Really enjoyed reading "Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism". Thanks for the heads up that it was outside the paywall!
As a side note, I wanted to say that you are one of the few speakers I drop everything to listen to when I discover that you've made an appearance that gets posted to YouTube. I always learn something.
The only problem is that I often don't know that they've happened. Will you be posting appearances here on your Substack as well, or is there a better way to be alerted to them?
Thank you. Much appreciate the ability to read the article "Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism," in the August 2023 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, without the paywall.
Basically my difficulty with your model is your unwillingness to course correct or verify it empirically even in the face of obvious facts like Ukraine or that the Putin regime are a bunch of lying mafia thugs. You have a great model of reality but science isnt merely modelling reality it is also testing predictions of the model against reality to correct the model. In other words yeah your theory is literally half baked.
I have sometimes (often) been somewhat disrespectful in our exchanges so far, and I regret that.
I realized this morning that you may not feel the need to go back over the factual basis of your posts as these issues are addressed in your books. So I will read them.
I also understood, by carefully reading your posts, that you were not among the neocons. But I am at least as suspicious of the neocon narrative as you seem to be of the Russian narrative. I should have remembered that I was addressing Eric Engle, a scholar whose writings engage, not Victoria Nuland...
By professional training (or professional distortion) —I am first and foremost a lawyer—, my intellectual approach is based on three principles: (i) Always look the truth in the face, without complacency, on the basis of reason rather than each other’s emotions, trying not being blinded by our own subjectivity (nemo judex in sua causa); (ii) Always hearing both versions before drawing conclusions, by seeking to understand the perspective and interests of both parties (audi alternam partem); (iii) Devote at least 80% of our efforts to examining the facts and their geopolitical context, and be deeply suspicious of reasoning built on prejudices or generalizations of a purely theoretical nature.
It is with this approach—very empirical, I readily admit—that I will read your posts and your books.
To observe the geopolitics is a bit like watching a poker game... To understand the motivations of different players and anticipate their next move, an observer is unfortunately forced, to a large extent, to speculate on the cards each player actually has in hand and is trying to hide...
To be clear, I am a French-speaking Canadian. My English is very imperfect, unfortunately. I try constantly to improve it.
sadly i have wasted plenty of time reading Mearsheimer only to conclude he is catastrophically mistaken (and self-inconsistent). He claims to be an offensive realist but in practice he's just another whining liberal (at best).
yeah, i write such books, did my military service speak a bunch of languages. Maybe you need to figure out the difference between armchair general and the real thing o keyboard warrior.
Is it serious, in geopolitics, to assume as an obvious fact that the Putin regime is a bunch of lying mafia thugs? If the Russian government were as honest and truthful as the US government, would it be more accepting of Ukraine joining NATO?
If John J Mearsheimer's offensive realism really describes "how great powers behave toward each other" (Tragedy, passim and ad infinitum), why does he have to intervene to tell them they are getting it wrong?:-)
So, @OSINTBRIEF , I don't agree with you that "You [Mearsheimer] have a great model of reality".
A great model of the reality of the weather would explain how Humidity. Rainfall. and Wind Speed "behave toward each other". There would be no need for a weather-person to tell Humidity not to be so wet, or Rainfall not to pour down somewhere, or Wind Speed not to rush in, and yet JohnJ does this daily.
And this is why, @SROC67, Eric Engle is right about needing to correct the model.
If I am to follow your reasoning (if we can speak of reasoning), Mearsheimer having the same theses as Hitler, the latter, if he were still in this world, would have opposed with the same force as Mearsheimer to the everlasting wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, etc... Very insightful!!!
there's not much to reason about; the reason is a 9 mm bullet, the solution is a skull. Though, between here and that happy day I'm happy to entertain you with accurate lurid descriptions of the destruction of the "Russian" fakeration, a mafia state run by criminals who are already turning against each other. You wish me to talk about Mearsheimer, when I clearly was speaking about Putin. Mearsheimer is a well-meaning fool, a useful idiot, a foil.
Having read many of your erudite posts, I don't think you have wasted time reading the great Mearsheimer.
