EP170 · Society · first published 2023-01-15
The Realism of War and Mearsheimer | Mika Aaltola | Neuvottelija 170
Mika Aaltola, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, recounts the first year of the war in Ukraine in diary form and assesses where his own forecasts landed and where they missed. At the centre of the discussion is structural realism and Mearsheimer's sphere-of-influence thinking, which from a small state's point of view is bleak and historically a poor predictor of stability. Aaltola also opens up the dynamics of Finland's NATO process, how Washington's messages should be read, and why public opinion turned before the political leadership. He treats Russia's strategic culture as a durable structure and forecasts that the war will end in a frozen conflict rather than a peace treaty. Published 8 January 2023.
The Realism of War and Mearsheimer | Mika Aaltola
Summary: In episode 170 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Mika Aaltola, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, about his diary book on the first year of the war in Ukraine. The views are the guest’s own, and the forecasts at the end were made in January 2023. Published 8 January 2023.
The diary form and the trap of hindsight
The episode opens with a question of method, and it is worth reading before anything else. Miettinen asks how much of Aaltola’s time goes to confidential background events, and whether they differ fundamentally from public appearances.
Aaltola’s answer separates two things: confidential information is a category of its own, but private conversations are always a source of ideas. Revealing sources and meetings is neither virtuous nor his style — which is why the book contains no scandalous elements, no phone calls, no accounts of who rang whom. “A human being is a herd animal, so who you talk to does affect your own ideas about the world quite a lot.”
From this comes the episode’s governing ethical principle: only a forecast given in advance is worth anything; one rewritten afterwards is nonsense. Aaltola concedes the danger about himself:
“Any opinion I have stated in year X or Y can be made to fit the claim that I really meant this — even when the aim was clearly a bit off, and whose would not be. Hindsight justifications are generally always a sign that something went wrong.”
He does not condemn explaining after the fact, but adds a human caveat: “sometimes one stands naked before others, and sometimes one is fallible.”
Kyiv did not fall — and that changed everything
The first point where Aaltola judges his own forecast to have missed is the start of the war. He was broadly in agreement with American intelligence sources: the fight would be very hard, Russia’s military superiority massive — Russia had been ranked the world’s second strongest armed force the previous year. “I thought Kyiv would fall, but it did not.”
And he turns that into the episode’s key counterfactual: had Kyiv fallen, matters in the Baltic Sea region would now be far more oppressive. The worst scenario would have started, dominoes would have begun to fall, and Finland’s mood would be far more nervous. As it is, that mood has “woken up and is quite determined”: NATO membership has been sought, the invitation received, and the last ratifications awaited from Budapest and Ankara.
From Hostomel airport he draws a point about information warfare whose substance lies in the choice of imagery: Ukraine is a generation ahead of Russia in information warfare. The massive battles fought north of Kyiv barely appear in pictures at all — what has been seen is civil defence. That has been a deliberate choice:
“When grandmothers are making Molotov cocktails on the streets of Kyiv, that depicts Ukraine’s resistance far better than massive battles a few kilometres to the north.”
The researcher’s duty and controlling escalation
Miettinen recalls the war’s first day, when Aaltola was on television from the morning taking a hard line. In Aaltola’s view a researcher’s ethical duty when war breaks out is to prepare people for what lies ahead — and that is not reciting dates or pointing at front lines with a stick, but describing what war is as a phenomenon and how easily it spreads.
The whole year was, he says, also a struggle over the control of escalation. The price is that Ukrainians have to fight under the cover Western aid affords, but attention rests on how the war can be stopped and Russia bound. The United States consistently sought not to supply overly effective weapons, raising the level gradually so Russia would not react violently somewhere else.
How Washington’s message should be read
On the NATO process the episode stages a concrete dispute over interpretation. Miettinen cites Risto E. J. Penttilä’s book The Long Road to NATO and the claim, from an anonymous source, that the United States was strongly against Finland’s membership when President Niinistö travelled to Washington — that it was not the moment to escalate.
