War in Ukraine | The realist and the ambassador

One believes that Ukraine must take Russian regional dominance into account and avoid getting too close to the West. The other thinks that Vladimir Putin does not represent the wishes of Russians and that Ukraine should be completely free to choose its future. Two renowned and controversial political scientists faced off in a debate on Thursday evening in Toronto.

Mathieu Perreault
The Press

Two visions

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, John Mearsheimer has been the spokesperson for “realistic” political scientists who believe that the West should never have dangled Ukraine into the European Union and NATO. . “When you are a country like Ukraine that lives next to a great power like Russia, you have to be careful what the Russians think,” explained the University of Chicago political scientist at the Munk debate on Thursday evening. . “If you take a stick and annoy the Russian bear, it will fight back. This is a tragedy for Ukraine. For him, this means that Ukraine should be a neutral country that is not too close to the West. Michael McFaul, for his part, defends tooth and nail Ukraine’s right to choose sides and believes that the West must arm the country to defeat Russia and ideally promote regime change. “I recently received a message from Alexei Navalny [célèbre opposant russe emprisonné]and he doesn’t have the same definition of Russian national interests as Vladimir Putin at all,” McFaul said Thursday night.

The ex-ambassador

Michael McFaul is a political scientist at Stanford University. From 2012 to 2014 he served as the United States Ambassador to Moscow. Two years during which he was suspected by the Russians of being a CIA agent, which led him to conclude that Vladimir Putin was harmful to Russia. At the start of the invasion, he criticized a BBC journalist for having interviewed a deputy from Mr Putin’s party on the air. “It’s as if the BBC interviewed a Nazi MP right after the German invasion of Poland in 1939,” Mr McFaul thundered. He opposes Mr. Mearsheimer’s realism in the name of “morality”. “Don’t we want a world where morality trumps brute force? “, he asked Thursday. However, he is not in favor of the establishment of a NATO-guaranteed no-fly zone over Ukraine.

The realist

John Mearsheimer makes the following comparison about Ukraine: if Canada decided to enter into a military alliance with China and welcome Chinese soldiers on its territory, the United States could retaliate. Her “realistic” approach has been equated with “toxic masculinity” by American freelance journalist Melissa Chan, because she endorses the territorial claims of leaders like Vladimir Putin. Mr. Mearsheimer has a gift for destabilizing arguments. At the end of Thursday’s debate, he said that the way John F. Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was identical to the solution of a neutral Ukraine: in exchange for the withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba, Kennedy promised Nikita Khrushchev to withdraw American missiles from Turkey, but asked for silence on this compromise so as not to give the impression that the United States was backing down. “Follow Kennedy, not Biden,” concluded Mr. Mearsheimer, raising the excitement of the spectators.

The other ambassador

During Thursday’s debate, another US ambassador, William Burns, who was in post between 2005 and 2008 in Moscow, also played a role. Mr. Mearsheimer repeatedly recalled that Mr. Burns had said that NATO’s expansion into Ukraine was a “red line” for the Russians. And yet, at the NATO summit in Budapest in 2008, Ukraine and Georgia were invited to join the alliance. “It has long been known that this is unacceptable for the Russians, so why did NATO reiterate the 2008 commitment at a summit in 2021? asks Mearsheimer. Mr. McFaul retorts that precisely, Ukraine is still not part of NATO, so Russia should not worry about it. And anyway, according to Mr. McFaul, the fear that Ukraine is part of NATO is a whim of Mr. Putin. “I don’t think we should assume that Putin alone knows what Russia’s national interests are. He also said that he wanted to liberate the Donbass from the Nazis. Should we think that this is also a Russian national interest? »

The weight of history

Thursday’s debate also included a former defense and foreign minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski. When Mr. Mearsheimer argued that perhaps NATO shouldn’t have included Eastern European countries either, because Russia didn’t have the capability to invade those countries anyway, Mr Sikorski countered that historically, Russia had often invaded Poland. “Perhaps you can understand, then, that the Russians are still afraid of being invaded from Europe,” Mearsheimer replied.

When Ukraine was nuclear

John Mearsheimer is one of the few experts to have believed that Ukraine was making a mistake in 1994 by giving up its nuclear weapons in return for a security guarantee from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom. On Thursday evening, he recalled that if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons, the Russian invasion might not have taken place.