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Att: B402 - What John Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine

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Related: Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine
For years, the political scientist has claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused
by Western intervention. Have recent events changed his mind?
By Isaac Chotiner
March 1, 2022
[...]
Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe.” And then you say, “But this account is wrong.” Does anything that’s happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the truth than you might have thought?

Oh, I think I was right. I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.

You mean because the Russians did the annexation and the invasion?

Yes.

I was interested in that article because you say the idea that Putin may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in Eastern Europe, is wrong. Given that he seems to be going after the rest of Ukraine now, do you think in hindsight that that argument is perhaps more true, even if we didn’t know it at the time?

It’s hard to say whether he’s going to go after the rest of Ukraine because—I don’t mean to nitpick here but—that implies that he wants to conquer all of Ukraine, and then he will turn to the Baltic states, and his aim is to create a greater Russia or the reincarnation of the Soviet Union. I don’t see evidence at this point that that is true. It’s difficult to tell, looking at the maps of the ongoing conflict, exactly what he’s up to. It seems quite clear to me that he is going to take the Donbass and that the Donbass is going to be either two independent states or one big independent state, but beyond that it’s not clear what he’s going to do. I mean, it does seem apparent that he’s not touching western Ukraine.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine
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The great-power realist lets theory get in the way of fact.

By Katie Stallard

IMAGE - Photo by Lyndon French

Heaps more links

When the facts change, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson once said, I change my mind. Not so the realist scholar John Mearsheimer who, despite repeated evidence to the contrary, remains wedded to his conviction that the West is to blame for Russia’s war on Ukraine .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine , that Vladimir Putin .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/vladimir-putin .. is not an imperialist, and that the Russian president is a “first-class strategist”. To Mearsheimer and his defenders, he is a courageous teller of truths. But there is a basic flaw at the heart of his argument: he does not understand Russian or Ukrainian domestic politics.

According to Mearsheimer’s model of great power behaviour, as he explains in a recent interview with the New Statesman’s Gavin Jacobson .. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/09/tragedy-john-mearsheimer , Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 “should have come as no surprise” – although he concedes that he was personally surprised when it happened – because it was an all but inevitable response to the US-led march into “Russia’s backyard”. He characterises the conflict as a “preventive war” that “Russian leaders certainly saw… as ‘just’, because they were convinced that Ukraine joining Nato was an existential threat that had to be eliminated”.

It is certainly true, as Mearsheimer notes, that the Nato summit declaration in Bucharest in 2008 stated that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of Nato”, but without any timeline for their accession. This was deliberate. The declaration was a compromise between those leaders who supported Kyiv’s eventual admission, most notably the then US president George W Bush, and those who were opposed, such as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Was the resulting equivocation a particularly smart idea? No. Does it constitute justification for Russia .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/russia ’s invasion? Also, no.

[Insert: Putin’s Talk with Tucker Carlson... and America: A Mixture of Blunt Lies and Toxic Propaganda
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173818900]

Fifteen years later, Ukraine is not meaningfully closer to joining Nato. For evidence, one only has to look to Volodymyr Zelensky .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/volodymyr-zelensky ’s scathing response to the latest formulation from Nato leaders in Vilnius this July, which promised to “extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met”. (They did not specify what those conditions were.) As the Ukrainian president interpreted the message: “It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance.”

Even if Ukraine had been close to Nato membership, this would still not explain Putin’s compulsion to invade it. Finland, which has a 1,340-kilometre land border with Russia, joined the alliance in April .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/04/finland-join-nato .. this year. Sweden, which sits across the Baltic Sea from St Petersburg, is poised to do the same if Turkey and Hungary approve its accession. Both countries have fought wars with Russia in past centuries. Yet Russian troops are not massing on their borders. The difference, of course, is how Putin views Ukraine.