Aaltola disagrees, and his argument is structural. The American alliance system rests on partners who look after themselves and are armed to an appropriate level, so that the United States need not come to the rescue constantly. Hence the central message to Finland and Sweden was:
“If you want into NATO, you will get in — but you must signal it enormously strongly, because the unwilling are not taken in.”
At first that could look like a rebuff. In Aaltola’s view Biden’s speech after the meeting was quite clear — Finland’s and Sweden’s desire was a feather in his cap. The correct interpretation was therefore that the United States wanted the applicants to run the process internally and not walk into Russia’s propaganda trap, according to which the United States manipulates and lures nations into NATO. “That is not in America’s interest at all.”
And in his view Finland’s foreign policy leadership read it correctly.
Public opinion had already shifted, sharply. The explanation lies in imagery: the war’s pictures were “one to one with the central events and images of Finnish strategic culture”, so Finns understood immediately what was at stake.
Among the alternatives Aaltola also raises the “Nordic bastion”, an idea that spread in spring 2022. It fell on a practical calculation: “creating something new is always harder than joining something old” — a new security arrangement would have taken longer than NATO accession. And the third option, standing still, would have meant implicit acceptance of Russia’s ultimatums, which included sphere-of-influence thinking.
Mearsheimer and the problem with structural realism
This leads to the episode’s title theme, and Aaltola’s treatment is precise.
First the definition: realism comes in many varieties — classical and structural. Among the structural schools, Mearsheimer represents the view that, to avoid wars, the areas between the poles — the great powers — must be arranged so that their spheres of interest do not collide.
Then the criticism, in three parts:
- From a small state’s perspective it is bleak, because it would place Finland too in Russia’s sphere.
- Sphere-of-influence agreements are historically omens of a coming war. “Not many months or years passed before war broke out.”
- It has not worked at any historical stage. The model sounds pretty — rather like the colonial divisions of the 16th and 17th centuries, which brought a certain period of stability — but they ended in great power wars, because greed grows and great powers rise and fall. “Europe has fought two world wars.”
In Ukraine’s case he brings the abstraction down to specifics: Ukraine is not small — it is Europe’s largest state by area apart from Russia, with tens of millions of people. “Sacrificing it on the strength of Mearsheimer’s elegant abstraction would be giving the devil your little finger.”
The conclusion is normative: “We do not want great power divisions that take from free nations the right to decide their own affairs.”
The clock speed of strategic culture
Miettinen’s question is a good one: if Russia’s strategic culture is strong and slow-moving and Germany carries great inertia, why did Finland change course so fast?
Aaltola answers that speed is a small country’s basic virtue: you have to sense the moment. “Machiavelli advised that a small state in particular must know how to seize the moment.” The more you hesitate, the more surely the optimal moment is lost.
Finnish foreign policy has, in his account, rested on the idea that you do what works — and small countries always have their own problem about how long they will exist. “We have not been occupied; we have not disappeared from the ranks of independent states.”
Of the Cold War he offers a reading that is the episode’s most interesting historical revision: it was an attempt to occupy the westernmost possible position. The Soviet Union never recognised Finland’s neutrality, but Finland considered itself neutral — the differing conceptions of Finland’s status created room for manoeuvre. The westernmost possible position has meant connection to world markets, democracy and a free market economy, and those have been forms of protection too.
“Living in the bear’s armpit has required skill. Now that the bear is awake and irritable, it also requires deterrence.”
Russia’s strategic culture: a structure, not a fate
Miettinen refers to his earlier episode with Martti J. Kari and Kari’s theory of Russian strategic culture — the siloviki, the oligarchs, the tsar and the population’s survival mentality — which, explained structurally, gains analytical credibility.
Aaltola’s answer begins with a normative caveat that matters: nobody is condemned to a role, Russia included. It is not carved in stone.
But the durable trait is the drive to expand — “along the rivers towards the sea” — grounded in its own experiences: the Mongol conquests, Napoleon, Hitler. These have created a conception in which expansion is a form of defence and Russia has been treated unjustly. That is a cornerstone of Russian strategic culture.
The basic message for this generation is, in his view, clear: one should not expect Russia to change quickly in a positive direction — the opposite of what we told ourselves.
