The larger critique of realism that Applebaum and Maçães are speaking for goes something like this: Yes, realists like Mearsheimer predicted some kind of conflict over Ukraine. But realism’s predictions still did not describe reality, for three reasons. First, the predictions imagined a defensive logic to Russian strategic conduct, oriented around the protection of a sphere of influence, a fear of encirclement by NATO. But the decision to invade seems to have been motivated more by Putin’s professed and very personal desire to restore a mystical vision of greater Russia — a grand ideological idea that the mere Western pledge not to admit Ukraine to NATO was unlikely to appease.
Second, the realist predictions underestimated the agency and strength of Ukrainians themselves, treating Russia’s near abroad as a landscape where only great-power force projection really mattered, ignoring Ukraine’s potential capacity
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But then when it comes to Putin’s aggressive war, Mearsheimer seems to assume that the Russian president thinks like him, the realist, rather than like the utopian politicians of the West. Putin, he says, “understands that he cannot conquer Ukraine and integrate it into a greater Russia or into a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union.” And if the United States only worked harder “to create friendly relations” with Moscow, Mearsheimer argues, there could be a tacit American-Russian “balancing coalition” against the rising power of China.
But why should Putin necessarily be immune from the hubris and delusions of Western leaders? Why should we assume that he
doesn’t dream of reintegrating Ukraine and Belarus into a greater Russia? Why should we take for granted that the right diplomatic strategy will bring him into an American coalition against China, when he might instead be committed to a sweeping ideological vision of
Eurasian power aligned against the decadent West?
Why should we assume, in other words, that structural and schematic explanations of Putin’s war are more important than personal and ideological explanations? After all, as the historian Adam Tooze
points out, it appears that very few members of the Russian foreign policy elite — all presumably opponents of NATO expansion, all “devotees to Russia’s future as a great power” — actually believed that Putin would invade. And if so many participants in Putin’s regime, all good servants of the national interest as realists define it,
wouldn’t have made his fateful choice, then did realist premises actually predict the war itself?
Just as important, did they predict the way the war has played out so far? I myself did not: My assumption was that Ukraine might mount a strong resistance in the western part of its territory, but that Russia would sweep pretty easily to the Dnieper and probably put Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to flight. (Some version of this assumption was shared by U.S. intelligence, which was predicting the quick fall of Kyiv two days into the war.) After almost two weeks of stalled-out offensives and mounting Russian casualties, that faulty assumption does look a bit like a Risk-board view of the world, where all that matters is positioning and pieces, not patriotism, morale, leadership and luck.
And there are a lot of ways that this kind of Risk-board mentality can deceive.