2. Why Mearsheimer Matters

He is one of the most valuable Western apologists for Putin's aggression

On 14 June 2024 Vladimir Putin gave a speech to senior officials of the Russian foreign ministry laying out an ostensibly new proposal to end hostilities in Ukraine.

The proposal was immediately rejected by Ukraine and the Western allies, as Putin knew it would be, since it would require Ukraine to surrender substantial additional parts of its territory, permanently preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, and included the usual demands for the “denazification and demilitarization” of Ukraine, meaning regime change and installation of a puppet administration. Furthermore, Ukraine would be required to limit the size and capability of its military forces to the point of rendering it defenceless in the face of a resumption of Russian aggression.

In addition to laying out this new bogus peace proposal, Putin’s lengthy speech included a detailed recitation of his version of the conflict’s origins, his justifications for the invasion, and what he hoped to achieve by it.

Amid all this, the speech included the following claim, which grabbed my attention since it rang a bell, it seemed familiar, though not from any previous Russian official statement:

As you know, in February and March 2022 our troops approached Kiev [Ukrainian spelling Kyiv]. There are many speculations both in Ukraine and in the West about this.

What do I want to say about this? Our units were indeed deployed near Kiev, and the military departments and the security bloc had different proposals on our possible further actions, but there was no political decision to storm the city with three million people, no matter what anyone said or speculated.

In fact, it was nothing else but an operation to coerce the Ukrainian regime into  peace. The troops  were  there in order  to push  the Ukrainian  side to negotiations, try to find acceptable solutions and thereby end the war Kiev had started against Donbass back in 2014, and resolve issues that pose a threat to the security of Russia.

This excerpt includes the usual Russian lie about Kyiv “starting the war against Donbass in 2014”. Russia started the violent conflict in the Donbass. This has been acknowledged, indeed boasted about, by the former FSB officer who commanded the military forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Igor Girkin. As reported by Reuters:

In an interview published last week in the Russian ultranationalist weekly Zavtra (Tomorrow), Girkin details how he helped instigate the insurrection and active-duty Russian soldiers later intervened to save the rebels from the jaws of defeat.

For Girkin, there is no question of who started the conflict; he claims to have started it himself. “I’m the one who pulled the trigger of war. If our squad hadn’t crossed the border, it all would have ended like in Kharkiv or Odesa. There would have been a few dozen killed, burned, and arrested. And that would have ended everything,” Girkin says. “Our squad set the flywheel of war in motion. We reshuffled all the cards on the table.” What the Kremlin tries to hide with fabrications and lies, Girkin says openly.

This assessment is confirmed by another Russian participant in the 2014 Donbass events, Pavel Gubarev, who said in an interview with a Russian nationalist blogger that it was Girkin who was able to “drag the uprising out of a usual, unarmed and toothless street process.” These surreptitious activities were followed in August 2014 by an invasion of Donbass by regular formations of the Russian army.

But notice Putin’s claim that the push toward Kyiv in February and March 2022 was nothing more than an attempt to coerce the Ukrainians into peace negotiations. Quite a negotiating tactic that, sending a column of vehicles 64 kilometres long toward Kyiv. Russia’s Northern Ukrainian campaign was the main focus of the invasion involving at its peak 70,000 troops and 7,000 vehicles according to Ukraine’s deputy defence minister General Pavliuk.

The reality is that nobody, including and especially the Russians, saw it as just a negotiating tactic at the time. Western experts interpreted the invasion as an attempt at a coup de main, the military term for an attempt to achieve a major outcome with one decisive blow.

The plan of operations was very similar to what the Soviets used to take over Afghanistan in December 1979. On that occasion, Soviet special forces seized key buildings in Kabul, while airborne units captured the main airport nearby. Simultaneously, armoured columns poured across the border. The Aghan regime was quickly decapitated, and a puppet regime friendly to Moscow installed.

The Russian attempt to achieve the same in Ukraine failed disastrously. The special operations groups (mainly Chechens and Wagner mercenaries) that entered Kyiv to kill or capture Zelenski and other Ukrainian leaders failed, some reportedly being wiped out. The attempt to seize the Hostomel airport north of Kyiv, so that reinforcements could be flown in, failed.

The armoured column that crossed the border from Belarus degenerated into a disorderly traffic jam that became trapped and vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery and anti-tank missiles on a single narrow road. There were logistical failures as tanks and other vehicles ran out of fuel.