I spent 5 years at the world's first school of international politics - a realist school at the time I was there - and the many years since reading in and around the subject, and from the quantity of hits, likes and comments alone, JohnJ must be the single most influential commentator on theory, and on the Ukraine and Gaza wars, in the world. So reading and commenting on his thoughts is valuable: whether you agree or disagree with him, because of him you progress in your own thinking.
Kenneth Waltz's theory, being a structural theory like Mearsheimer's, is vulnerable to the same criticism: if his 1979 Theory is an accurate model of how states behave, where is the room for Agency, for decision-makers think?
The only thing realists can say with any historical and predictive accuracy is that the anarchical international system is one influence among many on how decisions are made.
So much for theory of the anarchical system. When it comes to foreign policy, what are your thoughts on Alexander Wendt's "Anarchy is what states make of it"?
I don't think we can judge the accuracy or influence of a theory based on how popular it is or is not. I'm a materialist or if you prefer an empiricist. I have not engaged deeply with Wendt, yet.
The international arena features monopolists of violence. It is not "anarchical" in the sense of no-authority, rather it is polyarchical, so you see right there the great majority of theorists miscast the system from the get-go. These competing and cooperating authorities act much like a cartel, a cartel of violence. This is why international norms are often unenforced, until suddenly a long series of violations results in maximal enforcement. Basically all the other states gang up on the persistent violator. Thinking of the system as anarchic fails because it does not consider how and when and why states coordinate their actions, which they do. Minimal rules, maximally enforced. Moreover, though these monopolists of violence are that they are also makers of rules for international commerce: much of international relations in late modernity has nought to do with violence but instead goes to rules for trade and investment, even also to rules about climate, human rights and a myriad of other concerns. This will increasingly be the case, because of technology. I don't think we could describe ancient Greek as anarchic, even there we see leagues and alliances as well as agreements. All states make rules together, which they then enforce on other states. It takes a lot to get "voted off the island" but it totally happens and, fortunately, is happening to Russia because of its bribed up corrupt mafia shitstem. I shall try to read Wendt, but I have tried to explain why I don't take claims of "anarchy" so seriously. There are rules, they are enforced, they are enforced at gunpoint, and are enforced by groups of states which coordinate their actions against the utterly lawless. To put it in Russian: poka, sukha.
Anarchy can mean a zero-sum game, chaos and a war of all against all, and it's why Hobbes is a favourite reference. But alot of the time, within Mearsheimer's model of anarchy, the life of states is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; they can have common interests, common rules accepted and common institutions worked by them, which can exert an influence on them, even though Mearsheimer takes a jaundiced view of them much of the time. Cooperation can also be an elastic concept, with a spectrum from empire in which the colonial elites cooperate with the imperialists, through to completely voluntary, temporary and informal cooperation covering disaster emergencies. NATO would be somewhere in between, with the USA as clear leader but often outvoted (as during the 2008 Munich Conference when Ukraine was not asked to join, which you would have seen for yourself if you hadn't stormed out, Dear Vladimir). In 'After Hegemony', Robert Keohane begins his effort to explain international cooperation by assuming that anarchy is the fundamental. This view of anarchy is also apparent in the explanation of cooperation that emerges in Kenneth Oye's edited volume 'Cooperation Under Anarchy' (including great papers from Robert Jervis, Stephen Van Evera, and Robert Axelrod, and half the book concerning Applications on Economic Affairs). That there can be Order in Anarchy underpins Hedley Bull's 1977 'The Anarchical Society'. Apologies that my reading started from books written long ago.
As you point out, trade and investment, rules about climate, human rights and a myriad of other concerns are very much the stuff of cooperation. Competition too.
Wendt's paper from 1992 backs up your perspective, and challenges the realist view that anarchy inherently leads to self-help behaviour in international relations, but instead, anarchy’s effects are socially constructed through states' interactions and shared understandings.
The structure of international politics is shaped by intersubjective meanings, though, rather than the material forces Mearsheimer focuses on. States' behaviour is determined by identities and norms that evolve through interaction.
