Yup. You read that correctly. That is apparently a van blasting a speech given by Chicago University professor of international relations John Mearsheimer on the Ukraine crisis over its loudspeaker. My guess is the speech in question is the one that Mearsheimer gave to the alumni of Chicago University in 2015. It is well worth watching, for the brilliant rhetorical performance alone. Mearsheimer really knows who to deliver a line.
Tooze's article here is by far the worst of those I have read recently - reality for Putin is damned if he did, damned if he didn't. More specifically, Measheimer is only one of numerous famous strategic thinkers/diplomats who pinpointed blame on NATO expansion and predicted the exact mess today. They include George Kennan, Kissinger, Jack Matlock (who literally is the horse's mouth), William Perry, Bill Burns, Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating, Bob Gates, Pat Buchanan, etc. etc. and I have not included even a single "leftie/Ruskie"! See list including reference compiled here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592
Tooze's thesis also damns Measheimer without offering any sensible cogent solution Putin might have employed whatsoever - after all, Putin did try peaceful means for no less than 8 years - what exactly could he have done to turn the tide in the face of US/NATO encirclement, sponsored coup in 2014/regime change/colour revolution/arab spring, and proxy war in Donbas etc.? Just more waiting hoping US woke up one day regretting their disastrous, deadly "mission for democracy" around the world?
this article is horrible. It reeks of academic posturing and competition for status. claiming mearsheimer is an apologist is a disgusting smear. tooze seems hell bent on erasing any culpability on the part of the states and nato - gross.
While Mr. Mearsheimer might be a bit crude in its assertions, he is not that far from the warning the Athenian negotiators gave to the Melians, some 2500 years ago.
Mr. Tooze is definitely not inured with military literature and theories as might appear in War on the Rocks, or the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. But the present outcome in Ukraine was in fact pushed for by the US decades ago:
"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The CIA's Beebe follows with this almost unbelievable line:
"And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail."
The fact that Russia chose war to create its buffer zone in its west, with Ukraine as a no man land is not considered by Mr. Tooze as imperative shows that he never engaged with a military man.
While money men tried to position themselves with optic cables such that the instant trades could be performed by the thousands, cutting the time by microseconds, military men consider that positioning first strike capabilities as close as possible to Russia would make a nuclear war winnable. And 2014 coup makes that wet dream of US military planners a very serious possibility.
This very simple arithmetic of existential threat and pressure would be logically followed by a Russia that would acquiesce to the American hegemony. With all the perks for the victor. Maybe this time around wouldn't come to the same level of pillage that followed 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, but a big party for the Wall Street would definitely ensue.
I think that Russia's freedom of choice in the matter of Ukraine is a mere illusion in Mr. Tooze's head. After all, the first shots of this war have been reverberating around the world since US bombed Belgrade in 1999 with all the blather from Clinton that globalization will be done, whether people like it or not.
While the Russian economy might take a beating, I wonder what price Mr. Tooze puts on sovereignty, independence, dignity, and security? As far as I know, the US spends more than the next 10 countries combined in its offensive military posture. So as long as Russians feel safe and their lives are made maybe more secured, a little dent in their material comforts will be regarded as a cost of doing business.
The question I have is what the US and EU posture will be after some agreement between Russia and Ukraine is reached to Russia's satisfaction and papers are signed? Will US / EU continue with the sanctions? My bet is yes, showing that all this show of force is the West's constant position that Russia is not to be treated as an equal partner (the past 8 years of failed diplomacy in Ukraine, and failure of the West to force Ukraine to implement the internationally approved Minsk agreements, ability that the west amply had, given the great mobilization showed in the first hours of Russian invasion). It is the position of the US government that Russia, in its present form (a nuclear superpower) is an existential danger to the the US and must be annihilated. The US cannot breath at the idea that Russia has the ability to physically destroy the United States and there is many a paranoid in the US military planning that cannot sleep at night because of that.
I do think this assertion of mine is credible, given the insistence of US/Israel on the limitation of Iran's conventional missile program, which is the shield that Iran has built against foreign aggression. Iran cannot be coerced by the US via military means. No gunboat diplomacy with respect to Iran, same as no gunboat diplomacy with Russia, or China. The technological genie is out of the bottle. we are primitive men with sophisticated tools, and Mr. Tooze fails to understand this by looking at too many charts and to many prices.
This piece is really shallow on the history and lost in academic weeds ... We are only a few blunders away from WWIII and Tooze has it out for Mearsheimer. Who really cares? The real question is whether the West really did provoke and trigger this whole situation. And Tooze really provides next to no evidence to disprove the claim that the West is principally at fault for the grave crisis in Ukraine. There is ample historical evidence that the West provoked Russia in Eastern Europe, by expanding NATO when it promised that it never would (after the dissolution of the Soviet Union). Quite a number of prominent US geo-strategists and government officials warned, all the way back in the 90's, against the dangers of expanding NATO and unnecessarily provoking Russia.
