By Stephen Walt, Foreign Policy, 6/13/22

The political scientist Robert Gilpin once wrote that “no one loves a political realist.” His lament seems especially apt today, as the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine has spawned an uptick of realism-bashing. A small sample: Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols of the Atlantic, Columbia University professor and fellow FP columnist Adam Tooze in the New Statesman, University of Toronto professor Seva Gunitsky, and Michael Mazarr of Rand Corp. Even Edward Luce of the Financial Times, who is consistently one of the most insightful observers on U.S. and global policy, recently opined that “the ‘realist’ school of foreign policy … has had a terrible press recently, most of it richly deserved.”

Much of this ire has been directed at my colleague and occasional co-author John J. Mearsheimer, based in part on the bizarre claim that his views on the West’s role in helping to cause the Russia-Ukraine crisis somehow make him “pro-Putin” and in part on some serious misreadings of his theory of offensive realism.

Another obvious target is former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose recent comments urging peace talks with Moscow, a territorial compromise in Ukraine, and the need to avoid a permanent rupture with Russia were seen as a revealing demonstration of realism’s moral bankruptcy. As I explain below, Kissinger is an outlier within the realist tradition, but he’s still a convenient foil for its critics.

The irony here is hard to miss. Realists of various stripes repeatedly warned that Western policy toward Russia and Ukraine would lead to serious trouble, warnings that were blithely ignored by those who claimed that NATO’s open-door policy would lead to lasting peace in Europe. Now that war has broken out, lives are being lost, and Ukraine is being destroyed, you would think proponents of open-ended NATO enlargement would have set aside their idealistic illusions and think about these issues in a hard-nosed, realist fashion. Yet the opposite has occurred: The people who got it right are singled out for attack, while those who believed that enlarging NATO would create a vast zone of peace in Europe are insisting that the war continue until Russia is totally defeated and greatly weakened.

This phenomenon isn’t all that surprising, insofar as realism has never been popular in the United States. It is recognized as an important tradition in the study of international relations, but it is also the object of considerable animosity. In 2010, for example, University of California, San Diego professor David Lake’s presidential address to the International Studies Association criticized realism and other paradigms as “sects” and “pathologies” that divert attention from “studying things that matter.” Back in the 1990s, when many believed liberal values were spreading around the world, the political scientist John Vasquez published a lengthy article in American Political Science Review claiming that realism was a “degenerative” research program that ought to be discarded.

So why do so many people dislike realism so intensely? I might not be the most objective judge on this issue, but here’s what I think is going on.

Realism is a rather gloomy perspective on politics, even in its more benign versions. It assumes that people are irredeemably flawed and that there is no way to eliminate all conflicts of interest among individuals or the social groups they form. Moreover, all versions of realism highlight the insecurity resulting from the absence of an overarching global authority that can enforce agreements and prevent states from attacking one another. When violence is a possibility, human groups of all sorts—be they tribes, city-states, street gangs, militias, nations, states, etc.—will look for ways to make themselves more secure, which means they will be strongly inclined to compete for power.

Contrary to what some critics maintain, realists do not see these features as iron laws that determine every move a state might make. Nor do they believe that cooperation is impossible or that international institutions are of no value, and they certainly don’t think that humans lack agency or the ability to make different choices as they strive to protect their interests. Realists simply maintain that international anarchy (i.e., the absence of an overarching central authority) creates powerful incentives for rivalry and competition among states—incentives that are difficult to manage or overcome.

It’s not hard to understand why many people are reluctant to embrace such a pessimistic view of the human condition, especially when it appears to offer no clear escape from it. But the real question is this: Is this is an accurate view of international politics? When you consider the conflict and strife that have occurred throughout human history and continue to this day, and the tendency for states to worry about their security, the prima facie case for realism is strong.

Second, realism’s emphasis on power politics leads many people to assume its proponents as overly fixated on military power and inclined to favor hawkish solutions. But this view is simply false: Apart from Kissinger (who was a hawk during the Vietnam War and backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003), the most prominent realists have generally leaned dovish. George F. Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Hans J. Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz were all early critics of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and their scholarly successors were among the more prominent voices opposing the Bush administration’s march to war against Iraq in 2003.

