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Why John Mearsheimer blames the U.S. for the crisis in Ukraine

(John Mearsheimer interviewed by Isaac Chatineer, The New Yorker, 1 March 2022)John Mearsheimer is regarded as the doyen of the "conservative realist" school of international relations that holds that states, whatever their professed motivations, such as democracy promotion, act to maximize their interests. As such, he was a stern critic of NATO expansion into the former Warsaw Pact states. How well have his predictions held up in light of events?

On the face of it, you could argue Mearsheimer has been vindicated, but this usefully probing interview shows it is not that simple. According to him, Russia was acting as great powers do, and in general ought to do ("realism" in this sense seems to have both a descriptive and prescriptive aspect).

To predict bad things would happen following NATO expansion, and possible inclusion of Ukraine, seems to provide some vindication of his position. But is this valid? This extended and very probing post-invasion interview sheds some useful light on this, and reveals weaknesses in Mearsheimer's position.

To state the obvious, correlation is not causation. The invasion followed NATO expansion, but was this the real motivation, or just a useful blame-shifting rationale? Other items in this set of Readings indicate that there was a distinct and apparently deeply held ideological rationale for incorporating Ukraine in a greater Russia, laid out in detail in a long essay under Putin's name that appeared in July 2021.

Furthermore any given action might emerge from a multiplicity of motivations. As the historian Mary Sarotte notes in this very interesting discussion, she has encountered no major "unicausal" historical events.

Interestingly, in a 2015 lecture that blamed NATO for the annexation of Crimea and gray zone penetration of East Ukraine, Mearsheimer asserted with exuberant confidence that, as a rational interest-maximizing great power, there was no way Russia would try to swallow Ukraine whole, since that would be a disaster for Russia. He went on that if the West wanted to bring down Russia it should encourage it do do just that. That lecture has not aged well.

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You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?

If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.

Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe.” And then you say, “But this account is wrong.” Does anything that’s happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the truth than you might have thought?

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