And then there was yet more provocation when the US pushed for Ukraine to be a member of NATO, backed the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, promised them NATO membership, and then sent them bunches of weapons to fight Russian separatists ... The more one digs and looks at actual recent, historical evidence and the more the picture emerges that in fact the US was deeply involved in provoking Russia, and actually fighting it by proxy starting with the overthrow of the government in Ukraine in 2014 ... But these are facts that just don't fit with the current wave of shallow journalism one sees everywhere in western countries.
Here are some more serious academic and journalistic pieces on the real origins of the Ukraine crisis and now war, and one sincerely hopes that Adam Tooze might present a more rigorous and balanced presentation of the evidence if he treats this question again (which he is obviously more than capable of doing, given his prodigious talents):
Let's leave philosophical fluff aside for a while and review the facts:
2002 - US abandons ABM (Anti-ballistic missile treaty)
2019 - US abandons INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty
2020 - US withdraws from Open Skies treaty
2021 - Indication Ukraine is readying for NATO membership
With Ukraine in NATO, tactical nuclear missiles could be positioned in Ukraine, along with anti-ballistic missiles, and with no possibility to verify which base / launcher / container has which. Tactical nuke so close to Moscow effectively becomes a strategic weapon, and powerful ABM radar and capability so close (covering everything west of Urals) would mean Russian strategic land-based missile capability would be much compromised. It would be a strategic check-mate, or how Putin called it "knife under the throat of Russia", and there is no rational way to look at it differently. In such situation any launch of any missile from Ukraine - due to no reaction time - would be interpreted as decapitation attack against Russia triggering full retaliation across all targets (Europe and US).
Well having a van blasting a speech out is an overkill, straight from the book of the Japanese nationalists and their black buses. That's said Tooze piece just doesn't have the weight and logic of Mearsheimer as it is not backed up by historical analysis of the E. Europe and the world since 1989. I think Mearsheimer thesis is spot on and that's why gets the following and Tooze doesn't. Perhaps there is a simple professional jealousy at play here? I would love to read a factual and argumentative take down of Mearsheimer points however Tooze doesn't offer any. And all of the Neocons that try often fail (Applebaum being one of the most pathetic examples out there).
In a way I almost feel like Tooze is being Mearsheimer's Mearsheimer here. A well credentialled and widely respected intellectual trying to explain shittiness in a way that ultimately creates room for and justifies it. Tooze, I love your writing, but sometimes it feels like the mass of analysis smothers plain truth. Mearsheimer is an asshole supporting a literal terrorist state, and quite plainly too. Sometimes you have to say to hell with the academic politeness and take a damn stand, recognize that sometimes the average person gets it right, that what is going on is beyond the space for thought piecing and dissection it is just brutal and ugly evil.
In an interview in the WSJ, Robert Service called the 11/1021 Charter Agreement between the US and Ukraine one of two "immense strategic blunders." There's a whole section in the Charter entitled "Security and Countering Russian Aggression" and it contains the following sentence: "The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability."
The other immense strategic blunder that Service cites was of course Putin's decision to invade.
Too little has been made, I think, about Putin's show of force by massing his forces on Ukraine's borders. That was the precedent blunder for his eventual invasion blunder. I believe Putin was convinced that, seeing the magnitude of his forces, the West would negotiate Ukraine's right to join NATO. When we stood firm, he found himself in a position where he either had to withdraw his forces or use them. He left himself no flexibility, no way to back out without losing all credibility.
I'm convinced this was a war no one wanted. And I don't think it was inevitable.
I also have had trouble with Mearsheimer. As someone who has studied the Russian state, the role of the Mafia, the role of the siloviki and post-soviet survival of the KGB and other security services etc, it is hard to look at Russian interests in Ukraine other than in an Imperial lens, and one wrapped up in personal power and the dynamics of kleptocracy. Putin may claim to speak for "Russia's Interests", yet we rarely afford other dictatorial kleptocrats in Africa, central Asia, or anywhere else, the dignity of taking such claims seriously. The bank balances and offshore wealth tend to rub up the wrong way against claims of representing the "national interest". Any analysis that stops short of these facts is going to be a bit lacking, however elegant and simplistic the models may seem.
Why is it different with Putin compared to Idi Amin, or the Kazakh dictators, or Turkmenbashi et al? Well partly presumably because of the feared Russian military's power projection abilities, and partly because of the 3000 or so usable nuclear warheads. These are real (although the former has suffered a blow to its reputation in Ukraine), but they don't really change the calculus that Putin is one of the richest men in the world, without having invented Facebook or Amazon or Tesla. When your childhood friends are billionaires, your foreign minister's mistress's daughter has somehow accumulated several million USD, your former deputy PM has a £19million apartment in the heart of London, it's just silly to talk about these people having Russia's best interests at heart.
