5. Blame, Morality, Agency: A Mearsheimerian Muddle

If states are like billiard balls, how can it make sense to blame the West?

Here is something you might find a little odd about Mearsheimer’s thinking. He posits a theory of how states interact bordering on being rigidly deterministic, his chosen metaphor being colliding billiard balls. According to Mearsheimer, whatever their stated motives, with rare and unfortunate exceptions, states of all kinds obey the causal laws of his offensive realism theory that apply in the sphere of international relations.

On this view, Putin saw this large billiard ball with “NATO” imprinted on the side coming toward him and just did what he had to do. He saw an existential threat—and any other Russian leader in the same position would have also seen an existential threat. He could do no other than to invade Ukraine in response. Therefore, he is blameless for all the terrible consequences his decision has wrought. NATO and the Americans made him do it. For Mearsheimer, blaming Putin would be like blaming a ricocheting billiard ball that flies of the table and strikes someone in the eye.

And yet, Mearsheimer thinks it is possible—indeed essential—to assign blame to states, alliances, and their leaders, when things go wrong, implying some degree of agency to states and their leaders. It is someone’s fault, and we must identify the malefactor. In an interview shortly after the February 2022 invasion he said the following:

Now, with regard to the causes, it’s very important to understand that who caused this situation is of tremendous importance, because it involves assigning blame. You really have two choices here; you can argue that the West and especially the United States caused the crisis. Or you can argue that the Russians caused the crisis. But that means that whoever you argue caused the crisis is responsible for this disaster.

Notice that, in assigning blame, he speaks of causality, not responsibility. But how far back should we go in the causal chain? After all, the history of the world did not start with the formation of the United States, the main causal agent, according to Mearsheimer’s account.

If NATO expansion caused Putin’s “existential” fear, as Mearsheimer’s story goes, then what drove NATO expansion? Were they coerced into joining the alliance, as they were earlier coerced into the Warsaw Pact?

The short answer to that question is an emphatic “no”. States aspiring to NATO membership must apply for membership and meet an exacting set of criteria. Far from being coerced, the democratically elected governments of all these states chose to apply.

Indeed, they were desperate to be admitted. In her definitive book on the post-Cold War NATO expansion, the historian of international relations Mary Sarotte describes how NATO expansion was a response to “entreaties” from the newly freed states. They were frantically knocking on the NATO door, desperate for the protection afforded by Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

And, why would they want to do that, join another military alliance after having just escaped from the Warsaw Pact, at a time when it was widely thought in the West that Russia’s transition to democracy was secure? Even the veteran American diplomat George F. Kennan, who Mearsheimer likes to quote, thought NATO enlargement was unnecessary given “there was no reason for this whatsoever … no one was threatening anybody else … Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia.”

If things were so benign in Moscow, and given their historical ties to Russia, they could even have opted to join Russia’s own rival to NATO, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), founded in 1994 and currently having Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan as members.

No, they did not find the idea of submitting to the warm embrace of Russia a reassuring prospect. Far from it. The historical connections, especially for those states with long histories under the Russian heel like Poland and the Baltics, gave rise to the suspicion that Russia’s centuries-long tendency to imperial expansion and brutal repression had not been expurgated but was merely in remission, ready to recrudesce once Russia recovered its bearings after the traumas of the 1990s.

There were early signs that this might be the case, dating back to the Yeltsin years. In 1992, the Yeltsin regime inserted troops into the Transnistria region of Moldova, allegedly to protect ethnic Russians (sound familiar?) They have remained there ever since, notwithstanding Moldova’s adoption of a formal policy of military non-alignment in 1994, inserting into its constitution an article that reads “the Republic of Moldova proclaims its permanent neutrality [and] does not allow the deployment of armed forces of other states on its territory."’

Well, that should have satisfied the Russian’s, surely? If, that is, Putin’s sole concern was to stop the spread of NATO. But no, Russian belligerence  towards Moldova has continued to escalate, with calls in the Duma for its formal annexation, and even the setting up of polling booths for the 2024 Russian presidential “election” in Transnistria.