A total shemozzle. Russia suffered a catastrophic and completely unexpected defeat in  what has come to be known as the Battle for Kyiv.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Putin and his regime expected that Ukrainian resistance would quickly collapse, Zelenski and his government would flee or be eliminated, and a large part of the population would welcome the Russians. This is made clear in a trove of documents and intercepted messages that the Washington Post described in a report in August 2022 that indicates the expected takeover of Kyiv would be as much an FSB operation as a military one.

According to these documents, the FSB was tasked with ensuring the decapitation of the Ukrainian government and the installation of a pro-Russian regime. They thought it would be easy, according to the report:

So certain were FSB operatives that they would soon control the levers of power in Kyiv, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials, that they spent the waning days before the war arranging safe houses or accommodations in informants’ apartments and other locations for the planned influx of personnel.

Two weeks before the invasion, UK defence minister Ben Wallace visited Moscow, where he met defence minister Sergei Shoigu and armed forces chief-of-staff General Valery Gerasimov. Both assured him that the Ukrainians “won’t fight” and “would welcome them”, with Shoigu adding “my mother is Ukrainian, they won’t fight”, before quickly reciting the lie that anyway “they had no intention of invading”.

It would all be done and dusted within weeks, if not days, and Western military figures and intelligence services generally concurred. Chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff General Mark Milley thought Kyiv would fall in three days. So confident were the Russians of a swift outcome that the forces that tried to take Kyiv were told to bring their formal dress uniforms for the anticipated victory parade.

Russian state media in the days immediately following the invasion celebrated what they thought would be Ukraine’s return to the motherland, with one article declaring “Russia is restoring its historic unity: the tragedy of 1991, that unnatural aberration, has been overcome.”

The “unnatural aberration” that Putin wrote about at length in his July 2021 article posted to the Kremlin website titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Several months after that article was posted, Putin tried to turn that “historical unity” into a present-day reality. It was an attempt to swallow Ukraine whole. Something he thought would be easy, requiring just a short “special military operation”.

The idea that an operation of this scale was just a negotiating tactic to “coerce the Ukrainian regime into peace” as Putin claims is an absurdity of Orwellian proportions. Start an unprovoked war to compel the victim into peace!

Who could possibly take the invasion-as-negotiating-tactic line seriously? No reputable analyst or scholar in the West, surely?

Enter Professor John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and renowned scholar of international relations. Mearsheimer is the most publicly prominent advocate of the realist framework for analysing international relations, having come up with his own variant of the theory that he calls offensive realism.

Since the inception of this armed conflict in February/Marchd 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and, after fomenting a violent conflict in the eastern Donbass region using irregular forces, in August of that year sent its regular army into the region, Mearsheimer has been the most prolific academic defender of Russian conduct. While absolving Russia, he has placed almost sole blame for the conflict on “the West”, the NATO alliance, and especially the United States.

In 2014, Mearsheimer wrote an article that appeared in the August edition of Foreign Affairs magazine with the title Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault. He followed that up the following year with a lecture at the University of Chicago almost identically titled Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault? Since being posted to YouTube, this lecture has received 29 million views and nearly 19,000 comments, most praising the perspicacity of Mearsheimer’s analysis.

What a propaganda gift to Putin! A distinguished Western scholar providing a full endorsement of Russia’s propaganda line justifying its blatant aggression. No wonder the Russian ministry of foreign affairs immediately tweeted endorsement of Mearsheimer’s Foreign Affairs article. Mearsheimer was  invited to become an expert commentator for the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian outfit that holds periodic gatherings of Putin allies from Russia and abroad, with Putin himself featuring prominently. The Valdai Club even made a financial contribution to Mearsheimer’s latest book (How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, November 2023).

Since then, in a multitude of talks, lectures, interviews, and articles, Mearsheimer has continued to make the same case, insisting that the West “forced” Putin to invade Ukraine by expanding NATO into the newly freed former Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations.

It was in several of Mearsheimer’s contributions that I first heard the absurd invasion-as-negotiating-tactic claim. Here, for example, is what he said in October 2023 at an event in Brisbane sponsored by the centre-right think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS):

He did not try to conquer Kyiv. The reasons he invaded Ukraine was he wanted to force Zelenski to the bargaining table so they could get some sort of agreement on Ukrainian neutrality, Ukraine not being in NATO.

This claim, which is too silly for words, thereby became, in a sense, sanitized from the point of view of Russia’s propagandists. Something they would be unlikely to say on their own authority—but if a distinguished Western scholar had already endorsed it, thereby giving a modicum of credibility, why not!

