08/21/14 – John J. Mearsheimer – The Scott Horton Show

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I'm Scott Horton.
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And our next guest on the show today is John J. Mearsheimer.
He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the Co-Director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.
He's published several books, including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and, of course, with Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
I'm very well.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
And so, everybody, check out ForeignAffairs.com.
They'll let you buy the paywall for this one.
I guess they decide it's a good way to get eyeballs on the site.
I'm sure they're right.
Why the Ukraine crisis is the West's fault.
And I dare say, John, that it seems like maybe one of the major headlines about this article is that it's in Foreign Affairs.
And it's quite contrary to what Foreign Affairs tends to represent, which is the consensus about what's to be done.
Well, first, what's going on and what is to be done?
Is that fair to say?
Well, I think that Foreign Affairs, because it's located at the Council on Foreign Relations, which is the citadel of the establishment, does represent in very important ways the establishment.
But, nevertheless, I think Foreign Affairs, certainly under its present editor, Gideon Rose, has gone to great lengths to publish articles that represent all sorts of different viewpoints on controversial issues.
So I don't find it surprising at all that it appeared in Foreign Affairs, although I think the thrust of the article definitely cuts against what is the conventional wisdom at a place like the Council.
Yeah, I would give him credit, too, specifically because he, quite notably to me anyway, made an appearance on the Colbert Report right after the coup in February, where Colbert asked him, how come we're not spiking the football and pointing our finger and laughing in Putin's face that we're running off with his country here, as Rose had described it?
And he said, well, you know, we're kind of trying to get away with it while he's distracted with the Olympics and we're trying not to provoke him too bad so that there's some kind of counter reaction.
So he was sort of really explaining and cheerleading the consensus for the policy in real time, right, as it was going on.
So I'm agreeing with you that, you know, respect to him for publishing this article that really directly contradicts at least his position as of earlier this year.
I mean, I don't know what his position was earlier this year, but as a good editor, you publish articles that represent differing viewpoints on important issues.
And I think that's what he's been doing.
I think that's what Foreign Affairs has been doing.
And that's all for the good.
Sure.
By the way, I recommend that clip of him on Colbert because it's quite instructive and it's still online.
You can find it.
No problem.
It's really good.
Anyway.
So very, very interesting article again, it's called Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West Fault.
The subline is the liberal delusions that provoked Putin.
And so, of course, you're kind of, I think, near the chairman of the realist faction of American foreign policy ideas.
Right.
And so here you're kind of arguing against the liberal human, so-called humanitarian interventionism and and its precepts that you think have laid the groundwork for the current crisis.
Is that right?
Well, this is not really about humanitarian intervention.
What was going on here is that the United States and its European allies, starting in the mid 1990s, began to push NATO eastward.
This was called NATO expansion.
And eventually it was going to creep up to the Russian border.
Not surprisingly, the Russians made it very clear from the mid 1990s forward that this was unacceptable.
And nevertheless, the West, especially the United States, continued to push NATO expansion.
And it always incensed the Russians that we were doing this.
And that raises the question, why?
For a realist like me, basic balance of power politics tells you that if you get into another great power's neighborhood and you start marching up to its border, you start expanding your alliance right up to the Russian border, you're asking for big trouble.
And the Russians, of course, told us that that would be the case.
And this is geopolitics 101.
But the fact is that most leaders in the West, this includes the United States and Europe, thought that geopolitics was dead, that it no longer mattered.
And that what we could do is operate under the assumption that the United States was a benign hegemon and that spreading democracy and capitalism and institutions further eastward would not provoke the Russians.
And in fact, the Russians would come to ultimately accept these liberal solutions to all of Europe's problems.
Of course, it didn't work out that way.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry, because I really misspoken in the way I phrased the question.
I didn't mean so much humanitarian intervention as much as the humanitarian interventionists, the liberal kind of maybe more Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright type representatives we would think of in American politics, rather than right wing nationalists.
I mean, not that Richard Perle and them were ever against NATO expansion, of course.
It's partly their project, too, but it's a much broader consensus than just the right wing hawks.
It's the kind of thing that the people to the left and the right of you have consensus on.
Right.
Well, in the 1990s, when we first began to push NATO expansion, there was a great deal of resistance.
And it mainly came from realists who did not want to provoke the Russians.
I would note, by the way, there were some realists who thought that NATO expansion was important to contain Russia, much the way we contain the Soviet Union.
But they were a minority.
Most realists thought it was a bad idea.
But I would say that what has happened over time is that almost everybody except the realists has jumped on the NATO expansion bandwagon.
And as a result, in the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, you've had a great deal of support for expanding NATO eastward, not only among liberal imperialists like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, but also among neoconservatives.
And there's been a real consensus here.
There's just not been a lot of dissent.
