O Pioneers!

Seems like John Mearsheimer is getting a lot of currency these days.  Articles have appeared in The Economist and New Yorker, in which he updates his earlier thesis that holds the US responsible for the turmoil in Ukraine.  Mearsheimer, a distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, has long held a skeptical view of liberal foreign policy, favoring realpolitik instead.  He still views Eastern Europe as part of Russia's sphere of influence and believes the US and EU shouldn't meddle in this region.  He points to the 1995 Balkan Wars as the first flash point, followed by the subsequent expansion of NATO and enlargement of the EU into Eastern Europe in the early 2000s.  Through it all, he believes the US and EU ran roughshod over Russia's interests in the region, but the country was too weak to defend itself.  Then along came Putin to rebuild the great Russian state and once again reclaim its influence in the region by "defending" Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgian bully boy Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008, thereby re-establishing his authority in the region.  This in Mearsheimer's view brought further NATO expansion to a halt.  But, the EU then offered its Eastern Partnership initiative in an attempt to integrate Ukraine into its economy, which once again forced Putin to play his hand by invading the country in 2014, at which time this article was written.

In Mearsheimer's mind, this was the West's "final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow," as if Ukraine was now an oblast of Russia.  He defended Sergei Lavrov's assertion that the EU was a "stalking horse" for NATO, ignoring there are any number of countries who are a member of one and not the other.  Finland for instance is in the EU but not NATO, and shares the largest contiguous border with Russia among the Western nations.  The rest of his old paper trots out all the tired arguments as to why Ukraine is a bridge too far, ignoring the fact that it was the lack of economic development in the country that spurred Ukraine to seek greener pastures.

The Kremlin, which should be distinguished from Russia, never saw Ukraine as anymore than a conduit for its gas supply to the EU.  As tensions began to increase after the Orange Revolution of 2005, Russia sought agreements directly with Germany to create Nord Stream, which would bypass Ukraine all together, and further sink the country into economic oblivion.  This was especially true after a second uprising in Ukraine led to the ouster of the Kremlin-backed strong man, Viktor Yanukovych.  Putin was furious, and blamed the insurrection on the US, as he had the Rose Revolution in Georgia, which led to the ascension of Saakashvili in 2003.  There was some grounding for the previous revolution as Saakashvili had studied in the US and was a product of American conservative think tanks.  However, the Ukrainian revolution was entirely homegrown with little connection to American interests.  Ukrainians wanted what the other Eastern European countries now had - economic growth.  They were furious when Yanukovych rejected the EU trade agreement in late 2013, which they believed was the first step toward EU integration.

As it is, many Ukrainians live and work through out the EU.  They are highly valued as skilled labor, which is why Germany is taking in refugees, hoping to fill the roughly 300,000 open vacancies in their job market.  Even the UK, historically reticent to welcome refugees, is opening the door to Ukrainians for similar reasons.

You almost get the feeling that Mearsheimer is a tool of the Kremlin.  He defends Putin at every turn, never for one moment treating Ukraine as if it could have an independent thought of its own.  In his addled mind, everything that transpired in 2013-2014, leading to the ouster of Yanukovych, was the direct result of US intervention.  Mearsheimer then drifts into the realpolitik babble of Ukraine being a buffer zone for Russia, recalling the worst aspects of an empire that had long treated Eastern Europe as its "pale" in an effort to keep tyrants such as Napoleon and Hitler at bay.  In Mearsheimer's view, Russia has the same concerns today with American imperialism, with its vassal states in Europe promulgating a liberal notion of democracy that would never fly in the Kremlin.  Probably so, but we can no longer view independent countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia as buffer zones.  They have their own economic aspirations and security concerns separate from Russia.

I suppose the biggest fear in the Kremlin is that Russia might splinter again.  After all, it is an enormous country, four times the size of all the EU countries combined.  It straddles the great Eurasian expanse, controlling a vast amount of oil, gas, mineral and timber reserves that have only been partially exploited. What's to stop its many oblasts from seeking independent status, if they no longer feel the Kremlin serves their interests?

Also lost in all of Mearsheimer's prattle is that the US and EU have repeatedly reached out to Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It was in their interest to bring Russia into its liberal economic fold, which included making it an adjunct member of the G7 in 1997, despite an economy that lagged far behind the other member states.  The US figured that in time Russia would have one of the largest economies in the world.  Alas, that didn't happen.  Russia still lags far behind other G7 countries after more than two decades of Putin.  It's GDP is ranked 11th in the world.  When you break Russia's wealth down per capita, it plummets to 57, far behind former soviet states like Estonia and Lithuania, whose economies have grown exponentially since the 1990s thanks to EU integration.

Mearsheimer is still stuck in the Cold War paradigm, as is the Kremlin too.  One can argue that NATO has overextended its influence in Eastern Europe, but here again there were legitimate concerns.  Russia actively supported Serbia in the Balkan Wars, hoping to maintain at least some semblance of the former Yugoslavia, which was more or less a satellite state of the Soviet Union.  NATO stepped in when Serbia began committing massive atrocities against minorities, paving the way for the first open confrontation with Russia in the post-Soviet world, which Russia essentially lost.   Other Eastern European countries took note and wanted the security blanket that they believed NATO provided.  So, we saw the first expansion in 1999 that included Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary; followed in 2004 by an even greater expansion that included seven Eastern European countries including all three Baltic states, which shared direct borders with Russia.  Former Yugoslavian states have also joined the EU and NATO.  Even Serbia has applied for EU membership, and is hoping to complete negotiations by 2024. 

Today, we see a very similar situation in Ukraine.  At some point NATO will be forced to step in, as it did in the Balkan Wars, given the atrocities we see being committed throughout the country.  Not content with cleaving off Luhansk and Donetsk, as he did  Crimea eight years ago, Putin decided to launch a major offensive to cleave off everything east of the Dnieper river, taking Kyiv with it, and forming a new state that would be subservient to the Kremlin.  He just didn't bank on their being so much resistance, and is now resorting to punitive missile strikes on civilian targets that are leaving scores of innocent people dead, including children, displacing millions in the process.  Putin figures that if the US and NATO can carve up Yugoslavia then he is free to do the same in Ukraine, whether there is any popular will behind it or not.

This maximalist expansion is audacious in the extreme, but I'm sure Mearsheimer defends it in the same language he defended Putin's previous incursions into Ukraine.  He like many "realists" of his generation was perfectly content with keeping the Soviet Union in tact.  It was much easier to deal with in a realpolitik sense.  President George H.W. Bush himself wasn't prepared for the fragmentation that took place on his watch, even if he was proud to be the president who presided over the "fall of communism."  It is hard for such persons as John Mearsheimer to see these former soviet states as real countries, preferring now to regard them as Western vassal states.  A language eerily similar to Sergei Lavrov, whom Mearsheimer extolled in his 2014 paper.  

Anyway, I doubt too many people will have the energy to read Mearsheimer.  His time is up.  We live in a much more dynamic economic and political world than he is willing to accept.  Putin and his apologists represent the last bastion of realpolitik.   Not even China holds such anachronistic views of the world.