This blog has long shown its interest in and admiration for John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago international relations scholar and theorist. I've been reading Mearsheimer since 1990 and I've read several of his books, including his masterpiece, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). This book, published at the peak of what he calls the 'unipolar moment', when the United States made a 'Faustian bid' (in Peter Gowan's words) for global dominance, cheerfully punctured the language of the American-led 'rules based order' and showed that great power rivalry was no thing of the past, apparently replaced by Kantian universal peace and the 'new world order' at 'the end of history'. Rather the rise or return of older great powers - Russia, China - or the emergence of new ones - India, Brazil - would contribute to an increasingly unstable, fraught and potentially violent disorder in global politics. This has all duly come to pass.
Mearsheimer long ago offered a discomfiting prognosis of the Ukraine crisis - a video of a talk he gave at the time of the annexation of the Crimean peninsula has been viewed 29 million times and carries over 18,000 comments - where he suggested that the major driver of the problem was the determination of the West to push NATO and EU membership right up to Russia's borders, by bringing Ukraine and Georgia into the fold. This basic element of Mearsheimer's analysis has always struck me as correct and crucial. It's a matter of a Russian Monroe Doctrine - we can all imagine what the American reaction would be if a Russian or Chinese military alliance were to extend membership to Mexico or Canada; we all remember (or we should remember) what the reaction was of the Kennedy administration to Soviet efforts to deploy medium range ballistic missiles to Cuba in 1962. We in Ireland could even speculate productively as to what the British response might be if Ireland were to enter a defence treaty with Russia. It would not be a happy reaction, for sure. Shades of Churchill's ugly comments about Ireland's neutrality in the spring of 1945.
None of this suggests that the Russian regime is innocent of invading Ukraine, or that it is a charmingly anti-imperialist government, or that the war has not been conducted with great brutality. None of this suggests that Russia is a democracy; it's not. But that is not the point: the point is that an apparently moralising foreign policy brings with it severe problems: it leads the United States into actions and interventions which are driven by realpolitik even as they are cloaked in liberal rhetorics. Some American politicians, and many American people, actually believe the liberal language.
Mearsheimer now has a personal website - Mearsheimer | Home - which is chock-full with links to his essays and books. He also now maintains a Substack blogsite where links to his many appearances in the media can be found. He's now published a new essay on the Ukraine war, on this Substack site. It's well worth reading.
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