And I find this quite remarkable because the Russians have made it clear that this was unacceptable to them.
And one could easily make the argument that the August 2008 war between Georgia and Russia was precipitated by NATO expansion.
There had been a meeting in April 2008, a few months before that war broke out, where NATO had said at the end of the meeting in a communique that both Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members of NATO.
This incensed the Russians.
And I believe this was the principal cause of the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia.
So there's just been a lot of evidence over time that NATO expansion, especially into Ukraine, was going to get us into lots of trouble.
And it has.
But the fact is that most leaders in the West, and indeed most people in the foreign policy establishment, don't buy that argument.
They think that this is the Russians' fault, not the fault of the West.
Right, because history began yesterday.
So we're just working with what's going on right now instead of...
You want to talk about 1998?
That's ancient history, I guess.
Well, but so when it comes to ideas, isn't it right that one of the ideas is that Washington, D.C., sort of in general, just still hates Russia?
You quote this guy Gershman talking about, yeah, maybe one day we'll regime change you, too.
I mean, that's absolute crazy talk.
They may not be the USSR anymore, but they still got H-bombs and they still are not going to allow a coup in Moscow.
And so what is the real motive of this anyway?
Is it just selling fighter planes or what?
Because it's not just ideas, it's interests here at play.
Well, the basic goal here was to take Ukraine, which is an important neighbor.
Well, I mean, in expanding NATO to such a degree that they're provoking Russia, sort of in the larger picture.
What's the point?
Well, they didn't think they were provoking Russia.
They refused to buy that argument.
If you listen to Mike McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama talk, he will tell you that the United States and the West more generally went to great lengths to assure the Russians that we were not threatening them, that NATO expansion was not a move that they should see as threatening.
And it was mistaken on the part of the Russians to read things this way.
They were not purposely provoking the Russians.
This is what makes this all so amazing.
They thought that they could get away with this.
And my argument is that they thought they could get away with it because they had forgotten about basic geopolitics.
And they instead had this liberal vision of NATO expansion.
And they didn't think that we would ever reach the point where we got into a serious crisis with the Russians, which, of course, is now what's happened.
Is that really honest, though?
I mean, I don't mean, you know, McFaul's particular statement or that kind of thing.
But just generally speaking, Putin and the whole world laughed when George Bush said that the anti-missile systems going into Poland were to protect Poland from Iran.
And nobody took that seriously at all.
When Barack Obama said it, they took it seriously or pretended to for a little while.
But then he actually changed his mind about that as a bit too provocative.
But I mean, isn't it pretty clear that NATO expansion actually is about Russia, regardless of what these guys say?
No?
No, I don't think it was about containing the Russians.
There's remarkably little evidence of that.
It was based on the belief that in Western Europe, you had a giant zone of peace.
And the reason that you had this zone of peace was because NATO was in place on the western half of the continent.
And the idea was that if you could expand NATO eastward, you would include more European countries in that alliance and the zone of peace would become bigger and bigger.
The problem with your argument that this was all designed to contain the Russians is that nobody saw the Russians as a serious threat.
It wasn't like Russia, after the Soviet Union collapsed, was likely to make a comeback and we were going to get the second coming of the Soviet Union or we were going to get some powerful greater Russia.
That was just not in the cards.
This is a remarkably weak, great power.
And in fact, if you look at its projected trajectory out to the year 2050, it's going to get weaker, not stronger.
So nobody was talking about NATO expansion as a way of containing the Russians.
This is why we were so surprised when he took Crimea in February, March of this year.
We were shocked by this because we had no idea that he was even thinking of doing that, which he wasn't thinking of doing before the coup on February 22nd.
So this whole business of NATO expansion was not aimed at containing Russia.
It was aimed at creating this larger zone of peace that was based on traditional liberal strategies having to do with the spread of capitalism or economic interdependence, the spread of democracy and the spread of institutions.
So in other words, it's academic doctrine and policy, but then no real world objections raised actually count for anything, because there are smart people on the National Security Council who have an inkling of what line Putin might draw somewhere.
No?
I mean...
Well, there were doubters in the 1990s.
As I said before, there's no question if you look at the debate in the mid-19 to late 1990s about NATO expansion, there was significant resistance inside the government and outside the government.
And the forces in favor of expansion had to work very hard to prevail.
But by the year 2000, once the first expansion had taken place, this is the one that brings in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Once that had taken place, the opposition to further NATO expansion basically melted away and everybody seemed to get on the bandwagon.
So in the 2000s, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for more and more expansion.
People talked about an open door.
And of course, the more expansion you had, the closer you got to the Russian border.
Another way of putting that is the closer you got to including Ukraine and Georgia.
