In a highly successful lecture given in 2015 (viewed more than ten million times) John J. Mearsheimer, an esteemed professor of international relations at the University of Chicago and arguably the best-known exponent of the so-called realist school of thought, analyzed the conflict that broke out. in Ukraine the previous year. In essence, according to Mearsheimer, the responsibility for the 2014 Russian aggression lay with US and NATO expansionism, a gratuitous provocation against Russia.
Moscow’s reaction in that case had been natural, and the West could only blame itself for putting what Mearsheimer called frivolous “twenty-first century” ideas over solid “nineteenth-century” ideas. As for the Ukrainians, they were victims of fate: in the harsh world of the great powers those who live on the border with Russia should not seek greater integration with the West.
“The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept,” writes Thucydides. Mearsheimer’s position was essentially the same.
Today Mearsheimer’s lesson is often quoted by those who would like to blame the West for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet in the lesson there is a passage that should not be underestimated. In two moments Mearsheimer observes that “if you really want to destroy Russia, it should be encouraged to conquer Ukraine. But Putin ”, he adds,“ is too smart to try to do that ”. In his perspective, Russia could easily weaken Ukraine without invading it.
Apparently the reality has turned out to be far worse than the bleak realistic predictions. Why has Mearsheimer’s analysis proved so wrong and how can we really understand Putin?
An absurd thesis
There is a concept, widespread in economics and international politics, according to which “words are not worth much”: since the consequences of what is said are potentially negligible, one should not worry too much. For this reason, when on 12 July 2021 the Russian president published a kind of student essay entitled “On the historical unity between Russians and Ukrainians”, few took it into account. The pandemic was monopolizing attention and Ukraine seemed irrelevant. Actually Putin was really convinced of what he had written.
The essay is gruesome not only in form but also in content. The thesis that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians form a single people linked to the historic Russian nation is absurd, but Putin has continued to reiterate it. Yet most analysts ignored it, thinking it was just prepackaged speeches for internal use. The general idea was that Putin only needed the threat of aggression to win, without needing to go to the facts. So why did he decide to invade Ukraine? The answer lies in two aspects that realists underestimate, if not even ignore: the will of the leaders and the wishes of the population.
Today we know that in July 2021 Putin was speaking seriously about Ukraine. Today he is convinced that Ukraine does not exist as a nation and that his historical mission is to restore the former Soviet Union.. Its location, in other words, is no longer determined by the strategic calculation Mearsheimer referred to.
To understand Putin’s behavior we need to consider another current of international relations called constructivism, according to which leaders set their goals and set their actions based not only on calculations of power, but also on their self-belief. and their goals. Leaders are not irrational, but rationality is at the service of their goals. From this perspective, we can assume that Putin looked around and noticed that the United States was distracted by China, that Germany had just elected an as yet untested government, and that Europe was deeply dependent on Russian gas. He may have thought it was a good time to act. But action was a function of his broader goals. His words, after all, had weight.
The wishes of the people
In addition to underestimating the preferences of leaders, realists despise a country’s politics and internal forces. Listening to Mearsheimer, one is surprised by how much he ignores the Ukrainians’ desire for democracy and their willingness to forge a link with the West, a feeling that he considers irrelevant and built from abroad. For Mearsheimer, the Euromaidan protest movement that erupted in Ukraine in 2014 was simply a coup d’état, a useless hitch in the mechanism of the politics of the powers that be. But the truth is that in some moments people’s wishes make history, not the logic of the international system.
I remembered this recently, when Greece celebrated the bicentenary of its war of independence. Being Greek, I took the opportunity to brush up on history, and also read the new book by British historian Mark Mazower. At the time, even if the rebellion was directed against the Ottoman Empire which subdued the Greeks, the revolt was opposed by the European Concert, the alliance created to maintain stability after the upheaval brought by Napoleon.
Klemens von Metternich, Austrian chancellor, was a forerunner of Mearsheimer, the archetypal realist of the time, and did everything in his power to help suppress the revolt. But it was not successful. The Greeks got the state they wanted and began their path towards integration with the West. The will of the population overcame and then altered the balance of European power interests.
From this point of view, today’s story is the story of the clash between Putin’s idiosyncratic and imperialist revanchism and the national aspiration of the Ukrainians to overturn the realist logic of the politics of the great powers. And perhaps it’s also the story of how an unjustified war that was supposed to end the post-Cold War liberal world could strengthen and expand the very institutions he wanted to destroy.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)