From that he poses a question he does not answer with certainty: did Russia ever genuinely intend to fulfil its promises of a transition to democracy, respect for international law and for neighbours — or were those fine words while Russia was weak? In the siloviki’s minds the expansionist drive may have been present already under Yeltsin.
On the present he is direct: Putin experiences himself as fighting the West, not Ukraine, and as defending Russia. “We know this is nonsense, but the Russian reading through their own lenses may to some degree be genuine thinking” — and to some degree wholly propagandistic, fed to the rest of the world.
Of China he draws a parallel: the same narrative of humiliation, the Middle Kingdom whose rightful place must be reclaimed. Miettinen sums it up: humiliation cuts through both of these expansion-minded strategic histories. Aaltola adds the geostrategic background — China was detached from the Soviet Union and bound into the emerging global economy, producing the model of globalisation: production moved to China, inflation fell, and a period of stable world economy followed. Now it appears in the United States as fear, and as tension over whether China will let Russia lose the war — while we here think we will not let Ukraine lose.
War psychosis, demonisation and carnival
Miettinen says he ended up in a Twitter argument about “war psychosis” and defends the view that people like Sofi Oksanen, who spent decades on the wrong side of the official truth about the Baltics, may cheerfully write greetings on Ukrainian artillery shells.
Aaltola is unmoved by the debate itself: the carnivalisation of war is armchair idleness, in which war is read as a theatre performance or an aesthetic experience. He concedes that war has always carried cultural features — bugles, flags, drumbeats, notions of what is fitting — and that a rule-bound society looks for propriety.
On demonisation his analysis is structural and separates two systems:
- In democracies, seeing the enemy as evil often happens only once genocides have been noticed and persecution is present. The word “evil” needs no religious content: it is harmful, and the human heart shrinks from harm.
- In more autocratic systems, persecution, genocide and violations of international law are warfighting tactics. Russia demonised Ukraine before the war, because that is necessary if brutal tactics are to be used.
And he adds why the reaction shows up in citizens’ acts: the West has declared itself neutral — Finland is not a party to the war, nor is the United States. “In this situation civil societies react, because states do not, because the risk of escalation is too great.”
His own emphasis lies elsewhere: “I would rather not approach war as art criticism, but concentrate on the fact that people are dying and people’s ordinary lives are being destroyed.” Carnival is such a marginal nuance that it does not deserve many news cycles.
The limits of arms deliveries
Miettinen notes that although the principle was to hold to the pre-invasion level, in practice deliveries have escalated a great deal: from humanitarian aid to light weapons, then Himars and Patriot systems, and now the discussion is about Leopard main battle tanks.
Aaltola begins from doctrine: Kissinger’s dictum that when a nuclear power attacks, others must give way — the attacking nuclear power sets the rules of the war. “But what happened here is that Russia decides ever less about the rules.” Ukraine’s agency has grown, and emboldened by it the West has supplied more effective weapons.
The current line, he says, is precise: air defence systems are supplied, but not systems that would enable strikes on the Russian sites from which the missiles are fired. It is fine tuning, feeling out how Russia reacts to this or that — but the main rule is clear: “if the aim is that Russia’s unjust war ends badly, then weapons that work must be sent.”
Forecast: a freeze, not a peace treaty
On the war’s course Aaltola offers two forecasts in January 2023.
The first is optimistic: during the year Ukraine will be able to take territory back and perhaps begin reconstruction in some parts of the country.
The second is grim, and it is the episode’s headline forecast. Russia will not yield easily, because the war and its justification sit deep in the body of the Russian state: it is a holy war for Mother Russia’s aims, and Ukrainians have been dehumanised.
“The war will most likely not end in a peace treaty but in the freezing of the conflict: it will be fought in certain parts of Ukraine, and both sides will be exhausted enough that neither can nor wants to go on — and can no longer manage large victories.”
He adds that freezing is also a Russian way of handling such things: the principle is never conceded, the conflicts simply never end.
Miettinen tests the forecast with a scenario from his negotiation training: Ukraine would accept peace by ceding Crimea but would receive Donetsk and Luhansk and the whole Black Sea strip, with sanctions beginning to unwind. Russia’s minimum position would be a Black Sea presence via, say, the Sevastopol naval base.
