It’s not NATO — Putin always has had expansionist designs

Who would you believe about Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s intentions: a distinguished American political scientist or an equally distinguished Russian sociologist?

The American political scientist is John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. The Russian sociologist is Grigory Yudin of the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences.

Mearsheimer is known for having argued consistently that NATO enlargement was primarily responsible for deteriorating the West’s relations with Russia and, ultimately, producing the Russo-Ukrainian War. Yudin puts the blame squarely on Putin, arguing two days before the Russian invasion that Putin was “about to start the most senseless war in history.”

One year after the war began, both men appear to have stuck to their guns. Most recently, Mearsheimer told CGTN, a Chinese television station, that the conventional wisdom in the West has been that Putin was an imperialist and he was determined to conquer Ukraine and make it part of a greater Russia or he was interested in recreating the Soviet Union. There is no evidence to support that, he argues, and all the evidence indicates that Putin was fearful the West was trying to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border. And the principal element of the West’s strategy was NATO expansion into Ukraine. Putin and his advisers made it clear for many years that this was simply unacceptable, Mearsheimer’s argument goes, and if the West continued to push NATO eastward into Ukraine there would be serious trouble — and, of course, that’s exactly what happened.

Now here’s Yudin’s argument, in a recent interview:

“[T]he war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an enemy set on destroying him.

“There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will only expand… .

“Putin definitely intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence].

“I often hear, ‘It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!’ Not long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of Moldova, Ukraine and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger… .

“Russia’s general strategy is something like this: Let’s bite off a piece; then that piece will be recognized as legitimate and, in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we can take something else.”

So, who’s right — Mearsheimer or Yudin? I vote for Yudin. (Surprise!) For starters, he really knows Russia and its people. For another, unlike Mearsheimer, he’s not wedded to some theory that validates his work as a scholar.

But there are more important reasons for doubting Mearsheimer’s arguments.

First, the notion that the West was going to “push NATO eastward into Ukraine” had absolutely no basis in reality. The Russians, Europeans, Americans and Ukrainians knew that Ukraine’s membership was wishful thinking and wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, if at all.

Second, the fact that Sweden’s and Finland’s choice to join NATO has elicited no Russian saber-rattling shows that the problem wasn’t NATO enlargement; it is Ukraine, which, in Putin’s mind, has no right to exist.

Third, the national armies of NATO countries were in dreadful shape, for the most part, as NATO documents and Russian spies could have told Putin and his advisers. NATO posed no threat to a huge country with what was supposed to be the second most powerful army in the world.

Fourth, there are piles of evidence demonstrating that Putin has had expansionist designs from his first days in office. Just ask the Chechens, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Georgians and Ukrainians. Read Putin’s texts, in which he bemoans the USSR’s collapse and denies the legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence. Listen to his advisers who have openly called for the destruction of Ukraine and its people. Read Yudin and scores of Russian analysts who think just like him.

Fifth, even if we assume that NATO’s long-term plans were nefarious, it is impossible to claim that Putin’s decision to launch a total war against all of Ukraine, and then to embark on genocide, could possibly be the consequence of Russian pique at Western indifference to its security needs. Mearsheimer might have been right had Putin limited his “special military operation” to the Donbas, but no amount of pique could explain an all-out assault and mass murder.

Sixth, Mearsheimer might counter by saying that Putin’s perceptions were such as to lead him to believe that NATO and Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia. But that argument is contradictory because it shifts the causes of the war from what NATO did or did not objectively do to how Putin did or did not subjectively view NATO and Ukraine. Yudin surely would endorse such a strategy.

Finally, Mearsheimer’s realist theory compels one to ignore domestic factors and focus only on the interaction of states. That is akin to arguing that Adolf Hitler’s designs had no bearing on Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, initiation of World War II, and extermination of Jews.  Geopolitics also played a role in Hitler’s decision-making, but surely Nazism played some role too.

In a word, the NATO argument is dead wrong on so many counts that arguing against it is a bit like trying to convince members of the Flat Earth Society that they might be out of step with reality. Yet some are wedded to theoretical schemes and nothing can affect their beliefs.

So, read Mearsheimer for a theoretical appreciation of the geopolitical interests at stake in any war — for the framework. But then read people like Yudin for knowledge about the facts on the ground.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”