Third, realism is also seen as indifferent or even hostile to ethical or moral considerations. There is a grain of truth in this charge, insofar as realism’s theoretical framework does not incorporate values or ideals in any explicit way. As the name implies, realism tries to engage with the world “as it really is,” not as we might like it to be. Yet as Michael Desch and others have pointed out, most realists are also guided by profound moral commitments, and they are conscious of both the tragic nature of international politics and the importance of trying to act morally despite the pressures to act otherwise. For realists, noble aims and good intentions are not enough if the resulting choices lead to greater insecurity or human suffering.

Fourth, realism is unpopular in the United States because it runs counter to the widespread belief in American exceptionalism—the idea that the United States is uniquely moral and always acts for the greater good of humanity. For realists, the need to remain secure and independent in a world lacking a central authority often leads states with very different characteristics to act in strikingly similar ways. The United States and the former Soviet Union could not have been more different in terms of their domestic orders, political ideologies, and economic systems, for example, but the pressures of competition during the Cold War led each to form and lead large alliances, promote their respective ideologies wherever they could, build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, intervene in many other countries, fight destructive proxy wars, and assassinate foreign leaders. Locked in competition, these two very different countries produced rather similar foreign policies.

To be sure, realists recognize that domestic politics are not irrelevant and that there are important differences between, say, Nazi Germany on the one hand and Edwardian Britain on the other. But where idealists are quick to divide the world into “good” and “bad” states—and to blame the world’s problems almost entirely on the latter—realism recognizes that even well-established democracies will do horrible things to others when they believe their vital interests are at stake.

Back in the 1960s, for example, the Johnson administration was so worried that South Vietnam would become part of the communist world that it sent nearly half a million troops across the Pacific to fight there; 58,000 of those soldiers didn’t return. The U.S. military used napalm and Agent Orange and dropped some 8 million tons of ordnance on the country. When that didn’t work, the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia, undermining its fragile government and unwittingly helping the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime to gain power. Vietnam was a weak country and more than 8,000 miles from the continental United States, yet its leaders managed to convince themselves these actions were necessary for U.S. national security.

In July 1979—less than a decade later—the Carter administration became alarmed when a popular uprising in Nicaragua toppled pro-American dictator Anastasio Somoza, much as the Maidan uprising in Ukraine toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. When it came to power in January 1981, the Reagan administration responded by organizing and arming a rebel army—the Contras—much as Russia has backed separatist militias in Ukraine. Nicaragua was a poor country with a population of barely 4 million people, yet U.S. officials saw it as a serious threat. Some 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the Contra War—equivalent to losing approximately 2.5 million Americans as a percentage of the country’s population.

These examples of past U.S. misconduct do not justify what Russia is doing today in the slightest. If we are consistent, all these actions (to include the invasion of Iraq) should be roundly condemned on both strategic and moral grounds. Nonetheless, they are a reminder that governments of all types will do brutal things when they feel threatened, even if their fears are sometimes illusory. But in a country like the United States, which sees itself as uniquely virtuous and where top officials rarely admit mistakes or accept responsibility for them, reminding people that U.S. leaders have sometimes acted much as Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting today is probably not be the best way to win them over.

This phenomenon is especially powerful in wartime, when the understandable desire to rally popular support encourages governments to describe their own cause as wholly just and to portray their opponents as the embodiment of evil. To suggest that prior U.S. actions might have had something to do with the tragedy in Ukraine does not excuse Putin’s decision to invade or the conduct of the Russian armed forces, but it is bound to trigger a harsh reaction from those seeking to frame the conflict as a simple morality play between a brutal aggressor and an innocent victim and the latter’s well-intentioned and equally innocent friends.

Realists recognize that evil acts occur and that some states behave worse than others, but they also understand that all states compete for security in an imperfect world and that no country’s conduct is beyond reproach. For this reason, realists see diplomacy and compromise as critical tools for managing disagreements and resolving differences without the use of military force. By contrast, if evil leaders or regimes bear sole responsibility for all the trouble in the world—as liberals, neoconservatives, and other idealists maintain—the only solution is to eliminate the evildoers once and for all. The problem, alas, is that trying to get rid of governments you deem evil tends to get a lot of people killed. And in some circumstances—like the current war in Ukraine—it could lead to a wider and more dangerous conflict.

