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I don't think this scenario has ever happened in the history of the world. Conquering powers that aggressively steal land from others typically only pause to consolidate their gains, reshore their power and morale, cooldown international outrage, etc, before continuing to conquer. And even if the particular nation decides not to go further, if it becomes known you explicitly have a policy of not fighting back against conquest plenty of other nations will swoop in to exploit this. Nations with no militaries and no allies very quickly cease to exist.
Nobody ever explicitly sends soldiers "to die", except in very rare and very evil exceptions. People send soldiers in the hopes that they live and their enemies die. Again, killing bad people is good, killing good people is bad. If your enemies are aggressive and unprovokedly attacking you, then they are bad and you are good, so every soldier of theirs you kill is acceptable, and every soldier of yours they kill is yet another evil they have committed. The fact that your own people die is a horrible tragedy, but the blame for it lies on the enemy for killing them, not on you for sending them in self-defense.
This is pretty typical natural rights stuff, which can be religious or not depending on whether or not you believe the natural rights are inherent to humans or derived from God. Everyone is born with an inherent right to life, liberty, property, etc. Violating these is not okay. But if you willingly violate them in others then you forfeit some of yours (in various amounts depending on how harsh a perspective one has, but generally proportional to the amount that you violated from others.) Your natural rights are contingent on respecting the natural rights of others, and if you can't do that then you don't get the respect of others for yours.
Think of the Faklands. The British, rightfully, exchanged the lives of British soldiers for an important geopolitical claim. The British, in their minds rightfully, also fought Indian kingdoms and revolts for an important economic claim… were these Indians going to invade Britain?
Falklands is the obvious example, but this is also disproven if you consider the way the Mongols operated. Fighting the mongols always leads to more death, but if you win, you are in an economically more valuable position (less taxes paid). If human lives are the terminal value than it would never be rational to fight off the mongols.
Falklands is once again the obvious example. There’s an enormous difference between a territorial concession far away and invading the homeland. France would not invade the UK if the UK relinquished the Falklands.
This is an unserious semantic argument. We can predict with 99% accuracy that the some soldiers will die. We choose that they die to secure economic benefit. You haven’t argued against this point: soldiers have died to secure economic resources throughout history, in conflicts over geopolitically important or economically valuable territory, in cases where there is no direct threat of aggression in the mainland.
If human lives were the terminal value and there is no added risk to your defense, then the rational position would be to continually secede territory always, regardless of economic cost. We can even draft a hypothetical scenario involving interplanetary war, to make our intuitions clearer. Planet A and Planet B are completely defended and cannot be invaded. B is about to take A’s valuable resources which will leave A poorer. I think almost everyone would say that it’s permissible for A to sacrifice their lives to secure the valuable resources, even though there is no risk of mainland invasion — because we understand that resources increase wellbeing.
Okay so it’s rooted in whim
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