12. Conclusions
Mearsheimer's flawed theory is a revanchist aggressor's charter
This publication refutes Professor Mearsheimer’s contention that the main blame for the Ukraine war lies with the West, and that the Putin regime’s aggression against Ukraine was a rational and justified response to the West’s “provocative” expansion of NATO into the post-Soviet space, allegedly posing an “existential danger” to Russia, warranting the extreme measure of starting a major land war in Europe.
By pushing this line, Mearsheimer has made himself into a very useful asset in the Putin regime’s unprecedented information war to undermine Western support for Ukraine. He has become the go-to source of superficially credible arguments for critics of Ukraine aid across the ideological spectrum, from leftists congenitally hostile to anything the West does, to the emerging neo-isolationist right in the US, and all points in between.
Unsurprisingly, this support is highly valued in the capitals of the coalition of autocratic states centred on Russia and China that now poses the most serious threat to the democratic world since the mid-twentieth century. As Mearsheimer boasts, he finds himself among friends in Moscow and Beijing, with many enamoured with his “realist” vision.
Mearsheimer is a registered expert of the Valdai Discussion Club, which holds an annual forum in Russia drawing an assortment of sympathetic commentators from around the world, with Putin often the star attraction. The Valdai Club even kicked in a small grant to support research for Mearsheimer’s latest book, How States Think, and awarded another of his recent works, The Great Delusion, its 2019 prize for best book.
What’s not to like, from the autocrat’s point of view? Mearsheimer deprecates international legality and the ethical norms of Just War Theory that underpin it, and the rules-based international order more generally. He argues for the prerogative of great powers to dominate lesser states in their vicinity, by military force if necessary.
In Mearsheimer’s view, small relatively powerless states must resign themselves to a restricted form of sovereignty in which decisions about their systems of governance, their economic relations with other states, and especially their security arrangements, are subject to approval by the great power. He is unperturbed that these are all rights that the Soviet Union, followed by Russia, repeatedly acknowledged in a succession of conventions, treaties, and inter-state agreements. All this counts for nought, in Mearsheimer’s theory, which can be boiled down to a simple proposition: might is right.
This is Professor Mearsheimer’s worldview. It is a worldview that comports precisely with the transformation in the global order that the autocratic coalition is working toward. Mearsheimer has, in effect, become the theoretician of this project, providing its rationale and justification, and is its principal intellectual champion in Western media.
This is critically important in an age when the information domain has become a key facet of both grey-zone and actual kinetic warfare. Social media provides the totalitarians with an unprecedented capacity to try and shape Western opinion, with a special emphasis on generating uncertainty and cynicism about what is true and what is false. And they are using this to the full. Mearsheimer has become a substantial presence on YouTube, where his every appearance is accompanied by a flood of repetitive comments, obviously cranked out by pro-Russian troll farms, supporting him and deprecating his critics.
Mearsheimer has described Putin as a first-class strategist. So brilliant a strategist that, by starting a war ostensibly to stop NATO expansion, he managed to add to the alliance two new members, both with long histories of non-alignment, turning the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. A strategic masterstroke, that!
And what a flimsy edifice it is, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism theory. He has taken the broader realist framework, which has some virtues, and reduced it to a ridiculous caricature in which nation states are analogized to colliding billiard balls governed by physics-like deterministic laws, all bound in an “iron cage” to act in certain ways, stripped of all agency, with the sole exception being the United States, the taproot (one of his favourite words) of the most persistent ills besetting the international system today.
In Mearsheimer’s worldview, a powerful state like Russia has merely to assert some issue or concern is a survival issue, or an existential danger, for it to justify the most extreme measures. In his latest book, How States Think, Mearsheimer lends credence to Chinese regime claims that an independent Taiwan would be a “threat to China’s survival because it represents the permanent loss of national territory.” All 0.17 percent of it—a survival issue for China. Seriously?
No wonder he has found lots of enthusiastic offensive realists in Beijing, though they would be less impressed by his assertion in the same book that Japan was acting rationally by invading China in the 1930s since a continental empire “was the only chance left for Japan’s survival”, and moreover “Japan acted with restraint from 1937 to 1941”, a period that includes the Nanjing massacre.
