On varieties of invasion

TANKS rolling across borders, territory seized, defending troops put to flight. That, for most people, is what the term “invasion” suggests. And something like that sequence of events seems to be in the minds of American and European leaders when they warn Vladimir Putin not to invade eastern Ukraine, nor to annex chunks of it, as Russia has annexed Crimea. This, I submit, is a dangerously narrow way to think about invasion, if also a temporarily convenient one.

To begin with, many invasions in history have not been motivated by the permanent acquisition of territory. Some have aimed to depose or punish a foreign country’s ruler, appropriate its assets or sway its politics: witness, most recently, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And if motives have always varied, so have invaders’ tactics. For example, American and other special forces have sometimes moved into targeted countries covertly, in advance of larger deployments; sometimes their presence has been officially denied. So the Kremlin’s techniques in Ukraine have precedents. All the same, they represent a departure in the technology of intervention.

The Russian...Continue reading