I came across this very interesting September 2015 address given by political scientist Mearsheimer, an expert on Russian and Chinese viewpoints which inform a wisdom different from Western European and United States conventional wisdom. I found listening to this talk to be extremely worthwhile, especially in light of it having been delivered 6.5 years ago. One thing missing is specific mention of the now very evident deep seated belief by Putin that "the" Ukraine is an indispensable part of Russia. This most certainly must have always underlay Putin's attitude toward NATO's expansion to the East, and how far it could go before real trouble . Please try to listen to the entire talk and questions from the audience if you possibly can. Mearsheimer's opinions are based on an objective and scholarly study of facts and omit subjective and moral considerations that we often invoke when justifying our own views. I personally find it impossible not to view the War in Ukraine from my own moral perspective.
I have listened to this 1 hour, 14 minute video, including Q&A in its entirety. The speaker's presentation was extremely well organized, detailed, and well presented with maps and event timelines. I highly recommend anyone wishing a more in-depth understanding of European, especially regarding the issues surrounding Ukraine, and even Asian politics, to view this video and take notes. The speaker is John Mearsheimer, a renowned writer of books and articles concerning foreign policy. He starts off his lecture with defining and outlining the US's core strategic interests over time. To quickly summarize, Ukraine is not and should not be considered a major strategic interest for the US. China is a rising power that will divert an increasing amount of NATO's attention while Russia is declining, but will continue to remain a great power. Russia sees Ukraine as a vital strategic interest and should be used as a buffer against the West. Ukraine is a divided country by culture and language that is in a civil war. Mearsheimer says Putin is smart enough not to take over all of Ukraine because that would subject Russia to Afghanistan like insurgency indefinitely. A summary of US and NATO imperatives include expanding the US and NATOs influence for security, economic, and political reasons. Mearsheimer believes Ukraine should become neutral, NATO should explicitly declare their Eastward expansion dead while coordinating with Russia with a economic rescue plan for Ukraine(As of 2015), and recognize minority rights, especially language rights. Recent Russian peace negotiations basically reflect these "Core" considerations. "Crimea is now a permanent part of Russia and Putin will pound the rest of Ukraine indefinitely until the core terms are agreed to". Mearsheimer goes into depth behind Putin's reasoning. Based upon Mearsheimer's presentation, I now see Putin's desire to keep Ukraine neutral as reasonable and the West's response thus far as lacking depth, to put it mildly. In other words, "we are potentially risking everything for land that should not be considered a vital strategic interest". Our current handling of the Ukraine situation pushes Russia into China's arms, a situation that may be less than optimal for the West's long term security concerns. Further, Mearsheimer says if the West got along with Russia, dealing with countries like Iran and Syria would be easier. It really does seem the West lacks depth in strategic thinking compared to Russia and China. As the West continues to lose superpower status, mistakes in strategic thinking will become ever more costly. "The US seems to believe they have a right or obligation to intervene in foreign policy, but they no longer win wars, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, among others". In order to manage post length, I have left out a wealth of details that are invaluable to understanding drivers and issues regarding foreign policy. Again, I highly recommend this video. Edit: Mearsheimer says Steve Walt(?), Cowen, and Kissinger agree with his analysis.
I think Mearsheimer was probably referring to Stephen F. Cohen the professor of Russian studies at NYU. (died ~2020).
