John Mearsheimer on Ukraine

It seems like I can n ever post about the "realist" foreign policy outlook without declaring my love-hate relationship to it. So this is my official declaration for this post that I love the pragmatism, hate the amoral cynicism and determinism that sometimes seem to go with it (Henry Kissinger, cough, cough).

It's interesting in this video from 2015 on Ukraine that John Mearsheimer's more hawkish view of China figures heavily in his view of US-NATO relations with Russia. He thinks the logic of international balance-of-power politics will put Russia and US into a position whether they cooperate in balancing against China.

Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer 09/25/2021:

Mearsheimer is one of the two main participants in this very recent video conference from the Quincy Institute. And here he sounds almost deterministic in talking about how "realist" assumptions about how nations behave mean the US will engage in a containment policy against China.

Mearsheimer said in another presentation last year, "the United States is a ruthless great power. I have no illusions about the United States' behavior. Most Americans, as you know, think that the United States is an exceptionally benign country and everybody should love the United States. That's not my view of how great powers operate, the United States included."

This lack of sentimentality about the pretensions of US diplomacy puts him and other realists often in the position criticizing US military interventions.

In the 2015 video, Mearsheimer presents the following bullet points:

Mearsheimer contests both sets of conventional assumptions.

There is some hope that the US and NATO will take a pragmatic approach to the current Ukraine standoff: Rajan Menon and Benjamin Friedman, Putin draws lines over NATO, Ukraine: Let the negotiations begin Responsible Statecraft 12/20/2021. Menon and Friedman make this important point:

While Biden cannot possibly meet Putin’s demand for a legal guarantee that Ukraine will be barred from NATO, diplomats can surely negotiate to produce a formulation that provides Russia an assurance to allay its concerns that there will be no short-term change in Ukraine’s status with respect to NATO but does not foreclose Ukraine’s options.

But will Russia be satisfied with that? Ideally Moscow wants a neutral Ukraine, a la Cold-War Austria. Will it be willing to settle for something short of that? We won’t know - and perhaps even the Russians don’t - until the effort is made to find language that reconciles Ukraine’s insistence on self-determination and Russia’s demand that its security interests be respected. Given the continued danger of war, the effort is certainly worth it.