Where do reason and interest stand in this war?

The process that began with Russia’s attempt to invade Ukraine once again brings to light a nature of international relations that is usually covered over by certain myths. In international relations it is thought that all the actions of the parties are directed by strong calculation, rationality, reason and reality. In a situation in which everyone makes a rational and realistic calculation, many matters would in fact be settled without any need for war. Countries have interests, and in some cases these interests arise from the sharing of resources in common with close neighbors. When greed is set aside and agreement is reached through a fair division, one behaves in a far more rational way for a more lasting peace in the long run. Yet here the critical concept is precisely greed, and where there is greed, rationality is put out of action: power, national honor and national excitements come into play and provoke an irrational superiority toward the other nation. This gives rise to international crises and continually feeds them.

In international relations reason of course is never entirely put out of action, but what is decisive is often feelings, characters, personalities. Just as the cultural characters of some countries can be decisive, the personalities who govern those countries also contribute much to that cultural character or take much from it. There is also no straightforward account of what they give and take, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

What we see in Russia’s attack on Ukraine too is, rather than the rational attitude of nations and peoples, irrational, cultural, emotional actions, and, contrary to what was supposed, an incredible unpreparedness and even disarray in the face of this event.

There is an unpreparedness against what is happening that is no less than what was encountered during the pandemic. The approach displayed toward the wave of migration coming from Ukraine is relatively much better than that displayed toward Syrian migrants, because it is approached not rationally but emotionally-racially, and the migrants are approached with somewhat more empathy. This reveals an immensely emotional side behind Europe’s super-rational existence.

Since in this event Russia took the first step that no one would have calculated, Russia could be expected to act more rationally and with more calculation. Even what has happened up to now shows that whatever calculation Russia made at home, this calculation hardly matches the one in the market. That it met a resistance it did not expect at all in Ukraine, and that, with the occupation it thought to finish in a few days now approaching a month, the prospect of its conclusion is still not in sight, is a clear sign that its calculation was not very correct. Moreover, as the war drags on, the costs it incurs for Russia increase further.

Putin assumed a people in Ukraine who would greet his occupation with celebrations as in the US occupation of Iraq. Not even his own supporters, whom he had prepared and backed beforehand, could give this support, and the Ukrainian people as a whole went into resistance against such an occupation with an understanding of mobilization. On the contrary, the occupation brought into being, consolidated and nourished a Ukrainian identity that Russia had not hoped for at all. Russia’s strongest argument and pretext for the occupation, the claim that there is no independent Ukrainian identity, has thus collapsed because of this occupation. Going to Kyiv for rice, it lost the bulgur at home.

Now there is a Ukrainian people and identity fighting a life-and-death struggle before the eyes of the whole world. National identities, after all, form, take shape and are created in history, and none of them lasts forever. In today’s reality, whatever its origin, there is a people and nation called Ukraine, and Russia’s occupation completes the process that would practically require registering this nation’s existence.

It is very likely that the Russian war machine, disappointed and even more enraged in the face of this sociological reality, will do even more harmful things out of this rage. Everything it does acting out of anger will have harmed itself all the more. It has already become thoroughly isolated in the whole world. The sanctions that have been set in motion are encircling it tightly and dragging it once again toward a great closure, as in the Soviet era. The first great closure was likewise lived under the conditions of that day and produced its own balance. Yet it is certain that such a closure, if lived today, would be far from sustainable for Russia. Russia has a dynamic people that has attained middle-class comfort. In the early period it may support the process out of love of unity and solidarity, following Putin’s charisma and the national pride he has provoked, but the capacity of this kind of national-heroism discourse to carry such adventures is limited.

In fact, in this process, President recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has shown to all and sundry that he is the leader who knows best what he is doing and manages the process best with his experience and common sense, had already foreseen it in mid-January and expressed it openly. Stating openly at that time that he did not regard Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a realistic approach, Erdoğan had calculated that Russia’s taking such a step in the current situation would harm itself as much as Ukraine, indeed more than it. By setting out this realistic calculation in all its dimensions, he had warned Russia not to take such a step.

Can we think that Putin did not see what Erdoğan saw? What has happened shows that he may very well fail to see this obvious reality before his eyes.

After all, international relations are only another level of relations among people. And this level is not entirely exempt from the nature of relations among people. Feelings, touchiness, national pride, excitement, arrogance, covetousness, and heedlessness and error.

At this level everyone acts in keeping with their own character. Europe acts in keeping with its own character, so do the US and Russia, and of course Turkey.

At the end of the day, every comparison to be made shows that the actor in this process that is the most level-headed, the cleverest and that keeps open and alive a channel that can lead from the war to a solution in favor of the whole world is Turkey.