Here is a recapitulation of the arguments made in detail in earlier chapters as to what is wrong about Mearsheimer’s theorizing and broader worldview, and especially his accounts of the causality, motivation, and responsibility for the Ukraine war.
Specifically, Mearsheimer is:
Wrong to assign sole blame to NATO, the US, and the West for the Ukraine war, and his insistence that the former “forced” Putin to invade, thereby absolving Putin of all blame for the massive tragedy that has eventuated. In all his articles, speeches, lectures, and interviews since the invasion began in 2014, Mearsheimer has scarcely uttered a word of moral condemnation of the Putin regime, either for its decision to launch this catastrophic war, or its brutal conduct of it without regard to civilian casualties, or its appalling treatment of populations in the areas it have managed to occupy, including the widespread and systematic use of torture against the civilian population.
Wrong in taking seriously the Putin regime’s claim that a Western aligned Ukraine posed an “existential danger” to Russia serious enough to warrant a “preventive war”, or even that Putin himself genuinely believed that to be the case given the massive stand-down of NATO military capabilities that followed the end of the Cold War. German and British armies were reduced to a small fraction of their Cold War peak and the last US armoured brigade was withdrawn from Europe in 2013. The move to rebuild NATO capabilities only began with Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Moreover, there was not the slightest evidence of intent by the US, NATO, or Ukraine, to commit aggression against Russia, making Mearsheimer’s claim that the invasion was a preventive war farcical.
Wrong in completely disregarding the Putin regime’s blatant violations of international law and norms, especially Article 51 of the UN Charter and multiple other agreements that Russia and the Soviet Union have signed on to that prohibit recourse to military force except if a state is attacked, with the sole exception being if authorized by the UN Security Council. Under all these instruments, there is not a shred of legitimate justification for the invasion, even if all the claims about the threat posed by NATO expansion were true, which they demonstrably are not.
Wrong in insisting that NATO expansion was the sole motivation for Putin’s aggression, being unaware of or choosing to ignore abundant evidence of Putin’s long-standing aspiration to restore Russia’s status as a great imperial power by “gathering the Russian lands” and recreating the Russkiy mir (Russian world), which Putin interprets expansively to include pretty much any territory previously ruled by the Russian empire or its later incarnation, the Soviet Union. This invalidates the claim, bolstered by a misleading characterization of negotiations before and in the early weeks of the war, that there was a missed opportunity to settle the conflict on reasonable terms for Ukraine.
Wrong to deny that Putin’s goal in invading Ukraine was to conquer the country and effectively annex it to his empire, despite overwhelming evidence from the scope and extent of the military operation, confirmed by leaked Russian operational plans that envisaged Kyiv falling within days and the frontier with Poland being reached within six weeks, as well as articles posted on official websites in the days immediately following the invasion that celebrated the return of Ukraine to its rightful Russian fold. Not to mention Putin’s repeated insistence, dating back to at least 2008 and laid out comprehensively in his article posted on the Kremlin website in July 2021, that the very idea of separate Ukrainian nationality was an absurdity.
Wrong to describe post-Cold War NATO expansion as the US “shoving NATO down Russia’s throat”, given that unlike the Warsaw Pact NATO membership is entirely voluntary, indeed a sovereign right of states as acknowledged by multiple international agreements to which Russia and the Soviet Union are signatories, most importantly the Russia-NATO Founding Act (1997) and the Helsinki Final Act (1975). Far from being compelled or pressured by the US to apply for NATO membership, post-Soviet and former Warsaw Pact states were desperately banging on the door pleading to be let in to NATO as soon as possible.
Wrong in his characterization of the nature of the Putin regime, and post-Cold War Russia generally, starting with the early Yeltsin years. Mearsheimer should ask himself: Why were all these countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union so desperate to join NATO, and to get under the protective umbrella of Article 5 of the NATO treaty which stipulates “an attack on one is an attack on all?” Did they see something about internal developments in Russia and its external behaviour that Mearsheimer and many other Western commentators did not? Such as the insertion of Russian troops into the Transnistria region of Moldova in 1992 and keeping them there to the present day, despite Moldova declaring a policy of non-alignment in 1994.