Finally, realism tends to be unpopular because its proponents have an annoying tendency to be right. Not all the time, of course, because foreign policy is a complicated activity in which uncertainty is pervasive and the various theories that can help guide policymakers are crude instruments at best. For example, most realists—myself included—were surprised that NATO survived and expanded beyond the Cold War.

But realists were right about NATO enlargement, dual containment in the Persian Gulf, the war in Iraq, Ukraine’s ill-fated decision to give up its nuclear arsenal, the implications of China’s rise, and the folly of nation-building in Afghanistan, to note just a few examples.

That’s not a bad record, especially when compared to realism’s many critics. But I doubt it will make realism more popular, even if most states continue to act more or less as realism depicts.

By Gilbert Doctorow & Nicolai Petro, The National Interest, 6/11/22

Conflict in Ukraine is going to be with us for a long time. What we need right now is a framework that will entice the parties to make this a peaceful, rather than a military competition. The period of separation for Novorossiya, followed by a status referendum, might be the solution.

Current Western strategy in Ukraine is not conducive to peace because it does not deal with some essential aspects of the current conflict. It does not deal with the rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine, and it does not address the thirty-year failure to set up a pan-European security system that includes Russia. Both are issues of primary importance to Russia. The relationship between them may not be obvious to many in the West, but for Russia they illustrate a mindset of promoting Western interests and values at the expense of Russia’s.

It is precisely because of this mindset that the West was caught flat-footed when Russia suddenly seized the initiative, and decided to assert its interests through military means.This has left the West in a quandary, with few palatable options. Its preferred means of coercion—economic sanctions—are bound to become less and less effective over time, just as they have been in other countries, which have always found workable substitutes to dependence on the West. The importance of Russia in providing the world with essential commodities, such as oil, gas, grains, and fertilizer, give it even more economic clout.

At the same time, the political isolation that West has sought to impose, while it has a certain public relations appeal, further limits the West’s ability to get Russia to cooperate on other issues of vital importance to the West, and forces Russia into new alliances that will, invariably, be much more anti-Western. Henry Kissinger has recently argued that institutionalizing such animosity would be historically unprecedented, and should be avoided at all costs.

Meanwhile, despite the rhetoric from Kiev, the war has not brought Ukraine itself any closer to a resolution of its own internal conflicts. The rise of Ukrainian patriotic fervor is quite real, yet it often reflects the same regional disparities that have divided Ukraine since its independence. No matter how the military conflict ends, therefore, old resentments are likely to resurface, with Russian-speakers once again being blamed for their supposedly divided loyalties. As the popular Ukrainian journalist Mikhail Dubinyanski recently put it, “it took but a moment for the front lines to stabilize, for the traditional internal hate to re-emerge.”

A lasting settlement must recognize that this conflict will not end with the withdrawal of Russian troops. It must therefore address three vital aspects of the conflict simultaneously, or it will not last. First, the competition between Russia and the West over Ukraine, which is clearly not going to end after the fighting stops. Second, the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian elites over their respective national and cultural differences, which is only going to intensify after this war. Third, the conflict between Ukraine’s Western and Eastern halves, which current patriotic enthusiasm has temporarily masked.

Our proposal does not seek to end these conflicts, which are endemic, but rather to shift the competition from the military arena, with its concomitant dangers of escalation, to the arenas of economic well-being and soft power. In essence, this is the kind of competition that the West was engaged in with the Soviet Union during the heyday of détente, after it decided that coexistence was preferable to mutual assured destruction..

In exchange for the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of its military forces, Russia would be obliged to not annex the regions it currently occupies and agree to hold a status referendum there under international supervision, some 10-20 years from now. Ukraine, for its part, would accept its temporary loss of control over Novorossiya (the regions of Donbass, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, and Nikolayev), with the proviso that their status will be ultimately determined by the outcome of this referendum.

