John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, is the world's best-known exponent of “realism”, a theory about world politics. His intellectual forebears are Hans J. Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger and Kenneth N. Waltz. In realism theory, world politics represents an anarchic system characterised by the great powers’ striving for power, which are structurally in a relationship of conflict with each other. The possibility of war is always inscribed in it. World politics can only be tamed by the mutual balancing of these great powers. Against this backdrop, John Mearsheimer has explained in a series of high-profile speeches why the West bears responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine – most recently on 15 February at King's College in London.

From this point of view, it is in particular declarations of the intention to pave the way for Ukraine to join NATO, formally made at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 and again in 2018, which would have violated the Russian sphere of influence and made a strong Russian reaction indispensable. In Germany, a similar position is held in particular by people who belong to or are close to the Left Party. Sahra Wagenknecht is the best-known representative of this group. She is also keen to point out the ambiguity of the Western position because the United States had waged a war in Iraq that was illegal under international law, and a reaction comparable to today's failed to materialise at the time. In rather abstruse versions of this position, the interests of the German arms industry are also mentioned. The latter is not found in Mearsheimer’s appearance, but he too took a public stand against the Iraq war in 2002. The coalition described seems even more surprising when one considers that there are also supporters of these argumentations in the Alternative for Germany (AfD). “Strange bedfellows” is what they call it in English.

However, a coalition is not wrong just because it is strange. And even if what Gregor Gysi [politician of the Left Party] said is correct, that this position is expressed with a frightening “lack of emotion regarding the war of aggression, the dead, the injured and the suffering” in Ukraine and that it is primarily about rescuing the “anti-Western ideology”, the analysis could still be correct. So what is there to the view that the West is responsible for the messy situation in Ukraine and thus also partly to blame for the war? The answer is: little.

“The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong”

First, a closer look at the theory helps to see the weaknesses of this criticism of the West. Realism only knows the interests of great powers. If one takes the standpoint of this theory, then there is absolutely no external position from which it would be possible to criticise a particular policy as “irresponsible”. John Mearsheimer himself shows us this.

When he was still looking at world political changes from a different perspective, he first predicted at the beginning of the 1990s that Germany would become a nuclear power within ten years; he also meant: should become. In 1993, he recommended that Ukraine be equipped with nuclear weapons. At the time, he wrote: “The common opinion about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, Ukraine should have been encouraged to build its own nuclear deterrent right after it declared independence. Even now, urging Ukraine to become a non-nuclear state is a mistake.” Perhaps he was right. But it would certainly have been a provocation to Russia. And a much bigger one than the arms deliveries to Ukraine in recent years.

What in realism from the perspective of one great power has to be seen as a threat, appears as absolutely necessary from the perspective of the other great power. This is precisely what this theory sees as the essence of the international system. This does not have to be wrong, but it implies that realism – depending on the perspective – arrives at different recommendations and views. For it is the task of all great powers to contain the other side.

National self-determination is not a normative constituent of world politics

In the variant of realism advocated by Mearsheimer, the great powers are the decisive actors. These great powers do not need to take the normative principle of national self-determination into account. For, according to the theory, only those states have this right that can enforce it for themselves. The recognition of the Russian sphere of influence is thus necessarily accompanied by disregard for national self-determination. This theoretical assumption translates into Mearsheimer's description of the Orange Revolution: according to him, it was not a collective uprising of the Ukrainian population, but a strategy of the West. In any case, in realism national self-determination is not a normative constituent of world politics, but an argument in the enforcement of interests at best. To me, this no longer seems to be the case since the decolonisation movement, or at the very latest since 1989. It is precisely because of this violation of norms that the world community has reacted so intensively.

What is decisive, however, is that in the present case, the explanation offered by realism leaves crucial questions open. A well-known metaphor of the theory describes world politics as a game of billiards. According to this, the states are billiard balls that only interact with each other on their external sides, controlled by rational decision-making centres. The inside of the balls, which is the domestic political and psychological foundations of the decisions, plays no role. Without a view of these processes and possible misjudgements in the Kremlin, however, the timing of the attack on Ukraine must remain puzzling.