When challenged about this, Mearsheimer makes the following argument: If Russia had planned to conquer Ukraine, we would have known that he would need a much larger force than the 190,000 troops that were initially deployed, since Ukraine is a country of 45 million people, with a formidable Western trained and equipped army.

But, as mentioned above, there is overwhelming evidence that Putin and his military leadership did not anticipate serious resistance from the Ukrainians. They completely misjudged the situation, and such intelligence failures are one of the defining features of personalist autocracies, regimes characterized by a power vertical with a single dictator at its apex surrounded by sycophants anxious to tell the leader what he wants to hear.

This, by the way, highlights a major flaw in Mearsheimer’s offensive realism theory of international relations, which analogizes interactions between states in the international system to colliding billiard balls. They are all the same except for differences in size reflecting their relative power. This is Mearsheimer’s own metaphor, not a caricature erected by his opponents. In Mearsheimer’s view, the system of governance in a country makes little or no difference to state behaviour. Liberal democracies accountable to electorates, single-party dictatorships, theocratic rule like Iran, personalist autocracies like Putin’s Russia, all act pretty much the same in comparable circumstances.

In his most important book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer says Germany would have acted similarly in comparable circumstances whether ruled by Bismark, Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, or a democratic leader. Moreover, it does not matter whether states are “good” or “bad” (Mearsheimer’s scare quotes).

Bismark, Hitler, Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz—they would all do more or less the same thing, in the same international circumstances, according to Mearsheimer’s theory.

Critics question how anyone could seriously believe that, but Mearsheimer apparently does. And he also believes, as elaborated in his most recent book (How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, November 2023) that states, irrespective of regime type, can generally be presumed to be rational actors. Putin, he says, is clearly a “first rate strategist”, so he surely would not make the mistake of trying to conquer a country with an inadequate force.

Indeed, prior to February 2022 Mearsheimer was dismissive of the idea that Russia would attempt to conquer Ukraine at all. In his 2015 lecture Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault he said Putin would try to wreck Ukraine to punish it for daring to want to join the West, hardly prescient given he was already in the process of doing just that—in fact, he was working on it from when he became the Russian prime minister in August 1999. However, he ridiculed any suggestion Putin planned to conquer Ukraine:

What they’re doing is not trying to conquer Ukraine. There are many people who say the Russians are going to go on a rampage, they’re going to try and reestablish the Soviet Union or Greater Russia, and so forth and so on. That’s not going to happen.

Becoming exuberant, Mearsheimer went on:

Putin is much too smart for that.  … You want to stay out of these places. In fact, if you really want to wreck Russia what you should do is encourage it to try and conquer Ukraine. Putin, again, is much too smart to do that.

Except that, on 24 February 2022, Putin did just that. How to account for this strange development?

As noted above, one strategy was to simply deny it had happened at all, it was all just a tactic to force Ukraine to the negotiating table, but this explanation came sometime after the event.

His initial reaction was somewhat different, as he explained in an interview with Gavin Jacobson of New Statesman magazine, on the day of the invasion he was about to file an article to Foreign Affairs, but received an urgent message from fellow realist Stephen M. Walt to check the news before doing anything:

I was surprised. At a gut level it was hard to imagine a war of this sort in Europe … I didn’t understand the logic of preventive war in Putin’s thinking, 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.

So yes, he was surprised, but he didn’t realize that Western aid and training had transformed Ukraine into such a mighty power that it could pose a threat to Russia—as he was later to elaborate, a threat to its very survival! A de facto NATO army.

This is completely ridiculous. In assisting Ukraine between 2014 and 2022, the US and other Western powers were meticulously careful to only provide defensive systems, not ones remotely geared to major offensive operations. There were no Western main battle tanks, no combat aircraft, no long-range precision artillery systems, no air defence systems beyond simple MANPADS (man-portable air-defence systems).

More sophisticated and potent weapons only came after the invasion as Ukraine tried to recover its territory, and even then the weapons supplied were far from NATO’s state-of-the-art, for example F-16 jets released by NATO allies as they are replaced with fifth-generation stealth aircraft like the F-35.

Nonetheless, Mearsheimer continues to insist to this day that Russia was waging a preventive war. In How States Think, he goes further, conflating preventive war with a war of self-defence:

This is a war of self-defence aimed at preventing an adverse shift in the balance of power.

Turn that over in your mind, for a moment: A “war of self-defence” to prevent “an adverse shift in the balance of power.”

