking at. But it’s not easy. Putin is a dictator and if he’s not mad then he’s certainly bad. He sits at the top of a brutal regime which routinely murders those who oppose it. So it certainly could be that one day this dictator said to his generals, ‘ I don’t like these uppity Ukrainians. Let’s invade, teach them a lesson and rebuild our empire.’ And of course it casts us in a delightful light.

There we all were, the Ukrainians and us, all peacefully minding our own business when the Russians invaded. The problem with that sentence is not the ‘invaded’ part - Russia did invade - certainly no Ukrainian invaded any part of Russia - no, the problem is with the ‘minding our own business’ part. Because that gets into murky arguments about what is ‘our own business’ and what is us meddling in stuff which isn’t really our business. The West, by which I mean the USA and Western Europe, has a history - in recent times more of a history that Russia does - of drawing the boundary of what we consider ‘our business’ very broadly indeed.

And events in Ukraine are horribly mixed up with the international sale of natural gas, as they are also in Syria. America in particular has a history of regarding who sells oil and gas to whom and in what currencies as very much ‘their business’. America has made it very clear that it does not want Russia selling gas to Europe because Russia would then have some political leverage in Europe. Which is of course true. Any trade between countries automatically brings with it entanglements, dependancies and leverage. The irony is that it has been one of the main arguments for global free trade, that by making nations dependent on each other, globalisation makes the world a safer place. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have read that.

But it seems this is either not in fact true or, it might be true but when it comes to Russia selling gas to Europe, global free trade clashes with American strategic interests and then, global free trade be damned. Either way I start to think that ‘Putin the mad invader’ narrative, while still true is only part of the answer, not all of it.

And then there is the same point we made when we were discussing Israel and Gaza - the ‘when do you start your analysis’ question. Start it the day Russia invades and its black and white. Start a little earlier, say around 2008-ish and it gets less black and white, more morally uncomfortable, less idealistic and more realpolitik.

My view has been and is that it is better to see the War in Ukraine as the northern front in what I would call the Great Gas War. Syria is its southern front. Such a view is not to make excuses, let alone be on the side of either Putin or the Assad regime, but it is to say that there are questions to be asked about why we are involved in armed conflicts in those two countries.

Ukraine - A mad and bad dictator invaded! But is that really all there is to say?