When you come to Ukraine, you come to the topics of energy transhipment, corruption, Dimitry Firtash, Semion Mogilevich, and pure corruption, as well as traditional and non traditional (pipeline) geopolitics.
When you take this kleptocracy angle further, you end up looking at how Putin might feel threatened at home by another large former soviet republic next door doing well...with Russian speakers in. This is not about Russian interests, it is about Putin and his elite's interests. For an ethnographic-nationalist like Putin, this is simply unacceptable and is an existential threat to his kleptocratic regime.
Does anyone actually imagine that Russia led by Navalny, Nemtsov, or Kasparov would be locked into the kind of geopolitical battle that is given as an explanatory reason for Russia's 8-year war in Ukraine? Further, if Nemtsov had taken over instead of Putin (as Yeltsin was apparently considering at one point), do you imagine that the Baltics and Ukraine / Georgia would have been so keen to join NATO? It's possible, but it seems unlikely.
And it's also possible that the Balts, and E Europe, and former USSR states such as Ukraine and Georgia, might have had good reason to worry about Putin even back in the early 2000s when he himself was regularly using the term "defensive alliance" to describe NATO. When he met with Schroder in 2004, and explicitly said that NATO expansion is not a security threat to Russia (the article is still on the Kremlin Website ...now down by DDOS attack...here if anyone is interested: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/30679), even then the Balts and UKR and Georgia may have been suspicious.
Why? Well because they have more understanding of what Putin's past career meant for his mindset. They knew the kind of people who did the kind of jobs he did in the KGB, and the way those kind of people were trained and how they operate. They knew this because many of them suffered under the yolk of the KGB or its sister organisations in the former Warsaw Pact countries. They also probably had a much more nuanced and detailed understanding of what had gone on in St Petersburg during the 1990s, and would have recognised "KGB" tactics in Putin's operations there. They may also have recognised KGB tactics in the apartment bombings in Russia, including when the local police caught FSB agents planting explosives and arrested them, only to be told it was an exercise that the local police for some reason hadn't been told about. And they probably by 2004 would have seen the destruction of Grozny, and thought...well there but for the grace of a few years go we. A good question to ask, is what would a realist advisor such as Mearsheimer have advised the governments of Eastern Europe as they made their strategic decisions back then? Submit to Russian hegemony and influence? Or seek an outside power to balance Russia and offer protection?
Back to those alarming events in Chechnya: The USA of course was encouraged to view the Chechen Wars as part of the GWOT. And was happy to do so as Russia was working alongside NATO (not threatened by it then apparently) to facilitate operations in Afghanistan.
The idea that Eastern European states and former USSR states have their own people, sovereignty, and more importantly, foreign policy is obviously beyond the realm of some realist thought to include. I do love Adam's term:
"If we take Mearsheimer’s account seriously, Russia, rather than being a sentient strategic actor, is reduced to something akin to a resentful robot."
This is where i find the hubris and parochialism of some US analysis so ridiculous. The idea that Putin's Russia, shaped by the disaster of the 1990s (again, Russia was not forced at gunpoint into the economic reforms, however badly they did), the survival of the KGB after 1991 as a powerful entity, the memory of the attempted hardline coup that hung over the 1990s like a shadow, the survival and flourishing of the Russian mafia, the eventual merger of the Russian Mafia and the remnants of the KGB with the Russian state, first in St Petersburg, then in the whole country; Putin's personal nature, the emergent kleptocracy that Putin did not crush but instead co-opted when he took power, and a host of other factors, were not more important that NATO's Eastwood expansion in explaining Russia's policies is ridiculous.
Then you get to Putin's own words. His essay last summer "On the historic...." blah blah blah, absolutely nonsense, but no more nonsense than the claim that he suddenly felt threatened by NATO in 2007 and 2014 when he hadn't for the previous years. Could the trouble around his "re-election" in 2011/12 have been influential? Could it be that what he wasn't afraid of in the Maidan was NATO flags (there were none), but EU flags, of which there were plenty.
A popular uprising occurred not because Putin's fellow kleptocratic puppet in Ukraine turned his back on NATO, but because he turned his back on an agreement with the EU, in favour of one Putin had hurriedly put together. Another thought experiment to end:
Does anyone imagine that Putin could accept a sovereign, intact Ukraine (or even one without Crimea and the pre-war Donbas zones), that forswore any future bid to join NATO, but that was accepted quickly into the EU, with its rule of law, democracy, and civil protections?
