Reply to John Mearsheimer: Power needs to be contained, not courted

In his interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on May 6, 2025, under the provocative title " I would have done the same as Putin. I would have invaded Ukraine even earlier, " the US political scientist John Mearsheimer argues that the West—particularly through its pursuit of Ukraine's NATO integration—provoked Russia into a military response. He argues that the Russian attack on Ukraine was a rational preventative war that, from Moscow's perspective, was necessary to safeguard national security interests. Mearsheimer denies that Putin had an imperialist motive and instead emphasizes that the West ignored warning signals. According to him, lasting peace can only be achieved through Ukrainian neutrality, territorial concessions, and demilitarization—all of which he considers realistic, even if unacceptable to Kyiv. Mearsheimer rejects criticism of his position as strategic blindness on the part of Europe and moral self-deception on the part of the West.

It is a subtle irony that John Mearsheimer, once one of the most eloquent representatives of realism, loses himself in an idealized projection—the fiction of a rational Vladimir Putin, whose actions supposedly follow a cold logic of geopolitical necessity. In doing so, Mearsheimer replaces analytical classification with an apologetic reinterpretation of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. According to him, the West provoked Russia, to which Putin responded rationally. In this narrative, Ukraine appears as a pawn sacrificed by liberal hubris. Mearsheimer's theses are not only analytically reductive—they are strategically fatal and serve to justify the Kremlin's aggressive policies.

Pseudo-rationality as a fig leaf for Russian imperialism

Admittedly, this is by no means Mearsheimer's first problematic statement regarding Russia. Since February 2022, however, his analytical writing, bordering on Kremlin apologetics, has been on the rise. His regular appearances on programs by leading Russian state propagandists further complement the picture.

In a recent NZZ interview, Mearsheimer portrays Putin as a predictable actor, a classic power politician who merely reacts to border violations by the West. This portrayal, however, ignores the regime's ideological foundation. For years, the Kremlin has been pursuing a deliberate sacralization of Russian identity, history , and geopolitical exclusive claims to the so-called "Russian world." Putin's essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" in the summer of 2021 made it clear: the war against Ukraine is not merely a security policy reaction, but ideologically motivated revanchism.

Mearsheimer's dismissal of this ideological foundation as a "myth" is analytically dishonest. Realists, in particular, should approach such narratives with structural suspicion—not with rationalization. For a realism that ignores the ideological self-interpretations of authoritarian regimes becomes a ladder to revisionism.

Preventive war or post-factual justification of an attack?

When Mearsheimer describes the Russian invasion as a "classic preventive war," he devalues ​​the term by applying it without any boundaries. A preventive attack requires an imminent threat. Yet, in 2022, Ukraine was neither on the verge of NATO membership, nor was Kyiv hosting Western combat units. Military cooperation—training cooperation, limited arms deliveries, intelligence exchange—does not imply a commitment to mutual assistance, operational integration, or the stationing of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil.

The claim that Ukraine was a "de facto" part of NATO thus appears neither analytically sound nor comprehensible from a security policy perspective. Rather, it echoes Russian perspectives and reveals a structural contradiction: While Mearsheimer demands strategic sobriety from the West even in the face of concrete threats, he declares Putin's abstract sense of threat to be the only objective and therefore legitimate reality.

At the same time, Mearsheimer's thinking presupposes a normative double standard: Russia is granted a quasi-natural right to zones of influence and security, while the states located between NATO and Russia are denied any sovereign freedom of decision. This is not realism – it is an attempt to feudalize international order in the nuclear age. If Mearsheimer's logic is consistently applied, it means that every state may assert territorial claims – as long as it credibly threatens war. This is not order, but an invitation to power-political blackmail.

Perpetrator-victim reversal as a system principle

Particularly revealing is Mearsheimer's statement that, in Putin's place, he would not only have acted the same way, but would have invaded Ukraine even earlier. This statement is not an analytical abstraction, but rather a rhetorically disguised show of solidarity with an aggressor. In this view, states like Ukraine are not strategic subjects—but geopolitical objects in the power struggle between the major powers.