And I think it's fair to say that Putin and the Russians more generally drew a red line in the sand and said that Georgia and Russia are not going to become part of NATO.
And I think if you look at what's going on now with regard to Ukraine, I think basically Putin is saying that if the West and Kiev continue to insist that Ukraine has to become part of the West, we the Russians will wreck Ukraine before we let that happen.
We'll wreck it economically and politically.
And I think that is what's happening now.
Putin is going to considerable lengths to turn Ukraine into a political and economic wreck so that it can't become a viable partner for the West.
And this is why my argument is that we should back off and work to create a neutral Ukraine.
Could you please describe what you think is the plan as of now?
Is it just to take back the eastern provinces?
Because that doesn't seem to be working out very well.
It's been quite a few weeks of onslaught here.
I think that they will eventually, the Ukrainians, the government in Kiev will eventually put down the rebellion in eastern Ukraine and they will, in effect, have the whole country back in their hands.
But the problem is that the economic costs of doing this are great.
And furthermore, you're still going to have a decidedly unhappy population in eastern Ukraine that has the potential to cause lots of trouble.
And the Russians, who are right across the border, are going to help those people in eastern Ukraine cause trouble.
And the Russians themselves have the potential to cause all sorts of problems, especially when the weather gets cold and they can begin to fool around with natural gas prices.
So Putin has lots of levers that he can use to make life increasingly miserable in Ukraine.
And as I said before, effectively wreck the country.
And not only that, it's quite clear that what's going on in Ukraine is having negative effects in the European Union.
The European Union has been in economic trouble since 2008.
It's had a series of recessions.
Its growth rates look anemic at best at this point in time.
And the last thing it needs is an economic crisis generated by what's happening in Ukraine.
And it looks like that's what you're going to get.
So this is just an unqualified mess and something has to be done to fix it.
And what needs to be done is we need to adopt a completely different policy.
Well, you know, speaking of power, politics and realism and all that, I'm really curious what you think about America's relationship with Germany at this point in terms of our, you know, more or less unified foreign policy when it comes to these things.
Is this going to cause a permanent change in America's relationship with Germany and how we operate on these questions?
I'm not sure what you're saying about America's relationship with Germany.
Well, I mean, well, it's in the leaked phone call and all that that, well, you know, we got to get the Germans on board.
Basically, the EU is the Germans on board for our same plan for regime change in Kiev and that kind of thing.
And they've, at least in part, they've gone along with supporting the new government in Kiev and all of that.
But obviously, you know, like you're saying, there's a conflict over the gas and they have a lot closer relationship, a lot more interdependent relationship with Russia than anything America has to worry about.
So I just wonder whether you think the split between us is going to get wider.
Did I overstate the degree to which we're ever on the same page with them on this?
Well, I think you overstate the split.
I don't think there's a split between us and them now.
I think there's no question that they're more vulnerable to sanctions from Russia than we are.
And I think the potential for their potential damage to their economy from the Ukrainian crisis is much greater than it is to the American economy.
They asked Kiev to make peace a couple of times and America told them, never mind that, keep going, right?
No, I don't think that's true.
No, I don't see us and the Germans being on a different page here.
I think that we're basically on the same page.
I'm actually surprised at the extent to which the Germans have gone along with the American policy of playing hardball with the Russians and being super friendly with Kiev.
But I would say it's very hard to tell what's going on behind closed doors.
Oftentimes in American foreign policy, and this is true of any country, what is being said in public is very different than what's being said in private.
And I would not be surprised if the Germans are going to considerable lengths to try and work out a deal with the Russians to solve this crisis.
I think the Germans are more sensitive to Russian concerns than the United States is.
If you go back to the April 2008 NATO meeting that I was talking about before, where it was said at the end of that meeting and communicated that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO, it's important to emphasize that during the actual meeting itself, the United States was pushing hard to move forward right then and there to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
And it was the Germans and the French, but especially the Germans, who put their foot down and said that that cannot happen.
The Germans were actually worried that NATO expansion would provoke the Russians at that point in time.
But the Americans overwhelmed them and they issued this communique after the meeting that led to all sorts of trouble.
But the Germans are, I think, much more aware than the Americans of what's going on between Russia and Ukraine and how dangerous this situation is, especially for Europe's economy.
So I think the Germans may be in private more conciliatory towards the Russians than appears to be the case in public, because in public it does, to me anyway, look like the Americans and the Germans are pretty much on the same page.
Only right.
The Germans have a lot more to lose than the Americans.
I mean, there's no question about that.
Yeah.
Short of the Europeans more generally.
Yeah.
Well, now, there's so much more to follow up on here, I guess.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second and say, yeah, but come on, Putin is a right wing nationalist himself.
And of course, he would like to recreate the Soviet Union.