Wrong in insisting that Putin, in deciding to invade Ukraine, was acting rationally in that this action accorded with the tenets of a sound theory, his own offensive realism, and followed a deliberative process that included “robust and uninhibited debate” within the councils of his regime. Mearsheimer disregards evidence to the contrary, showing that the decision-making process, such as it was, was a shambles with even senior civil and military officials terrified to take issue with the dictator, and most only learning about it on invasion eve. This led to an exasperated foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who himself only found out at 1 am on invasion day, to quip to a questioner that Putin’s decision was guided by his advisers “Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.”
Wrong in his belief that the behaviour of states is solely determined by “structural” features of the international system, with internal features of states such as the system of governance (liberal democracy, one-party state, personalist dictatorship, military junta, theocracy), as well as the characteristics of the key decision maker(s), of limited or no relevance. Remarkably, in his main book on offensive realism, Mearsheimer claims that German behaviour would be unaffected whether it was run by Bismark, Wilhelm II, Hitler, or a democratic leader like Angela Merkel or Olaf Scholz. He gives expression to this strange idea by comparing state interactions to colliding billiard balls, differing only in size reflecting their relative power.
Wrong in his dogmatic application of offensive realism, no matter how strange the conclusions, exemplified by his insistence in a 1990 article that the ending of the Cold War would come to be seen as a bad thing, leading to a resumption of historic hostilities between democratic states such as Britain, Germany, and France, once the Soviet threat was removed, notwithstanding their democratic systems of governance. Mearsheimer suggested that Germany may well decide to attack states in eastern Europe to enhance its power position and might even start a wave of nuclear proliferation. Mearsheimer emphatically, and wrongly, rejects the “democratic peace” thesis that democracies are less likely than undemocratic regimes to make war with each other.
Wrong to ignore the importance of the trend toward personalist rule, with a single leader dominating decision-making, in the emerging alliance of autocracies led by China and Russia. Scholars have identified distinctive behavioural characteristics of personalist autocracies that distinguish them from other kinds of undemocratic rule. These include a propensity to embark on bold, risky overseas endeavours, and a greater tendency to act irrationally due to relying on advice from a narrow circle of terrified supplicants who dare not tell the leader anything he does not want to hear. This led the president of Finland Sauli Niinistö to lament after the Ukraine invasion that he never thought he would pine for the old Soviet politburo, a collective leadership that at least provided some restraint on the worst follies of an autocratic leader.
Wrong to deny the sovereign right of small relatively powerless states to make their own decisions about their system of government, their economic relationships with other countries, and their military alliances, contrary to multiple international agreements and instruments to which Russia itself is a signatory. Mearsheimer would even deny a small state the right to enhance its security against a potentially belligerent or revanchist larger power by joining a military alliance, as the tiny Baltic states did when they successfully applied for NATO membership. When asked about this, Mearsheimer conceded this protected them from being attacked by Russia but, incredibly, still insisted it was a bad thing!
Here is the most important thing Mearsheimer is wrong about. He is wrong to insist that all states face an imperative to maximize their power relative to actual or potential rivals. According to him, this is how states, especially great powers, behave in practice when faced with an “anarchic” world full of uncertainties. It is not sufficient, according to offensive realism, to gain enough power to maintain the power relativity status quo. He thinks great powers should strive, if it seems feasible and expedient, to disrupt the status quo and become hegemonic at the regional and global level. This is what they do, ideological or moral considerations and rationalizations notwithstanding, and that is what they should do. He insists it does not matter much what system of governance a state has, be it a liberal democracy with leaders accountable to an electorate, or a personalist dictatorship like Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.
The Ukraine episode exemplifies a key flaw in this thinking: it fails to take account of the counter-measures countries near a power-grasping state might take to protect their security and survival. If, counterfactually, NATO was a military threat to Russia, all Putin’s behaviour has done has increased that threat, with formerly non-aligned Finland and Sweden joining the alliance. Ukraine, a nation with many affinities to Russia, has gone from generally warm relations after the 1991 separation to intense hostility, with most of its people likely to harbour a burning hatred for all things Russian likely to last for generations. Good one, Vlad!
