America’s leading ‘realist’ keeps getting Russia wrong

John J. Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago’s realist foreign policy guru, published his latest analysis of the Russian-Ukrainian War on a historic day: June 23, when Russia was roiled by a failed putsch led by the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fate, as well as that of his regime, hung in the balance, just as a successful coup could have altered the course of the war, led to civil bloodshed and the possible disintegration of the Russian Federation — all scenarios invoked by Putin in his address to the nation — Mearsheimer failed to give any attention whatsoever to Russia’s domestic politics, preferring to focus instead, as he always does, exclusively on the Russia state’s relations with Ukraine and the West.

This would be like ignoring domestic factors in the U.S. conduct of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; French and British hopes for appeasement in 1938; the role of power struggles and ideology in the Soviet decisions to invade, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan — and, of course, Putin’s very personal decision to launch a poorly planned all-out attack on Ukraine in 2022.

Prigozhin’s march on Moscow, though unsuccessful, revealed to Russians and the world that the Russian state and regime are brittle, that Putin is increasingly vulnerable, and that the proximate and ultimate outcome of the war depends as much on what Russians do within their state as on what they do to Ukrainians with their state. 

Mearsheimer’s oversight is no accident. Domestic factors are irrelevant to his theoretical model. That doesn’t mean that he has no insights to make that are worthy of attention; it does mean that his predictions and policy recommendations are so utterly divorced from anything resembling reality as to be wrong a priori. 

Putin, for one, would agree. His fateful decision to invade Ukraine was based exclusively on Mearsheimerian balance of power calculations. Putin, like Mearsheimer, saw that Russia had a larger military, economy and population than Ukraine. Naturally, it would win, and quickly — a view that many policymakers and analysts inspired by Mearsheimer’s realism also shared. Had America’s Founding Fathers been realists of Mearsheimer’s ilk, they would never have dared to declare independence from the reigning global superpower in 1776. 

Unsurprisingly, although Mearsheimer’s lengthy paper has 68 endnotes, not a single one references a Russian- or Ukrainian-language source. Given such limitations, Mearsheimer cannot access the views of real Russians or Ukrainians on the left, right, and center — who might have alerted him to the brittleness of the regime and the weakness of Putin — and must therefore rely on and take at face value the foreign-policy statements of Russian leaders and their propagandists.

There is, after all, no other way to buttress his claims about Russia’s supposed fear of NATO and the West. Russian- and Ukrainian-language sources, as well as Sovietologists and post-Sovietologists, might have reminded Mearsheimer that Russian leaders habitually engage in mendacity, a tradition that goes back at least as far as Vladimir Lenin, who promised to liberate non-Russians and instead imposed a colonial yoke on them. 

Putin and his comrades see Nazis where there aren’t any: Ukraine. They see militarization where there isn’t any: ditto. They insisted in late 2021 and early 2022 that they would never, ever invade Ukraine — and then did. They deny, still, targeting Ukrainian civilian targets. They deny, still, having destroyed the Kakhovka dam. The list could go on ad infinitum.

And yet, bizarrely, when Russians say they fear Ukrainian membership in NATO and U.S. nuclear weapons on Ukraine’s eastern border, Mearsheimer believes them, when he should be asking himself whether such ostensible fears have any grounding in reality and what the real reasons might be. 

I’ve made these points many times. For starters, absolutely no one, including the Russians and Ukrainians, expected Ukraine to become a NATO member for at least 20 years. And in 2014, the year the war actually began, there was no talk of Ukraine’s joining, by either the Ukrainians, the West or the Russians. Ukraine didn’t matter to the West’s perceptions of its security. In contrast, Ukraine mattered to Russian perceptions, not because of any actual military threat — Ukraine had some 6,000 battle-ready troops in 2014 — but because of the ideological threat the democratic Maidan Revolution posed to Putin’s claims to be a legitimate autocrat.

Obviously, official Russian statements would never admit to such an interpretation. Russian-language analysts, and their Ukrainian counterparts, could easily have briefed Mearsheimer and helped correct his myopia.

Mearsheimer notes in his analysis that, “I am attempting to predict the future, which is not easy to do, given that we live in an uncertain world. Thus, I am not arguing that I have the truth; in fact, some of my claims may be proved wrong.”

Indeed, he doesn’t, and indeed, they will.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”