States’ identities are not fixed but are developed through their relationships with others. Interests arise from these identities, meaning that anarchy does not dictate self-help as the only possible outcome.
If states act on distrust, it reinforces the idea of self-help. However, cooperative behaviour can lead to more peaceful norms. Through repeated positive interaction, states can develop collective security arrangements, transforming the anarchic system. His Constructivism highlights the role of social theory in understanding international politics and opens avenues for rethinking power and cooperation in global relations.
Thank you for your comment, @SROC67. We can agree that Mearsheimer asserts that "the ultimate test is how well theories explain events in the real world" (Tragedy), and yet he constantly decries US foreign policy practitioners for not following his theory.
He is open about (some of) the limitations of his model, that it "pays little attention to individuals or domestic political considerations". And yet in his London Review of Books 2007 essay on the Israel Lobby, he trumpets "the thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics".
Ukraine might well lose the war. One could argue that Ukraine has already lost: if it negotiates any peace ceding land and its sovereign wish for economic and political alignment with the EU and away from Russia, then it has lost, and if it continues the war, necessarily entailing huge loss of blood and treasure, then it again has lost. That JohnJ's prediction might prove correct doesn't mean his theory is scientifically correct.
Mearsheimer’s model is based on reality in that it highlights the most important contextual factors to explain conflicts and predict their most likely outcome. In this sense, it is normal that Mearsheimer denounces the lack of realism of the American leaders, to the extent that their strategic errors led the West, despite the advantageous situation in which the United States found itself at the end of the cold war, to accumulate geopolitical failures since the 1990s...
These "strategic errors", if Realists are to be believed, go back alot further than "the 1990s": Morgenthau - whose Politics Among Nations was the very first book I read at university - was against the Vietnam War. As Mearsheimer has been since the Iraq War and certainly by the time he published his Israel Lobby, Morgenthau became persona non grata in DC when he faced up publicly against McGeorge Bundy in 1965.
From this, the questions are two-fold: if Realism scientifically describes "the reality" of "How States Think" and act, how come the USA has consistently failed to fall inline with the science? And second, if states do behave as Mearsheimer says they do, why should he need to campaign so vociferously to try to make them do so?
And as an addendum to the second question, do you notice how it can be levelled at Marx: if the revolution is historically inevitable, why do you need a Communist Party to campaign for it?
Putin's goal is for political influence over Ukraine. Yes, the war is about territorial control but more so about achieving political influence over Ukraine. Russia’s aim is to prevent Ukraine from aligning with the West, particularly the EU.
His 2014 and 2022 invasions aimed for regime change, to install a pro-Russian government (that was about to sign an economic agreement with him in late 2013 and prevent it from signing with the EU) to ensure Ukraine remained in its sphere of influence. Although the war has evolved into a prolonged conflict, Russia’s primary objective remains unchanged.
A peace deal granting Russia occupied territories but leaving Ukraine aligned with the West would be a loss. Russia seeks to politically destabilise Ukraine, making it susceptible to future influence. In that regard, it is exactly like Hitler against 1938 Czechoslovakia: by taking Sudetenland, he destabilised the "rump" of the country, and it wasn't long before he walked into the rest as it collapsed.
Putin’s strategy focuses on achieving his aims through negotiations, pressuring Western countries into agreements that undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.
So, while continuing the war will look like a loss to Ukraine and the West through the loss of blood and treasure, ending the war as Trump, Mearsheimer and you want will also mean an immediate loss for Ukraine, the principle of sovereignty and the right of self-determination, aswell as the Czechoslovakianisation of Ukraine.
Poorly structured peace agreements will inadvertently fulfill Russia’s objectives, destabilising Ukraine. Europe, that is, countries to the West of Russia, will be destabilised by the massive economic and political problems due to Putin's destabilisation of Ukraine. Russia's victory involves securing political control through negotiations. Superficial peace deals will enable Russia to claim success without overt military dominance. Russia aims to exploit peace talks to weaken Ukraine militarily, politically, and economically. Concessions on issues like NATO membership or constitutional changes would only further destabilise Ukraine.