Not only does Mearsheimer expect all states to behave this way, with rare and unfortunate exceptions, he affirms they are right to do so—recall that he regards his offensive realism theory as both descriptive and prescriptive. Moreover, this power-seeking should not be constrained by international law and established norms, but should be achieved by any means necessary, including military force if expedient, something Mearsheimer thinks is an underrated tool of statecraft. In his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he contends that in 1905 Germany should have attacked France since, at that time, France’s ally Russia was on its back due to defeat in the war with Japan and the alliance with Britain had not yet been made. Germany stupidly passed up the chance to become the hegemon of Europe! The remarkable thing about Mearsheimer is that he does not balk from appalling conclusions like this, which most people would see as the reductio ad absurdum of his theory.
But what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Why wouldn’t the US be justified in enhancing its relative power by pushing extension of NATO as far as possible? That would just be good offensive realism, would it not? Here is the irony: Mearsheimer makes a point of denying, contrary to overwhelming evidence, that Putin has imperial aspirations. But why bother—his own theory mandates state behaviour that would be largely indistinguishable from what could be expected of an aggressively expansionist imperial power.
Consider the morality, or rather the amorality, of all this. Naked power would dominate the globe. Might would be right. This is an area where Mearsheimer is particularly incoherent. In his main books, Mearsheimer barely touches on the morality of state conduct, eschewing making any distinctions between “good” or “bad” states (Mearsheimer’s scare quotes).
Here is how he sees the role of moral considerations, including the moral imperative to avoid killing lots of people to gain more relative power for one’s own state: There are moral considerations, and there are strategic considerations. It is nice if morality and strategy point in the same direction, but if they conflict, then strategy, the optimal pursuit of the power imperative, should rule. But why should it? This, in itself, is a kind of moral judgement—it concerns how a state decision-maker ought to act. Why should power trump morality? Mearsheimer offers no explanation.
And, consistent with this, you rarely if ever hear Mearsheimer offering the slightest condemnation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his brutal conduct of it, which has already led to hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians and wrecked the lives of millions. Morality is not worth mentioning in Mearsheimer’s world—unless of course it is to engage in moral denunciation of the world’s only Jewish state as it battles attacks from multiple terrorist organisations (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis) that are openly and explicitly committed to its annihilation and the extermination of its people, orchestrated by Iran, a regime that adheres to an end-time theology that includes the annihilation of Israel, and is likely soon to acquire nuclear weapons. No existential threat there, apparently!
This is Mearsheimer’s dismal worldview. A world where the Melian Dialogue, described by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in the context of the Peloponnesian War, with the operative principle “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Compared to which, the often disparaged rules-based international order doesn’t look so bad, does it?
Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has served as a clarifying moment, casting a harsh halogen light on a geopolitical landscape that suddenly seems much more threatening. It is widely spoken of as marking the end of the post-Cold War era, with its naïve expectations that the age of dangerous superpower conflict was over, that we had reached “the end of history”, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous proclamation, with liberal democracy and globalized market economics triumphant.
Not the least of the illusions of that period dashed by subsequent events, and especially the Ukraine war, was the thinking that Russia had irreversibly turned its back on autocracy and joined the ranks of the liberal democracies. One of the most prominent realist critics of NATO expansion was the veteran diplomat George F. Kennan, author of the famous 1946 long telegram from Moscow that provided the intellectual foundation of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union that was central to US policy for decades to come. Kennan was an opponent of NATO expansion, in part because he saw no need for it, even asserting in 1997 that Russia’s progress to democratic governance was more advanced than that of the nations being admitted to NATO.
Below the surface developments in Russia were much less benign. As described in the book From Red Terror to Terrorist State by Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Popov cited in Chapter 9, the fall from power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union opened the way for the organs of the security apparatus, the so-called siloviki, pre-eminently the KGB, to fulfil a long-held ambition to assert complete control over the Russian state. This process was completed with the accession to the presidency of the KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin, who from the outset of his rule set about demolishing all the elements of a liberal democratic state. Putin’s election in March 2000 was to be the last genuinely free election to that post to the present day.
