I was sent a long video from 2015 of John Mearsheimer discussing the roots of the Ukraine crisis. At a superficial level his talk seems impressive. He’s very knowledgeable. Dig deeper, however, and it all falls apart.
One thing I noticed almost right away is that Mearsheimer is quite biased, and presents information is a misleading fashion. At times he seemed to be echoing RT talking points.
Here’s a minor but telling example. He presents a graph showing the poll results when Ukrainians were asked if they wished to join the EU or a Russian trade pact. In every single city in Ukraine, a plurality of those who responded to the question favored the EU over the Russian option. The graph goes by quickly and is rather complicated, however, and thus most listeners may not notice this fact. They might believe that Mearsheimer is telling the truth when he says the poll showed that Eastern Ukrainians have “little interest” in joining the EU. That interpretation is simply false. Among those who responded to the survey, a plurality favored EU membership in every single Ukrainian city, no matter how high the proportion of ethnic Russians. In other words, while no option got a majority in a few eastern cities, EU membership was the most popular option in all cities.
He makes a big deal of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, which he misleadingly calls a “coup”. This was triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision not to move forward on joining the EU. Mearsheimer says that joining the EU would be a terrible mistake because Ukraine needs to stay neutral. But neutrality in no way precludes a country from joining the EU. Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Austria are all EU members. Ukraine is a sovereign European country and thus has every right to join the EU. Doing so poses no threat to Russia, indeed I hope that someday Russia joins the EU.
His other big obsession is NATO. Mearsheimer seems to agree with Putin that NATO is a threat to Russia. If so, then why didn’t Putin complain when the Baltic States joined NATO? They are right on Russia’s border. He presents a dark image of NATO as an aggressive force, bent on overthrowing governments that it does not like. But his real target seems to be the US, particularly when he cites US foreign policy in places like Iraq.
Mearsheimer has some truly far-fetched analogies involving the Monroe Doctrine. He claims that the US would never allow foreign powers to get involved in our back yard. But Cuba’s been a Soviet/Russian ally for decades. Yes, we did support the foolish Bay of Pigs, but that was certainly not an all out invasion of Cuba with US troops. In any case, I’ve never liked Cold War moral equivalence arguments. What the Soviets did in the Warsaw Pact was outright colonialism, far different than NATO.
I suppose the best argument along those lines is that we did not tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba. But if the Russians were merely arguing against US nuclear warheads in Ukraine then I’d agree with them. Indeed we pulled our nukes out of Turkey as part of the Cuba deal.
[To be clear, I am not arguing that we should now admit Ukraine to NATO, I’ve opposed that for quite some time. But I’m also opposed to a statement that Ukraine can never join NATO. I hope that at some point in the future all the world’s nations belong to NATO, and then if one country attacks another, the entire world goes to war with the aggressor. Obviously, that’s a dream for the 22nd century, if we are still around.]
Mearsheimer’s most notable mistake was his repeated claim that Putin was far too smart to invade Ukraine, and that this would be a disaster for Russia. Perhaps it will be a disaster (it’s too soon to say), but obviously he was wrong about Putin. He said that comparisons between Putin and Hitler were ridiculous. If by “comparison” you mean, “they are identical”, then Mearsheimer is correct. But if by comparison you mean, “just as Hitler used force in an attempt to create a Greater Germany, Putin will use force to create a Greater Russia”, then comparisons are appropriate.
This talk occurred in 2015. Since that time, the entire world has become far more nationalistic. Not just Russia, but also China, India, Turkey, Hungary and to a lesser extent even places like the US the UK, and Israel. Mearsheimer may not have anticipated this trend, which is why he thought Putin would never invade Ukraine.
When bad guys behave badly, beware of claims that the “root cause” is some minor policy mistake by the good guys. Bad guys are bad.
PS. This National Review article caught my eye:
Former Trump administration national-security adviser John Bolton dismissed the notion that President Trump deterred Russian president Vladimir Putin from behaving aggressively toward Ukraine while he was in office, arguing that the Trump administration was tough on Russia in spite of the president, not because of him. . . .
“But in almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it and saying we were being too hard. The fact is he barely knew where Ukraine was. He once asked John Kelly, his second chief of staff, if Finland were a part of Russia. It’s just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians,” he added.
Finland part of Russia? And to think that my Republican commenters think Biden is senile!