The Realist’s Delusion, or why John Mearsheimer was wrong about Ukraine
An Essay
On February 28, 2022, at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry sent out a bizarre tweet quoting an article from John J. Mearsheimer, a noted American international relations analyst who is part of the realist school of foreign policy. Published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2014, the article is titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.”[1]
It may appear a mystery at first glance why a Russian government institution would direct the public to an essay by an American scholar, until one finds out that Mearsheimer’s views are shared among the hard Left and populist Right of the American political spectrum. It is not surprising, therefore, to see Western populist leaders such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban refusing to contribute aid and weaponry to Ukraine against naked Russian aggression (“He is virtually the only one in Europe to openly support Mr. Putin,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy[2]). Henceforth, the objectives of this essay are to examine the arguments made by Mearsheimer’s Foreign Affairs article, and to provide counterarguments to the author’s central thesis.
Mearsheimer’s essay was published in the Fall of 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, part of Ukraine’s territory. The annexation, and the West’s failure to deter President Vladimir Putin, motivated Russia to continue its aggression towards Ukraine. That account, according to Mearsheimer, is only a fantastical narrative propagated by the West, hung up with delusions of a liberal international order:
“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, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.”[3]
Therein lies the essay’s central claim: rather than condemning Putin’s naked expansionist ambitions, the author blames the United States and Europe for believing in the principles of democracy and the rule of law. It is small wonder why the Russian Foreign Ministry is sympathetic to the views of the article: Mearsheimer is effectively doing its propaganda work.
While Mearsheimer is a prominent practitioner of realpolitik, my essay does not aim to denigrate the philosophy of realism in international relations as a whole. Two of the 20th century’s most important international relations scholars, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, are realists. Both of them differ, however, from John Mearsheimer and those of his school in that the former’s emphasis is on securing peace based on the balance of power among nation-states. In contrast, Mearsheimer and his acolytes observe foreign relations simply through the lens of great-power politics. “This is realism in the style not of Henry Kissinger but of Noam Chomsky,” writes Eli Lake, an American columnist for Bloomberg, in an article published by the journal Liberties. “As in Chomsky, the aggression of America’s adversaries is explained away as responses to American power. And as in Chomsky, the explanation often veers into apologies for monsters.”[4]
Consider Mearsheimer’s proposal for a neutral Ukraine, which was quoted in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s tweet:
“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.”[5]
For a hard-nosed realist, Mearsheimer certainly knows how to indulge in fantasies, because the notion of a “prosperous but neutral Ukraine” has been the most widely believed mirage in mainstream discourse regarding the current crisis. The view held by its believers is that Ukraine should serve as a neutral buffer between the West and Russia, and the Eastward expansion of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) after the Cold War ended has jeopardized this possibility. However, the fantasy of a “neutral” Ukraine completely neglects the legitimate aspirations of self-determination of that country and its people. Ukraine, in the realist’s point of view, is merely a pawn in the game of great-power struggle, as articulated by Mearsheimer: “There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.”[6]
As the 2022 crisis unfolds, it is clear that the dreams of national self-determination and closer ties with the West is not shared only among “some Ukrainians”, but the Ukrainian people as a whole. Eight years before, when the country had a pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, its people took to the streets and demanded stronger ties with the European Union (EU), an event that Mearsheimer dismisses as “antigovernment demonstrations” backed by Washington, DC. The realist then goes further to makes an outrageous, unsubstantiated claim: “The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.”[7] Eight years after this was published, Vladimir Putin himself would claim his mobilization of troops to Ukraine as part of a campaign to “de-Nazify” the country, whose president is of Jewish descent and has relatives killed in the Holocaust.
“Washington did not actively aspire to be [eastern Europe]’s dominant power,” writes Robert Kagan, senior fellow of the American think tank Brookings Institute, in a recent article published by Foreign Affairs. “But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence.”[8] As of this writing, Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, an American diplomat who in 2014 served as assistant Secretary of State. In Mearsheimer’s essay, she was accused of advocating for “regime change” in Russia. His evidence? First, Nuland, along with American senator John McCain participated in the aforementioned “antigovernment demonstrations”. Second, a leaked telephone call recording between Nuland and Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk revealed that she wanted him to be the future Prime Minister, which he eventually did[9]. This level of conspiracy theorizing is not uncommon among Putin and his cronies, nor is it uncommon among the Western countries’ hard Left and populist Right factions.
