7. The NATO-as-Existential-Threat Furphy
In what way does NATO expansion threaten the very existence of Russia?
Putin’s aggression against Ukraine is devoid of any shred of legitimate justification, if judged against the provisions of international law, the principles of Just War Theory that underpin international law, as well as multiple instruments and agreements signed by the Russian Federation and its recognized precursor state, the Soviet Union.
Mearsheimer does not care about that, however. He has his own theory of right action by nation states that is grounded in his offensive realism theory which stresses the imperative for nation states to maximize their relative power compared to actual or potential rivals in order to ensure their security and survival. Indeed, he takes this to an extreme, arguing great powers should aspire to become hegemonic, even if this means recourse to war.
As for small states, their prerogatives barely warrant consideration. As Mearsheimer said to Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker Magazine in an interview in March 2022:
In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy. But in the real world, that is not feasible.
Indeed, in the same interview, Mearsheimer made clear that in his view they are not even entitled to seek collective security against possible great-power aggression by joining an alliance. Here is what he says about the tiny Baltic states joining NATO:
Mearsheimer: There are people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. First of all, the Baltic states are members of NATO and—
Chotiner: Is that a good thing?
Mearsheimer: No.
Chotiner: You’re saying that he’s not going to invade them in part because they’re part of NATO, but they shouldn’t be part of NATO?
No, such states just have to accept their lot, as subservient to whatever larger power feels inclined to bully and subjugate them. This could be called the Mearsheimer Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty, following Brezhnev’s doctrine of the same name used to justify his invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
This thinking leads him to ascribe primary, almost sole, responsibility for the Ukraine war to the West, NATO, and especially the United States. NATO expansion after the Cold War, and especially the failure to permanently rule out Ukrainian membership undermined Russia’s strategic position.
Therefore, he contends, it was natural, righteous, and indeed obligatory for Russia to attack Ukraine to remove this threat. But how on earth can a need to maintain a country’s strategic position possibly warrant starting a war in the absence of compelling evidence of an impending attack? Even from the viewpoint of national survival, this hardly seems prudent, as the dictators of Germany, Japan and Italy who launched the Second World War could attest, were they able to speak from beyond the grave.
It just seems nuts. Except, Mearsheimer thinks he has a trump card: “existential risk”. In virtually all his presentations absolving Putin and blaming the West, Mearsheimer stresses that NATO’s expansion into the post-Soviet space posed an existential threat to Russia. Or, more precisely, he mentions that Putin and regime propagandists, all say that NATO near Russia’s borders poses an existential threat.
Memo to all “realists”. The fact that a dictator asserts that X is an existential threat is not conclusive evidence that X is such a threat, or even that the dictator sincerely believes X is such a threat. There are good reasons to believe that neither is true for Putin and Russia’s claims about NATO.
Existential risk has become a regular figure in public discourse nowadays, invoked for legitimate, dubious, or even scurrilous motives.
Legitimate cases include the minute but real risk of earth colliding with a large near-earth object (asteroid or comet), enough of a concern for NASA to launch the Spaceguard project to provide early-warning of such an event. There were the concerns of some of the physicists involved in developing the first atomic bomb that the unprecedented heat it would generate might trigger chain reactions in the atmosphere and oceans that might incinerate the surface of the earth, wiping out all life (they estimated the probability of such an event was just under 0.3 percent, so OK to proceed!)
More recently, there are concerns about nuclear war, lethal pandemics, and out-of-control technologies, especially the sharp acceleration of progress on artificial intelligence that has brought forward estimates of when artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI with super-human capabilities, will arrive. Not to forget climate change, though even such a passionate advocate of urgent climate action as the American scientist Michael Mann concedes there is no evidence it would be truly existential. These new threats have led to the establishment of a number of research centres in major universities devoted to identifying and analysing existential risk.
One problem with these discussions is a lack of clarity about what it takes for a risk to be considered existential. Existence of what? Humanity? Life on earth? Civilization-as-we-know it? The British philosopher Toby Ord has proposed the following definition: an existential risk is a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. This would obviously include human extinction, as well as unrecoverable civilizational collapse, or circumstances that could lead to the long-term immiseration of humanity.
These are legitimate, in some cases urgent issues, and the public nowadays have become accustomed to existential risk talk in relation to some issues. It is often deployed as a trump card in contentious debates. After all, what could be more important than an issue that is existential? Surely, everything else must be put on hold to deal with this one question?
