Everything that Mearsheimer stated would happen to Ukraine has now come to pass. He predicted it perfectly 7 years ago. He was not wrong. Neocons and Liberal Imperialists, as he calls the "war party", have now sacrificed Ukraine and left them to be massacred by advancing Russians. If you want to debate any of his arguments, please do so.
If you accept the latter rather than the former, I think it's hard to lay the blame on the West for simply having a defense alliance that sovereign states chose to join -- unless you would argue that NATO should simply not exist.
Strictly speaking that isn't true.
That doesn’t justify Russia’s action - you aren’t justified in invading your neighbour over the mere inchoate possibility they might join a potentially hostile military alliance. (Ukraine still hasn’t joined NATO, and there is no evidence they were likely to be accepted as a NATO member in the near future.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing
The really bad part is that they were acting during the 'first installment' against people that weren't part of the attack on the United States to begin with (it was essentially a pretext), and the second time they outright lied about the intelligence regarding the WMDs (of which there already was conflicting data collected by the UN weapons inspectors).
NATO’s own resources are essentially office buildings, computer and communication systems, bureaucrats, and seconded military planners. The US didn’t need them for the Iraq War, although it would have liked to have had them involved, because of what that would have meant politically/diplomatically/symbolically.
Despite claiming a broad “coalition”, only three countries actually contributed fighting assets to the initial US invasion - the UK, Poland, and Australia - only the first two are NATO members, and Poland at the time had only recently joined (only 4 years prior). 3 more NATO members (Netherlands, Italy and Spain) provided non-combatant support. I don’t see in what meaningful sense it could be said to be something NATO did.
More NATO members joined in the occupation forces after the initial invasion. But that was never an official NATO operation because those require unanimous approval, and certain member states (most notably France) were always opposed to that.
NATO eventually did become involved in Iraq - training the new Iraqi government’s military. But no fighting ever happened in NATO’s name.
NATO was very careful to obtain requests from the UN in both cases, resolutions 1244 and 1973.
How is Putin ceasing to throw Russia's unwilling and unwitting armed forces onto Ukraine not easy?
"The treaty was created with an armed attack by the Soviet Union against Western Europe in mind, but the mutual self-defense clause was never invoked during the Cold War."
After WW2, it became clear that a new world order had emerged around what would be called "First World" (US-led countries members of NATO) and "Second World" (Soviet Union-led communist countries members of the Warsaw Pact). The "Third World" were non-aligned countries, often confused with "poor countries".
The roots of the current crisis trace back to these power structures. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China could be seen as the beginning of new alignment, but so far, we haven't seen it fully taking shape (China is certainly working on it). Russia, while nowhere near its Soviet Union peak, remains a military superpower and the owner of vast natural resources.
Russia's current role in the world is unstable - there is a dissonance between its hard power and its actual influence in world matters. It doesn't accept being relegated to a weak geopolitical player, and the invasion of Ukraine is part of an attempt to assert its position in the world.
And they just changed again.
Putin believes that the "Soviet Union" is simply another name for Russia, the name of a particular phase of Russian history.
In his mind, the ex-Soviet states were all part of Russia, and their people were Russian–Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians are not neighbouring foreign nationalities, they are Russians, traditional Russian ethnic minorities just like Chechens or Tatars or Tuvans. He views their independence in the breakup of the USSR as a historical mistake, for which he blames the Communist leadership.
He wishes the Communists had never introduced the idea of a "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" because he believes it planted the seeds for the breakup of Russia–yes, Russia, since to him the Soviet Union was just another name for Russia–in 1991, and his current invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to partially reverse that breakup – even though he probably doesn't plan to annex the whole of Ukraine in the near-to-medium term, installing a puppet government in Ukraine which will promote Russophilia and Russification would bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold, and might even eventually lead to full annexation further down the line.
> Since then, however, NATO has revived admirably. Under President Joe Biden America sounded the alarm about Russia’s build-up and co-ordinated the Western response. “Putin has single-handedly given NATO a vitamin injection,” says Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, an annual transatlantic talkfest that begins on February 18th. NATO’s three decades of angst about its role after the end of the cold war has been dispelled. Having performed “out of area” operations in the Balkans and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, it is going back to basics: the territorial defence of allies. The theological rivalry between institutions in Brussels over whether the EU should have an autonomous defence capability has for the moment been stilled.
