Isaac Chotiner
Just over three years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and perhaps the most prominent “realist” foreign-policy scholar of his generation, made clear that he believed the blame for Russia’s attack lay most prominently with the United States. This was not exactly a surprise. Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and supported a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine, Mearsheimer has been arguing that the U.S. and much of Europe are the main cause of Russian aggression in the region, largely because NATO has continued to expand eastward across the Continent. (Since the end of the Cold War, sixteen countries have joined the alliance.) Mearsheimer and I talked twice in 2022 after Russia’s invasion; both times, he castigated Western policy and defended Vladimir Putin from charges of imperialism and lying about his war aims. (That year, Mearsheimer visited Viktor Orbán, the autocratic Hungarian leader who has been sympathetic to Putin’s narratives about the war.)
When Joe Biden was President, and support for Ukraine was very strong in the U.S., Mearsheimer seemed like the odd man out. Now Donald Trump is back in power, and he has wooed Russia, stopped arming Ukraine, and publicly scolded Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, during a meeting in the Oval Office. Trump’s admiration for Putin hardly seems to fit into any grand geostrategic theory; nevertheless, Trump has been talking about the conflict in language that mirrors that of Mearsheimer, who is a strong critic of liberal internationalism, and is someone who believes it is natural for regional hegemons to exert dominance in their spheres of influence.
Mearsheimer and I recently spoke again by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why he thinks Ukraine should not get any security guarantees as part of a peace deal, whether he was wrong about Russia’s intentions prior to 2022, and why he still thinks Putin is misunderstood.
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