It is not surprising then that a scoundrel like Putin would tap into this sentiment to justify his recourse to war in Ukraine by claiming a Western-aligned Ukraine posed an existential danger to Russia “comparable to weapons of mass destruction”, as he said in his July 2021 article On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians posted on the Kremlin website. Mearsheimer invokes this over and over to support his contention that Putin was forced by the West to invade Ukraine.
How could NATO expansion threaten Russia’s very existence? Russia is a powerful state, with the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. What kind of existential risk scenario could Putin have in mind?
Do Russia’s top political and military leaders go to bed at night fearful at the prospect they might wake up to face a full-scale invasion of Russia through the flat plains of Ukraine by a NATO army, maybe spearheaded by German panzer divisions? A veritable Operation Barbarossa Mark II?
Mearsheimer seems to think they worry about something like this. In his Foreign Affairs article in the September/October 2014 edition that followed the annexation of Crimea he writes “Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia.”
Is he serious? Things have moved on since the days of Napoleon, things like nuclear weapons. With NATO a defensive alliance made up of thirty-two ideologically and culturally diverse nations that sometimes seem to have trouble agreeing on anything, let alone an enterprise like attacking Russia?
An alliance whose biggest European members had cut their military capabilities to the bone compared to the height of the Cold War. Take Germany: during the Cold War, the Bundeswehr reached a peak of 509,000 personnel. By 2014, it had fallen to 180,000. Things had reached a point where the chief-of-staff of the German army General Alfons Mais lamented, several hours after the 24 February invasion, “the Bundeswehr, the army which I have the honour to command, is standing there more or less empty-handed. The options we can offer the government in support of the alliance are extremely limited.”
Take Britain. At its Cold War peak, the British armed forces had over 870,000 personnel, falling to 142,000 by 2023. The reduction in US forces deployed to Europe was even more dramatic, falling from 4 million troops at its height to just under 80,000 by 2019, falling further to 60,000 subsequently. In 2013, the last American armoured brigade based in Germany was deactivated, which effectively left zero US army tanks in Europe, down from 5,000 in 1989.
This seems like a funny way to go about preparing an attack on Russia. In fact, things had reached a point where serious concerns were being expressed about whether NATO retained the capacity to effectively deter aggression by Russia.
This was the post-Cold War “peace dividend”, based on the false assumption that a major land war in Europe had become inconceivable. In 2019 French president Macron argued that NATO had lost its sense of purpose, indeed was becoming “brain dead”. At the same time, Russia was making a massive effort to modernize and expand its armed forces, an effort that we now know was significantly vitiated by inefficiencies and corruption in its defence industries.
Since 2014, in response to Russian aggression, a range of initiatives have been taken to restore NATO’s capability to deter, including the regular rotation of armoured brigades through Central and Eastern Europe, including the highly vulnerable Baltic states. Needless to say, these efforts have gained much more momentum following the 2022 invasion, a powerful defibrillator shock delivered by one Vladimir Putin.
Here is the reality. The NATO alliance is, and always has been, a defensive alliance, formed to counter the threat posed by the Soviet army and its Warsaw Pact allies. There is not a shred of credible evidence that NATO, Ukraine, or Ukraine in NATO have, or would have, contemplated launching military aggression against Russia, either in the short term or in the distant future. They would have to be clinically insane to do so.
As for nuclear weapons being placed in the new member states, NATO declared at the time it had no intention to station such weapons in them and has held scrupulously to this commitment since. Ironically, if Ukraine had not trusted Russian pledges in 1994 to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and on that basis surrendered all the 1,800 Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil to Russia, it would have held the third largest stock of such weapons in the world.
Here is a further memo to realists: the sure-fire way to induce a defensive alliance to rearm is to start threatening and committing acts of aggression against neighbouring states. Small states, especially, tend to get quite worried about that. Will they be next? This really could be an existential issue for them. No wonder Sweden and Finland overturned long-held policies of non-alignment and joined NATO, and the head of the Swedish armed forces has publicly announced that his nation needed to be prepared for the possibility of war.
States with centuries of experience under the Russian heel like Poland and the Baltic states also find Putinite Russia’s revanchist turn disturbing and are lifting their military game, especially Poland which has already raised its defence expenditure to 4 percent of GDP, the highest in the NATO alliance, and plans to go further in future.