With all this Russian provocation—not just provocation, but actual military aggression—Moldova has concluded, like Sweden and Finland, that a policy of neutrality is no longer viable. In July 2023 Moldovan foreign minister Nicu Popescu stated that his country's prosperity and security can only be guaranteed through its eventual membership in the European Union and through "intensified, accelerated cooperation with NATO.”

There were other early warning signs about Russia’s trajectory. There was the brutal conduct of the first (1994-96) and second (1999-2009) Chechen wars, with the regional capital Grozny utterly destroyed. There was the disturbing level of support for communists and ultra-nationalist extremists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, in the 1993 legislative elections.

And there were developments in the regime itself, most importantly the rise to power in 1999-2000 of KGB lieutenant-colonel Vladimir Putin, first as Prime Minister, then Acting President appointed by Yeltsin, then President following the March 2020 election. Putin was, and is, what the Russians term a Chekist, an acronym derived from the first name given to the secret police.

The significance of this development was not fully grasped in the West at the time, but as described in a recent book From Red Terror to Terrorist State by Russian historian Yuri Felshstinsky and former KGB colonel Vladimir Popov, it presaged a comprehensive takeover of the main power centres in Russia by those affiliated with the agencies of state repression, the siloviki. These authors contend that this takeover was the result of an orchestrated effort, including the placement of siloviki figures at the highest levels of government, that began almost immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.

This was followed by the progressive elimination of dissent, starting with the media, the persecution including murder of leading journalists like Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 as well as prominent opposition figures including Boris Nemtsov shot outside the Kremlin in 2015 after having been tailed for months by FSB agents, and most recently the killing of Alexey Navalny after an unsuccessful attempt to poison him with the nerve agent Novichok, then consigning him to a solitary cell in a prison north of the Arctic Circle (named Polar Wolf).

Then there are the brazen attacks on Russian dissidents living overseas, including former intelligence agents Alexander Litvinenko killed in 2006 and Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia poisoned in 2018. Litvinenko and the Skripals were living in Britain and were at the time of their killing naturalized British citizens.

They were poisoned using radioactive polonium-210 and the nerve agent Novichok (also used on Navalny) respectively, both intended to cause lingering, agonizing deaths. Use of these deadly agents endangered anyone living in the vicinity. Polonium, placed in a restaurant teapot from which Litvinenko drank, is one of the most lethal substances known to humanity, with some sources claiming that is up to a trillion times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide. The Russian scientists who created Novichok claim it is the deadliest nerve agent ever made. The Skripals survived, just, but an unrelated young woman was not so lucky, dying after picking up a contaminated perfume bottle.

The intent in these cases is to terrify regime opponents, even if they have escaped overseas, with the use of these exotic poisons intended to unmistakably indicate regime responsibility, notwithstanding pro forma Russian denials. What kind of state would perpetrate this kind of behaviour, even on the territory of a foreign power, potentially endangering thousands?

Given these developments, Kennan’s optimism about Russian democracy was misplaced, to put it mildly. Some Russians saw things more clearly at the time Putin took over. In an article in The Atlantic, the Russian journalist Sergei Dobrynin (now working for Radio Free Europe) writes about a conversation he had in early 2000 with his friend and mentor, the anthropologist Vladimir Arsenyev, in a St Petersburg cafeteria. Arsenyev punctured Dobrynin’s optimism about the coming Putin presidency in this exchange:

Arsenyev put down his beer and said (in Russian, of course): “This man, Putin, will bring this country to hell. I know this for sure. It is the worst thing that could ever happen to us.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He is a Chekist,” he said, meaning an agent of the secret police. “Once a Chekist, always a Chekist. He is pure evil.”

Sadly, Arsenyev’s pessimism has been well and truly borne out, though Mearsheimer does not think the characteristics of leaders have any bearing on regime behaviour. Putin is just a billiard ball responding to “provocations” by the West, not in the least responsible for any provocative, indeed positively alarming, behaviour of his own.

Who is it that set that terrifying NATO billiard ball rolling toward Russia in the first place, that caused the whole problem, and was therefore to blame for all that followed?

Somebody, some entity, must have the agency to start things off—there had to be a first mover, the wielder of the billiard cue that moved the first ball that led to the catastrophe.

In Mearsheimer’s world, that first mover in the modern context is almost invariably the United States, at least whenever things go seriously pear-shaped, whether it be Ukraine, the conflicts in the Middle East, whatever. Russia, on the other hand, is devoid of real agency, and therefore blameless.

