Is John Mearsheimer Right about Ukraine?

I didn’t write a full newsletter today. I’ve been busy preparing for Passover and it felt like a good time for a break. But we do have a Zoom guest this Friday at Noon ET. (Paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video next week.) Our guest is the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most controversial scholar of international relations in the United States. He was controversial fifteen years ago when he co-authored The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and he’s controversial now because he places most of the blame for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine not on Vladimir Putin but on the US and its NATO allies.

On both of these subjects—Mearsheimer’s views about the Israel lobby and his views about Ukraine—I have roughly similar views. I’m not entirely convinced by Mearsheimer’s position but I’m appalled by the way he’s been smeared.

I think Mearsheimer and Walt overstate the Israel lobby’s role in convincing the Bush administration to invade Iraq in 2003. But I don’t remotely think their book is antisemitic, as the Anti-Defamation League still claims to this day. To the contrary, it served an important purpose. Money corrupts American politics in multiple ways, and exposing that corruption is crucial to combatting it. Americans should feel as free to talk about the Israel lobby’s influence over US policy on the Middle East as they feel to talk about the health care lobby’s influence over US policy on prescription drug prices. Because of Mearsheimer and Walt’s book, we’re closer to that day.

In the same vein, I think Mearsheimer’s argument that the US could have avoided this war by foreswearing Ukraine’s entrance into NATO may ignore some harsh truths. Putin didn’t only want to keep Ukraine out of NATO. He wanted to keep Ukraine within his orbit, which probably required keeping it out of the European Union. And given how intensely many Ukrainians desire EU membership—which they see as their gateway to the West—satisfying Putin might have required muscling Ukrainians into abandoning their desires for prosperity and the rule of law, consigning them to the status of Belarus. As Eastern European commentators have noted, Mearsheimer understates how fiercely Ukrainians would have resisted this kind of compromise. Indeed, they would have seen it as a betrayal.

But none of this makes Mearsheimer responsible for Russia’s brutal invasion, as some prominent hawks have suggested. And these smears are particularly dangerous because in a US foreign policy debate dominated by people who draw a bright line between Moscow’s international behavior and Washington’s, Mearsheimer is a valuable countervailing voice. As a realist, he stresses the similarities between the way great powers behave, irrespective of their forms of government. That allows him to see parallels between America’s wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and Russia’s wars in Georgia and Ukraine. It helps him recognize the ways that America’s contempt for international law has helped to wreck the very “rules-based order” it claims to cherish. And it lets him view the Biden administration’s pretenses of devotion to self-determination and non-aggression the way billions of non-Americans, especially in the global south, view them: As full of shit. All this is a long way of saying that while I think Mearsheimer may be wrong about Ukraine, I think he’s often right about the United States.

For all these reasons, I’m excited to talk to him this Friday. Join us.

Other stuff:

In Jewish Currents (subscribe), Claire Schwartz talks to two Paris-based leftist activists about this month’s presidential election in France.

A revealing, disturbing twitter thread about why so many Russians won’t admit what their government is doing in Ukraine. 

Why some conservative southern evangelicals are embracing Putin’s brand of Orthodox Christianity.

Always read Raja Shehadeh.

See you on Friday,

Peter