Someone once said that “war is God’s way of teaching us about geography.” It does not always work – for example, during the second Gulf War, only 10 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could locate Iraq on a map while 100,000 U.S. troops were fighting there.  Still, Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine and takeover of Crimea has caused many folks to brush up on their knowledge of the former Soviet Union’s boundaries. It also has caused many foreign policy scholars and practitioners to rethink what we thought we knew about geopolitics.

Before discussing the global geopolitics of Crimea, we might consider the implications for the 70,000 Jews living in Ukraine. It is a tossup where one finds more anti-Semitism, in Ukraine or in Russia. On the one hand, Russia’s United Nations ambassador claimed that Moscow’s invasion was aimed at protecting ethnic Russians in a neighboring state from “ultranationalists, including anti-Semites.” On the other hand, the rabbi who heads the Jewish Federation in Ukraine suggested that the anti-Semitic incidents in Crimea were traced to pro-Russian Ukrainians. He signed a letter urging Russian leader Vladimir Putin to end his aggression. If I were a Jew living in Ukraine, I would rather hitch my sails to the democratic West and join the European Union than live in the orbit of Russia’s oligarchy, even though anti-Semitism persists to a degree throughout Europe. 

One of the issues at stake here is whether Ukraine will be allowed by Russia the freedom of maneuver to join the EU. Kiev’s flirtation with EU membership, after all, is what triggered the conflict. 

Here is where geopolitics comes in. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was right when he called Russia’s annexation of Crimea “an incredible act of aggression” that resembled “19^th-century behavior” of the sort many observers had assumed could not happen anymore in contemporary international relations. Whereas once, in the age of imperialism, the game of world politics was all about land grabs, since 1945 we have witnessed decolonization and the establishment of “the territorial integrity norm” rendering nation-state boundaries almost sacred. 

Neither of the two superpowers annexed an inch of territory during the Cold War, notwithstanding their many interventions in other countries’ affairs, and the last successful annexation of territory by conquest was Morocco’s seizure of the Spanish Sahara in 1976. (Israel’s territorial claims after 1967 resulted from a defensive war and are still contested.)

Even when Putin invaded neighboring Georgia in 2008 and created two new breakaway “states” (Abhazia and South Ossetia), also on the pretext of protecting the minority Russian population there from an ultranationalist central government that had privileged non-Russian language and culture, he was careful to exercise only de facto control over them rather than fully incorporate them into Russia.  

Thus, Putin’s outright annexation of Crimea was almost unprecedented in recent memory in terms of the level of chutzpah and the threat to the existing world order. The only parallel was Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait in 1990, which the international community, led by the United States, squashed.

So what should the United States and the international community make of all this? Putin clearly is trying to restore Russia’s prestige as a “great power” after the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991, and the subsequent enlargement of NATO. He sees Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics as part of the “near abroad,” traditionally vital to defending Russian security interests and within its “sphere of influence.” Additionally, he seeks control over $1 trillion in Black Sea oil and gas resources. 

He probably also rationalizes that his actions are not much different from the illegal American invasion of Serbia in 1999 that created the new state of Kosovo, even if our “humanitarian intervention” was a response to Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslims and we did not annex Kosovo in the process. 

President Barack Obama’s administration arguably emboldened Putin’s actions due to what the Council on Foreign Relations’ Richard Haass has called a weak, “feckless” foreign policy. (Harvard historian Niall Ferguson has noted that, where Machiavelli argued, “it is better to be feared than loved,” Obama “is neither.”) What would it take to resolve the Crimea crisis and stop Putin’s intimidation of his neighbors?

In fairness to Obama, he does not have many good options. The current economic sanctions, entailing financial costs to Putin’s closest associates, do not figure to work. We may be able to use our newfound natural gas and oil resources as leverage against Russia’s energy-based economy, but that will take a while. We could try providing military aid to Ukraine and possibly place NATO troops there as a tripwire to deter further aggression in the eastern part of the country, which is the function that 300,000 American troops stationed in Europe served during the Cold War. 

But important as the stakes are, they are not high enough to risk armed confrontation and the threat of World War III. Besides, we cannot afford to antagonize Putin too much; we need somehow to reset our relationship with Russia in a positive direction because we need Moscow’s help on Iran, Syria and other critical issues.

Perhaps the best hope is that Putin will come to his senses and understand that whatever short-term gains he derives from improving Russia’s image as a player, along with the momentary boost in domestic popularity that always initially accompanies flag-waving adventures, will be offset by long-term damage to his economy and Russia’s alienating its neighbors to the point of driving them further westward. 

Putin may well achieve a fait accompli in picking Crimea off from Ukraine, although the annexation is unlikely to ever be officially recognized outside Russia. Rand McNally mapmakers may ultimately decide the outcome of the conflict.

J. Martin Rochester, Curators’ Teaching Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is author of 10 books on international and American politics, the latest of which is “U.S. Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: Gulliver’s Travails.”  In addition to teaching courses in international politics, international organization and law, and U.S. foreign policy, he has served as Chairperson of the Political Science Dept. at UM-St. Louis.