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Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault by John J. Mearsheimer
This is a 2014 article from Foreign Affairs. I listened to it for background information after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mearsheimer's analysis is creditable and surprisingly sane in light of the cacophony of voices that have made the Ukraine invasion into a mysterious psycho-drama working itself out in Vladimir Putin's mind. After 1989, Russia was not adverse to a continuing NATO with American involvement on the grounds that this would put a lid on German expansionism. However, Russia was not going to tolerate Nato encroachment onto its borders. The west, however, did expand its influences to the borders of Russia. Prior to the Russian seizure of Crimea, America had replaced a pro-Russian government with a pro-Western government that included what Mearsheimer refers to as “four
high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.”
Mearsheimer argues that a reason for the situation in 2022 may involve something tragic and typical of the modern West - western elites live in a bubble chamber where they have mutually agreed that the old rules don't apply:
//And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU's past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer
mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.
So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry's response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don't in the twenty-
the first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”
In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine. //
So, since invasions were just “so old-fashioned” to fashionable globalists, nothing so beastly was going to happen.
You can bet on that until the mushroom clouds appear.
So far, we've been lucky. Disregarding history and the other side's worldview is not how we managed to survive the Cold War.
Mearsheimer also notes:
//The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process—a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.//
Accurate predictions are the best evidence that the analysis was correct.
At some point, we have to ask what this whole thing is for:
//But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”//
I have been of the opinion that Russia will eventually reconstitute its empire. However, prior instantiations of Russia were not falling off a demographic cliff. Russia may never return.
We are now ten months into Russia's two-week invasion. Russia is being humiliated. It may win, but it certainly has destroyed Ukraine and impoverished the West. For its part, America is underwriting Ukraine's economy, which is not producing the grain necessary to keep the world fed.
So, again, what is the real purpose behind America's provocation of war with Russia?