It seems increasingly clear from Trump's statements, well summarised by your comment that "The longer we delay the end of the fighting, the more disastrous the outcome will be for Ukraine and the West", that Western-backed peace deals could unintentionally align with Russian goals, undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and security while satisfying superficial demands for peace.
Mearsheimer loves to make predictions. In all his videos people start by asking him to make one. Here's mine: Putin will initiate symbolic gestures, like a ceasefire coinciding with Donald Trump's inauguration of 20 January, to shift blame onto Ukraine for continued conflict and advance its agenda during negotiations.
This is why politics can be a vale of tears, and this war a true "tragedy" of Shakespearian proportions, and certainly greater than JohnJ has contemplated.
by great model i mean just that MODEL; his theory is internally consistent, it's flaws are empirical and also contraried by his actual practice which as you note isn't realist.
...If John were right about "how states think" then why was he unable to dissuade the USA from its neocon crusade and why is he likewise unable to influence the wars in Ukraine or Palestine? When predictions and descriptions don't line up with facts then its time to modify the theory...
he underestimate the power of liberal peace through trade to prevent war. PTT is why 2014 is not 1914. China isnt gonna just blow up all that swag it worked so hard to build neither is murrica, these fuckers are greedier than they are fearful.
Really enjoyed reading "Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism". Thanks for the heads up that it was outside the paywall!
As a side note, I wanted to say that you are one of the few speakers I drop everything to listen to when I discover that you've made an appearance that gets posted to YouTube. I always learn something.
The only problem is that I often don't know that they've happened. Will you be posting appearances here on your Substack as well, or is there a better way to be alerted to them?
Thank you. Much appreciate the ability to read the article "Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism," in the August 2023 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, without the paywall.
Basically my difficulty with your model is your unwillingness to course correct or verify it empirically even in the face of obvious facts like Ukraine or that the Putin regime are a bunch of lying mafia thugs. You have a great model of reality but science isnt merely modelling reality it is also testing predictions of the model against reality to correct the model. In other words yeah your theory is literally half baked.
I have sometimes (often) been somewhat disrespectful in our exchanges so far, and I regret that.
I realized this morning that you may not feel the need to go back over the factual basis of your posts as these issues are addressed in your books. So I will read them.
I also understood, by carefully reading your posts, that you were not among the neocons. But I am at least as suspicious of the neocon narrative as you seem to be of the Russian narrative. I should have remembered that I was addressing Eric Engle, a scholar whose writings engage, not Victoria Nuland...
By professional training (or professional distortion) —I am first and foremost a lawyer—, my intellectual approach is based on three principles: (i) Always look the truth in the face, without complacency, on the basis of reason rather than each other’s emotions, trying not being blinded by our own subjectivity (nemo judex in sua causa); (ii) Always hearing both versions before drawing conclusions, by seeking to understand the perspective and interests of both parties (audi alternam partem); (iii) Devote at least 80% of our efforts to examining the facts and their geopolitical context, and be deeply suspicious of reasoning built on prejudices or generalizations of a purely theoretical nature.
It is with this approach—very empirical, I readily admit—that I will read your posts and your books.
To observe the geopolitics is a bit like watching a poker game... To understand the motivations of different players and anticipate their next move, an observer is unfortunately forced, to a large extent, to speculate on the cards each player actually has in hand and is trying to hide...
To be clear, I am a French-speaking Canadian. My English is very imperfect, unfortunately. I try constantly to improve it.
Your review of the book shows that you obviously don't understand it, or worse, haven't read it.
sadly i have wasted plenty of time reading Mearsheimer only to conclude he is catastrophically mistaken (and self-inconsistent). He claims to be an offensive realist but in practice he's just another whining liberal (at best).
As Epictetus said, “we cannot teach anyone who thinks he knows everything.”
Maybe you’d better be interested in professional sports rather than trying to read geopolitics books.
yeah, i write such books, did my military service speak a bunch of languages. Maybe you need to figure out the difference between armchair general and the real thing o keyboard warrior.