Few political leaders, statesmen and academics in the West were aware of this reality. For years, Putin was given the benefit of the doubt, as he perpetrated one outrage after another: murdering political opponents like Boris Nemtsov and investigative journalists Anna Politkovskaya, taking complete control over the media, imprisoning and driving out critical oligarchs like Mikhail Khordorkovsky, even carrying out murders of critics on foreign soil using extraordinarily dangerous radiological and chemical poisons (Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal respectively). The agents used in these attacks posed a serious danger not just to the intended victims, but to nearby populations, necessitating the evacuation of entire suburbs.
Then there was the brutal conduct under Putin of the Second Chechen War, with the terrorist apartment bombings that triggered it almost certainly an FSB false flag operation. The there was the brutal intervention in the Syrian civil war, the aggression against Georgia in 2008, and the invasion of Donbass and annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Throughout all this, Western leaders and businessmen prioritized continuing trade relations with Russia, with Europe becoming ever more dependent on Russia for oil and gas, a source of leverage for Putin that he thought would stymy efforts to aid Ukraine, one of his many miscalculations. Far from seeking to humiliate Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West provided extensive economic aid and technical assistance in the 1990s, and the Group of Seven leading market economies (G7) agreed to admit Russia in 1998, becoming the G8. After being admitted to the top table of developed economies, Russia was only expelled in 2014 in the wake of its aggression against Ukraine.
On the military side, as described in Chapter 7, NATO forces were dramatically reduced in size and capability, to the point that weeks before the 2022 invasion the head of the German army complained that his force was depleted to the point where he questioned whether he could contribute significantly to NATO’s collective defence. These reductions, known as the peace dividend, were used to fund social expenditures and other priorities, in the expectation that the prospect of major land warfare in Europe was extremely remote.
Give Mearsheimer credit for this, at least: his recognition of the illusory nature of the “end of history” notion, the idea that the world had definitively seen off the era of major power conflicts grounded in ideology or religion and that the democratic West could afford to switch priorities accordingly, adjusting its militaries to deal with “little wars” (except for those directly involved) like Iraq and Afghanistan rather than maintaining them in a state to hopefully deter, and if not to fight, major power wars.
The nature and magnitude of the threat facing the democratic world is now plain to see. A loose coalition of autocratic states, trending to outright totalitarianism, dominated by the CCP regime in China, the Putin dictatorship in Russia, and the chiliastic theocracy in Iran, are collaborating closely in a historically unprecedented challenge to the liberal democratic world.
Unlike the first Cold War, they are not bound by a common ideology. We see a Marxist-Leninist regime in China the increasingly dominant member of the coalition, the Putin regime’s white guard ideology of extreme social conservatism and ultra-nationalism and imperial ambition coupled with Orthodox religiosity, and Shia Islam in Iran.
Each very different, but bound, for now, by a common project to overturn the hitherto Western dominated global order. Each of these autocratic states aspires to hegemony in their local region, with CCP China with its immense population and industrial and technological capacities a realistic aspirant to become the global hegemon. There is increasingly close co-operation between them in terms of shared military resources and technologies, and mutual political co-operation and diplomatic protection, with the permanent members of the UN Security Council, with their ability to veto resolutions, particularly important in that regard.
The prospect of a world dominated by the autocratic coalition does not bear thinking about. What makes the possibility exceptionally sinister is that the emergence of this challenge coincides with one of the most significant technological developments in human history—according to some credible experts, the most significant development—the recent exponential acceleration of progress on artificial intelligence (AI). This has brought forward estimates of the date when AI will equal or exceed human capabilities across a wide range of domains, a point described as artificial general intelligence (AGI). The timeline to AGI has contracted from centuries to decades—or even years.
Informed speculations about what AGI could mean range from utopian abundance to dystopian scenarios in which human labour ceases to have value, to the extinction of humanity. One possibility is that it could make possible a form of totalitarianism that employs AI/AGI to implement systems of surveillance and control far exceeding George Orwell’s worst imaginings; so comprehensive and pervasive—and intelligent—as to make totalitarian regimes virtually impossible to overthrow.
Theorists who speculate about this scenario describe it as stable, or robust, totalitarianism. It would mean the end of liberalism, democracy, protections against abuses of state power, freedom of speech, the entire Enlightenment project. Now, that is an existential danger worth worrying about.