By Ihor Rosomakha
May 16, 2025
When Frederick Forsyth published The Devil’s Alternative in 1979, it was billed as a Cold War thriller—a genre already crowded with nuclear brinkmanship, secret agents, and ideological stalemates. Yet over forty years later, the novel reads less like period fiction and more like prophecy. Beneath its suspense and espionage lies a sobering foresight: the return of authoritarian aggression, the paralysis of Western democracies, the weaponization of energy and food, and the rise of regional conflicts with global consequences. Nowhere is Forsyth’s vision more vividly realized than in the modern war for Ukraine.
Unlike Orwell’s dystopian abstraction or Huxley’s psychological speculation, Forsyth dealt in grounded geopolitics. He was not a futurist, but an investigative journalist—and that’s what made his fiction so durable. The Devil’s Alternative doesn’t predict the future in precise detail. Instead, it maps the structural anatomy of power: how leaders act under constraint, how truth becomes a tactical asset, and how small nations become the terrain of great power ambition.
At its core, The Devil’s Alternative follows a spiraling crisis: a grain shortage threatens famine in the Soviet Union, Ukrainian nationalists hijack a supertanker, and the West must choose between nuclear confrontation and political surrender. “There are no clean choices,” one character declares, “only degrees of foulness.” That line, spoken in fiction, now echoes in fact.
Russia’s Authoritarian Return and Imperial Ambition
Forsyth’s USSR is ruled by aging ideologues clinging to power through repression and secrecy. Reformers exist, but they are sidelined by hardliners who mistake survival for strength. The regime, fragile beneath its posturing, teeters on collapse—and lashes out to preserve control.
This captures the essence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia: a centralized autocracy obsessed with restoring imperial grandeur, intolerant of dissent, and insulated by a shrinking inner circle. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine, justified through invented threats and imperial nostalgia, is not an anomaly. It is the modern sequel to the authoritarian logic Forsyth portrayed. He understood that dying empires don’t fade—they flare, violently.
The Paralysis of the West
In The Devil’s Alternative, Western leaders face a stark dilemma: challenge Soviet aggression and risk war, or compromise and risk appeasement. The phrase “the devil’s alternative” names this paralysis—every path leads to ruin.
This precisely mirrors NATO’s and the EU’s response to Ukraine: massive economic sanctions, humanitarian aid, military support—but no direct intervention. Forsyth grasped the strategic torment of democracies: bound by consensus, limited by public opinion, haunted by past overreach. His insight is chillingly relevant—when democracies move too slowly, they risk becoming complicit through inaction.
Food and Energy as Weapons
A major plot driver in Forsyth’s novel is a looming Soviet grain crisis. With famine imminent, the USSR covertly begs for Western grain, forcing the world into a game of geopolitical brinkmanship.
Today, Russia has weaponized the same resources. By blockading Ukraine’s grain exports and manipulating gas supplies to Europe, it echoes Forsyth’s fiction with uncanny precision. Once again, food and energy aren’t just market variables—they’re instruments of coercion. Forsyth foresaw that global stability could hinge not on missiles, but on wheat.
The Rise of Asymmetric and Hybrid Warfare
Forsyth’s narrative thrives on more than tanks and treaties—it’s driven by espionage, rogue actors, and psychological warfare. Disinformation, sabotage, and shadow diplomacy play central roles in triggering global tension.
This is the logic of modern hybrid war. Russia’s cyberattacks, election meddling, and weaponized propaganda reflect the battlefield Forsyth described decades ago. As one Western intelligence chief in the novel warns, “It’s not what armies do—it’s what stories people believe.” In today’s world, the front lines run through data streams and news feeds, not just trenches. Forsyth didn’t just anticipate the shape of war—he understood its language.
The Struggle of Small Nations
Perhaps the most haunting theme of Forsyth’s novel is how easily smaller nations are sacrificed. Ukrainians, yearning for a free Ukraine, though central to the plot, are ultimately manipulated by larger forces for strategic ends. National identity becomes collateral.
Modern Ukraine flips that script. It has emerged not as a pawn, but as a protagonist—defying occupation, rallying global solidarity, and reframing its identity on its own terms. Where Forsyth’s Ukrainians are tragic catalysts, today’s Ukraine is a geopolitical counterweight. It has resisted not only invasion, but erasure. In doing so, it challenges the very fatalism that once seemed inevitable in Forsyth’s world.
When Fiction Refuses to Stay Fiction
The Devil’s Alternative is no longer just a Cold War novel—it is a blueprint in retrospect, a forecast disguised as fiction. Between its pages lie the raw mechanics of today’s crisis:
authoritarian decay, democratic inertia, the monetization of survival, and the exploitation of the vulnerable.
What made Forsyth prophetic was not prediction, but perception. He saw that power left unchecked doesn’t stabilize—it metastasizes. That fear masquerades as prudence. And that history, if unexamined, does not vanish—it reloads.
Ukraine is not merely reliving Forsyth’s narrative. It is rewriting it. Against all odds, it has refused the passive role of victimhood. It has rewritten its arc—not as a shattered buffer state, but as a moral fulcrum around which the conscience of the West now pivots.
And yet, the question Forsyth posed still looms: when every option leads to peril, what do you choose?
That was the devil’s alternative.
But today, the stakes are deeper. It’s no longer just war or peace—it’s about memory or amnesia, conscience or convenience, resistance or resignation. Because if fiction keeps becoming reality, the real threat isn’t what happens next. It’s our growing ability to accept it.
So the question is not what crisis comes next.
The question is: what will we choose to remember—before we forget again?