If you answer no, which I think is the only realistic answer, then the NATO question is moot. It is already moot of course, because Putin knew quite well that Ukraine was "pre-Article V" since 2014 anyway. The frozen conflicts in Donbas, and the state fo Crimea meant that even if Germany, Hungary et al would not have blocked Ukrainian membership in NATO (and they would), but that Ukraine joining was impossible. As Putin well knew on both counts.
It is also moot because the war is being prosecuted to destroy the Ukrainian state under the guise of an argument that the state doesn't exist. Putin is very influenced by Carl Schmitt, as Adam knows, especially his text back in the 1930s about non-interventionism and reichs. (I mean the one that was originally published, not the one that Schmitt later tried to clean up having avoided Nuremberg.)
"... until recently we imagined ourselves no longer under the shadow of nuclear deterrence." What? Really? Who is "we" here? Why would anyone think this? China and Russia both have nuclear weapons on a large scale. The possession of large nuclear arsenals by the major powers is the foundation of the current world order. American predominance in nuclear weapons is the fundamental fact of international politics. Who ever believed anything else? What possible reason could there be for anyone thinking anything else? Playing some kind of make-believe game with these weapons lying around is suicidal. They are unpleasant to think about, but there is no excuse for not thinking about them.
I never thought I will ever say this but I think this needs to be said: the way the UA/Russia war is being covered by the US/West Media and the current situation with the Polish MIGs (transfer) looks like the worst Soviet Propaganda from the depths of the Cold War ringing truth!
As dispassionate as one may be about the theoretical reasons to "explain" Putin or not, clearly a lot of Russia Today-style fellow travelers need this particular output of Realism to be true, otherwise they have been living a lie, a lie namely that Russia under Putin is a rational actor and a benign counterweight to US imperialism. Ironically what many anti-imperialists and leftists do not appreciate about Mearsheimer's brand of Realism (as Adam rightly points out) is that it "predicts" (implicitly justifies) military containment of China without escalation guardrails. Taken normatively it would suggest cordial US-Russia relations, not for the sake of peace, but for the sake of a greater crazy Gotterdammerung later on in the South China Sea. (How did this go viral in China huh?)
Leaving that aside, the NATO expansion hypothesis is still one of two serious explanatory hypothesis about the crisis. The second is what I would call the Russian irredentism vs EU integration hypothesis. The truth definitely lies somewhere in between: and where it lies also dictates in what proportion Putin's war crimes are exculpated as attempts to ensure a strategic buffer zone on the one hand, and on the other to recreate the quasi feudal imperialism that's been the default recourse of Kremlin politics since... forever.
What exactly does a "buffer zone" mean in the ICBM age? Subjugating a nation of 40 million to avoid some remote possibility of the reduction in the warning time of a nuclear first strike by like, 2 minutes (launchers in Ukraine vs Poland) - is this a serious explanation for Putin's actions? No, but it's the one he wants to talk about exclusively, because its the only one in which he can emphasize potential Russian vulnerability and victimhood. We shouldn't shy away from psychology and bat away that stupid canard about "demonizing Putin." Putin is a palpable psychopath and as such he is a master of manipulation.
I personally think true "realism" would have opposed NATO expansion not on the victim blaming rubric of "provoking Russia" but rather on the basis that creating a weak eastern flank, especially in the Baltics, over-extended the alliance and creates the potential for crisis. NATO expansion was a mistake and it was done for largely cynical reasons (selling more kit and getting more auxiliaries for Afghanistan). It did aggravate Great Russian chauvinism. But that chauvinism is only a means for Putin to shore up his regime by ensuring that a core area of the FSU does not become a functioning liberal democracy. For this he is committing war crimes and will likely commit genocide, but I'm sure the "anti-war" left and liberterian right will keep finding excuses for Russia. They always have and always will, since they are entirely motivated by grievance against the Western establishment and too myopic to see any other international reality.
What I have against Realist IR theory generally is that it is not very realistic. It has two flaws that an economist might call "Lucas critique" and "lack of microfoundations" respectively.
Lucas critique: the writing of Realists is predicated on the assumption that only America has agency, standing outside the mechanism of historical processes and having the opportunity to bend them to its will. All other parties lack agency, and must blindly follow the dictates of the model.
Microfoundations: Realism operates at the level of stylized facts. I've got nothing against that per se, but you can't explain what you have assumed. Evo-devo type frameworks (c.f. Azar Gat) explain everything that Realism gets right, but don't always predict the things it gets wrong. On top of that, it is a more fundamental and thus parsimonious theory.