Bizarrely – despite the fact that Putin has claimed that Ukraine is not a “real” country, invaded it, and compared himself to the 18th century Russian imperialist Peter the Great .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/06/vladimir-putin-the-great – Mearsheimer refuses to believe that his actions could be motivated by imperialism. “There’s no evidence that he had imperial ambitions before the war,” Mearsheimer assured .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/john-mearsheimer-on-putins-ambitions-after-nine-months-of-war .. the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner in November 2022, two months after Putin had announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/10/vladimir-putin-desperation-donetsk-luhansk-ukraine . “There would have to be evidence that he had said that it was desirable to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia.” Plus, he added, Putin had said that he respected Ukraine’s sovereignty. But, Chotiner countered, Putin had also said that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, so should we necessarily take him at his word? Mearsheimer changed the subject.

Equally perplexing is Mearsheimer’s tendency to conflate Putin’s obsessions with Russian interests as a whole. Mearsheimer’s assertion that “Russian leaders” viewed the invasion as “just” ignores the fact that much of the Russian foreign policy establishment was blindsided by the start of the war. Within the Kremlin elite, it was not a settled matter that conflict with Ukraine was inevitable or desirable. In fact, according to the Financial Times .. https://www.ft.com/content/80002564-33e8-48fb-b734-44810afb7a49 , Putin did not even consult his own foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, ahead of the attack. “He has three advisers,” Lavrov reportedly complained to an oligarch later: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”

[The long history of Russian imperialism shaping Putin’s war
[...]The world is trying to make sense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine. But his attack is not rooted in any rational calculation of costs and benefits.
P - Instead, Putin is making an ill-conceived gambit to reclaim his nation’s stature as an imperial power and assert Russia’s prestige, authority and will on the world stage. Putin has positioned himself as a frustrated representative of an aggrieved fallen empire — for example, lamenting “the paralysis of power and will .. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/full-text-putin-s-declaration-of-war-on-ukraine ” that led to the complete “degradation and oblivion” of the Soviet Union in 1991. Though this grievance seems situated within what Putin has called the tragedy of the Soviet collapse, his imperial inspiration extends even deeper into the country’s past. As Putin described it in a 2012 speech, the revival of Russian national consciousness necessitates that Russians connect to their past and realize that they have “a common, continuous history spanning over 1,000 years.”
P - Putin understands the post-Soviet global order through the prism of Russia’s long history. And that history is inextricably tied to Russia’s dynamic imperial mission both in the past and today.
P - The first “Russian” state was established in present-day Kyiv in the 9th century.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168092855]

But perhaps the most glaring omission in Mearsheimer’s theory of the war is the role of Ukrainians themselves in determining the country’s future. As he presents it, Ukraine’s post-Soviet trajectory has been shaped by the West, above all the US .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us , and Washington’s supposed obsession with bringing Ukraine into Nato. According to this world-view, Ukraine should be understood primarily as a strategic battleground to be dominated by Russia or the West, rather than an independent nation exercising its own democratic will. Mearsheimer does not see the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a popular uprising against a corrupt, autocratic president who had reneged on the promise of closer integration with the EU, but as a “coup .. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault ”. Putin’s invasion is not a desperate attempt to halt Ukraine’s progress towards a European future, but a predictable reaction to the US-led scheme to transform Ukraine into a “pro-American liberal democracy”.

[That to which this post replies -- Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution Was Not a ‘Coup’ ]

Besides revealing an almost touching faith in American democracy’s promotion efforts, Mearsheimer misses the fact that Ukraine’s shift away from Moscow has been driven by direct experience of Russian foreign policy under Putin. There was no groundswell of popular support .. https://news.gallup.com/poll/167927/crisis-ukrainians-likely-nato-threat.aspx .. in Ukraine for joining Nato before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Ukraine’s military modernisation and its determination to join the Western alliance – like the rejuvenation of Nato itself – has been galvanised by Russia’s actions, not those of the US. His theory of great power politics might have made sense in the abstract, but it breaks down when confronted with the facts in Ukraine, and he comes uncomfortably close to defending an indefensible act of aggression. In this respect, we should be clear that Mearsheimer is not delivering harsh truths the world is not ready to hear, he is simply wrong.

[ See also: Guns, grain, and history
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/10/poland-ukraine-tensions-europe ]

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/10/john-mearsheimers-incorrect-views-on-everything

"Not delivering harsh truths..." At this point in time B402 comes to mind.