And he's just taking advantage of the excuse of this coup in February to, you know, move toward someday soon.
They've been saying for about eight months straight now, invade and take eastern Ukraine, maybe even as far as Odessa.
And why wouldn't he, John, want to recreate as much of the USSR as he possibly could?
Well, there's no question that he'd like to recreate the USSR if he could.
There's no question that he'd like to create a greater Russia if he could, but he can't.
First of all, this country is in serious economic and demographic trouble and it does not have the power, especially the military power, to go on a rampage and to conquer other territory.
The fact that it took Crimea was a no brainer.
There's no real conquest involved there.
If the Russians were to invade eastern Ukraine up to the Dnieper River for the purposes of incorporating that into a greater Russia, it would be a terrible mistake on their part.
It would do enormous damage to their economy.
And it's not clear that they could absorb all of those people.
As I said in the article I wrote, it would be like swallowing a porcupine.
So the idea that Russia can, that Russia has the capability to sort of go on a rampage and conquer countries is just simply not true.
It doesn't have that capability.
Furthermore, there is no evidence before the February 22nd coup, no evidence that Putin or Russia more generally was bent on conquering any territory, including Crimea.
When we were pushing NATO expansion before February 22nd, nobody was saying that it was necessary to expand NATO for the purposes of containing Russia.
This is the point that I made to you before.
You would think from a common sense point of view that NATO expansion was all about containing Russia.
But you can find hardly any evidence of policymakers saying that we should expand NATO to contain Russia.
And that's because we did not think that Russia was about to try to recreate the Soviet Union again.
In other words, this is a new talking point, but it just doesn't reflect reality.
Of course, it's a new talking point because neither the United States or any European country wants to take responsibility for causing this mess, even though they caused the mess.
Any time you get into a crisis like this, what you would expect to happen is that the Americans will blame the Russians and the Europeans will blame the Russians.
They're not going to blame themselves.
They're not going to say this is all a result of NATO expansion.
If you ask Bill Clinton, who's the father of NATO expansion, whether or not his policy ultimately led to this mess, he will say no and he'll blame Putin.
So needless to say, when you look at what's happening, you know, inside the foreign policy establishment in Western Europe and here in the United States, everybody's blaming the Russians.
But as I said earlier, that's not the case.
Well, but what about the Americans?
I mean, this has been a pretty long, hot summer, 2014 here.
We talked before about you said you think that the Kiev government ultimately will prevail against the secessionist provinces in the east.
But what's the danger that that could provoke a real Russian intervention, military intervention like the kind that the West has been saying they're prepared to do all this time?
I think if you had a bloodbath in eastern Ukraine and large numbers of Russians died, that there would be very powerful incentives for the Russian military to intervene.
I think Putin has made it clear that if Russians in the near abroad die in large numbers, that the Russians are coming in.
And I think for that reason, if a civil war were to break out in eastern Ukraine, the Europeans and the Americans and the government in Kiev would go to great lengths to try and shut it down as quickly as possible to prevent the Russians from coming in.
Because I think everybody understands that a war between Russia and Ukraine over eastern Ukraine is in absolutely nobody's interest.
Right.
One more thing real quick.
Eric Margulies, the renowned war reporter, said he talked to a Russian diplomat that he knows, I think in Spain, who said this is the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis.
Something has got to be done to break this.
And I wonder whether you think that kind of rhetoric and panic in response to the situation is at all relevant.
I mean, we're a few months into this, so the temperature seems to have died down a little bit on the talk about it.
I wonder if you think the crisis is really that bad.
I think one could make the case that this is the worst crisis since the Cuban missile crisis between Moscow and Washington.
But at the same time, this crisis is nowhere near as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis.
We came reasonably close to having a nuclear war in 1962.
The Cuban missile crisis is an unequivocally dangerous crisis.
We're not anywhere near that at this point in time.
The fact is that the United States has made it clear that Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest.
And even people like John McCain, who have never seen a war they didn't want to fight in this case, are not talking about fighting in Ukraine.
Nobody is making the argument that it's in America's interest to fight in Ukraine if the Russians were to invade.
So the likelihood that the Russians and the Americans would end up eyeball to eyeball in a conflict with the possible nuclear escalation here is, I think, remote.
And that's very different than the Cuban missile crisis.
Sure.
Still saying something that in communism still lasted for decades after that.
And this is anywhere near the second place at all is bad enough, if you ask me.
But all right.
Well, thank you so much.
I've already kept you over time.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
You're welcome.
Very good.
Talk to you.
That's John Mearsheimer, everybody.
He's the author of the Israel Lobby, co-author of the Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.
And he's the author of this piece in Foreign Affairs.
Why the Ukraine crisis is the West's fault.
The liberal delusions that provoked Putin.
Hey, I'll Scott here.
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