But to Mearsheimer Russia is just doing what comes naturally. After all, according to offensive realism, his prescriptive theory, a great power should aim to be the regional hegemon by whatever means are necessary, including military force.
If Putin really does live in fear of a NATO attack, it would refute definitively Mearsheimer’s insistence that he is a cool strategic thinker with high-level analytical skills, the epitome of a rational actor. However Putin himself disposed of this suggestion in his January 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, who was Fox News’ most popular commentator until it fired him in April 2023, and now runs an enormously popular X account.
This interview should not be viewed as a journalistic enterprise but a Russian state information operation in which Carlson was a willing collaborator, having been a consistent Russian apologist from the start of the 2022 invasion. Did it reveal anything important, despite this? As it happens, the answer is yes, in a “dog that didn’t bark” sense, as in what Putin didn’t say.
Carlson’s opening question was:
Mr. President, thank you. On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started, and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States, through NATO, might initiate a, quote, surprise attack on our country and too American ears, that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
Putin brushed this off:
It's not that America, the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. I didn't say that. Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?
Putin then said he would spend “thirty seconds, or one minute”, to provide Carlson with some relevant historical background, and proceeded with a half-hour-long boring and tendentious account of Russian history, from the foundations of Kyivan Rus more than a millennium ago to the present day. Even if every element of Putin’s version of history was accurate, it would provide no justification for his actions. And it certainly is not accurate—see this article by historian Timothy Snyder for a comprehensive rebuttal.
At this point, Carlson could have pressed Putin by asking “but Mr President, you have said repeatedly that Ukraine in NATO posed an existential risk to Russia, but you now insouciantly dismiss as unserious the prospect of a NATO military attack. In that case, what kind of truly existential risk do you have in mind that could possibly justify starting the first major land war in Europe since 1945, with the all-too-real existential risks that entailed?” But, of course, probing Putin’s fallacious arguments and factual claims was never the purpose of this interview.
In fairness to Carlson, while Putin did not use the words “NATO surprise attack” in his February 2022 speech, he did raise the danger of Ukraine being the springboard for the launching of a “pre-emptive strike” against Russia. A pre-emptive strike refers to an attack made in circumstances where there is real and credible evidence of an imminent attack on one’s own forces, as with Israel’s air strikes in the 1967 Six Day War.
So, if Russia wants to avoid a pre-emptive strike, all it need do is refrain from posing a credible and imminent threat of attack on another state, the kind of threat it posed to Ukraine in early 2022, and in spring 2021, as it concentrated forces on the latter’s border. By its very nature, a pre-emptive strike would have to be a surprise attack.
Yet, when prompted by Carlson, Putin declined to try to defend the surprise attack, or pre-emptive strike scenario, or to explain just what kind of threat he was concerned about being posed by NATO, instead blowing a big cloud of smoke with his historical monologue.
Putin clearly sensed that the suggestion NATO would mount a surprise attack on Russia just needed to be stated for its absurdity to be obvious to anyone with intact rational faculties. As Carlson said, it sounded paranoid. Only marginally more absurd, though, than Professor Measheimer’s theory, expressed in an interview with Gavin Jacobson of the New Statesman, that Putin “had been thinking in terms of preventive war” because Ukraine had become a potent fighting force.
From Jacobson’s article about the interview:
I was surprised,” Mearsheimer, 75, told me from his office in Chicago. “At a gut level it was hard to imagine a war of this sort in Europe.” Mearsheimer said that he hadn’t appreciated the extent to which the West had armed and trained Ukraine to the point where it was becoming a de facto member of NATO.
I didn’t understand the logic of preventive war in Putin’s thinking,” he explained, “because I thought Ukraine was a weak power. But once it was clear in the early stages of the battle that Ukraine was a potent fighting force, you could see that Putin had been thinking in terms of preventive war – I had missed that.
Utter nonsense. Up to the time of the invasion, the US and NATO allies had been meticulously careful to provide only defensive weapons to Ukraine—anti-tank missiles, short range air defence systems, and the like. Ukraine received no modern main battle tanks, combat aircraft, long-range precision artillery systems. Mearsheimer’s contention that Putin was waging a preventive war is patently nonsensical.
