As I understand it, at least some strands of realism would argue that a free and democratic Russia would still feel threatened by the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO and would still eventually act militarily, as Putin has done.
He says, as he posts a 9 minute, 22 second YouTube that is merely Part 1 of 7.
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Only the video I linked to is about realism, it isnât a seven part realism series.
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One thing I donât understand about this realism perspective is, what do they predict happens when great powers decline and their sphere of influence shrink? Are things like this conflict in Ukraine inevitable because the great power will always be in denial about their own decline?
And is Germany or EU today a great power with itâs own sphere of influence or is it part of US sphere of influence due to NATO?
The fact that Ukraineâs neighbors to the west have a growing economy, standard of living, and global influence relative to themselves and their neighbors to the east makes it inevitable that the people of Ukraine will want to separate from the Russian influence and move toward EU. There will always come some point where a majority of their population feels like it is time and a minority does not and you have tensions like they had in 2014. I really donât know what the US was doing to encourage this move but, from a realist perspective, I think there is no way to look at the last 20 years and see Ukraine moving in this direction as anything but inevitable regardless of what the US did. What does Mearsheimer say about that? Does he have a theory of how the sphere of influence could contract without these type of conflicts when a great power declines into an also ran?
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I remember listening to NPR in early 2017 and they had the then Russian opposition guy on. He spoke about democracy and liberal values etc⌠and then the NPR interviewer asked him about Ukraine clearly expecting him to continue to dunk on Putin but he was like ânah man, that shit belongs to Russia.â
The tenets of realism according to the political scientist Robert Kaplan are:
⢠Order comes before freedom
⢠Work with the material at hand
⢠Think tragically to avoid tragedy
⢠Not every problem has a solution
⢠Interests come before values
⢠American power is limited
⢠Passion and good policy often donât go together
Also, the implication of what NBZ said about the state being the critical unit is that multinational institutions are toothless and ineffective.
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Yes? the goal is to maximize your sphere of influence while denying those who oppose you. Thatâs what expanding NATO and arming Ukraine does. Does it matter that Russia is a smaller country? No. Thereâs no morality here, the big pick on the small and Russia and either fight or submit and as long as itâs +EV for the US to keep pushing then they should. Things like the horrors of war arenât relevant.
Morality takes a back seat to strategic goals here. If arming Ukraine hobbles Russia while not making the US worse off then itâs strategically a good idea, with the caveat of it being +EV up to Russia falling apart.
It doesnât necessarily ignore morality but Mearsheimer was pretty explicit in his interview with the New Yorker that he thinks that strategic goals outweigh moral qualms. He gave the example of the US siding with Stalin against Hitler
I think there is a strategic and a moral dimension involved with almost every issue in international politics. I think that sometimes those moral and strategic dimensions line up with each other. In other words, if youâre fighting against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, you know the rest of the story. There are other occasions where those arrows point in opposite directions, where doing what is strategically right is morally wrong. I think if you join an alliance with the Soviet Union to fight against Nazi Germany, it is a strategically wise policy, but it is a morally wrong policy. But you do it because you have no choice for strategic reasons. In other words, what Iâm saying to you, Isaac, is that when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations. In an ideal world, it would be wonderful if the Ukrainians were free to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy.
But in the real world, that is not feasible. The Ukrainians have a vested interest in paying serious attention to what the Russians want from them. They run a grave risk if they alienate the Russians in a fundamental way. If Russia thinks that Ukraine presents an existential threat to Russia because it is aligning with the United States and its West European allies, this is going to cause an enormous amount of damage to Ukraine. That of course is exactly whatâs happening now. So my argument is: the strategically wise strategy for Ukraine is to break off its close relations with the West, especially with the United States, and try to accommodate the Russians. If there had been no decision to move nato eastward to include Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbass would be part of Ukraine today, and there would be no war in Ukraine.
