It has become fashionable to argue that geopolitics is best understood through cold realism. The past few days have made this painfully clear – with talk of a peace in Ukraine on Russia’s terms, reportedly enabled by the United States, and renewed American threats over Greenland.

Two narratives now dominate.

The first argues that small states must re-engineer their own sovereignty – trade formal control for functional survival, convert independence into bargaining capital. In the Greenland case this logic treats geopolitics as a mechanical problem of power management: coercion cannot be met with coercion, so inducement becomes the only “rational” path. Offer Washington security control, basing rights, infrastructure, minerals – wrapped in the language of Greenlandic independence – and domination can be achieved without annexation.

The second insists on defending norms and reacting with declarations of principle: sovereignty, self-determination, the rules-based order. Scandinavian and Baltic leaders remind Washington that Greenland is Danish, that peoples decide their own future, that empires are over.

Both positions are coherent. Both are incomplete.

The first normalises a new form of Finlandization – not imposed by force, but voluntarily designed by those who fear being crushed. When limitations are built into our own doctrines and frameworks, domination no longer needs to be enforced. It is internalised.

The second mistakes moral protest for strategic agency. It defends sovereignty rhetorically rather than operationally, turning small states into eloquent spectators of their own marginalisation.

Together they form a trap: one designs its way into submission, the other protests its way into irrelevance.

For the Nordics and the Baltics, wedged between the United States and Russia, this is not theory. It is national survival.

This exposes the deeper flaw in contemporary realism: when theory treats power as fixed and agency as asymmetrical, it does not merely describe the world – it begins to sacrifice smaller states to it. Realism becomes a theology of inevitability.

That logic must be broken. For Sweden, this means building a strong and just society, strengthening our defence, deepening Nordic defence cooperation, raising European competitiveness, and working relentlessly for a Ukrainian victory – or at minimum a peace on Ukraine’s terms. These are not moral gestures. They are instruments of survival.

And in the end we all know this: wars are not won by theorists, but by practitioners – in trenches far from the abstractions of our desks. Strategy must therefore be built not on resignation, but on agency.

Andreas von der Heide