In other words, I feel like some people have a consistent standard on what constitutes acceptable aggression depending on who the aggressor is.
This kinda borders on the radio station justification - a rogue terrorist attack does not justify an invasion, and most of the attackers were Saudi, so its not even consistent.
That was a really eye-opening moment for many people, I felt the same as now about Ukraine.
Honestly, that is going to be tested when Russia attacks one of them. How eager the rest of NATO will be to support or abandon them.
Joining NATO won’t protect you and will just antagonize Russia. Maybe next time they’ll just try and remain neutral?
My understanding is the Ukraine was “up” for consideration of NATO membership at some unspecified date in the future?
On the other hand, around 20 years ago Putin said he could imagine joining Nato one day...
Of course the west is ultimately not to blame for Russia to invade. There were bad choices...
Here is the actual treaty:
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.ht...
Article 4 is quite deliberately vaguely worded. And the treaty also explains why NATO only got involved in Libya after the UN requested it to.
Even the Yugoslavian war did not - though it almost happened - ended up pitting NATO against Russia, and I believe that if Russia had followed through on the reforms instead of turning into a Dictatorship/kleptocracy that they just might have joined NATO at some point.
Moreover he explicitly says that NATO/US does not want to expand to Ukraine as it is not a vital strategic interest to the United States, instead US will have to focus on Asian alliances to counter China.
UN security council is how things like Srebrenica happen. In my eyes, disregarding it is justifiable if there is a high enough likelihood of something like that repeating.
It’s fine to have a principle of non-intervention but the situations are not really comparable outside of both being interventions. The Iraq War is a better comparison, and the US should have been sanctioned for it.
And that has exactly nothing to do with defensive NATO core mission.
Sectarian violence happens all around the world, except NATO chose to invade Kosovo under the pretext of ethnic cleansing / "genocide", again current RU excuse, which later investigation pointed out to be unfounded. The real cynical reason was for NATO to rationalize its existence post USSR collapses by reinventing itself as an offensive alliance for LIO/US geopolitical interests, which is how it has been wielded since causing untold deaths in various interventions. NATO is a hegemonic instrument disguised as a humanitarian one. RU sees through the "defensive" narrative. Ultimately, the point is US opened pandora box of bad norms in terms of prosecuting wars and upsetting balance of power. It won't get sanctioned for it, instead wielding sanctions to deter geopolitical adversaries from pursuing more pertinent self interests. Until the sanctions stop working, and US adversaries use US playbook for their own interventions.
Mearsheimer points the finger at an enthusiastic expansion of NATO here and draws a line from it to the West being at fault, but I don't think it was really the case.
So it wasn’t independent peoples joining a defensive pact, but Russia dislocating its arms onto stolen territory.
Only exceptions are Belarus, which effectively remains under Russian thumb, and Ukraine which didn’t make it (and had, now dead, significant pro Russian sentiment).
Either we agree that countries have sovereignty and can enter whatever pacts they so please or we do not. You can't have it both ways. NATO is an alliance that Baltic nations joined of their own accord. The US doesn't even enter the picture here.
I completely agree. The problem is that for the past 70 years or more, this has not been like the US has behaved. They set the historical precedent that it's ok to respect other countries sovereignty if and only if said country aligns with your own interests. When that's not the case, it's fine to overthrow the government to make it more "democratic".
> Joining NATO--not that the Ukraine was even doing that
Ukraine was actively seeking NATO membership since 2014, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
I find it completely overestimated. The makes it US responsibility to prevent Ukraine from considering to enter defensive act. And when US does not shut it, somehow US is responsible for Russia invading Ukraine.
US is not responsible for making sure Russia can take over Ukraine whenever they please. US is not responsible for making Russian emprire to happen.
Setting aside other countries for a moment, the actions of a country is ultimately decided by its leader and the leader of Russia went to war. We can debate how other countries influenced the leader, but before that, are you in agreement that Putin premeditated a troop build up around ukraine and then invaded despite no immediate threat to russian soil?
Can you please state that ultimately the buck stops with putin russia freely chose to do this war, and then we can get into the debate of how other countries may have pushed him that way only once that clear acknowledgment has been made without any digressions that may come off as unintentional prevarications.
In the video, around 23:30, he says putin is too smart to invade ukraine and that an invasion will not happen...