What about the other NATO countries? According to Mearsheimer, they have no agency either, not really. In the end, perhaps after some token protestations, they invariably do what Uncle Sam tells them. This would have been news to President George W. Bush when he was trying to get French and German support for the 2003 Iraq invasion, with then secretary of state Colin Powell reportedly “incandescent with rage” at their persistent opposition.

So, the fact that France, Germany and other European states were opposed to admitting Ukraine to NATO within the foreseeable future and prepared to exercise their veto—Chancellor Scholz even assured Putin just before the invasion that Ukraine would not be admitted for at least thirty years, rendering nonsensical any talk of it being an urgent existential threat, as claimed by Putin. Apart from which, a condition of  admission to NATO is that a state have no outstanding territorial disputes, so all Putin needed to do was stick to his 2014 annexations.

Nonetheless, Mearsheimer maintains United States has the final say in NATO, and Scholz, Macron, and the rest of them would surely buckle. He asserts this, without evidence, because without this assumption his claim that Putin’s invasion was motivated by fear of NATO becomes untenable.  Aside from which, in the weeks before the invasion US officials also provided similar assurances to Putin: no admission of Ukraine to NATO for the foreseeable future.

This is the spurious case he makes to absolve Putin of all moral responsibility for the war. He had no agency—he was just a billiard ball, compelled by the physics of offensive realism theory, the imposition of an existential threat to Russia, to do what he did. The sole genuine moral agent in the world is the US, and it therefore must bear all the blame for the war.

This is absurd. Even if his complaints about NATO were valid which, as argued below they are not, Putin was in no sense compelled to invade Ukraine. He could have decided otherwise, and taken the less risky option of avoiding war, with all the unpredictability and genuinely existential escalatory dangers that war entails.

Mearsheimer’s defence of Putin boils down to the claim that the Russian dictator was faced with a compelling strategic imperative to invade Ukraine. He had no option since Russia’s very survival was threatened by NATO expansion, and especially the prospect of Ukraine joining. As argued further in Chapter 7, this defence is untenable, and Putin’s decision, by starting a major land war, with its escalatory potential, significantly endangered Russia rather than making it safer.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, there was compelling strategic case for Russia to invade Ukraine. How should such a strategic imperative be balanced against considerations of international legality and morality? Mearsheimer’s view is that where strategy and moral considerations point to the same policy, then morality can be considered. However, where they conflict, the strategic imperative will prevail over what morality and legality indicate. And, according to Mearsheimer, that is as it should be—recall that he sees offensive realism as both a descriptive and a prescriptive theory.

Mearsheimer addressed this issue in an interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker on 6 March 2022, several days after the invasion. Chotiner queries Mearsheimer about the apparent inconsistency between what Mearsheimer says about Ukraine and an article he and his colleague Stephen Walt wrote in 2006 about what he contends is the pernicious influence of the Israel lobby in America on US policy in the Middle East (Mearsheimer’s treatment of the Israel-Hamas war that started on 7 October 2023 is addressed in detail in Chapter 11).

Here is the relevant exchange in the interview:

Chotiner: I went back and I reread your article about the Israel lobby … I know you think of yourself as a tough, crusty old guy who doesn’t talk about morality, but it seemed to me you were suggesting there was a moral dimension here. I’m curious what you think, if any, of the moral dimension to what’s going on in Ukraine right now.

Mearsheimer: I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if you’re fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons.

In other words, what I’m saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations.

To illustrate his point, he cites the alliance between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union in World War II. He acknowledges that the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin was guilty of mass murder and other outrages—not that the Soviet Union was a “bad” state since offensive realism does not distinguish “good” from “bad” states (scare quotes are Mearsheimer’s). In this case, he argues, the imperatives of strategy and morality did not coincide. But despite this the democracies were right to ally with it to secure victory in the war since, according to Mearsheimer, strategy trumps morality.

He presents this as yet another straight binary choice: strategy versus morality; states must choose one or the other. Yet, he offers no plausible explanation of why strategy should always prevail over morality. What if the moral considerations are overwhelming, and the strategic stakes are marginal? How to weigh the two, in a variety of circumstances? Faced with strategic considerations, should moral concerns always have to give way?

