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Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if Trump was president?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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Great man theory being incorrect can be taken too far. It’s incorrect to also say that individual choices are inconsequential.
Had Trump been in power, Ukraine wouldn’t have been confident of US backing, and so would have folded early in the game.
The broader centuries-long conflict between Russia / China and the western empire would have remained, great man theory being incorrect works here. But it takes it too far to insist the individual choices made by people with great power don’t shape global events on the scale of years or decades.
Like, had Gore been president during 9/11 then it’s unlikely the US would have invaded Iraq because that was a project for a particular political faction in the US. So individual choices can impact history a lot. But of course had Gore been president there still would have been games being played in the Middle East.
While I agree with most of this, I still doubt anything would have been different in Ukraine with Trump in power. He vetoed the bill to stop supporting the Yemin war and this Ukraine proxy war was already underway before Biden took office. So of course it's not that people in power don't effect politics, but we have a tendency to put everything on them and ignore dialectical materialism. Capitalism needs war. It will happen no matter if it's Jimmy Carter Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein. It may not be overt wars like Iraq but it will shift to covert operations, outsourcing, proxy war etc. Until and unless capitalism is dismantled this is the unfortunate reality.