Is it serious, in geopolitics, to assume as an obvious fact that the Putin regime is a bunch of lying mafia thugs? If the Russian government were as honest and truthful as the US government, would it be more accepting of Ukraine joining NATO?
Oh, it's no assumption. It's a well proven fact. Don't stand near open windows brat. You might outlive your usefulness, o thou useful idiot.
If John J Mearsheimer's offensive realism really describes "how great powers behave toward each other" (Tragedy, passim and ad infinitum), why does he have to intervene to tell them they are getting it wrong?:-)
So, @OSINTBRIEF , I don't agree with you that "You [Mearsheimer] have a great model of reality".
A great model of the reality of the weather would explain how Humidity. Rainfall. and Wind Speed "behave toward each other". There would be no need for a weather-person to tell Humidity not to be so wet, or Rainfall not to pour down somewhere, or Wind Speed not to rush in, and yet JohnJ does this daily.
And this is why, @SROC67, Eric Engle is right about needing to correct the model.
defensive realism is more than tenable though incomplete.
offensive realism, well, that's hitler's theory.
If I am to follow your reasoning (if we can speak of reasoning), Mearsheimer having the same theses as Hitler, the latter, if he were still in this world, would have opposed with the same force as Mearsheimer to the everlasting wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, etc... Very insightful!!!
there's not much to reason about; the reason is a 9 mm bullet, the solution is a skull. Though, between here and that happy day I'm happy to entertain you with accurate lurid descriptions of the destruction of the "Russian" fakeration, a mafia state run by criminals who are already turning against each other. You wish me to talk about Mearsheimer, when I clearly was speaking about Putin. Mearsheimer is a well-meaning fool, a useful idiot, a foil.
I was commenting this post of you:
“defensive realism is more than tenable though incomplete.
offensive realism, well, that's hitler's theory.”
Having read many of your erudite posts, I don't think you have wasted time reading the great Mearsheimer.
I spent 5 years at the world's first school of international politics - a realist school at the time I was there - and the many years since reading in and around the subject, and from the quantity of hits, likes and comments alone, JohnJ must be the single most influential commentator on theory, and on the Ukraine and Gaza wars, in the world. So reading and commenting on his thoughts is valuable: whether you agree or disagree with him, because of him you progress in your own thinking.
Kenneth Waltz's theory, being a structural theory like Mearsheimer's, is vulnerable to the same criticism: if his 1979 Theory is an accurate model of how states behave, where is the room for Agency, for decision-makers think?
The only thing realists can say with any historical and predictive accuracy is that the anarchical international system is one influence among many on how decisions are made.
So much for theory of the anarchical system. When it comes to foreign policy, what are your thoughts on Alexander Wendt's "Anarchy is what states make of it"?
I don't think we can judge the accuracy or influence of a theory based on how popular it is or is not. I'm a materialist or if you prefer an empiricist. I have not engaged deeply with Wendt, yet.
The international arena features monopolists of violence. It is not "anarchical" in the sense of no-authority, rather it is polyarchical, so you see right there the great majority of theorists miscast the system from the get-go. These competing and cooperating authorities act much like a cartel, a cartel of violence. This is why international norms are often unenforced, until suddenly a long series of violations results in maximal enforcement. Basically all the other states gang up on the persistent violator. Thinking of the system as anarchic fails because it does not consider how and when and why states coordinate their actions, which they do. Minimal rules, maximally enforced. Moreover, though these monopolists of violence are that they are also makers of rules for international commerce: much of international relations in late modernity has nought to do with violence but instead goes to rules for trade and investment, even also to rules about climate, human rights and a myriad of other concerns. This will increasingly be the case, because of technology. I don't think we could describe ancient Greek as anarchic, even there we see leagues and alliances as well as agreements. All states make rules together, which they then enforce on other states. It takes a lot to get "voted off the island" but it totally happens and, fortunately, is happening to Russia because of its bribed up corrupt mafia shitstem. I shall try to read Wendt, but I have tried to explain why I don't take claims of "anarchy" so seriously. There are rules, they are enforced, they are enforced at gunpoint, and are enforced by groups of states which coordinate their actions against the utterly lawless. To put it in Russian: poka, sukha.