His whole approach to this is hopelessly muddle-headed. Moral choice is all about what those with agency ought to do in various circumstances, all things considered. Strategic assessment should be an input to moral deliberation, not an alternative to it. In the World War II case, there was a moral imperative to win the war because the morally significant consequences of the Nazis winning it would be so catastrophic.

Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people would have been compounded by a further round of Nazi atrocities, with large numbers of Slavic untermensch (sub-humans) murdered or deported to create Lebensraum (living space) for the Germans, in accordance with Nazi ideology. Moreover, the European democracies would have been destroyed and their populations subjected to Nazi tyranny, and according to Franklin Roosevelt even the United States would in due course be threatened by an overwhelmingly powerful axis of totalitarian powers, with Japan the regional hegemon in Asia. That is what morally justified the wartime alliance, not a crude prioritization of strategy over morality.

On Just War Theory, Mearsheimer makes the novel move of defining of as “just” any war that it waged to secure state survival. Here is what he said to Gavin Jacobson of New Statesman magazine in an interview in September 2023:

I [Jacobson] asked if it could be considered a “just war”? “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a preventive war,” he said, “which is not permissible according to Just War Theory. But Russian leaders certainly saw the invasion as ‘just’, because they were convinced that Ukraine joining NATO was an existential threat that had to be eliminated. Almost every leader on the planet would think that a preventive war to deal with a threat to its survival was ‘just’.”

Mearsheimer elaborates on his thinking about the relationship between strategy, international legality, and morality, in a paper titled War and International Politics for the Notre Dame International Security Center on 30 January, 2024. He expanded on the themes of this paper in a lecture posted on YouTube two weeks later.

The lecture is useful in that it brings together in a concise format his views  on the circumstances where recourse to war is justified. He invokes  the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz to argue that war, being the continuation of politics by other means, should be seen as a legitimate tool of statecraft, to be used much more permissively than allowed by present-day international law and Just War Theory.

Mearsheimer sums up his viewpoint on the justifications for war in the following passage from the paper:

In keeping with international law and contemporary just war theory, most people in the West who think seriously about this issue believe that starting a war is only acceptable under a narrow set of circumstances: 1) if a country has good evidence that it is about to be attacked by an adversary and it launches a pre-emptive strike. In other words, it gets in the first blow in a war that is bound to happen; 2) if a state secures permission from the UN Security Council to attack another state; and 3) if one country intervenes in another to prevent mass murder or genocide.

According to the dictates of both international law and just war theory, preventive wars, which are wars aimed at averting an adverse shift in the balance of power, are verboten. They are illegal or unjust. So are wars of opportunity, where the balance of power is not shifting against the initiator, but it sees an opening to gain more power and enhance its security or perhaps achieve some other political objective like spreading an ideology. Thus, whether you see Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a preventive war, as Naftali Bennett, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jens Stoltenberg do, or you see it as an unprovoked war of aggression, as most people in the West do, it is both illegal and unjust, and should be condemned.27

In essence, many contemporary Western thinkers reject Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is an extension of politics by other means. For him, war is simply a useful tool of statecraft that states employ whenever it makes good military and political sense. That perspective allows for launching preventive wars as well as wars of opportunity. Naturally, there is no room for moral or legal considerations in Clausewitz’s understanding of war, which puts it at odds with how most people in the West think about war initiation.

The first paragraph of this excerpt contains a couple of inaccuracies in how he describes the criteria of international law and Just War Theory. Article 51 of the UN Charter states war is justified in only two circumstances: when exercising the inherent right to self-defence in response to an actual attack; and when authorized by the UN Security Council. Contrary to Mearsheimer, the Charter does not legitimize pre-emptive war, though there is debate among scholars about whether it is a reasonable interpretation of the inherent right to self-defence.

In his earlier writings and lectures, and in this lecture, Mearsheimer argues that nation states concerned about their security and survival inevitably will, and should, be prepared to breach international law and the moral norms of Just War Theory (moral and philosophical underpinning of international law) if they are sufficiently threatened.

Consequently, Mearsheimer thinks states should be open to waging two additional types of war, both strictly prohibited under international law: preventive war, and wars of opportunity.