In addition, NATO would formally pledge not to consider Ukrainian membership. In deference to Ukraine, however, there would be no formal pledge of Ukrainian neutrality. This would permit Ukraine to receive a wide variety of defensive military assistance and training from other countries, short of permanent foreign bases and weapons systems capable of striking Russian territory. Ukraine’s security concerns would be further allayed by a formal pledge by Russia that it will not object to EU membership for Ukraine, opening the door to the multi-year assistance with investments and reforms that Ukraine will desperately need to recover.

Russian security, meanwhile, would be bolstered by international recognition of Novorossiya (some of the mechanisms used to defuse the dispute over the Free Territory of Trieste and Saarland might apply). A de-militarized zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border could be created, and security further enhanced by the commitment by several key states to ensure the borders of both Ukraine and Novorossiya.

Some sweeteners for Ukraine (bitter pills for Russia):

A Ukraine state that is able to pursue the post-2014 nationalist agenda. To obtain Western security guarantees, Russia will have to give up its goal of fully de-Nazifying Ukraine;

The firm prospect of EU membership in the foreseeable future. Russia may draw some scant comfort, however, from fact that the regime that will be built in Ukraine will then be Europe’s headache (as some are beginning to realize);

Multi-year aid and defensive weapons assistance for Ukraine;

The possibility that these regions now lost could eventually rejoin Ukraine, if it provides them with appealing reasons to do so. This will, of course, depend on the policies that Kiev adopts toward those regions, but Ukrainian authorities will have the better part of two decades, and significant Western assistance, to make their case.

Some sweeteners for Russia (bitter pills for Ukraine):

The loss of Ukrainian territory—Crimea permanently, Novorossiya perhaps only temporarily;

No NATO membership for Ukraine;

Western sanctions lifted on Russia, Belarus, and Novorossiya. One can reasonably assume that the regions within Novorossiya will more naturally be drawn to Russia. The EU should therefore not repeat the mistake that it made in 2013 of forcing Ukrainians to choose between European and Eurasian economic integration. This time around, everything should be done to create a free trade zone that encourages these regions to become a vital bridge linking both;

Finally, there is the possibility of Novorossiya eventually choosing to join Russia, should it prove to be more appealing and successful than Ukraine. No doubt, the West will do everything in its power over the next two decades to ensure that this is not the case.

The West should welcome such a shift in the focus of competition, since it regards economic success and soft power as areas of traditional strength. Russia too should also welcome it, since it argues that at heart Russians and Ukrainians share a cultural and spiritual bond that goes much deeper than economics. This would be a chance to prove or disprove this argument. Ukrainian nationalists should also welcome it, since it would give them two decades in which to build a broad base of support within Ukraine for their view that Russians and Ukrainians have nothing in common, and to propagate this view through cultural ties and exports to Novorossiya. Moreover, they will be able to do so among a much more homogenous Ukrainian population, with the blessing and financial support of the West.

Finally, there is the not inconsiderable security advantage that Europe and the world would derive from establishing a framework in which Russia and the West can compete in ways that would be potentially mutually beneficial, rather than assuredly mutually destructive.

It will be objected that such a settlement rewards Russian aggression. In an imperfect world, however, the morality of punishing Russia (without, mind you, ensuring its withdrawal) must be weighed against the morality of allowing further suffering in Ukraine, especially when the alternative not only stops the bloodshed, but offers a mechanism whereby, under more auspicious conditions, Ukraine can potentially regain its territories. Time, however, is of the essence. The longer that settlement negotiations are delayed, the more territory that Ukraine is likely to lose to Novorossiya.

Another likely objection will no doubt be that Russian officials cannot be trusted to keep their word. Not now, not ever. Those who feel this way have a ready-made objection to any form of negotiations, and not just with Russia. The only thing we would point out is that, by putting the status referendum a good way off into the future, the means of its implementation will be negotiated not by those who unleashed this war, but by a post-Putin Russian leadership. The type of relationship we will have with those future Russian leaders, is still very much in our hands to determine.

Gilbert Doctorow completed a Ph.D. in Russian history at Columbia, followed by a 25 year career in international business focused on the USSR/Russia. His two-volume Memoirs of a Russianist, published in 2021-22, has been reissued in translation in St Petersburg.

Nicolai N. Petro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island (USA). During the collapse of the Soviet Union he served as Special Assistant for Policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine in 2013-2014, and is the author of the forthcoming book,  The Tragedy of Ukraine.

