Has John Mearsheimer been frivolous in his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War?
I’ve written quite a bit here about Über-Realist John Mearsheimer’s analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War. I just came across an article criticizing his position that I thought I would share. Although the argument is weak enough that one might suspect using it as a counterpoint to Mearsheimer is making use of a strawman argument that could easily be knocked down.
The article is by Neil Hughes.1 To be fair, it is a “discourse analysis” whose focus is testing certain theories of political discourse against Putin’s use of language in justifying the war on Ukraine. That part can be viewed separately from the rhetorical shots he takes against Mearsheimer and his brand of foreign-policy realism.
One of those shots is this:
[Mearsheimer] claimed, just over a week before Russian troops and armour rolled in, that “Putin had no intention of invading Ukraine”. He advanced this argument on the grounds that it would be irrational for Putin to launch an attack given the potentially crippling economic impact of Western sanctions in the event of Russian aggression, and the costs and challenges involved in occupying Ukraine.
That does sound like quite a blooper on Mearsheimer’s part, doesn’t it?
What Hughes cites there is from a podcast interview Mearsheimer did whose publish date is February 15, 2022, just before the Russian invasion of February 24. [date corrected] And, yes, the phrase Hughes quotes does appear in that interview.2
It comes just after 31:00 in the video. The discussion is about the general background of the debate over Ukraine becoming a part of NATO and focuses on the period from 2008 on. The interview poses the following question to Mearsheimer in terms not just of the situation on that day but also the preceding “weeks and months”:
Do you think Putin had any intentions over the past few days or weeks and months including the preparations for what unfolded over the past few days, do you think he had any intentions of invading Ukraine? Or is this just all about embarrassing the West and creating a situation where the narrative can be changed slightly?
My view is that he did not have any intention of invading Ukraine, and that he nevertheless understood that there might be circumstances under which that was necessary.
For example, I believe that if Ukraine was to attack the forces, the Russian-supported forces in the Donbas, he would come to their assistance and that would probably involve a Russian invasion of the eastern part of the country.
So I think there’s certain scenarios where he might have come in. But I think, putting that aside, he had no intention of invading Ukraine. And there are two reasons for that.
One are the costs, and, two, the benefits. Let’s just talk about the costs. First of all, if he invaded Ukraine, he’d own it. He’d be an occupier. And that would not work out very well. As he surely knows, when you occupy a country in the modern world, it invariably leads to huge resistance and all sorts of trouble. Putin is surely smart enough to know that invading Ukraine and owning it would be a prescription for huge trouble.
Secondly, if he invades Ukraine, we have made it clear in the West that we will go to great lengths to cripple the Russian economy. So there will be significant economic costs [to Russia] in addition to the costs of running an occupation in a huge country filled with people who don’t want you there.
So, those are the costs. Now, what about the benefits of not invading? Putin is winning. First of all, he’s got our [the West’s] attention, right? We’re now scrambling to negotiate with him, talk to him, to ameliorate this crisis. Furthermore, we in the West now understand that NATO expansion into Ukraine is viewed by the Russians as an existential threat.
So, Ukraine, is never going to become part of NATO. That’s just not going to happen now. We now know that. Nobody will say that, and Biden is in no position to back off. But Putin has made it clear where the Russian stand on this. Everybody knows there is a red line in the sand.
Furthermore, Putin is doing enormous damage to the Ukrainian economy. He is weakening Ukraine. He is making it less like that Ukraine will be in a position to launch an offensive against the Donbas, making it less likely that Ukraine will ever be in a position to become a member of NATO.
This is why the President of Ukraine [Volodymyr Zelenskyy] is saying to President Biden, please stop talking about an imminent Russian invasion! Because when you do this, you’re doing serious damage to the Ukrainian economy. Which, as I said before, was a basket case before the crisis.
So, this crisis has done serious damage to Ukraine and at the same time has sent a clear message to the West that the present plans of the West to bring Ukraine into NATO are not going to happen. So I think when you marry the costs with how well the stregy is owrking out, Putin is a winner. [my emphasis in bold]
Someday, we in the public will have a better idea of exactly when the final decision on the February 22 invasion was made in the Kremlin. Although, obviously, it was not a done deal until the invasion was actually launched.
