MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED WITH AN INTERESTING RESPONSE
The EUI has made available a video of a recent lecture by John Mearsheimer (Chicago), which is a good antidote to the hysterical and moralizing nonsense that dominates American and much Western coverage of and commentary on the Russian war of aggression, even that by some allegedly informed academics.
UPDATE: Professor Mearsheimer kindly gave permission to share the text of his talk: Download Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis.National Interest
ANOTHER: A well-informed response from a longtime reader:
I think Mearsheimer makes some misleading claims in the speech you shared on your blog. In general, I appreciate Mearsheimer’s perspective and critique of US policy, but he overstates his case.
First, Russia may not have aimed to annex Ukraine, but certainly aimed to make it a puppet state. It is impossible to square the assault on the capital at the outset of the war with this point. Mearsheimer points out the invading force was not capable of conquering the entire country which is true, but the Russian plan was evidently to cut off the head of the snake and in doing so eliminate resistance to either a puppet government or a full annexation. Nowhere do the repeated references by Putin to the “denazification” of Ukraine’s government, a piece of propaganda that aimed to justify the installation of a new government, appear in Mearsheimer’s analysis. The plan Russia had was flawed because it assumed there would be little Ukrainian resistance and that the Russian military forces were highly competent. But a flawed plan to make Ukraine a puppet state is still a plan to make it a puppet state. In general, much of Mearsheimer’s argument about Russian intentions assumes an intelligent and calculating decision-making apparatus and yet we know from the U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Iraq (which he references) that states often make terrible and stupid decisions when deciding to invade another country. Why is it impossible that Russia made such a decision?
Second, he repeatedly dismisses Putin's statements about imperial ambitions by pointing to statements about the threat of NATO. But Putin has made contradictory statements about the motivations for the war at different points in time. Why the NATO threat is the real reason and a desire to expand Russian territory and influence is not remains unclear. Of course, the two are also related. Russia’s view may be that it can make itself more secure by annexing or puppeting Ukraine.
It is also hard to make the case that the war in Ukraine is a direct result of U.S. policy and not a function of the imbalance between Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR. Mearsheimer himself made the argument that the imbalance would one day lead to war in 1993 while arguing that Ukraine ought to possess a nuclear weapon. Yes, Russia is concerned about Ukraine’s drift west, but Ukraine has also sought to join the West of its own accord so that it might gain protection from Russia. While a neutrality bargain might have been possible before the war, I think it would have only delayed the war. Both sides would view the neutrality bargain as impermanent and face strong incentives to improve their position at the other's expense so that their preferred outcome would be achieved when neutrality ended.
Finally, I think Mearsheimer downplays the demands Russia made in December of 2021. The removal of any NATO forces from Poland, the Balkans, and Baltics would be a) unacceptable to those NATO allies and b) returns to a state of affairs last seen in 1997. These Eastern European NATO members see Russia as a threat and with good reason. It is a more powerful country that uses force to achieve its aims quite liberally. I think Mearsheimer views Russia as more defensive in intentions than is warranted by its behavior.
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