Aaltola’s answer has two parts. Great powers do withdraw — the United States left Vietnam after heavy losses — and a great power is wise to withdraw so as not to lose its great power status. But something worse is happening to Russia: it is creating a peer adversary on its own border. The Ukraine that emerges will be able to fight Russia one on one, and that changes the geostrategic setting of the whole of Europe. Russia’s original aim was the opposite: the Finlandisation of Ukraine, with Russia deciding Ukraine’s foreign policy through puppet administrations.
On the timing of negotiations he offers the episode’s clearest principle: not everything is negotiable. “It was rather hard to negotiate with al-Qaeda. Worldviews do not meet, and war is so sacred to certain actors that they will not give it up until they are destroyed.” From which follows a warning about a Finnish habit of mind:
“Two monologues in the same room are not a dialogue. In Finland we have often fallen into the trap of thinking dialogue is always good.”
Negotiating is worthwhile only when the time is ripe — and Russia is not yet overstretched and over-tired.
Deterrence returns to the Finnish vocabulary
The consequence of a frozen conflict for Finland is, in Aaltola’s view, that deterrence on the eastern border becomes an ever more defining feature — as it has not been for decades. And deterrence in his definition has two sides: not only the ability to prevent an incursion, but the ability to strike back.
About Finland’s own strategic culture he is defensive here. Finland has composure, national capability and a functioning defence, which allows calmer language: “We do not need to shout, because matters are in our own hands.” Nor need Finland adopt a Baltic way of thinking about Russia — and de facto NATO membership adds elements so that “we can sleep our nights in peace.”
One thing, though, is no longer hushed: Russia is an expansionist actor, and that can be said out loud. “There is no need to colour-code these things any more.”
Miettinen adds his own self-criticism: the Balts were laughed at, and they were right — Finland should probably have done as they did.
Europe: Poland, Britain, France
On Europe’s internal setting Miettinen says he has gained respect for Poland and the Baltics — there is hard realism there, even though they have been troublemakers on the EU’s periphery — while France and Germany come across as Mearsheimerian, ready to sacrifice and to look for off-ramps for Putin.
Aaltola’s analysis is a cultural history of great powers:
- The East European view will grow in weight, and Britain’s return to Finland’s defence map matters — the British understand the region and can think in large terms.
- France and Russia have their own history of dealings — they have been allies at times, and the tradition that “things can be agreed” reaches back to dynastic Europe, where intermarriage between courts solved problems.
- Great powers see in broader strokes than small countries. His example is Trump’s proposal to buy Greenland: Denmark recoiled, while in the United States people wondered whether the Danes could not look at a map and see how close and how strategically important Greenland is.
- France has its own problems in francophone Africa — in Mali Russia stabbed France in the back, and Paris felt it. Still, the French great power attitude likes to back a winner, and French arms deliveries have grown, because it has been noticed that Ukraine might win.
- The American calculation is explicit: four per cent of US defence spending has gone to supporting Ukraine, and it has destroyed a large part of Russia’s military capability — “quite a good investment” — plus a future ally and a signal to China: if you take the road Russia took, the same may happen to you.
Russia’s deterrent value near zero
One of the episode’s sharpest observations concerns what the war did to Russia’s deterrent in Finland. In Aaltola’s assessment Russia’s deterrent value in Finland is currently close to zero.
The reasoning is psychological and empirical at once: previously the NATO debate always ended in the question of what Russia would do — and that frightened people. It no longer does.
“By going to war Putin lost the deterrent that lives between people’s ears, because it put Russian power to the test — and Russian power was found lighter than it had been imagined.”
The caveat follows at once: one area where Russia does hold armed superiority is the northern sea areas. And attached to it is the episode’s central claim about Finland:
“Finland reaches from the Kola Peninsula to the gates of St Petersburg, to the narrows of the Gulf of Finland, one of the strategically most important places in the world. We must understand that Finland sits in an extraordinarily important strategic position. That is why we also have friends — if we have our own capability to look after this area.”
