The belief that we in the West are always the guilty party in any dispute - Chomsky being perhaps the godfather of this particular world view - is forever with us, even in Ukraine. In the Spectator, Christopher Booth takes on the Russian "realists":
[I]n certain schools of international relations, there’s a kind of especially vigorous anti-narcissism in fashion: the idea that when it comes to the sins of the world, ‘we’ in the west are almost always the guilty party (excepting those enlightened enough to perceive this truth).
Ukraine is the latest conflict where self-flagellants flex a version of the argument. In short, were it not for the incautious expansion of Nato, and the half-promises made to Kyiv, none of this horror would have happened.
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is a vocal proponent of the view, and his commentaries have notched up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube during the war. That’s a lot of likes for an academic. So he is clearly tapping into something some people feel.
‘We have led the Ukrainians down the primrose path and encouraged them to join Nato’ he declares. At the same time, ‘we took a stick and we poked the bear in the eye’ when it comes to Russia. It is again, you see, all about ‘us’.
Mearsheimer is an articulate and well-regarded thinker, and has published much learned material to great acclaim. By contrast, I’m merely a former Moscow correspondent. But having spent a decade in Russia between 1988 and 2005, and witnessed the emergence and flourishing of Putin’s way of running the country, I can’t help finding Mearsheimer’s theory of ‘offensive realism’ a poor guide to what is taking place. And in some ways, it just strikes me as plain offensive.
There are lots of reasons why. Starting with the glaring iniquity that such a worldview denies Ukrainians the opportunity to choose their future. They are either obliged to accept Moscow’s ‘right’ to call the shots; or they’re painted as dumb puppets of western manipulation.
The toppling of the pro-Russian government in Kyiv in 2014, which so upset the Kremlin, is described by thinkers like Mearsheimer as a ‘coup’. The choice of word is telling, because it smuggles in a value judgment.
Many of my Ukrainian friends, however, would term the events a popular uprising. Not one in which they were gulled by the CIA and dark forces, but one in which they eagerly seized the hope to make a country better than the one Putin was willing to begrudge them. That may be described as ‘unrealistic’, but it at least permits Ukrainians a role in their affairs....
Another shortcoming of the theory is that it supposes people like Putin and his entourage are motivated by statesmanlike reason. But while the Russian defence staff may have planned the war through a prism of rationality – in the event, that prism turned out to be a drastically flawed one – their commander-in-chief has demonstrated spitting anger and a bloody messianism as high among his motivations for conflict.
As I noted a month ago, when this all kicked off, the modern political landscape of realpolitik assumes that all leaders are driven by rational considerations and can be bargained with, but that simply doesn't apply to Putin. He's driven by an atavistic ideology and a personal hatred that are beyond reason. In a word, he's evil. As Booth concludes, "the realists have no explanation for the grisly calculus of evil men".
Mearsheimer has form. He may be a "well-regarded thinker", but only in certain quarters. In particular his speculations about the Israeli lobby and its influence over Washington foreign policy were much admired by characters like Abdul Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and by David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader. And by the London Review of Books under its former editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, which consistently followed a strong anti-Israel line, and where Mearseimer and his colleague Stephen Walt first published the essay which developed into their 2008 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
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