What is presented here as a sober analysis is in reality a return to a 19th-century order—an order of spheres of influence, legitimized by strategically and historically grounded power projections. What was legitimate, even at times peacekeeping , in the age of Metternich, degenerates in the age of emerging multipolarity into an irresponsible free pass to global chaos. The fact that Mearsheimer affirms this logic rather than criticizes it is an expression of the analytical abandonment of a once great thinker of international relations.

The construction of alleged lack of alternatives

Mearsheimer is convinced that there is no solution to the war in Ukraine—only the option of accepting Putin's demands in the face of Russian superiority. This rhetoric of political indifference systematically ignores the fact that Putin's strategic calculations have already failed. Ukraine was not only able to hold the capital and thwart Moscow's war aims in the first decisive weeks, but also permanently tied down Russian troops in the Donbas. According to the renowned Institute for the Study of War, the Russian armed forces were able to record only minimal territorial gains throughout 2024, despite massive losses of materiel and personnel.

The prerequisite for this was not leniency, but resistance. The factor that Mearsheimer structurally underestimates is Ukrainian resilience. What's more, Western support has enabled a sustainable counter-strategy—at least in the short to medium term—from an asymmetric rearguard action.

There is no doubt that the West could have responded more decisively to the Russian invasion. Yet it was by no means passive. This is evident not least in the establishment of the Ramstein format, the coordination of military assistance within the Ukraine Defense Contact Group across more than 50 states, and the most far-reaching sanctions packages to date. At the same time, security policy debates within NATO intensified over nuclear deterrence, forward defense, and the operational relevance of Article 5. The discussion about the relevance of the NATO alliance case, for example in the context of Baltic border scenarios, marks the return of the logic of hard deterrence—not as an escalation, but as a reaction to the erosion of the European security architecture. This multilateral response is anything but an expression of strategic hubris—it is the necessary consequence of Russian escalation.

Strategic self-deception as an unquestionable dogma

For all his criticism of the all-too-obvious strategic weaknesses on the European side, John Mearsheimer's recurring accusations of Europe's "strategic dilettantism" fail to recognize its structural constraints and seem like a pose. His "realism" culminates in the thesis: Those who adhere to principles risk escalation, while those who give in maintain stability. But this logic ignores the strategic paradox that every appeasement policy creates: Stability through capitulation always remains temporary—and makes revisionist escalation possible in the first place. Munich sends its regards.

A Europe that accepts Putin's "red lines" will not gain in security, but will lose its capacity to act. A genuine realism, as advocated by George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Stephen Walt, or Charles Kupchan, distinguishes between pragmatic interest politics and a creeping normalization of aggressive revisionism. After all, power seeks to be contained, not courted. Anyone who fails to recognize this simple truth cannot be a realist. The reflexive recourse to apparent balance, as embodied by Mearsheimer, is not an expression of intellectual honesty—but rather the result of a self-destruction in the face of authoritarian violence, such as has been all too common in the West since 1991.

Moreover, Mearsheimer overlooks the geostrategic convergence of authoritarian order patterns. Global competition no longer runs solely along the Moscow-Washington axis. It revolves around the struggle between sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating regional order models. A realism that demands leniency toward Russia without considering the consequences and the tectonic system rivalry is analytically backward—and strategically blind. Ukraine is not just a theater of war, but a litmus test for the credibility of Western deterrence. China is closely monitoring Western behavior in Ukraine—not so much out of solidarity with Moscow, but rather to draw conclusions about the cost of revisionist strategies in Taiwan.

John Mearsheimer's theses legitimize violence, delegitimize self-defense, and confuse analytical sobriety with strategic capitulation—a product of political self-deception. In doing so, Mearsheimer speaks not as a once-celebrated analyst of global power relations, but as an apologist for a gutted realist tradition. A realist tradition whose time has passed and which, along with its proponents, must be jettisoned from the steamer of the present.

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