Tooze's article here is by far the worst of those I have read recently - reality for Putin is damned if he did, damned if he didn't. More specifically, Measheimer is only one of numerous famous strategic thinkers/diplomats who pinpointed blame on NATO expansion and predicted the exact mess today. They include George Kennan, Kissinger, Jack Matlock (who literally is the horse's mouth), William Perry, Bill Burns, Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating, Bob Gates, Pat Buchanan, etc. etc. and I have not included even a single "leftie/Ruskie"! See list including reference compiled here: https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592
Tooze's thesis also damns Measheimer without offering any sensible cogent solution Putin might have employed whatsoever - after all, Putin did try peaceful means for no less than 8 years - what exactly could he have done to turn the tide in the face of US/NATO encirclement, sponsored coup in 2014/regime change/colour revolution/arab spring, and proxy war in Donbas etc.? Just more waiting hoping US woke up one day regretting their disastrous, deadly "mission for democracy" around the world?
this article is horrible. It reeks of academic posturing and competition for status. claiming mearsheimer is an apologist is a disgusting smear. tooze seems hell bent on erasing any culpability on the part of the states and nato - gross.
While Mr. Mearsheimer might be a bit crude in its assertions, he is not that far from the warning the Athenian negotiators gave to the Melians, some 2500 years ago.
Mr. Tooze is definitely not inured with military literature and theories as might appear in War on the Rocks, or the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. But the present outcome in Ukraine was in fact pushed for by the US decades ago:
"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The CIA's Beebe follows with this almost unbelievable line:
"And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail."
The fact that Russia chose war to create its buffer zone in its west, with Ukraine as a no man land is not considered by Mr. Tooze as imperative shows that he never engaged with a military man.
While money men tried to position themselves with optic cables such that the instant trades could be performed by the thousands, cutting the time by microseconds, military men consider that positioning first strike capabilities as close as possible to Russia would make a nuclear war winnable. And 2014 coup makes that wet dream of US military planners a very serious possibility.
This very simple arithmetic of existential threat and pressure would be logically followed by a Russia that would acquiesce to the American hegemony. With all the perks for the victor. Maybe this time around wouldn't come to the same level of pillage that followed 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, but a big party for the Wall Street would definitely ensue.
I think that Russia's freedom of choice in the matter of Ukraine is a mere illusion in Mr. Tooze's head. After all, the first shots of this war have been reverberating around the world since US bombed Belgrade in 1999 with all the blather from Clinton that globalization will be done, whether people like it or not.
While the Russian economy might take a beating, I wonder what price Mr. Tooze puts on sovereignty, independence, dignity, and security? As far as I know, the US spends more than the next 10 countries combined in its offensive military posture. So as long as Russians feel safe and their lives are made maybe more secured, a little dent in their material comforts will be regarded as a cost of doing business.
The question I have is what the US and EU posture will be after some agreement between Russia and Ukraine is reached to Russia's satisfaction and papers are signed? Will US / EU continue with the sanctions? My bet is yes, showing that all this show of force is the West's constant position that Russia is not to be treated as an equal partner (the past 8 years of failed diplomacy in Ukraine, and failure of the West to force Ukraine to implement the internationally approved Minsk agreements, ability that the west amply had, given the great mobilization showed in the first hours of Russian invasion). It is the position of the US government that Russia, in its present form (a nuclear superpower) is an existential danger to the the US and must be annihilated. The US cannot breath at the idea that Russia has the ability to physically destroy the United States and there is many a paranoid in the US military planning that cannot sleep at night because of that.
I do think this assertion of mine is credible, given the insistence of US/Israel on the limitation of Iran's conventional missile program, which is the shield that Iran has built against foreign aggression. Iran cannot be coerced by the US via military means. No gunboat diplomacy with respect to Iran, same as no gunboat diplomacy with Russia, or China. The technological genie is out of the bottle. we are primitive men with sophisticated tools, and Mr. Tooze fails to understand this by looking at too many charts and to many prices.
This piece is really shallow on the history and lost in academic weeds ... We are only a few blunders away from WWIII and Tooze has it out for Mearsheimer. Who really cares? The real question is whether the West really did provoke and trigger this whole situation. And Tooze really provides next to no evidence to disprove the claim that the West is principally at fault for the grave crisis in Ukraine. There is ample historical evidence that the West provoked Russia in Eastern Europe, by expanding NATO when it promised that it never would (after the dissolution of the Soviet Union). Quite a number of prominent US geo-strategists and government officials warned, all the way back in the 90's, against the dangers of expanding NATO and unnecessarily provoking Russia.
And then there was yet more provocation when the US pushed for Ukraine to be a member of NATO, backed the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, promised them NATO membership, and then sent them bunches of weapons to fight Russian separatists ... The more one digs and looks at actual recent, historical evidence and the more the picture emerges that in fact the US was deeply involved in provoking Russia, and actually fighting it by proxy starting with the overthrow of the government in Ukraine in 2014 ... But these are facts that just don't fit with the current wave of shallow journalism one sees everywhere in western countries.