I can see truth in all of what you've written.
Anarchy can mean a zero-sum game, chaos and a war of all against all, and it's why Hobbes is a favourite reference. But alot of the time, within Mearsheimer's model of anarchy, the life of states is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; they can have common interests, common rules accepted and common institutions worked by them, which can exert an influence on them, even though Mearsheimer takes a jaundiced view of them much of the time. Cooperation can also be an elastic concept, with a spectrum from empire in which the colonial elites cooperate with the imperialists, through to completely voluntary, temporary and informal cooperation covering disaster emergencies. NATO would be somewhere in between, with the USA as clear leader but often outvoted (as during the 2008 Munich Conference when Ukraine was not asked to join, which you would have seen for yourself if you hadn't stormed out, Dear Vladimir). In 'After Hegemony', Robert Keohane begins his effort to explain international cooperation by assuming that anarchy is the fundamental. This view of anarchy is also apparent in the explanation of cooperation that emerges in Kenneth Oye's edited volume 'Cooperation Under Anarchy' (including great papers from Robert Jervis, Stephen Van Evera, and Robert Axelrod, and half the book concerning Applications on Economic Affairs). That there can be Order in Anarchy underpins Hedley Bull's 1977 'The Anarchical Society'. Apologies that my reading started from books written long ago.
As you point out, trade and investment, rules about climate, human rights and a myriad of other concerns are very much the stuff of cooperation. Competition too.
Wendt's paper from 1992 backs up your perspective, and challenges the realist view that anarchy inherently leads to self-help behaviour in international relations, but instead, anarchy’s effects are socially constructed through states' interactions and shared understandings.
The structure of international politics is shaped by intersubjective meanings, though, rather than the material forces Mearsheimer focuses on. States' behaviour is determined by identities and norms that evolve through interaction.
States’ identities are not fixed but are developed through their relationships with others. Interests arise from these identities, meaning that anarchy does not dictate self-help as the only possible outcome.
If states act on distrust, it reinforces the idea of self-help. However, cooperative behaviour can lead to more peaceful norms. Through repeated positive interaction, states can develop collective security arrangements, transforming the anarchic system. His Constructivism highlights the role of social theory in understanding international politics and opens avenues for rethinking power and cooperation in global relations.
In “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, John J. Mearsheimer explains more fully his model (and the inherent limitations of any such model)?
To analyze the conflict in Ukraine and predict its outcome, experience shows that Mearsheimer was right and that the neocons were wrong...
Thank you for your comment, @SROC67. We can agree that Mearsheimer asserts that "the ultimate test is how well theories explain events in the real world" (Tragedy), and yet he constantly decries US foreign policy practitioners for not following his theory.
He is open about (some of) the limitations of his model, that it "pays little attention to individuals or domestic political considerations". And yet in his London Review of Books 2007 essay on the Israel Lobby, he trumpets "the thrust of U.S. policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics".
Ukraine might well lose the war. One could argue that Ukraine has already lost: if it negotiates any peace ceding land and its sovereign wish for economic and political alignment with the EU and away from Russia, then it has lost, and if it continues the war, necessarily entailing huge loss of blood and treasure, then it again has lost. That JohnJ's prediction might prove correct doesn't mean his theory is scientifically correct.
Mearsheimer’s model is based on reality in that it highlights the most important contextual factors to explain conflicts and predict their most likely outcome. In this sense, it is normal that Mearsheimer denounces the lack of realism of the American leaders, to the extent that their strategic errors led the West, despite the advantageous situation in which the United States found itself at the end of the cold war, to accumulate geopolitical failures since the 1990s...
These "strategic errors", if Realists are to be believed, go back alot further than "the 1990s": Morgenthau - whose Politics Among Nations was the very first book I read at university - was against the Vietnam War. As Mearsheimer has been since the Iraq War and certainly by the time he published his Israel Lobby, Morgenthau became persona non grata in DC when he faced up publicly against McGeorge Bundy in 1965.