I posted both this and Cohen's commentary in the Ukraine thread about a week and a half ago. When I suggested that we were warned and could have listened, I was called a Kremlin Lover and Putin apologist. Here is another good read: ‘We told you so!’ How the West didn’t listen to the countries that know Russia best Poland and the Baltic states understand the Kremlin better than Western governments, but found their warnings about Putin ignored. The Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, in Warsaw, honors the victims of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 | Mateusz Wlodarczyk/NurPhoto via Getty Images BY STUART LAU March 9, 2022 1:00 am Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linkedin Share on WhatsApp Mail Print PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Amazon Polly VILNIUS — For years, Western Europeans have been dismissive of politicians from Poland and the Baltic countries whenever they sounded the alarm over the expansionist threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. They now realize they should have listened to countries with a far deeper knowledge of the Kremlin and a bitter historical memory of the violence that Moscow is willing to unleash to pursue its goals. Instead, the Westerners followed a path of commercial and political appeasement of Putin, led by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which has now spectacularly backfired with the invasion of Ukraine, the bombardment of its cities and mass emigration. “The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years,” said Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister. “For years [they] were patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'” The Easterners say they ran into a brick wall when they made pleas for increased NATO deployments, drew attention to cyberattacks and called on Berlin not to let the EU be held hostage by giant pipelines pumping gas straight into Germany. The outspoken, pugnacious Sikorski, then defense minister, triggered outrage in thin-skinned diplomatic circles in 2006 when he dared compare the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipeline project, which bypassed Poland, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that divided Poland between the Nazis and Soviets. Polish and Baltic leaders saw Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 as a defining threshold that signaled that Putin needed to be stopped with a genuine show of force from the West, or otherwise he would go on to attack more targets. In fruitless meetings in Brussels, however, Polish and Baltic diplomats found that most of the European Union was reluctant to impose heavy sanctions on Moscow despite its invasion of an EU ally. The furious anti-Putin camp dubbed the Italian-led opposition to sanctions as the “Club Med” grouping. Their wariness of Moscow has centuries-old roots. Poland lost its independence in the 18th century to a coalition of attackers led by Russia, fought Russia in two bloody and failed uprisings in the 19th century, and earned a stunning victory against the communist Soviets in 1920. The USSR gots its revenge in 1939, seizing a half of Poland and meting out bloody punishment, executing 20,000 prisoners of war and deporting hundreds of thousands of civilians before subjecting post-war Poland to four decades of Communist dictatorship. The Baltic countries enjoyed two decades of independence between the wars before being annexed by the Soviet Union. Thousands were murdered and many more were deported deep into the USSR. Their countries were colonized by Russian settlers, and they barely survived to regain their independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most recent cycle of Russian aggression has many of its origins in 2007. That year, Putin made a speech at the Munich Security Conference that provided a bedrock for many of the decisions that followed. In the speech, he lashed out at the U.S. for creating a unipolar world “in which there is one master, one sovereign,” criticized NATO’s eastward expansion and challenged the post-Cold War order in Europe. Sikorski, who became Poland’s top diplomat the same year, began asking for more NATO forces in his country. After all, Germany had 35,000 American troops stationed there, and a further effort toward rebalancing of power in the face of Russia’s military modernization campaigns seemed to make sense. Not everyone in NATO thought so at the time. “When I demanded on numerous occasions that our membership in NATO be fulfilled by physical presence — and I was only asking for two brigades, which is to say 10,000 American troops — this was regarded as outrageous. Germany in particular, but others too, for the first time in history found themselves surrounded by exclusively friendly states. And they didn’t feel our pain of being a flank country, of being on the edge of the world of democracy, rule of law and security,” Sikorski said. After Sikorski’s time in government, the messaging on Moscow out of Warsaw has been much muddier since the nationalist Law and Justice party took power in 2015. It won thanks to an untrue conspiracy theory that Russia was responsible for a 2010 plane crash that killed Poland’s president and many top officials. The Polish government spent its energy painting Germany as an enemy, engaging in warfare with the EU over rule of law, launching attacks on LGBTQ+ people and palling around with right-wing Putin allies like Italy’s Matteo Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen. ‘You know nothing’ Estonians remember another episode in 2007. In April, the Baltic country’s computer servers were hit by a massive wave of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on public and private websites alike, essentially shutting the whole country down digitally for weeks. Nearly a million “zombie” computers were deployed, according to the then-defense minister, shortly after a plan to relocate a Soviet “Monument to the Liberators of Estonia” out of Tallinn’s city center. While the Russian government repeatedly denied involvement in the cyberattacks, Estonia was unconvinced. But what was even more shocking to officials in Tallinn was yet to follow, when they presented their case to fellow NATO