Here are some more serious academic and journalistic pieces on the real origins of the Ukraine crisis and now war, and one sincerely hopes that Adam Tooze might present a more rigorous and balanced presentation of the evidence if he treats this question again (which he is obviously more than capable of doing, given his prodigious talents):
- https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/06/calling-russias-attack-unprovoked-lets-u-s-off-the-hook/
- https://tomdispatch.com/how-did-we-get-here/
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict
- https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/not-one-inch-eastward-how-the-war-in-ukraine-could-have-been-prevented-decades-ago/
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/04/demonisation-russia-risks-paving-way-for-war
- On the US backed coup in Ukraine:
https://mate.substack.com/p/by-using-ukraine-to-fight-russia?s=r
Let's leave philosophical fluff aside for a while and review the facts:
2002 - US abandons ABM (Anti-ballistic missile treaty)
2019 - US abandons INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty
2020 - US withdraws from Open Skies treaty
2021 - Indication Ukraine is readying for NATO membership
With Ukraine in NATO, tactical nuclear missiles could be positioned in Ukraine, along with anti-ballistic missiles, and with no possibility to verify which base / launcher / container has which. Tactical nuke so close to Moscow effectively becomes a strategic weapon, and powerful ABM radar and capability so close (covering everything west of Urals) would mean Russian strategic land-based missile capability would be much compromised. It would be a strategic check-mate, or how Putin called it "knife under the throat of Russia", and there is no rational way to look at it differently. In such situation any launch of any missile from Ukraine - due to no reaction time - would be interpreted as decapitation attack against Russia triggering full retaliation across all targets (Europe and US).
Well having a van blasting a speech out is an overkill, straight from the book of the Japanese nationalists and their black buses. That's said Tooze piece just doesn't have the weight and logic of Mearsheimer as it is not backed up by historical analysis of the E. Europe and the world since 1989. I think Mearsheimer thesis is spot on and that's why gets the following and Tooze doesn't. Perhaps there is a simple professional jealousy at play here? I would love to read a factual and argumentative take down of Mearsheimer points however Tooze doesn't offer any. And all of the Neocons that try often fail (Applebaum being one of the most pathetic examples out there).
In a way I almost feel like Tooze is being Mearsheimer's Mearsheimer here. A well credentialled and widely respected intellectual trying to explain shittiness in a way that ultimately creates room for and justifies it. Tooze, I love your writing, but sometimes it feels like the mass of analysis smothers plain truth. Mearsheimer is an asshole supporting a literal terrorist state, and quite plainly too. Sometimes you have to say to hell with the academic politeness and take a damn stand, recognize that sometimes the average person gets it right, that what is going on is beyond the space for thought piecing and dissection it is just brutal and ugly evil.
In an interview in the WSJ, Robert Service called the 11/1021 Charter Agreement between the US and Ukraine one of two "immense strategic blunders." There's a whole section in the Charter entitled "Security and Countering Russian Aggression" and it contains the following sentence: "The United States supports Ukraine’s efforts to maximize its status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner to promote interoperability."
The other immense strategic blunder that Service cites was of course Putin's decision to invade.
Too little has been made, I think, about Putin's show of force by massing his forces on Ukraine's borders. That was the precedent blunder for his eventual invasion blunder. I believe Putin was convinced that, seeing the magnitude of his forces, the West would negotiate Ukraine's right to join NATO. When we stood firm, he found himself in a position where he either had to withdraw his forces or use them. He left himself no flexibility, no way to back out without losing all credibility.
I'm convinced this was a war no one wanted. And I don't think it was inevitable.
I also have had trouble with Mearsheimer. As someone who has studied the Russian state, the role of the Mafia, the role of the siloviki and post-soviet survival of the KGB and other security services etc, it is hard to look at Russian interests in Ukraine other than in an Imperial lens, and one wrapped up in personal power and the dynamics of kleptocracy. Putin may claim to speak for "Russia's Interests", yet we rarely afford other dictatorial kleptocrats in Africa, central Asia, or anywhere else, the dignity of taking such claims seriously. The bank balances and offshore wealth tend to rub up the wrong way against claims of representing the "national interest". Any analysis that stops short of these facts is going to be a bit lacking, however elegant and simplistic the models may seem.
Why is it different with Putin compared to Idi Amin, or the Kazakh dictators, or Turkmenbashi et al? Well partly presumably because of the feared Russian military's power projection abilities, and partly because of the 3000 or so usable nuclear warheads. These are real (although the former has suffered a blow to its reputation in Ukraine), but they don't really change the calculus that Putin is one of the richest men in the world, without having invented Facebook or Amazon or Tesla. When your childhood friends are billionaires, your foreign minister's mistress's daughter has somehow accumulated several million USD, your former deputy PM has a £19million apartment in the heart of London, it's just silly to talk about these people having Russia's best interests at heart.
