The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought to the surface a historical philosophical debate about morality and politics, particularly in foreign policy: Whether international relations should be idealistic, moving towards higher moral ground, or should be according to what is actually happening, because being moral, by definition, is an ideal situation, in addition to having different definitions of morality.
At the beginning of this century, with the fall of the Communist bloc and the end of the Cold War with the Democratic West occurring at the same time as the economic, political and military rise of Communist China, two American university professors rose as leaders of the two respective groups of realistic and idealistic international relations:
John Mearsheimer, at University of Chicago, has been writing books for decades about realpolitik, with titles like: “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”; “Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics”; and, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities;”
On the other side, Thomas Pepinsky at Cornell University has been writing books critical of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, with titles like: “Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes; “Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power; and, Contemporary Indonesian Politics.”
Mearsheimer’s theory of Realpolitik relies on the following premises:
First, there is anarchy in the international system, which means that there is no superior power that can guarantee limitations on the behavior of states.
Second, all great powers possess offensive military capabilities, which they are capable of using against other states.
Third, states can never be certain that other states will refrain from using those offensive military capabilities.
Fourth, states seek to maintain their survival (their territorial integrity and domestic autonomy) above all other goals, as it is the means to all other ends.
Fifth, states are rational actors, which means that they consider the immediate and long-term consequences of their actions, and think strategically about how to survive.
On the other side, Pepinsky wrote mostly about liberalism.
He wrote that, under “embedded liberalism,” free trade, multinational investment, and liberal immigration policies enabled the factors of production to flow across national borders, benefiting more people, and different socio-economic classes.
He criticized the philosophies that focused “just on trade in goods and capital …”
“Embedded liberalism” outside the US rested on “political foundations at home,” and has been promising, despite current debates about the fate of the liberal order in times of populist resurgences, as former President Donald Trump’s movement has shown.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a reactivating cause for this historical debate about realism and liberalism, and both Mearsheimer and Pepinsky didn’t miss the chance.
These are excerpts from their respective tweets, websites and statements to the media.
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Mearsheimer: “NATO’s Fault”:
“I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO said that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand.
I am not going to argue about the Ukrainians’ right to be independent and free, and it is not imperialism, as some say, on the part of the Russians to impose their will on them.
But this is not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate …
States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States. Let us not forget The Monroe Doctrine: There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.
Let us not forget that we overthrew democratically-elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave …
Let us not forget that this is not about spreading democracy. I think it would be difficult to say that America’s policy in the Middle East in the past seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War, or in the past thirty years since the end of the Cold War, has been to create liberal democracies in the Middle East.
We all know now -- if not then -- that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not to establish democracy. I remember when I joined with Harvard’s Stephen Walt and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami to lead a group of 33 scholars, many of them card-carrying academic realists, to sign a declaration opposing the war.
We published an advertisement in the “New York Times” that cost $38,000, and we paid for it themselves … The top of the ad ran, WAR WITH IRAQ IS NOT IN AMERICA’S NATIONAL INTEREST …
Now, the US is mobilizing the whole world against Russia because of Ukraine …
My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument …”
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Tom Pepinsky: “Russia’s Fault”:
Professor John Mearsheimer, one of the most prolific realist international relations theorists of our time, has recently wrote about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And his opinion has turned a lot of heads – and that was not the first time in this regard.
In 2014, after the Russian annexation of Crimea, he wrote an opinion in “Foreign Affairs” titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”
Now, he is at it again.
Almost everyone who I know expresses something between exasperation and outrage at Mearsheimer’s stance that it is the US and NATO which bear the blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine …
I think the core problem with Mearsheimer’s analysis is that his realism combines description with prescription …
My realism starts from a different premise: Russia is not a great power anymore.
It is a declining power. Its only claims to global power status are its petroleum reserves, its nuclear arsenal, and our collective memories of the Cold War.
Take those away, and Russia is no more a great power than Turkey was in 1935.
The Soviet Union lost the Cold War decisively. Its empire fell into pieces, its regional alliance disappeared, and most of its former allies joined NATO.
Russia lost, and the Western alliance won.
Given this, it is not NATO’s responsibility to protect Russian state security interests. It is Russia’s responsibility to give a wide berth to NATO, recognizing—as every realist should—that the strong do what they will, the weak do what they must …
No one wants to invade or destroy Russia, there are not and have never been plans for a NATO conquest of Russia. Russia had a good deal: they got to sell their petroleum and defend their territorial integrity with their aging nuclear arsenal.
Invading Ukraine was a stupid strategic error made by a declining power that does not understand The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. In the immediate short-run, Ukrainians will pay the prices for Russia’s strategic errors, but in the long run, Russia will bear the consequences …”
