John Mearsheimer is a University of Chicago international relations professor who hosts his essays and papers on foreign policy.
HN commenters link his Ukraine essays as a realist analysis; some call him prescient, while others dispute his arguments and say he ignores Ukrainian sovereignty.
Mearsheimer was prescient when he advocated Ukraine be allowed to keep a strategic nuclear stockpile in the early 90s when the US admin was pushing to disarm Ukraine, post breakup of USSR.
The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent
Most Western observers want Ukraine to rid itself of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. In this view, articulated recently by President Bill Clinton, Europe would be more stable if Russia were to become "the only nuclear-armed successor state to the Soviet Union." The United States and its European allies have been pressing Ukraine to transfer all of the nuclear weapons on its territory to the Russians, who naturally think this is an excellent idea.
President Clinton is wrong. The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake.
A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. Ukraine cannot defend itself against a nuclear-armed Russia with conventional weapons, and no state, including the United States, is going to extend to it a meaningful security guarantee. Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.…
My claim is that we see the same terrible violence and wars of aggression with subsequent public support (for a time) in both the Russia and the West. Ie, there is a fundamental hypocrisy to either set of alliances to condemn wars of aggression and the mass murder of children. It's quite clear that both sets of elites consider either one to be a policy option if they think it will get them results they want.
And your response is that things should "not be counted numerically" and that it is "incredibly fucked up" to consider human lives to be of equal value. Altogether, it seems like you can only see things in terms of one ethnically european empire or another as morally righteous, with no other options. Ie, you cannot understand or imagine the perspective of someone who considers neither empire to be moral agents who deserve to have their crimes ignored or downplayed. You have made no argument and your emotional appeal looks identical to eurocentric white supremacy which denies its nature but can only use emotional blackmail and threats to explain why it isn't.
It is not disgusting to ask why some raped and murdered civilians are "the worst thing since the holocaust" while others which preceded it that are of a larger scale are not merely forgotten but denied.
All of the current western leaders who forced Ukrainian denuclearization and talk openly about using Ukrainian lives as a "cheap" way to harm Russia are your true friends...
Meanwhile, people like Mearsheimer…
> Well, not all of them, but the there were enough separatists in Crimea
First of all, us Westerners have already questioned how democratic the supposed cessation from Ukraine was. So let’s not get selective now. Russia already had their military stationed their. That could have a chilling effect.
Second of all, plenty of people in Crimea speak Russian. And a lot of the Crimean Tatars were forcefully deported under the Soviet Union. I just bring that up since forceful deportation is not exactly, uh, the tool of a governing party that feels that they can just manipulate their subjects into becoming… whatever the Soviet Union wanted them to become.
> ... and Donetsk, etc. to destabilize those regions.
In your quote you left out the rest of the paragraph where I addressed the separatists. Even if we assume—and this is an insane hypothetical for the sake of this specific argument—that all those separatists were hypnotized by Russia, that’s still a very lackluster result considering that the majority of Ukraine is pro-Western right now. I mean they did commit to an all out war with them. So much for subversion.
But let’s entertain this point for one more paragraph. The separatist conflict started after the 2014 coup which America supported.[1] So the separatist sentiment was in part caused by America trying to subvert the political process of Ukraine (and kind of openly, too). That’s in a way more impressive than Russian subversion considering how far away the US is.
[1]…
Assuming that you're asking this in good faith and would like to rea more from reliable source, here are a handful of the countless sources from across the political spectrum:
"Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
"The CIA And FBI Are Reportedly Advising Ukraine As Pro-Russia Separatists Spread Across The Country" - https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-and-fbi-reportedly-advising-ukraine-2014-5
"Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show" - https://pandodaily.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-ukraine-revolution-groups-with-us-government-documents-show/
Our use of CIA/State Dept Tech Camp to help foment revolution, video posted by US embassy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpIoBUDuL3U (also see this for background on how we use the program elsewhere: https://www.fastcompany.com/1744389/hillary-clintons-senior-tech-advisor-talks-radical-global-citizenship
"Washington Was Behind Ukraine Coup: Obama admits that US “Brokered a Deal” in Support of “Regime Change”" - https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-was-behind-ukraine-coup-obama-admits-that-us-brokered-a-deal-in-support-of-regime-change/5429142
"How and why the U.S. Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine" - https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/how-and-why-the-u-s-government-perpetrated-the-2014-coup-in-ukraine/
"In the rapidly worsening Ukraine fiasco, the U.S. is reaping exactly what it…
But this view is shared by some of the most renowned geopolitical analysts in the USA. It's not popular in the mass media, but it is absolutely not a view that should discredit anyone, unless you believe you and the media are qualified to say John Mearsheimer[1] does not have a balanced view of the conflict, while you, with all your background knowledge about Ukraine and Russian relations, do.
His arguments are easy to read if you're at all interested in different views: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
Here's a very good article that criticizes his views:
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/09/tragedy-john-mearsheimer
> Stephen Kotkin, the preeminent historian of the Soviet Union, and Michael McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, acknowledged that Mearsheimer was “a giant of a scholar” and “one the clearest, most logical realist theorists out there”, but he was wrong to blame the US for Putin’s invasion.
Some of his statements in this article:
"International politics is a tragedy – it always has been, it is today, and it always will be. Those who believe that you can escape the iron cage, and transcend this Hobbesian world, are delusional. My argument disturbs liberals greatly.”
“The tragedy ... is that you could have two states who are content with the status quo and have no interest in fighting or competing for power. Nevertheless, because they cannot know each other’s intentions, and…
Mearsheimer doesn’t even recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine, it’s realist vs liberal schools of thought (with realism having been sidelined for decades in the west).
There’s a Foreign Affairs article version instead of the hour long random YouTube lecture version: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
In a nutshell of what it’s like:
One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. … Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests.
Guy did argue for Ukraine to keep nukes in the 90s though, it’s just a much more mechanistic type of thinking.