When you come to Ukraine, you come to the topics of energy transhipment, corruption, Dimitry Firtash, Semion Mogilevich, and pure corruption, as well as traditional and non traditional (pipeline) geopolitics.
When you take this kleptocracy angle further, you end up looking at how Putin might feel threatened at home by another large former soviet republic next door doing well...with Russian speakers in. This is not about Russian interests, it is about Putin and his elite's interests. For an ethnographic-nationalist like Putin, this is simply unacceptable and is an existential threat to his kleptocratic regime.
Does anyone actually imagine that Russia led by Navalny, Nemtsov, or Kasparov would be locked into the kind of geopolitical battle that is given as an explanatory reason for Russia's 8-year war in Ukraine? Further, if Nemtsov had taken over instead of Putin (as Yeltsin was apparently considering at one point), do you imagine that the Baltics and Ukraine / Georgia would have been so keen to join NATO? It's possible, but it seems unlikely.
And it's also possible that the Balts, and E Europe, and former USSR states such as Ukraine and Georgia, might have had good reason to worry about Putin even back in the early 2000s when he himself was regularly using the term "defensive alliance" to describe NATO. When he met with Schroder in 2004, and explicitly said that NATO expansion is not a security threat to Russia (the article is still on the Kremlin Website ...now down by DDOS attack...here if anyone is interested: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/30679), even then the Balts and UKR and Georgia may have been suspicious.
Why? Well because they have more understanding of what Putin's past career meant for his mindset. They knew the kind of people who did the kind of jobs he did in the KGB, and the way those kind of people were trained and how they operate. They knew this because many of them suffered under the yolk of the KGB or its sister organisations in the former Warsaw Pact countries. They also probably had a much more nuanced and detailed understanding of what had gone on in St Petersburg during the 1990s, and would have recognised "KGB" tactics in Putin's operations there. They may also have recognised KGB tactics in the apartment bombings in Russia, including when the local police caught FSB agents planting explosives and arrested them, only to be told it was an exercise that the local police for some reason hadn't been told about. And they probably by 2004 would have seen the destruction of Grozny, and thought...well there but for the grace of a few years go we. A good question to ask, is what would a realist advisor such as Mearsheimer have advised the governments of Eastern Europe as they made their strategic decisions back then? Submit to Russian hegemony and influence? Or seek an outside power to balance Russia and offer protection?
Back to those alarming events in Chechnya: The USA of course was encouraged to view the Chechen Wars as part of the GWOT. And was happy to do so as Russia was working alongside NATO (not threatened by it then apparently) to facilitate operations in Afghanistan.
The idea that Eastern European states and former USSR states have their own people, sovereignty, and more importantly, foreign policy is obviously beyond the realm of some realist thought to include. I do love Adam's term:
"If we take Mearsheimer’s account seriously, Russia, rather than being a sentient strategic actor, is reduced to something akin to a resentful robot."
This is where i find the hubris and parochialism of some US analysis so ridiculous. The idea that Putin's Russia, shaped by the disaster of the 1990s (again, Russia was not forced at gunpoint into the economic reforms, however badly they did), the survival of the KGB after 1991 as a powerful entity, the memory of the attempted hardline coup that hung over the 1990s like a shadow, the survival and flourishing of the Russian mafia, the eventual merger of the Russian Mafia and the remnants of the KGB with the Russian state, first in St Petersburg, then in the whole country; Putin's personal nature, the emergent kleptocracy that Putin did not crush but instead co-opted when he took power, and a host of other factors, were not more important that NATO's Eastwood expansion in explaining Russia's policies is ridiculous.
Then you get to Putin's own words. His essay last summer "On the historic...." blah blah blah, absolutely nonsense, but no more nonsense than the claim that he suddenly felt threatened by NATO in 2007 and 2014 when he hadn't for the previous years. Could the trouble around his "re-election" in 2011/12 have been influential? Could it be that what he wasn't afraid of in the Maidan was NATO flags (there were none), but EU flags, of which there were plenty.
A popular uprising occurred not because Putin's fellow kleptocratic puppet in Ukraine turned his back on NATO, but because he turned his back on an agreement with the EU, in favour of one Putin had hurriedly put together. Another thought experiment to end:
Does anyone imagine that Putin could accept a sovereign, intact Ukraine (or even one without Crimea and the pre-war Donbas zones), that forswore any future bid to join NATO, but that was accepted quickly into the EU, with its rule of law, democracy, and civil protections?
If you answer no, which I think is the only realistic answer, then the NATO question is moot. It is already moot of course, because Putin knew quite well that Ukraine was "pre-Article V" since 2014 anyway. The frozen conflicts in Donbas, and the state fo Crimea meant that even if Germany, Hungary et al would not have blocked Ukrainian membership in NATO (and they would), but that Ukraine joining was impossible. As Putin well knew on both counts.