Why didn’t Putin use Donald Trump's presidency as an opportunity to take control of Ukraine? When Trump was president, the West would certainly not have imposed such far-reaching sanctions. The fact that there is still so much money in the now frozen accounts of Russian oligarchs also points to significant misjudgements by the Kremlin about the West's reaction to the invasion. And why was the intervention undertaken now, when there was little aspiration for Ukraine to join NATO in the foreseeable future?

Russian miscalculations have increased

The more recent arms deliveries to Ukraine served as a substitute, not a harbinger, of Ukraine's NATO membership. It was exactly in this substitutive sense that Robert Habeck [Germany’s Federal Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, then co-leader of the Alliance `90/The Greens party] brought up the arms deliveries last summer. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in any case, saw his country's chances of joining NATO increasingly dwindling: “There are concrete reasons for this: resistance from Russia and from some member countries of the Alliance.” So why this invasion at a moment when Ukraine was realising how heavy Russia's political resistance weighs? The interpretation of the war according to realism does not provide the answers.

If the main goal of Russia's Ukraine policy was to prevent the country's integration into NATO, then Russia's earlier military actions in Crimea and the Donbass were quite clumsy. For it was only afterwards that the wind changed in Ukraine's capital. Zelenskyy's predecessor in office, Petro Poroshenko, only pushed for NATO accession in response, on condition that the people would agree in a referendum.

With the thesis of NATO's eastward expansion as the cause of the war, it is also impossible to understand why Putin is now resorting to justification narratives involving apparent Nazis in the Ukrainian government (drug addicts or not), genocides and crude reconstructions of history.

The question of timing can be much better explained by another theory. Because of his world view and to preserve his power, Putin cannot tolerate a democratic Ukraine. And this is precisely the kind of development we have seen in Ukraine since 2014, against the world trend. A revival of the democratisation process, which most recently conveyed a decent degree of stability and marginalised the Putin forces in the country. According to the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) research institute's electoral democracy index, Ukraine can been classified as a democracy again since 2020.

In addition, there is an obvious change in the Kremlin. Increasingly, a world interpretation has gained dominance, according to which Russia and its allies are confrontational towards the liberal West. Moreover, information channels have narrowed and misperceptions have increased: about the Ukrainians' readiness to fight back, about the willingness of liberal democracies and their civil societies to impose sanctions, and about the strength of the Russian military.

The war is the result of a systemic struggle between an autocracy and a democratising neighbour. The concrete decision, which was apparently taken as early as October last year, was fuelled by structurally induced misjudgements.

There remains a reference to the American invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration's war in Iraq was clearly contrary to international law and much more damaging to the liberal world order than the Russian aggression today because the drastic violation of norms was shrugged off at the time, whereas it is sanctioned today. However, the condemnation of the American invasion of Iraq in no way justifies the war today. That is sometimes insinuated otherwise.

At one important point, however, I consider the equation too free-handed. The United States deprived Iraq of an authoritarian, inhuman government with the naïve idea that once Saddam Hussein was gone, a Western-oriented democracy would develop in the course of democratic self-determination. To this end, international support was openly solicited in advance. Even if this idea turned out to be a fatal miscalculation (and was accompanied by other calculations), the case is quite different from the war against Ukraine. This is about depriving a self-determining nation of its democratic government in order to permanently control the country politically from the outside. And let us not be deceived again: Putin is concerned with control over the entire country. Because a self-determined Ukraine would push with the greatest determination towards the West.

This article was first published on 16 March 2022 in the national newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Translation by Elisabeth Nöfer.

Prof. Dr. Michael Zürn is the director of SCRIPTS, professor of International Relations at Freie Universität Berlin, and director of the Global Governance Unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.