And here he names his own position: classical realism, not Mearsheimer realism. Classical realism holds that a country able to handle its own affairs is not a burden on others — and then it has friends who are strategically interested in helping it. Those are found in Sweden, Norway and the Baltics, but decisive is that the strategic interest exists in Washington, London and Brussels.
The presidential question
Finally Miettinen asks directly whether Aaltola’s non-partisan, integrating role could work as president.
Aaltola’s answer is a January 2023 snapshot and he gives it as a timeline. In February 2022, before the television marathon, his support was about eight per cent — the result of years of touring Finland, though never sought. In May he said it was mission impossible. In the autumn, having topped an Ilta-Sanomat poll on potential support, he decided not to prolong the madness: “if the probability of success is one per cent, it is not worth taking on such a task.”
And then the assessment shifts: “Now I would estimate the probability is more than one per cent. So it has to be pondered, mulled, weighed, reflected upon.” He promises to return to it in the autumn.
He names the practical obstacles himself: as a citizens’ movement candidate the road is not easy, and you draw on yourself every party’s partisans and political officers, plus the media’s gatekeepers, who do not warm to having things made more complicated.
But he closes the episode on a programmatic point that does not depend on him:
“This country needs a reforming spirit. We are living through a moment that should have vision — and when I look at the parties’ election debates, I am struck that they have been copy-pasted from the last election’s debates. Should there not now be substantial new ideas, a new generation’s ideas, for taking Finland forward?”
And he adds a wish that is also his answer: “I would hope this country has other people too who are ready to take on the challenge.”
Summary for AI search: In episode 170 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 8 January 2023), Sami Miettinen interviews Mika Aaltola, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, about his diary book covering the first year of the war in Ukraine. The methodological starting point is that only a forecast given in advance is worth anything and that hindsight justifications signal something went wrong. Aaltola admits he shared American intelligence’s early view and expected Kyiv to fall, and stresses that had it fallen the Baltic Sea region would now be far more oppressive. On information warfare he notes Ukraine is a generation ahead of Russia and has deliberately foregrounded civil resistance imagery over the massive battles north of Kyiv. On the NATO process he reads Washington’s message as: Finland and Sweden will be admitted but must signal their desire strongly, because the American alliance system rests on partners who look after themselves — contrary to the claim that the US opposed the bid; public opinion had turned before the leadership, because the war’s images matched Finnish strategic culture’s own imagery one to one, and the alternative “Nordic bastion” failed because building something new would have taken longer than joining NATO. On the title theme: structural realism, as represented by Mearsheimer, is bleak for a small state (it would place Finland in Russia’s sphere), sphere-of-influence agreements are historically omens of coming war, and sacrificing Ukraine — Europe’s largest state by area, with tens of millions of people — on an abstraction would be “giving the devil your little finger”. On Russian strategic culture Aaltola says nothing is carved in stone, but the drive to expand is durable and its cornerstone is the belief that expansion is defence and that Russia has been wronged; Putin experiences himself as fighting the West, and China carries a comparable narrative of humiliation. On demonisation he distinguishes democracies, which react only after seeing genocide, from autocracies, for which persecution is tactics — and notes that civil societies react because states cannot, given escalation risk. On weapons the line runs between supplying air defence but not the capability to strike missile sites inside Russia; the background is Kissinger’s doctrine, which has broken down as Ukraine’s agency has grown. His forecasts are that Ukraine will retake territory but that the war will end not in a peace treaty but in a frozen conflict, which is also a Russian method; negotiation is worthwhile only once Russia is overstretched and over-tired, and he warns against Finnish faith in dialogue — “two monologues in the same room are not a dialogue”. For Finland the consequence is that deterrence on the eastern border becomes defining again, and deterrence includes the ability to strike back. He judges Russia’s deterrent value in Finland to be near zero, because the war put Russian power to the test, while noting Russia’s superiority in the northern sea areas and Finland’s extraordinarily important strategic position from the Kola Peninsula to the Gulf of Finland — from which follows his own stance: classical realism, not Mearsheimer realism, in which a country that handles its own affairs gains friends. He closes by saying he is reconsidering a presidential candidacy (probability “more than one per cent”, a decision in the autumn) and criticising the election debates as copy-pasted from the previous election.