Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault by John J. Mearsheimer

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault Reviews

• 
  Peter Bradley

  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?
• 
  Ethan

  Here I cite the paper as according to:
  https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-conten...
  
  Mearsheimer's paper and lecture on Ukraine from 2014 has become a sensation. The lecture given at the University of Chicago (
  https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4) has amassed over 17 million views as of writing, and is likely to be viewed even further. With that in mind, the contents of the paper (which he essentially presents in the same lecture) are important to discuss, especially with a thesis as striking as his:
  
  

  ...the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to
  move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.

  
  
  So is this true? His argument seems to envelop multiple facets: Russia is justified in its annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and further NATO is purposefully aggressing eastward in order to isolate Russia from the rest of Europe.
  
  

  Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests[...]But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant—and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border

  
  
  The emphasis of realpolitik (or political realism) should be noted as it becomes rather important later in the paper.
  
  The first claim, upon which much of this paper hinges on, is whether there was some agreement that NATO would not move Eastward.
  
  

  As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns.

  
  
  It is often argued that some agreement was breached in the German Re-unification treaty, but this was not the case, rather, as James Baker put it, comments on NATO Eastward movement were made with specific reference to the context of Germany:
  
  

  "neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction."

  (
  https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-bo...)
  
  So put very simply there was no agreement, Gentleman's or otherwise, that there would not keep NATO from movement Eastward in broader Europe. While, in moderation, one can be fair in granting that this comment has been the subject of some historical debate, it would also be pertinent to mention that the U.S.S.R. was not dissolved until 1991, and thus even if we were to grant the comments had applied to Europe broadly, it would be strange to talk of Eastward movement toward countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Crimea, and more often mentioned in the same breath, when these countries could not have been granted NATO membership, nor would it have been anticipated they could at the time the statements were made as they were Soviet Republics!.
  
  Rhetorically, also, Mearsheimer remains vague, whether it be to obfuscate just when the treaty was signed in order to make his argument seem more tenable, or because he is a bad writer is left unclear but in either case it leads to an odd trick. Bear in mind that the treaty was signed in 1990, and yet he fronts the sentence with "As the cold war came to a close...", by introducing the topic at hand in this manner it implies that the end of the U.S.S.R. (being the end of the cold war) was a well recognised fact prior to its end, that its dissolution was a predetermined fact of history; it is as though the treaty has been agreed in the context of the fall of the U.S.S.R. but as the above shows, this is quite far from the truth of it.
  
  Mearsheimer continues, in a realist style, to show how Russia can be seen as justified in defending their country security:
  
  

  Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided—and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance.

  
  
  We can see very clearly some parallels with the current crisis with Ukraine: the recognition of legitimacy in separatist regions and the launch of an invasion with the intention of absorbing some part of the country within the Russian federation. The problem here with Measheimer's reading is that, given it is realpolitik, he skirts from moral judgment and in doing so inadvertently legitimises Putin. Given that relations between Russia and Georgia had considerably soured throughout the 2000s up until the Russo-Georgian war, it is unsurprising the Georgia had overwhelming support for accession to NATO (over 75% in a non-binding referendum.) Rather than a view of legitimate aggression, it seems moreso a justification for war on Russia's part. Yet, even if we were to grant that this is a security concern for Russia, why do we 1) discount the perhaps genuine security on behalf of Georgia, a former Soviet Republic? and 2) offer legitimisation by realism for Putin's invasion as though the sovereign decisions of Georgia were to be of less importance? Should we not estimate that this in fact justifies the very existence of NATO?
  
  Mearsheimer accuses the West of using financial aid also to Westernise Ukraine:
  
  

  ...Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.

  
  
  In some ways it is not as though this is false, but it is clearly implied that this is some form of justification for Russian security concerns. Yet, Russia used its own form of financial incentivisation prior to the Euromaidan where Yanukovych rejected the Ukraine-Europe Association Agreement in favour of a $15 billion dollar aid package from Russia. It is also the case that Yanukovych was pro-Russian, including the intention to make Russia the second official language of Ukraine, as well as refraining from considering the famine of Holodomor a genocide in order not to antagonise their neighbour. The implication that U.S. Aid toward Ukraine over a period of over 15 years is somehow a legitimate security threat to Russia should be discarded, and furthemore the events of the Euromaidan and the ousting of Yanukovych, whether "realistic" or not, does not give Russia the legitimacy to invade, and annex Crimea.
  
  It is worth remembering that in all this language of Realpolitik, the central thesis is in essence a moral condemnation: "The West's Fault", and while I could go further with every single claim made in this 12 page paper, I think the above shows such a great deal of issues that it would be unnecessary at this stage.
  
  Other points of note.
  
  Putin regularly creates reasons for invasion, much of what has been postulated above seems moreso rationalisation of already intended movement as opposed to a serious concern for the health of Russia's economy.
  
  For instance Putin is on record as saying:
  
  

  "First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said. “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.
  “The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself," he said, referring to separatist movements such as those in Chechnya.

  (
  https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057)
  
  This would indicate Putin has some motivation for the reuinification of prior Soviet republics within the Russian Federation, whether that be for economic, cultural, or otherwise reasons.
  
  Secondly, Putin has written on The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, withe the strong implication that there would be some legitimacy for the two reuniting:
  
  

  During the recent Direct Line, when I was asked about Russian-Ukrainian relations, I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole. These words were not driven by some short-term considerations or prompted by the current political context. It is what I have said on numerous occasions and what I firmly believe. I therefore feel it necessary to explain my position in detail and share my assessments of today's situation.

