> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)

That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.

Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons.

There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.