From this, the questions are two-fold: if Realism scientifically describes "the reality" of "How States Think" and act, how come the USA has consistently failed to fall inline with the science? And second, if states do behave as Mearsheimer says they do, why should he need to campaign so vociferously to try to make them do so?
And as an addendum to the second question, do you notice how it can be levelled at Marx: if the revolution is historically inevitable, why do you need a Communist Party to campaign for it?
The war in Ukraine is already lost, just as the Vietnam War was already lost when Nixon came to power.
The longer we delay the end of the fighting, the more disastrous the outcome will be for Ukraine and the West.
Name an example of a military adventure promoted by the Neocons in Washington that ended in victory?
"The tree is judged by its fruit."
Putin's goal is for political influence over Ukraine. Yes, the war is about territorial control but more so about achieving political influence over Ukraine. Russia’s aim is to prevent Ukraine from aligning with the West, particularly the EU.
His 2014 and 2022 invasions aimed for regime change, to install a pro-Russian government (that was about to sign an economic agreement with him in late 2013 and prevent it from signing with the EU) to ensure Ukraine remained in its sphere of influence. Although the war has evolved into a prolonged conflict, Russia’s primary objective remains unchanged.
A peace deal granting Russia occupied territories but leaving Ukraine aligned with the West would be a loss. Russia seeks to politically destabilise Ukraine, making it susceptible to future influence. In that regard, it is exactly like Hitler against 1938 Czechoslovakia: by taking Sudetenland, he destabilised the "rump" of the country, and it wasn't long before he walked into the rest as it collapsed.
Putin’s strategy focuses on achieving his aims through negotiations, pressuring Western countries into agreements that undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.
So, while continuing the war will look like a loss to Ukraine and the West through the loss of blood and treasure, ending the war as Trump, Mearsheimer and you want will also mean an immediate loss for Ukraine, the principle of sovereignty and the right of self-determination, aswell as the Czechoslovakianisation of Ukraine.
Poorly structured peace agreements will inadvertently fulfill Russia’s objectives, destabilising Ukraine. Europe, that is, countries to the West of Russia, will be destabilised by the massive economic and political problems due to Putin's destabilisation of Ukraine. Russia's victory involves securing political control through negotiations. Superficial peace deals will enable Russia to claim success without overt military dominance. Russia aims to exploit peace talks to weaken Ukraine militarily, politically, and economically. Concessions on issues like NATO membership or constitutional changes would only further destabilise Ukraine.
It seems increasingly clear from Trump's statements, well summarised by your comment that "The longer we delay the end of the fighting, the more disastrous the outcome will be for Ukraine and the West", that Western-backed peace deals could unintentionally align with Russian goals, undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and security while satisfying superficial demands for peace.
Mearsheimer loves to make predictions. In all his videos people start by asking him to make one. Here's mine: Putin will initiate symbolic gestures, like a ceasefire coinciding with Donald Trump's inauguration of 20 January, to shift blame onto Ukraine for continued conflict and advance its agenda during negotiations.
This is why politics can be a vale of tears, and this war a true "tragedy" of Shakespearian proportions, and certainly greater than JohnJ has contemplated.
by great model i mean just that MODEL; his theory is internally consistent, it's flaws are empirical and also contraried by his actual practice which as you note isn't realist.
Already reading the book. Thank you so much
...If John were right about "how states think" then why was he unable to dissuade the USA from its neocon crusade and why is he likewise unable to influence the wars in Ukraine or Palestine? When predictions and descriptions don't line up with facts then its time to modify the theory...
I’m looking forward to reading your book. I finished a month ago, the Tragedy of great power politics, it was so interesting and insightful.
he underestimate the power of liberal peace through trade to prevent war. PTT is why 2014 is not 1914. China isnt gonna just blow up all that swag it worked so hard to build neither is murrica, these fuckers are greedier than they are fearful.
I just purchased the audiobook version. Looking forward to a great read. Thanks for your work and challenging opinions.