  (
  https://www.rusemb.org.uk/article/708)
  
  In conclusion, despite any possible errors in the above text (I wrote this quite late, but if I'm wrong I'm free to corrections) the overwhelming case is that Mearsheimer is wrong. The realist case for Russia's relations with Ukraine, and the contemporary conflict are little more than justifications for the actions of a man who wishes for an expanded Russian Federation, and in some cases an ironic justification for NATO's place in defending sovereign nations which cannot shirk the heavy hands of Russia.
• 
  K H

  John Owen says it well:
  
  Although Putin’s invasion of Ukraine certainly is a reaction to NATO expansion, it won’t do to say that the war is therefore the West’s fault. The flaw in the thinking of Mearsheimer, Walt, and other academic realists is that they present an inconsistent view of how international relations works. Mearsheimer, for example, is no more entitled to say that the West caused the war by expanding NATO than he is to say that Russia caused the West to expand NATO by being weak. A fuller explanation for the war takes into account the ideological differences between authoritarian Russia and the democratic West.
• 
  Read a Book

  Aged poorly on many fronts. Most striking, however, is the lack of agency the author gives to nations not dubbed ‘great powers.’ The result is a paper-based view of an oversimplified world that is neither predictive or descriptive.
• 
  Scipio Africanus

  Great analysis of the situation and even more relevant today. Gonna be diving into Mearsheimers work as I think he has some of the best analysis of geopolitics currently out there.
• 
  Andy Caffrey

  EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS AUDIOBOOK, OR READ THIS 2014 FOREIGN AFFAIRS ARTICLE BY PROF. JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER TO SEE WHY THE DESTRUCTION OF UKRAINE IS ON BILL CLINTON, GEORGE W. BUSH, BARACK OBAMA, JOE BIDEN & MADELEINE ALBRIGHT!
  
  Today all of the Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, and all of the mass media is on the wrong side and lying about why Russia is destroying Ukraine. Bill Clinton & Albright psychopathically and in dissociative states brought all of this about.
  
  Some of the lies he predicted we would be told:
  
  It is ridiculous to think Ukraine in NATO is a genuine strategic threat to the military.
  
  Mearsheimer explains exactly why it is a massive threat and reminds us that everything Putin is doing today, he warned us he would do.
  
  Putin wants to bring back other states into a new USSR. Putin is like Hitler. Putin is insane. There are no NAZIs in Ukraine because they have a secular Jewish president. Putin is an autocrat and the only member of the defense establishment who would go to war to keep Ukraine and Georgia out of NATO.
  
  Mearsheimer in 2014 said these idiots would lie to us about all of these things. And none of them are true.
  
  The western bankers who want capitalism to destroy socialism everywhere NO MATTER WHAT are the EU. Their con is that what they are doing is pushing democracy.
  
  But Mearsheimer points out that these democracy foundations are set up to finance privitization plutocrats and fascists winning all of the important elections in those "democracies." Such US foundations put $5 million into the Ukrainian elections.
  
  We should realize that just like in the US, where we only get in our "democracy" the choice of two psychopathic imperialist elites for president, these post-socialist democracies are budding pathocracies and plutocracies with money dominated voting systems and lots of former Nazi sympathizers and accomplices.
  
  As Mearshiemer points out, starting with Clinton and Albright and the bankers, the US has been relentlessly engaged in "social engineering" in Ukraine. The US has been arming Ukraine. Mearsheimer invites us to imagine if China developed a large military alliance and included Canada and Mexico.
  
  Well, the US has instead insisted on the Monroe Doctrine which bans any Eastern Hemisphere nations from bringing arms or setting up bases anywhere in the Western Hemisphere!
  
  So the Demo-Publican con is HUGE! It is that Putin is Hitler and as such, we, the FUSA, can be hypocrites on everything, especially on calling out war criminals when we reject the jurisdiction of the World Court. We don't have to keep Bush I's promise to Gorbachev to keep NATO away from Eastern Europe. And, OH! That's right! We can arm Ukraine but Russia can't arm Cuba!
  
  And there is so much more in this brilliant essay. This is truly a must read, especially in this time when EVERYONE IS LYING TO US! Especially MSNBicioC's favorite Putin troll former Ambassador Michael McFaul, who wrote the pathetic response to this article. It is so clear who won that debate!
  
  So what is Putin doing in Ukraine? Is he trying to take it over? Nope! Mearsheimer even pointed out how crappy the Russian army is and says there is no way it is capable of conquering Ukraine.
  
  Russia, not just Putin, is destroying Ukraine so that it can't become part of NATO or the EU. Mearshiemer says Putin can't even take over Donbas. So all Putin has to do to win is to destroy as much as he thinks he needs to destroy.
  
  So far, Mearshiemer is the most accurate and correct Ukraine analyst of them all. Once you read this, you will shudder the next time you watch the MSNBidioCNN Memory Hole anti-news infotainment coverage. Check out his videos on youtube if you can't get access to this article.
• 
  Isaac Chan

  Revisiting this old gem in its original format - article in Foreign Affairs. Ah well, L US. This one aged like fine wine. The ship of turning Ukraine into a neutral buffer has sailed, too late.
  
  Interesting how people really keep making the same mistakes. The liberals post-Cold War rlly thought 'this time is different' - the old ways of geopolitics no longer apply, the US is 'the indispensable nation' - how self-righteous can you be to say that? Every time someone says 'this time is different', is when you put on your skeptical hat.
  
  Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason. When you're so deep up your own ass that you think everyone else should think and do like you do, is when you know you're on the kool-aid. Imagine how shitty of a person you'd have to do this lol - step into someone else's turf, and then make them out as the bad guy when they push you out, after ample warning.
  
  I wonder what the counter-arguments to this piece are. If they're centred around the liberal hegemony argument - that isn't very strong innit?
• 
  Mkawass

  Sensational. The lecture from 2014 is as good as the God father.