In the lecture, Mearsheimer defines a preventive war as one that is “aimed at averting an adverse shift in the balance of power.” As discussed in Chapter 2, this is Mearsheimer’s defence of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as both rational, according to offensive realism, and warranted. This was because NATO expansion, and especially the prospect of Ukraine joining, caused just such an adverse shift.

This begs the question: how big a shift in the strategic balance would warrant going to war?

Would a neighbouring state increasing its military capabilities warrant going to war? That would undoubtedly change the strategic balance, but nobody, probably even Mearsheimer, would suggest that absent evidence of aggressive intentions, that could justify going to war. If it did, the United States would have been justified in attacking China decades ago when it became apparent that it aimed to match American naval capabilities.

Recognizing this, Mearsheimer needs to add an additional claim: that NATO expansion posed such a severe risk to Russia’s survival, an existential risk, that going to war was justified to counter it. Here is what he says in the paper, echoing his earlier comment to Jacobson:

Consider the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was a preventive war, which is impermissible according to both just war theory and international law. But Russian leaders surely believe the invasion was just or at least justifiable because they are convinced that Ukraine joining NATO is an existential threat that must be prevented. I believe that almost every world leader would think that a preventive war aimed at eliminating a mortal threat is a just or morally correct decision, even if just war theory says it is not.

I will not rehearse in detail the arguments made in Chapter 7 as to why this “existential risk” claim is ridiculous and indefensible. Russia has signed agreements that acknowledge the right of all states to join alliances, including military ones. Mearsheimer adds a footnote reference to a speech Putin made three days before the invasion that acknowledges that right but adds the stipulation that doing so should not “pose a threat to other states.” Ukraine had not joined NATO and had little prospect of joining it other than possibly in the distant future.

Moreover, there is no evidence that NATO has ever contemplated attacking Russia, holder of the world’s largest stock of nuclear weapons. They would be crazy to even contemplate such an act. The former Soviet bloc states were desperate to join NATO because of vastly more justified existential fears prompted by disturbing Russian conduct dating back to the early Yeltsin years.

Recall that in 1994 Ukraine agreed to surrender all the Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil to Russia in exchange for assurances from Russia (and the US and the UK) that it would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity within its 1991 borders. Mearsheimer has acknowledged that had Ukraine decided to hang on to these weapons, it would have effectively been immunised against Russian attack.

In the paper and lecture, Mearsheimer contends that there are two classes of war that are both illegal according to the stipulations of international law, and unjust according to the norms of Just War Theory but are nevertheless in his view justified by the imperative of ensuring state survival.

Which raises an obvious question: how does he justify this form of justification? Here is what he says on the question in his January 2024 lecture:

What is going on here, however, is more than just a disagreement: the aim of just war theorists and champions of international law is to subordinate the conduct of international politics to a moral or legal order that dictates when states can start a war as well as how they should wage it. Simply put, they want to create a world where initiating a war is permissible only in narrowly bounded circumstances.

But this is not how the world works. Preventive wars and wars of opportunity are baked into international politics, and nothing is going to change that fact of life in the foreseeable future. Whether states are democracies or non-democracies, they will launch these kinds of wars if they conclude that it is in their strategic interest to do so.

You could call this the argument from inevitability, but it is an obvious fallacy. Preventive wars and wars of opportunity are inevitable; therefore, they are justified, an obvious non sequitur. Why not cut to the chase and say that wars are inevitable, so there is no point trying to minimize them. Or, for that matter, crime is inevitable, so why combat it, and so on and so forth.

The whole point of instituting a rules-based international order, along with sanctions against violating them, is to diminish the incidence of wars, especially those of the type Mearsheimer defends. Talk of such wars being “baked into” international politics presumes the world is immutable. Mearsheimer offers no justification for this claim.

The history of post-war Western Europe provides a telling refutation of this fatalistic attitude. Britain, Germany, France, and other states had been at each other’s throats for centuries. Yet when they all became liberal democracies, the prospect of war between them became inconceivable, even if they continue to squabble about all manner of things. They lend powerful evidence for the “democratic peace” argument, that Mearsheimer disparages in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, citing a study that actually strongly confirms it.

