Mearsheimer and McFaul on the Russia-Ukraine War
Here is a snapshot of one piece of how the American polemics over the Russian-Ukraine War are going. Former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tweeted this:
McFaul’s Twitter posts, I’ve observed, tend to lean toward political potshots, though he does have useful things to say about the war. (See below.)
John Mearsheimer, who is not known for being shy in making applications of his brand of “realist” international-relations theory took that same approach in this interview with a Chinese news service. What McFaul retreated calls it “CCP [Chinese Communist Party] media” But McFaul engages in the tweet with a point Mearsheimer makes directly.
The German version of the YouTube video of the interview has an informational notice below it:
Maybe in this case, “CCP media” and “funded by the Chinese government” could be a distinction without a difference. The US State Department in 2020 designated CCTN as a “foreign mission”.1
I don’t know if CCTN is known for misleading editing of such interviews. But I’ve heard several interviews with Mearsheimer over the last year on the war, and nothing in this one seems inconsistent with what he has said in others. (I’ll leave it for others to judge whether he was exercising good judgment in giving an interview to this outlet or not.)
The point McFaul singles out about Russian “imperialism” comes in Mearsheimer’s first comments in the video. More specifically, what he is saying is that he has never accepted the view that Vladimir Putin “is an imperialist” who wants to seize and incorporate large amounts of territory into a Greater Russia or who somehow wants to reconstitute the geographical Soviet Union, which included various republics including Ukraine that are now independent countries.
He’s rhetorically poking in the eye Western commentators who make that claim and he obviously enjoys being a bit provocative. But the point on which is focusing is that he believes the Russian leaderhip’s goal in its Ukraine policy has been a reaction against NATO expansion, not territorial expansion as such. He makes it very clear later in the interview that he doesn’t judge Russia’s goals in the current war as in any way benevolent towards Ukraine. Three minutes or so into the video, he explains that he expects the most likely outcome will be that Russia will turn Ukraine into a “dysfunctional rump state.”
Superficial polemics aside, it just makes no sense to me for polemicists to argue that Russia’s Ukraine policy was entirely driven by internal considerations and had nothing at all to do with NATO expansion. The Russia expert and former intelligence analyst Fiona Hill, who served in the Cheney-Bush, Obama-Biden and Trump-Pence administrations, spoke in a recent podcast interview with Freddie Sayers about the very public disputes in 2007-2008 over NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia and explains why she thinks the Western handling of that issue was really bad policy.2
For those not familiar with what he’s been saying, Mearsheimer is far from denying the reality that Russia has formally annexed Crimea and parts of the Donbas region and so far as I’ve seen or heard is in no way excusing those actions.
There are speeches of Putin’s and statements by Russian nationalists supportive of Putin that could be seen as indicating territorial expansionist goals on the regime’s part. And Mearsheimer hasn’t made the argument anywhere that I’ve seen that somehow Putin is pure of heart on such matters. But Mearsheimer’s brand of realist IR theory assumes that great powers can be expected to view threats in certain ways. And in the absence of explicit evidence, Russia’s actions in Ukraine can be explained (not justified!) by realist assumptions about security considerations without assuming that territorial expansion as such is the goal.
In Mearsheimer’s outlook and with his crusty style of arguing, understanding the security motives on which Russia is operating is more important than constantly saying, “Russia bad, Putin bad.” In the realist IR view of the world, the evilness of the goals or actions is not the most important factor in understanding what is driving the foreign-policy decisions of major powers.
That same perspective leads him to say that relations between Europe and Russia are likely to be bad for a long time. And that the security imperative that NATO perceives in the current situation are very likely to lead to the following prospect:
I think that the West will continue to support the Ukrainians as much as possible. The West is deeply committed to this war. The view in the West is that the United States and its allies cannot afford to lose. So I think we will continue to give the Ukrainians as much m ilitary aid as we can.
He then pivots to a more specifically military consideration that doesn’t seem to have been prominent in recent commentary about arming Ukraine:
The problem that the West faces and the Ukrainians face is what they really need is artillery. This is a war of attrition. And the key military system, or the key weapon that matters in a war of attritioin is artillery. And the Russians have a huge advantage in artillery. Some people estimate that the Russians have six-to-one or seven-toone more artillery tubes than the Ukrainians have.
And the problem the West has, it doesn’t have to artillery tubes and the artillery shells to give to the Ukrainians. This is why we’re giving the Ukrainians armored vehicles like tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Because we don’t have the artillery to give them. But the problems is that tanks are not a good substitute for artillery. And we’re not giving the Ukrainians that many tanks.
So all this assistance from the West doesn’t really add up to that much. What is needed here is artillery.
I just don’t find anything in this interview that is cheerleading for Ukraine in rah-rah style. And nothing that in any way suggests that the West shouldn’t support Ukraine. On the contrary, he assumes the grimly practical considerations on which he argues that great powers operate makes that support essentially inevitable.
As he puts it, “I think there’s no question that both the Russians and the West are deeply committed to winning this war.”
Mearsheimer here also talks about how the nuclear-deterrence doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” functions differently in the context of a direct war between Russia and NATO than in that of possible Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in this war.
This interview is an example of why I alsways say I have a love-hate relationsip to tealist IR theory. The tend to be good at defining the key power-political factors at work. And that’s both the good and bad news. Neither enthusiastic partisans for one side or the other nor the most hardcore peaceniks are likely to come away from a Mearsheimer presentation like this feeling rosy and optimistic about a near-term peace agreement to end this war and the accompanying human and material destructive for Ukraine that comes with it.
Mearsheimer does not view the current EU as a great power in the dimensions of the US, China, and Russia. “The Americans basically call the shots in Europe,” he says matter-of-factly at the end.
Michael McFaul also has useful non-polemic things to say on this war, too
I can’t really recommend McFaul’s Twitter snark. But he does have some useful observations in this recent interview with Katie Couric3. That is, once you get past the very non-Mearsheimer-ish thoughts on NATO expansion.
For instance, he mentions the interesting fact that Ukrainians have been training with the California National Guard for a long time.
He also says that the Ukrainian leaders do not think time is on their side in the war. That kind of claim is obviously inseparable from the urgency Ukraine is showing right now to request/demand more weaponry from the West. But it's also a key point to keep in mind, how different players in the conflict evaluate the value from their perspective a of a long war vs. a short war.
He also makes a good point about the value of the New START Treaty whose continuation is now in question. He also notes that Russia announced a suspension of the treaty rather than pulling out of it completely. Since the treaty doesn't provide for "suspension," that apparently means Russia is not going to fully comply with at least the inspection requirements for the immediate future.
And he makes good practical sense when he talks about the implication of Russia using "tactical" nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Ortagus, Morgan (2020): Designation of Additional Chinese Media Entities as Foreign Missions: Presss Statement.US State Department 06/22/2020. <https://2017-2021.state.gov/designation-of-additional-chinese-media-entities-as-foreign-missions/index.html> (Accessed: 2023-01-03). “These nine entities all meet the definition of a foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act, which is to say that they are ‘substantially owned or effectively controlled’ by a foreign government. In this case, they are effectively controlled by the government of the People’s Republic of China.”
Fiona Hill: Absolute victory over Russia is not possible. UnHerd YouTube channel 02/21/2023. (Accessed: 2023-27-02).
Katie Couric and the Fmr. US Ambassador to Russia discuss one year of the Russia-Ukraine war. (YouTube channel 02/25/2023. (Accessed: 2023-25-02).