Is Mearsheimer serious? The balance of power in the world is changing constantly. For example, China has for some time been engaged in a massive military buildup with the goal of becoming the hegemon of the Indo-Pacific area, and ultimately the world. Should the United States have gone to war to prevent that? How many wars would that doctrine legitimize, if widely adopted by major and minor powers?

To give this absurd and dangerous proposition greater plausibility, Mearsheimer invariably invokes Putin’s bald assertions that NATO expansion posed a grave threat to Russia’s survival. As Mearsheimer often says in his presentations, with great emphasis “it’s an existential issue!”

So, according to Mearsheimer, launching a massive invasion, and annexing the territory, of a neighbouring country that had never committed any act of aggression against it, nor expressed the slightest intention to do so, just because of the distant prospect it might join the NATO alliance, is justified by the right of self-defence?

Bear in mind that Russia has signed on to a treaty, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, that explicitly acknowledges the sovereign right of all states to join military alliances to ensure their security.

What kind of existential danger is Putin thinking of? What possible scenario? Are Putin, and Mearsheimer, seriously suggesting that the thirty-two member NATO alliance might contemplate a massive attack on Russia, possessor of the world’s largest stock of nuclear weapons? Putin himself dismissed that notion as “unserious” when asked about it during his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson.

If not that, what else could count as an existential danger? Mearsheimer is rarely pressed about this. One of the rare exceptions was at the 2022 conference of the American Political Science Association, where Russia/Ukraine experts Oxana Shevel and Olena Nikolayenko queried Mearsheimer on this point. Here is how one participant reported his response:

Mearsheimer said repeatedly that Russia faces an “existential threat” in Ukraine and is responding rationally and predictably. When he completed this phrase, it turned out not to mean a threat to Russia’s sovereignty, autonomy, or security within its borders. Mearsheimer meant a threat to Russia’s status as a great power.

Oh, so that’s it: Russia’s status as a great power. Not quite the same thing as a threat to the very survival of a nation and its people, which most people would understand by the term existential danger.

Since when does a threat to a country’s status provide a legitimate justification for war—with the all-too-real existential dangers to both aggressor and victim, and the wider world, that going on the warpath entails?

Short answer: it does not. There is not a shred of legitimate justification for Russia’s aggression to be found in international law, the moral criteria of Just War Theory (which provides the basis for much international law), nor the norms of the much-maligned rules-based international order, the most fundamental tenet of which is the prohibition on annexing, in whole or part, the territory of another state by military force.

A few other points about the not-so-existential danger to Russia of Ukraine joining NATO. In Mearsheimer’s 2015 lecture, he off-handedly makes this observation:

… by the way, NATO expansion is dead. I’ve talked to countless policy makers, who say it’s dead, but what we have to do is explicitly abandon it, say it is not happening.

Does this call to mind the Dead Parrot sketch in Monty Python? It seems, the dead prospect of Ukraine joining NATO posed an existential threat to Russia so serious as to warrant starting the first major land war in Europe since 1945.

But maybe, like the one in the Python sketch, the dead parrot of NATO expansion was not dead, just resting? In the aftermath of the 2013-14 Maidan Revolution, it certainly seemed it was dead, or at least comatose.

The first democratically elected post-Maidan Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko initially stated it to be a low priority. According to polls at the time, public support for joining was low. Ukraine actually had a provision in its constitution prohibiting the joining of alliances, or the stationing of foreign forces on Ukrainian soil.

So, what could have reawakened this dead parrot? Well, that would be Russia’s first military attack on Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea that began on 20 February 2014, followed by the incursion into the Donbass in April. After this, public support for joining NATO surged to a majority, and has continued to grow in the years since. Legislation to remove the constitutional prohibition on alliances passed with the support of 303 of 450 members of the Rada (parliament).

An explanatory note to the legislation, moved by the new President Poroshenko, explained the change of position:

…the Russian Federation's aggression against Ukraine, its illegal annexation of Crimea...its military intervention in eastern regions" and other forms of pressure created the need for "more effective guarantees of independence, sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.

As a purported “realist”, you would think Mearsheimer might appreciate that there is nothing quite like being the victim of military aggression by a larger power to awaken interest by the victimised nation in seeking security in an alliance.

The answer to the mystery of who awakened the dead parrot is one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin! The same character who, by his aggressive conduct, recently persuaded Finland and Sweden, both with long and proud histories of military non-alignment, in Sweden’s case dating back two centuries to the Congress of Vienna, to seek NATO membership.