But then he draws on what he believes to be his trump card: mortal threats, threats that endanger the survival of the state—existential dangers. Ensuring state survival, he contends, is the supreme obligation of the leaders of every state.

Not necessarily. He falsely analogizes states with people. People cannot fulfil any of their other goals if they fail to survive. Ditto states, argues Mearsheimer. But states, as such, do not have goals, nor a “will to life”. It is perfectly possible for the people of a state, and indeed their leaders, to be in favour of abolishing a state structure of which they are subjects, in pursuit of a better life, or indeed of greater security. The people and government of the GDR (the old East Germany) cheerfully assented to the termination of that state’s existence in 1990 and absorption into the Federal Republic. Scotland, likewise, abolished itself as a separate state to become part of the United Kingdom in 1707.

But let’s grant that in most cases state leaders will attach a very high priority to ensuring the survival of their state. In the lecture, Mearsheimer says this about the Ukraine war:

To illustrate my point, consider the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was a preventive war, which is impermissible according to both just war theory and international law. But Russian leaders surely believe the invasion was just or at least justifiable because they are convinced that Ukraine joining NATO is an existential threat that must be prevented. I believe that almost every world leader would think that a preventive war aimed at eliminating a mortal threat is a just or morally correct decision, even if just war theory says it is not.

And he seems quite excited at the discovery that even Michael Walzer, the liberal American political scientist, author of the magisterial Just and Unjust Wars, and strong defender of the Just War Theory approach, concedes in this book that the rules of war can be violated when a state is confronted with a “danger of an unusual and horrifying kind”, but qualifies that by adding it must wait until it is “face-to-face not merely with a defeat likely to bring disaster to a political community” before it can act unjustly.

To which Mearsheimer replies:

Why would a state facing an existential threat wait until the moment when it is on the verge of destruction to act like a realist? Would it not make more sense for a state to deal with a rival before it became a mortal threat? Obviously, it would, but that logic pushes states to act according to realist dictates from the get-go and ignore just war theory unless it is in synch with balance-of-power logic.

In essence, the survival imperative in international anarchy leaves states with little choice but to see preventive wars and wars of opportunity as acceptable tools of statecraft. Indeed, if a state strictly adhered to just war theory or international law, it would put its survival at risk.

What Mearsheimer’s formulation fails to consider is that, if his thinking is taken to license starting wars based on any future hypothetical threat scenario, however improbable or implausible, it will amount to a recipe for more wars, endless wars of prevention and opportunity, each with serious risks, including disastrous escalation

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes the point perfectly. Russia started a war, ostensibly to ward off a potential future threat from NATO, in reality a vanishingly low-probability event. However, this course of action is far from riskless. How many regimes and empires, and nations, have gone under after initiating wars? And nowadays, any such undertaking carries the risk of catastrophic risk of escalation, as Putin’s incredibly irresponsible nuclear brinkmanship illustrates. There is serious talk of Russian failure in Ukraine possibly leading to the breakup of Russia.

In addition to which, there is the objection of “defensive” school realists that such conduct will inevitably trigger a reaction from countries who feel threatened by it. Sweden and Finland’s decision to overturn long-standing policies of military non-alignment and join NATO in response to Russian aggression illustrates the point perfectly.

If, counterfactually, NATO is a dire threat to Russia, it is now a bigger one, with the Baltic Sea now a “NATO lake”, and NATO’s Finland frontier perilously close to the Kola Peninsula, where many of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons are housed. Ukraine, likely to survive in some form, has gone from a nation marked by generally friendly attitudes to Russia to one that imbued with a burning hatred for all things Russian, likely to last for generations.

Across the board, NATO member nations, especially “frontline” states near to Russia, including Poland, the Baltic nations, Finland, and Sweden, have all markedly ramped up their defence spending in preparation for what they see as a possible future war between Russia and NATO.

Some wag on X (Twitter) summed it up by posting a spoof gold medallion signed by NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg awarded to Vladimir Putin for services helping to build the alliance.

(PS you might have noticed in the first quotation above from Mearsheimer’s paper that he “verbals” Stoltenberg as supporting his “defensive war” characterization of the invasion. In fact, Stoltenberg was making an ironical reference to the counterproductivity of the invasion viewed as a measure to weaken NATO).