So, if Putin was not motivated by the prospect of a physical attack by NATO that would endanger the very survival of the Russian state, what other kind of threat could he have in mind that might count as existential? One preoccupation of Russian leaders, including and especially Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a close supporter of Putin and his Ukraine war, is concern about the threat to the nation’s spiritual security posed by the influence of decadent Western values, with a special obsession with woke gender ideology. This is described in a December 2022 paper by Kristina Stoeckl, a professor of sociology at the University of Innsbruck. She links this to the decision to go to war to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold:
The Russian war on Ukraine, which started in 2014 and escalated in 2022, has clarified the stakes of Russia’s spiritual security doctrine: it leads to repression to the inside, and to war with the outside world. Russian politicians, security agencies, and religious leaders who developed the National Security Strategy never concealed their deep conviction that Ukraine was an integral part of the Russian World and that controlling Ukraine was of vital interest for the nation’s spiritual security.
In his speech at the beginning of the invasion, Putin justified the “special military operation” as necessary to protect Russia from harmful Western influences: “they sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within”. The spiritual security doctrine has become the justification for Russia’s war on Ukraine and, in an enlarged perspective, with the West.
This ties in with a broader concept considered important by some international relations scholars—Russia’s ontological security. This is essentially about a state’s sense of itself, and of its proper place in the world. In the case of a personalist dictatorship like Putin’s Russia, it is very much about the aspirations of the leader who dominates the decision-making process. As one scholar puts it “it is security as being, rather than security as survival.”
This kind of thinking, an extension of human psychology to nation states, is antithetical to realism, none more so than Mearsheimer’s offensive realism that likens state interactions to colliding billiard balls, with the traits of the leader of little relevance. As demonstrated in the Chapter 8, Putin sees himself as following in the footsteps of Peter the Great, the Russian leader who in the first decades of the eighteenth century embarked on a program of conquests that established Russia’s status as an empire.
Frustratingly, Mearsheimer is rarely pressed to clarify what he means by an existential threat. Existence of what, that is of sufficient importance to warrant starting a major land war?
One exception to this was at the 2022 conference of the American Political Science Association, where after being pressed by Russia/Ukraine experts Oxana Shevel and Olena Nikolayenko, Mearsheimer reportedly ended up conceding it was not a threat to Russia’s sovereignty or security within its borders, but to Russia’s status as a great power.
Oh, now we see. An existential risk to Russia’s status as a great power. Not quite the same as a military threat to the physical survival of Russia is it. Is anyone supposed to feel sympathy for this? Putin feels Russia has a right, maybe even a divine right, to be a great power, and how can it be a truly great power without having an empire?
Who would have thought it: the Great Realist is worried about the self-esteem of Vladimir Putin. But would not referral to a good psychiatrist or counsellor be a better way of addressing this than apologizing for his warmongering?
Where might this kind of reasoning lead? Consider this passage, from Mearsheimer’s latest book How States Think:
Germany’s decision to go to war in 1914 provides further evidence that states privilege survival over other goals … victory over the Triple Entente would have shifted the balance of power decisively in Germany’s favor, all but assuring its survival. German leaders subordinated prosperity to survival and chose war.
A similar logic applies to China’s relationship with Taiwan today. Chinese leaders have emphasized that they view an independent Taiwan as a threat to China’s survival because it would represent the permanent loss of national territory, something that virtually no Chinese is willing to countenance. Beijing has said it will go to war if Taipei declares independence, despite economic consequences that Thomas Friedman has described as “mutual assured economic destruction.”
There is a certain sense in the German reference. German military leaders were worried about being overtaken by Russia given its rapid industrialization, and some thought war with Russia inevitable so better to fight it early. This would not however make the war decision rational, let alone moral, given the inherent risks a state undertakes when it starts a war. After all, the outcomes of the war included the destruction of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the end of Germany’s status as an imperial power. Not a good survival strategy.
Remarkably, Mearsheimer then goes on to bracket this with China’s insistence on reunification with Taiwan. This too is a survival issue! Something that no Chinese would be willing to countenance! At least, that is what the Chinese leaders say, just as Putin says a West-aligned Ukraine is an existential issue.
How is it a survival issue for China? Because it would mean the permanent loss of national territory, containing 0.17 percent of the mainland’s population (albeit more if GDP is the measure). You might as well say that someone faced with having their big toe amputated is a survival issue, indeed an existential issue.
But the Chinese leaders say it is a survival issue and, according to Mearsheimer’s thinking, therefore it is, and recourse to war is justified to avoid this terrible existential danger.