“What Mearsheimer leaves out of his essay,” Eli Lake writes. “is that Yanukovych campaigned for the presidency of Ukraine on a promise to integrate his country into the European Union, an entirely worthy goal. But he violated his pledge with no warning, and under Russian pressure; and his citizens became enraged…Ukrainians did not rise up because of the imperialist adventures of Victoria Nuland…They rose up because their elected president tried to bamboozle them by promising to join Europe only to join Russia.”[10] Nevertheless, Mearsheimer’s analysis remains appealing to the Western anti-imperialist Left, in so far as they are only against American “imperialism”. After the failure of the US-led Iraq War, “interventionism” becomes a dirty word among the political chattering class, and America undergoes a period of retrenchment, which continues to this day. From Barack Obama’s unilateral withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011 to Joe Biden’s unilateral withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, American foreign policy has increased its focus on nation-building at home, rather than abroad. This motivates Vladimir Putin, whose imperialistic aspirations are made clear since his rise to power in the late 1990s. According to Robert Kagan, “Washington’s protestations of goodwill, the billions of dollars it poured into the Russian economy, the care it took in the early post–Cold War years to avoid dancing on the Soviet Union’s grave—all this had no effect, because what Putin wanted could not be granted by the United States. He sought to reverse a defeat that could not be reversed without violent force, but he lacked the wherewithal to wage a successful war. He wanted to restore a Russian sphere of interest in central and eastern Europe that Moscow had lost the power to sustain.”[11] In other words, Putin, a hardened former KGB agent, is seeking to revive the great-power status that the Soviet Union lost, and controlling Ukraine will accomplish that goal.
As to the nationalist Right, which is represented by such figures as Donald Trump (United States), Viktor Orban (Hungary), Marine Le Pen (France) and Nigel Farage (United Kingdom), Mearsheimer’s analysis also provide ideological comfort. The author blames “[t]he West’s triple package of policies— NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion”[12] as the underlying reasons behind the Ukraine crisis. As quoted above, Mearsheimer claims that elites in the United States and Europe “tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic inter-dependence, and democracy.”[13] On the contrary, it is Mearsheimer’s cynical realism that holds little relevance in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, for it does not allow room for ideals such as liberal democracy and the rule of law. For realists like Mearsheimer, says Eli Lake, “Russia was strong and Ukraine was weak. Russia’s perception of the threat of an enlarged European Union mattered, whereas the democratic choice of Ukrainians did not. Realists are not moved by democratic aspirations, which are usually domestic annoyances to high strategy. Nor are they bothered by the amorality of their analysis of history.”[14] (emphasis added) It is small wonder that nationalists of the Right routinely praise Putin as a model of leadership. To them, democracy matters little compared to strength.
What John Mearsheimer presents as “realism” is actually old-fashioned isolationism. It was the view that dominated American and British foreign policy in the 1930s, when German and Japanese imperialism threatened to swallow up all of Europe and Asia. It was the view that empowered Vladimir Putin to invade Georgia in 2008, annex Crimea in 2014 and make Belarus a de facto Russian puppet state. If the objective is to prevent war, this view is as wrong-headed as can be: “Imagine if the United States and the democratic world had responded in 2008 or 2014 as they have responded to Russia’s latest use of force, when Putin’s military was even weaker than it has proved to be now… If the United States and its allies—with their combined economic, political, and military power—had collectively resisted Russian expansionism from the beginning, Putin would have found himself constantly unable to invade neighboring countries.”[15] Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West, largely following Mearsheimer’s advice, is turning its back on its responsibility to lead the free world. An international order not governed by the rule of law and liberalism shall be ruled by might. Therefore, looking at the Ukraine crisis solely through the lens of great-power conflict ignores the eternal ideological conflict between democracy and autocracy.
[1] MFA Russia (@mfa_russia), “‘Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault’ article by John J. Mearsheimer (@ForeignAffairs, 2014),” Twitter, February 28, 2022,
[2] AP, “‘A victory so big you can see it from the moon... and Brussels,’ says Hungary's Viktor Orban,” updated April 04, 2022, accessed May 27, 2022, https://www.euronews.com/embed/1889108.
[3] John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 93, no. 5 (September/October 2014): 77 – 78.
[4] Eli Lake, “America in the World: Sheltering in Place,” Liberties Vol.1, no. 1 (Autumn 2020), accessed May 27th, 2022, https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/america-in-the-world-sheltering-in-place/.
[5] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 89.
[6] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 88.
[7] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 80.
[8] Robert Kagan, “The Price of Hegemony,” Foreign Affairs Vol. 101, no.3 (May/June 2022): 12.
[9] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 81.
[10] Lake, “Sheltering in Place.”
[11] Kagan, “Hegemony,” 16.
[12] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 77.
[13] Mearsheimer, “Ukraine Crisis,” 78.
[14] Lake, “Sheltering in Place.”
[15] Kagan, “Hegemony,” 19.