nations. “We were told by some of our NATO allies in Europe that, ‘Oh you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just being Russophobic’ — and this at a time by people who wouldn’t know a computer from a toaster while we were already then part of the most digitally advanced [country] in Europe,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was the Estonian president at the time of the cyberattacks. He was born in Sweden after his parents fled the Soviet occupation. Eventually, NATO conducted an internal assessment For linguistic and historical reasons — as well as pure fear of the danger across the border — the Baltic states often have excellent intelligence and analysis of Russian activity, but could find themselves roundly ignored. Rihard Kols, chair of the Latvian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said Riga was involved in warning NATO about Russian ambitions before its invasion of Georgia in 2008. But Kols said he regularly found it difficult to convince his counterparts in the West of how dangerous Putin could be. “In general, the Baltics have been warning our colleagues in the West to be vigilant and not fall into naïveté based on wishful thinking. The constant readiness to restart relations with Russia, regardless of what its breaches have been, is what got us to this day, unfortunately,” he said. The U.S., under Barack Obama’s administration, also opted for a “reset” with Russia in 2009. The gesture famously got off to a glitchy start when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov with a big red button, but with the wrong Russian word written on it. Regardless of the bad Russian, it was a decision that Ilves called “disastrous.” The one European leader who always “surprised” him was Merkel. She had been raised behind the Iron Curtain, but proved enigmatic on whether she really grasped the risk. “Privately,” Ilves said, “she seemed to have few illusions, but I guess she saw that publicly, that’s something that she needed to do. Or she was telling me things she didn’t believe in. I don’t know. I can’t say.” Now everyone’s eyes are opened to Putin’s true nature. “As of February 24, there has been this dramatic revolution and all of this. But it really took an invasion, a brutal invasion of Ukraine to make people sit up. Given their previous behavior, with invasion of Crimea and invasion of Georgia … but now this, I guess, was so over the top that even they had to react,” Ilves went on. Unity at stake In August 2014, months after Russia annexed Crimea, EU foreign ministers were in heated debates about how far to go to sanction the Kremlin. The Baltics, as usual, sided with the Poles, the British and Swedes to call for tougher sanctions. The opposing camp came from fellow ex-communist states, Hungary and Slovakia — both governed by pro-Kremlin populists. “The sanctions policy pursued by the West … causes more harm to us than to Russia,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said. “In politics, this is called shooting oneself in the foot.” Then-Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius responded by saying it was better to shoot yourself in the foot than to let yourself be shot in the head. The message was clear: If Putin was allowed to get away with Crimea, he would go on with his wars of expansion. In an interview in Vilnius, Linkevičius lamented the lack of action from the West over the past 15 years in response to Putin’s expansionism. He recalled the 2008 NATO Russia Council meeting in Romania, where Putin was already describing Ukraine as “an artificial creation.” The term didn’t go unnoticed. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then Danish prime minister before he became NATO secretary-general, replied to Putin by saying this wasn’t the way to talk about partners. “Putin means what he says,” Linkevičius said. “And now to pretend that we are surprised that something [went] wrong, that’s too much.” When Putin’s troops were massed around Ukraine a month ago, French President Emmanuel Macron was one of the Western European leaders flying in to Moscow to try to talk Putin out of the inevitable. Linkevičius wasn’t impressed. “This is like psychotherapy. All these talks were so far an illusion.” He stressed that the West bears no blame for what’s happening in Ukraine today, as it is entirely Russia’s own doing. Still, he said, if “those who would have had opportunity in time to do something, didn’t [do anything], they must share responsibility.” The war now raging in Ukraine, says Ilves, should teach Western Europe a lesson: “Don’t do Russia policy without consulting people who know far more about Russia than you do. Don’t rely on people who have been trained as diplomats but have no real understanding of patterns of Russian behavior.” Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting
22:43 - "In fact if you really want to wreck Russia what you should do is encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine. Putin again is much smart to do that." Yeah... so much for that.
As I was listening to this presentation, with of course the advantage of knowing what would happen 6+ years hence, I was struck by the depth with which this guy understood the politics of that region. . He may have been right on when he said, "In fact if you really want to wreck Russia what you should do is encourage it to try to conquer Ukraine", we will have to wait and see to know for sure. But at this point it does seem he sure got Putin wrong! Putin wasn't too smart after all! Mearsheimer, in 2015, may not have fully appreciated Putin's now obvious deep seated belief that Ukraine in an indispensable part of Russia. He probably put a little to much emphasis on Putin's annoyance with NATO on his doorstep. What annoys him even more, I would guess, is that were Ukraine to join NATO it would close the door on his dream of making Ukraine become once again "The Ukraine" region of mother Russia. He may have thought time was running out. He had such an easy time occupying Crimea, I suppose he thought occupying the rest of Ukraine would be a piece of Cake. Mearsheimer had it right, it seems, when he implied Putin would be a fool to try and conquer all of Ukraine. But as it turned out, Putin, wasn't "too smart" this time.