I bolded strategically wise because his whole argument doesnât hinge on the horrors of war or destruction, it hinges on the idea that the US expanding NATO and flirting with Ukraine is a bad use of time and material because the US should be aligning with Russia, not seeing it as a rival to be subdued. And because of that we should allow Russia to exercise its sphere of influence. If the US does see the Russia as a rival itâs not clear why the US shouldnât expand NATO and press its advantage to the fullest, like it should be doing with China and not Russia.
Thatâs why I can see the coherency in the idea from anti-China nationalists that we should make overtures to Putin and not get involved in his backyard so that we can bring him into our orbit against China. It makes sense from that realist perspective.
I donât see the coherency if the only two big actors are Russia and the US. Then we should be maximizing our advantage so long as itâs +EV.
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Heâs talking about it there from Ukraineâs perspective, not the US perspective! If Mearshiemerâs assumptions are correct, that the Russians will fight to keep Ukraine out of the Western orbit, and that Ukraine will lose that confrontation regardless of the level of US indirect support, then that makes sense.
But shifting back to the US perspective: if itâs just the US and Russia then the US is really indifferent to if Ukraine is in NATO or not. Ukraine doesnât matter to the US strategically, at all. So thatâs a situation where a realist can look at second order stuff like morality, trying to decrease the likelihood of a conflict that really doesnât impact the US at all, and the remote but serious prospect of a regional conflict somehow blowing up into a nuclear confrontation. Mearsheimerâs âpush comes to shoveâ is doing a lot of work there, and the US isnât going to come to pushes or shoves in Ukraine because it is irrelevant to US interests. Whereas if some shit is going down in Mexico weâre not going to consider any of that, weâre going to do what hegemons do when their regional hegemony is challenged.
This is directly contradicted by sworn testimony by relevant individuals during Trumpâs impeachment hearings, but, sure, I guess you know best.
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well, turns out his assumptions were wrong about ukraine losing the confrontation, for no other reason than the corruption of the russian state which is the very thing ukraine would like to avoid. if ukraine believes that they wonât lose, and the us watches the preparedness not pointing to decisive russian victory, doesnât that realism change their calculus?
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I wouldnât count the eggs before they hatch.
I feel like following these values would have kept the US out of WWII, and weâd be living in a much much worse world right now.
Which would make staying out of WWII neither the practical nor the moral solution. Same goes for shunning Ukraine imo.
ukraine has already rewritten their national charter around this new history. even if they lose hundreds of thousands more lives and more territory, they will emerge as a totally reborn nation. even as military victories are different, they will have left the russian sphere of influence for decades
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Navalny has a troubling history of nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, his main redeeming feature is his opposition to Putin.
Navalny has never hid his sympathies for the Russian nationalist movement â only a few weeks ago (2013) he co-authored a statement on ethnic violence in Pugachev [ru] with prominent nationalist opposition leaders. Muzhdabaevâs questions, however, were much more personal. In particular, he addressed allegedly racist episodes in Navalnyâs biography â one in which he reportedly called a female Azerbaijani co-worker a âdarkieâ (â chernozhopaia ,â literally âblack-assedâ), and another in which he referred to Georgians as ârodentsâ (a play on words: Gruziny (Georgians) and gryzuny (rodents)) during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.
I agree. I guess we canât all be blessed with the same cynicism that Mearsheimer, Putin and Keeed share.
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Yeah, probably would have just shrugged off Pearl Harbor.
You probably would have argued Pearl Harbor was our fault for antagonizing the Japanese in their sphere of influence.
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Not sure how I would have argued that, but suzzer, if you can dream it you can do it!
Itâs true! Pearl Harbor was a reaction to the US oil embargo we imposed in response to Japanâs invasion of China. Mearscheimer would absolutely be condemning FDR for stirring up trouble with a great power in an area that we donât care about.
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I donât know what Mearsheimer would say about the embargo, youâd have to ask him. I think it was a good policy though. Same with destroyers for bases. It was obvious which side we wanted to win and which side we wanted to contain in the opening years of WW2.