

I get where youāre coming from, and I think youāre right that geopolitics isnāt driven by morality. But saying that morality āmatters very littleā is different from saying it doesnāt matter at all. Leaders donāt operate in a vacuum, but they also arenāt just passive reflections of material conditions. They make choicesāsometimes bad ones, sometimes catastrophic onesāand those choices have consequences beyond the abstract forces of history.
The chain of cause and effect youāre talking about is real, but it doesnāt eliminate agency. If it did, thereād be no point in trying to influence anything, because everything would already be preordained by material processes. Thatās not how history actually plays out. Leaders make decisions within constraints, but they still make them. The idea that Russia had no other choice but to invade Ukraine ignores the fact that plenty of other post-Soviet states also experienced economic and political instability, yet Russia didnāt invade them all. Why? Because it wasnāt just about abstract āmaterial processesāāit was about specific decisions made by people with power.
Youāre also implying that NATOās role in this is straightforwardly imperialist, which oversimplifies the situation. NATO is a military alliance, and yes, it serves Western interests. But Ukraine wasnāt āforcedā into NATOās orbitāit actively sought security guarantees after watching what happened in Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas. If weāre doing a materialist analysis, Ukraineās desire to align with NATO is as much a material reality as Russiaās desire to stop it. So why treat one as natural and the other as Western manipulation?
I donāt think we disagree that material conditions shape conflicts. But I do think dismissing leadership choices as secondary, or treating NATO as the sole driver of the conflict, is just as much of a simplification as ignoring material conditions entirely. The best analysisāwhether practical or historicalāaccounts for both.
Everytime I see this guy, this is all I can think of.