“Do you know what to write about? About Mearsheimer. He’s got it. Always look to the US first,” said a lawyer and peer I met on the street last month. John Mearsheimer, a 74-year-old political scientist at the University of Chicago, has argued since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 that the “silly” West is to blame for the war in Ukraine. And not Putin, one “first-class strategist”who has never set out to ‘take territory in eastern Ukraine’.
Mearsheimer is not only a figurehead for this lawyer. He is too in academic circles for the so-called ‘realists’. Realists pride themselves on analyzing questions of war and peace soberly, unlike liberal ‘idealists’ who would moralize.
As befits a guru, Mearsheimer held his course unflinchingly. Even after Russia had started its frontal attack on Ukraine at the end of February. In an interview of The New Yorkers he again advised Kyiv to break with the West and “adjust to the Russians.” Putin was certainly not building a “greater Russia and not interested in the conquest and integration of Ukraine.”
Mearsheimer had spoken. But was the case settled? No. After all, in the nine months everything went differently than the realist pope ex cathedral predicted in Chicago. The New Yorkers so called him again in November. Putin had just annexed four Ukrainian provinces and threatened to defend this new Russia with “all available means”. Mearsheimer was not impressed by these facts. In the weekly magazine he reiterated that “the narrative that Putin is aggressive” is a “fabrication” of the West. That Kyiv ignored his advice, did not “accommodate” but fought back, is strange indeed, at least different “than most people had previously expected”.
Pretty is different. A little more introspection is perhaps too much to ask of a guru, who only follows the main lines and, in the end, knows nothing about Ukraine and Russia. The tendency to dismiss facts that belie one’s own predictions as “unexpected surprises” is common among realists more widely.
After that, however, the interview gets dirty. When asked why Putin himself joined the 300th birthday of Tsar Peter the Great acknowledged that Russia is imperialist, Mearsheimer says: “There was no evidence of its imperial ambitions before the war. […] There is no evidence that he wanted to occupy four provinces.” He dismisses the fact that Putin wrote in a historiographical article half a year before the invasion that Great Russians (Russia), Little Russians (Ukraine) and White Russians (Belarus) have one language and one religion, in short form “one people” with one goal. He even claims that Putin “makes it very clear in that article that he recognized Ukrainian nationalism, that he recognized that Ukraine was a sovereign state.” The idea that Putin would lie is unthinkable. That would be “unprecedented” in history, except for Hitler, according to Mearsheimer.
Here now Mearsheimer is openly cheating. Because if Putin did anything in that essay from July 2021, it was to deny the authenticity of Ukraine. It was not for nothing that the title was ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. Putin even argued in the article that Ukraine is historically nothing more than a Western “bridgehead against Russia”, a plot by Habsburg Austrians, Poles, Nazis and Americans, respectively, who use Ukraine as an “anti-Moscow” project.
Mearsheimer unmasked himself this year. Mearsheimer is an intellectual con artist.
Hubert Smith is a journalist and historian. He writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 1, 2022 newspaper