On the issue of the post-Cold War expansion of NATO more generally, Mearsheimer talks of the US “pushing NATO down Russia’s throat”, as if Uncle Sam rode out and lassoed the newly free states and dragged them into the alliance. In reality, almost from the time they were freed from the Soviet yoke, these states were pounding on the door demanding to be admitted to NATO. As Mary Sarotte, author of the definitive history of the expansion put it, they were issuing “desperate entreaties” to be let in.

Why the desperation? After all, NATO expansion began in the seemingly benign 1990s. According to some Western analysts of the realist persuasion, including the veteran Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan, with the demise of the Soviet Union, there was no longer anything to worry about. Kennan even claimed that Russia’s democratization had progressed further than some of the countries seeking admission.

What did these states, especially those like Poland and the Baltic nations with long histories under the Russian heel, see that Kennan did not? They feared that the Russian imperial impulse was not dead, but merely in remission, likely to reemerge when circumstances permitted.

There were disturbing signs of this, even in the early Yeltsin years. Take what happened to Moldova, a small former Soviet republic on Ukraine’s southwestern border. In 1992 the Yeltsin government inserted troops into Transnistria, a region on the eastern side of Moldova, allegedly to protect the ethnic Russians living there. 

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.

This, of course, is the exact formula that Putin defenders like Mearsheimer contend would have protected Ukraine from Russian aggression. Despite this, the troops remained, and recently there has been an escalation of tensions, with calls in the Russian Duma for its formal annexation, and the provocative placement in Transnistria of polling booths for the recent Russian presidential “election.”

And, lo and behold, with all this Russian provocation—not just provocation, but actual military aggression—Moldova has concluded, like Sweden, Finland, and Ukraine, 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.”

Another NATO-building triumph by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the bloke who Mearsheimer has repeatedly described as a “first class strategist.” Some strategist!

The truth is that the main impetus for NATO expansion was, and continues to be, Russia’s belligerent conduct.

Mearsheimer matters, despite the egregious defects in his analysis, and his entire dismal worldview. He matters because the democratic world is now facing an unprecedented challenge from a coalition of autocratic states that, notwithstanding their various ideological foundations, are united in a common project to overturn the existing Western originated global order and replace it with a global regime favourable to them.

Since 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the intention to subjugate and ultimately annihilate the Ukrainian nation, the conflict between the democracies and the autocratic coalition has entered a new, kinetic phase. Hamas’s assault on Israel added a second violent conflict to this unfolding confrontation. More conflicts are in the offing, given the CCP’s declared intention to subjugate and absorb Taiwan, and the growing belligerence of the Kim regime in Korea.

In all these conflicts, the informational domain of warfare has become critically important. The newly networked world presents the autocracies with unprecedented opportunities to intervene in Western polities to help achieve their goals by demoralizing democratic communities and undermining support for embattled nations, like Ukraine and Israel.

In the information domain, the enemies of freedom have the asymmetric advantage of enjoying nearly open access to Western social media, which they have exploited very effectively, at the same time as severely censoring their own media.

In TikTok, a Chinese entity that is answerable to the CCP regime, they have available a powerful trojan horse within the democracies, that can be deployed to support each other. Thousands of fake TikTok accounts are spreading Russian narratives, and Russian propagandists have hundreds of thousands of followers.

The Russian state has itself put considerable resources into information warfare, with troll farms filling comment sections in social media with pro-Russian narratives, and free speech protections limiting democratic government’s ability to take effective countermeasures.

In this environment, a credible Westerner prepared to espouse the autocrat’s cause can have their voice magnified many times using their social media assets. A prime exemplar of this is Tucker Carlson, whose pro-Russia, pro-Putin interventions, including his February 2024 interview of Putin, attract hundreds of millions of views.

In this respect, Mearsheimer also fills an important niche, lending an air of academic credibility to positions that deserve none, that can be blown up using the information tools now available, including flooding comments sections with repetitious items generated in troll farms.

Here is an example you should check out: the YouTube interview by Freddie Sayers, editor of the excellent UnHerd online magazine, of Mearsheimer on the Gaza war. Sayers is one of the few interlocuters to challenge Mearsheimer about the inconsistency in his takes on Ukraine and Gaza. Sayers is an effective interviewer, and Mearsheimer became distinctly uncomfortable as he struggled to respond coherently.

Yet check out the comments, full of repetitious entries saying variations on “that great scholar certainly schooled the stupid interviewer.”

Here is the bottom line: with his theory, and his method of analysing international issues, Mearsheimer has effectively produced a charter for revanchist autocrats willing and able to use military violence to achieve illegitimate ends. That is why Mearsheimer matters.