It is also moot because the war is being prosecuted to destroy the Ukrainian state under the guise of an argument that the state doesn't exist. Putin is very influenced by Carl Schmitt, as Adam knows, especially his text back in the 1930s about non-interventionism and reichs. (I mean the one that was originally published, not the one that Schmitt later tried to clean up having avoided Nuremberg.)
I actually never reported for RT only had my text published there. But I do stand by my comment, товарищ!
To simplify the distinction between explanation and justification: “You made me angry, so I shot you.”
"... until recently we imagined ourselves no longer under the shadow of nuclear deterrence." What? Really? Who is "we" here? Why would anyone think this? China and Russia both have nuclear weapons on a large scale. The possession of large nuclear arsenals by the major powers is the foundation of the current world order. American predominance in nuclear weapons is the fundamental fact of international politics. Who ever believed anything else? What possible reason could there be for anyone thinking anything else? Playing some kind of make-believe game with these weapons lying around is suicidal. They are unpleasant to think about, but there is no excuse for not thinking about them.
I never thought I will ever say this but I think this needs to be said: the way the UA/Russia war is being covered by the US/West Media and the current situation with the Polish MIGs (transfer) looks like the worst Soviet Propaganda from the depths of the Cold War ringing truth!
As dispassionate as one may be about the theoretical reasons to "explain" Putin or not, clearly a lot of Russia Today-style fellow travelers need this particular output of Realism to be true, otherwise they have been living a lie, a lie namely that Russia under Putin is a rational actor and a benign counterweight to US imperialism. Ironically what many anti-imperialists and leftists do not appreciate about Mearsheimer's brand of Realism (as Adam rightly points out) is that it "predicts" (implicitly justifies) military containment of China without escalation guardrails. Taken normatively it would suggest cordial US-Russia relations, not for the sake of peace, but for the sake of a greater crazy Gotterdammerung later on in the South China Sea. (How did this go viral in China huh?)
Leaving that aside, the NATO expansion hypothesis is still one of two serious explanatory hypothesis about the crisis. The second is what I would call the Russian irredentism vs EU integration hypothesis. The truth definitely lies somewhere in between: and where it lies also dictates in what proportion Putin's war crimes are exculpated as attempts to ensure a strategic buffer zone on the one hand, and on the other to recreate the quasi feudal imperialism that's been the default recourse of Kremlin politics since... forever.
What exactly does a "buffer zone" mean in the ICBM age? Subjugating a nation of 40 million to avoid some remote possibility of the reduction in the warning time of a nuclear first strike by like, 2 minutes (launchers in Ukraine vs Poland) - is this a serious explanation for Putin's actions? No, but it's the one he wants to talk about exclusively, because its the only one in which he can emphasize potential Russian vulnerability and victimhood. We shouldn't shy away from psychology and bat away that stupid canard about "demonizing Putin." Putin is a palpable psychopath and as such he is a master of manipulation.
I personally think true "realism" would have opposed NATO expansion not on the victim blaming rubric of "provoking Russia" but rather on the basis that creating a weak eastern flank, especially in the Baltics, over-extended the alliance and creates the potential for crisis. NATO expansion was a mistake and it was done for largely cynical reasons (selling more kit and getting more auxiliaries for Afghanistan). It did aggravate Great Russian chauvinism. But that chauvinism is only a means for Putin to shore up his regime by ensuring that a core area of the FSU does not become a functioning liberal democracy. For this he is committing war crimes and will likely commit genocide, but I'm sure the "anti-war" left and liberterian right will keep finding excuses for Russia. They always have and always will, since they are entirely motivated by grievance against the Western establishment and too myopic to see any other international reality.
"Putin has not only committing a crime against international law.. "??
Did the US commit a crime against international law in 1921, when we invaded the USSR?
In 1950-1953: when we invaded Korea?
In 1953, when we stages the Iranian coup to overthrow its elected government?
In 1961, when we launched the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba?
In 1963, when we invaded Vietnam?
In 1965, when ww supported the massacre of 500,000 Indonesians?
In 1983, when we invaded Grenada?
In 1989, when we Invaded Panama?
I rest my case.
What I have against Realist IR theory generally is that it is not very realistic. It has two flaws that an economist might call "Lucas critique" and "lack of microfoundations" respectively.
Lucas critique: the writing of Realists is predicated on the assumption that only America has agency, standing outside the mechanism of historical processes and having the opportunity to bend them to its will. All other parties lack agency, and must blindly follow the dictates of the model.
Microfoundations: Realism operates at the level of stylized facts. I've got nothing against that per se, but you can't explain what you have assumed. Evo-devo type frameworks (c.f. Azar Gat) explain everything that Realism gets right, but don't always predict the things it gets wrong. On top of that, it is a more fundamental and thus parsimonious theory.