It seems very clear that Mearsheimer was describing the situation leading up that moment that we now know was just days before the invasion. And he was looking at it in terms of what might be ways of averting a far worse crisis. To Western decision-makers, he was pointing out that their insistence on brining Ukraine in NATO (and the EU) had significantly higher risks than they had seemed to be assuming. To Russian decision-makers, he was pointing out that escalating to a full-blown invasion would have huge long-term consequences for Russia, many of them negative ones.
But it’s worth noting that he was talking in terms of decisions that could and should be made. Which raises the question:
What is this type of foreign policy “realism”?
The brand of realism Mearsheimer advocates, one largely shared by his colleague Stephen Walt, assumes that in the system of nation-states in which the world is currently organized, large powers in particular perceive enormous pressure to give high priority to geopolitical considerations such as the proximity of potentially hostile nations and the need to protect their access to vital natural resources and trade routes.
Any political-science theory articulated as an academic framework is destined to sound somewhat bloodless when it focuses on broad patterns of behavior. But any political scientist not living in the clouds knows that actual policies are made by real people with various electoral pressures, ideological outlooks, and individual ambitions and neuroses, who are pressured by well-heeled interest groups with their own narrow agendas, and very specific contingencies in crisis situations.
The Mearsheimer brand of realism can be particularly valuable in encouraging decision-makers to think pragmatically and realistically about how other players in the international system view their own goals and limitations, as well as encouraging them to think carefully about the consequences of their own decisions.
This brand of realist theory is “determinist” only in the sense that it calls attention to real constraints in foreign policy that can’t simply be wished away. But it does not argue that decisions that leaders do make are driven by some immutable fate. Mearsheimer’s famous and influential book with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), specifically argued that subjective considerations had often led US policymakers to make poor decisions that created avoidable disadvantages to American interests. (And, in the Israeli case, even to Israel, as well.)
What Mearsheimer has been actively arguing since 2014 is that the failure to take adequate account of predictable Russian reactions to NATO expansion led policymakers to take avoidable risks without taking full account of how serious the risks were. Whether one agrees or disagrees with that argument, it not an argument that countries are driven by pre-determined fates.3
Neil Hughes makes the argument more-or-less directly that Mearsheimer’s realism is determinist:
From Mearsheimer’s perspective, state interests and actions such as those of Putin, are determined by the anarchic structure of the international state system and the balance of power within it, and not, as will be argued here, by the ideological beliefs, contingent interpretations and values embodied and diffused in politicians’ political discourse. [my emphasis]
Yes, we should certainly pay attention to what politicians say and the ideological frames they are using. But we also have to remember the observation by I.F. Stone that I promise to try not to include in every post I make about the arguments over the Russia-Ukraine War: "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."4
Or, to use a saying from the Bush I Administration: politicians’ lips need to be read with care.
Hughes, Neal (2023): Mearsheimer, Putin, ideology, and the war in Ukraine: A political discourse analysis. Journal of Language and Politics 22:4, 438–457. <https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22112.hug> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).
Professor John Mearsheimer (2022): The crisis in Ukraine. King’s Politics YouTube channel 02/21/2022 (interview on 02/15/2022). (Accessed: 2023-15-09). My transcription.
However, it’s hard not perceive the outcomes of many decisions as having a big tragic element. In the classic Greek tragedy, Fate was driving the outcome. One of the most important contributions to realist foreign policy theory is Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History (1952), which focuses on how American policies articulated in the form of high-minded ideals could and often did lead to ugly results. The leading “restrainer” advocate Andrew Bacevich wrote an introduction to a later edition of Niebuhr’s book. Bacevich also wrote an introduction to a later edition of William Appleman Williams’ left-leaning critique of the Cold War framework applied by the US after the Second World War, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).
I.F. Stone. Wikipedia 06-March-2022. <https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=I._F._Stone&action=history> (Accessed: 2023-11-02).