By Craig Murray, Antiwar.com, 6/9/22

I was in Turkey to try to further peace talks, as an experienced diplomat with good contacts there, and as a peace activist. I was not there as a journalist and much of what I discussed was with the understanding of confidence. It will be probably be some years before I judge it reasonable and fair to reveal all that I know. But I can give some outline.

Turkey continues to be the center of diplomatic activity on resolving the Ukraine war. It is therefore particularly revealing, and a sign of Western priorities, that I did not come across a single western journalist there trying to follow and cover the diplomatic process. There are hundreds of Western journalists in Ukraine, effectively embedded with the Ukrainian authorities, producing war porn. There appear to be none seriously covering attempts to make peace.

There was a sea change two weeks ago when Ukraine shifted to a public stance that it would cede no territory at all in a peace deal. On 21 May, Zelensky’s office stated that “The war must end with the complete restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.” Previously while they had been emphatic that no territory in “the East” would be ceded, there had been studied ambiguity about whether that referred to Donbass alone or also the Crimea.

The new Ukrainian stance, that there will be no peace deal without recovering the Crimea, has ended for now any hopes of an early ceasefire. It appears to be a militarily unachievable objective – I cannot think of any scenario in which Russia de facto loses Crimea, without the serious possibility of worldwide nuclear war.

This blow to the peace process was a setback in Ankara, and I should say that every source I spoke with believed the Ukrainians were acting on instructions conveyed from Washington to Zelensky by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who openly stated he wanted the war to wear down Russian defense capabilities.

A long war in Ukraine is of course massively in the interest of the US military industrial complex, whose dripping roasts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have gone rather off the heat. It also forwards the strategic objective of severely damaging the Russian economy, although much of that damage is mutual. Why we live in a world where the goal of nations is to damage the lives of inhabitants of other nations is a question which continues to puzzle me.

Turkey has for now turned towards the more limited goal of ensuring that grain supplies can be shipped out from the Black Sea through the Bosphorus. This is essential for developing nations and essential for world food supplies, which were already under pressure before this war began. Turkey is offering to clear sea lanes of mines and to police the ships carrying grain from the port of Odessa, which is still under Ukrainian control. Russia has agreed to the deal.

Ukraine is objecting to this plan to export its own wheat, because it objects to the removal of the mines, which I should be clear were put down in the sea lanes by Ukraine to prevent amphibious attack on Odessa. There is monumental hypocrisy by the West on this, blaming Russia for preventing the export of the grain while it is actually blocked in by Ukraine’s own mines, which they currently refuse to allow Turkey to remove.

On 19 May this was the headline of a UN press release:

Lack of Grain Exports Driving Global Hunger to Famine Levels, as War in Ukraine Continues, Speakers Warn Security Council

As it states, Ukraine and Russia together account for one third of world grain exports and two thirds of world sunflower oil exports. Many of those who die from this war are likely to do so in developing countries, from hunger. The decision of the EU and US to target Russian and Belarussian agricultural exports for sanctions displays an extraordinary callousness towards the very poorest human beings on the globe, who cannot afford rising food prices.

Well, the headline here is that the USA and EU are pushing Ukraine to block any food deal, based on a number of objections including the reduction in the security of Odessa and the claim that Russia will sell looted Ukrainian grain. The view in both Ankara and the developing world is that the big picture, of millions facing starvation, is being lost.

The experience has made me so cynical that I am left wondering if the interests of the powerful agricultural lobbies in both the EU and USA are influencing policy. High world food prices benefit some powerful interests.

I blame Putin for starting a war that does nothing to redress Russian long term security concerns. But the truth is that politicians in the West are equally keen on this war. Boris Johnson yesterday was blatantly promoting it for his own survival. Anybody who makes any effort to stop the killing – Presidents Macron and Erdogan in particular – are immediately and universally denounced by the “liberal” media.

Yet what is the end result that the liberal warmongers wish to achieve? When we reach the stage that Henry Kissinger is a comparative voice of sanity, the political situation is indeed dire.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster, human rights activist, and former diplomat. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. The article is reprinted [by Antiwar] with permission from his website.