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Comment by c-smile | Hacker News Reader

The Great Delusion (2020) by prof. John Mearsheimer: https://youtu.be/nZVIaXFN2lU

That if someone really wants to understand where we are with all those Libya, Syria, Iraq, ... Ukraine.

And how and when this one really started: https://youtu.be/ppD_bhWODDc

As of Francis Fukuyama predictions...

I am Ukrainian by myself. With family spread over West Ukraine and Russia East. Note: Russia is the second country after Ukraine where Ukrainians leave.

There is a concept of "for the Motherland" and there are many as Russians as Ukrainians who still consider joined Russia and Ukraine as a common motherland and those predictions are completely out of touch in this respect.

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A counterpoint to Mearsheimer from historian Stephen Kotkin in conversation with David Remnick:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-...

Interesting article overall, but the counter-point is not that strong IMO. I don’t think that those which are arguing that NATO over-extended and that they’re not innocent bystanders harbour the illusion that failing such expansion Russia would be a more democratic country.

The argument is that they wouldn’t be so aggressive because they wouldn’t feel threatened. There was a great argument that I read on HN explaining why Ukraine being NATO-friendly was causing massive problems for Russia - the gist of it was that they could project significant more power right at their doorstep.

In a recent interview Mearsheimer said that even if Ukraine wants to join NATO and NATO wants them to join, in reality Russia has a kind of veto power, no matter if that may seem immoral and unfair.

Mearsheimer's getting a lot of airplay right now, but his analysis is straight out of the 19th century "great game" -- Ukraine is hardly even mentioned. His reasoning is all about the territorial conflicts of the "great powers".

In reality Russia is a small, poor, and mostly irrelevant state, mainly getting airtime because it has nukes. Without the nukes it would be taken as seriously as other countries of its economic clout, like Australia. Which is to say, not taken seriously at all.

Russia provides something like 20% of global wheat supply, something like 15% of global agricultural supplement input, and something like 12.5% of global oil/gas. They also have an enormous intellectual human capital history — the soviet era physicists and mathematicians were definitely peers to their western counterparts, which is to say nothing of their literature. And finally, they have top-tier homegrown armaments in nuclear, submarines, ICBMs, fighter aircraft, and so on.

I think any metric (e.g. GDP) that reduces this multidimensional situation to "mostly irrelevant" is probably saying more about the metric than about the reality on the ground.

By that metric greece should be a superpower. They have the world's 1st navy too.

It doesnt work that way. Russia is not irrelevant, but almost-irrelevant. It can be cut off from the global economy without disastrous results

They are far far from an imperial power though, and haven’t really been one since the mid sixties, perhaps earlier. They should just face the music as onetime apex predator Britain has. Italians are proud of their Roman forebears but have no pretensions of contemporary imperial greatness. Likewise Turkey.

it s basically the points that Putin made in his speech before the invasion. He s pretty clear about what he wants and people should read that speech

> That if someone really wants to understand where we are with all those Libya, Syria, Iraq, ... Ukraine.

I appreciate Mearsheimer's perspective, but for a self professed "realist", I find it strange that he talks a lot about "ideology" and very little about "oil".

At the end of the day all of those conflicts are conflicts over the control of fossil fuels. I have a hard time taking any analysis seriously that doesn't focus on this primary issue.

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