Mearsheimer: Some Recent History that Brought Us the Russia Ukraine war

Richard Mellor

 

John Mearsheimer is a respected, and some say, brilliant US bourgeois strategist and expert on international affairs and global politics. I am not. I am a worker, a socialist and I think, I observe, I read, and I have lived many decades. I have to say I cannot find much to disagree with in this video, his analysis of the history and events that carved out the path to the present conflict in Ukraine. I agree with him when he details the reckless, bullying, foreign policy of the world’s richest and heavily armed imperial power as its arrogance leads it to make policy decisions that are against its own interests. It has driven Russia and China closer together. As he says, US foreign policy here has created a mess in Ukraine that makes it almost impossible for them to walk away from and it is the people of Ukraine that are suffering the consequences of this disastrous US foreign policy.

 

I agree with his view that Russia had no serious intention of conquering Ukraine and certainly not western Europe though Putin and others might wish that were so. And I agree that what we are seeing here is not NATO against the Russians but the US against the Russians as the US controls NATO. As he says, NATO could not exist without a Russian threat, real or not, just like Zionism, the fringe element that had no serious following among Jewish workers prior to the betrayal of Stalinism and the horrors of the Nazism, could not have gained traction without anti-Semitism which is Zionism’s lifeblood.

 

Mearsheimer’s sober analysis of events is right on in my opinion, and it is just that, an opinion based on my life experiences and the information I take in like everyone else. I do not believe Putin is Hitler, if he's Hitler, who is Kissinger. Putin is a former KGB man with all that entails and whether he’s deranged, greedy, narcissistic, homophobic, transphobic or any of the other personality traits that are the results of those whose politics are dominated by attempts at psychoanalysis, it doesn’t matter. As Mearsheimer says in answer to a question in the video, he doesn’t know anything about Putin’s personality.

 

As one very small fish in this big ocean, I agree with Mearsheimer’s assessment of China as the only peer threat to US imperialism. And from a global point of view, in the post World War Two era, we have been through a bipolar moment, a uni-polar moment as he points out from the early nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union to 2017 and are now, despite US imperialism’s dominant economic and military power, in a multi-polar era given steam with the decline of US imperialism to a certain extent and the rise of China in particular.

 

Watching the English language media from India it is not uncommon to hear this complaint from what is often referred to as the world’s largest democracy, that the US refuses to accept that we are now in a multi-polar world. US capitalism emerged from the second great imperialist war with more that 50% of world trade and no competition. After dropping nuclear bombs on highly populated urban centers, the US went on to expand its global reach intervening in a civil war in Korea and in Vietnam where it supported a regime in the South that couldn’t get elected by its own people. The Korean War has never ended and US capitalism was defeated in Vietnam after the death of some 3 million Vietnamese and 67,000 US Americans. The US illegal war in Cambodia killed an estimated 600,000.

 

The US regime coerced, cajoled, bribed and threatened weaker nations to follow its lead in its failed military ventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so on.  It has left millions dead and destruction and misery in its wake. Many of the countries that are neutral with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine may well be doing so for economic and trade reasons, but there is a distaste and resentment for yet another western power’s bullying. US sanctions against Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, particularly in the middle of a global pandemic, have caused untold  suffering for workers and the poor.

 

The 2019 victory of Mauritius over Britain at the International Court of Justice stating that the Chagos Archipelago, where Diego Garcia island is located, must be returned to Mauritius was vehemently opposed by the US and its surrogate the UK. British colonialism forcibly removed the inhabitants of Diego Garcia which contains a British airbase it rents to the U.S. and the US used it as a base for drones and aircraft in the 20-year bombing of Afghanistan. Indira Gandhi considered ti a threat to India. Many former colonies of Britain either abstained or voted against the proposal and one of the reasons is that there is no love lost between its former colonies and the British ruling class. India, once a colony ruled from London for over a century, with Queen Victoria being named Empress of India, certainly has no desire to be pushed around by Washington. Given the highly censored US mass media most Americans would not be aware of the resentment millions of people throughout the world have toward the US, its arrogance and disregard for weaker nations and their right to make decisions for themselves.

 

In the video Mearsheimer talks of great powers and how they write the rules giving the example in our era of Gatt and the WTO, the UN and so on, and how these are institutions to facilitate world trade, commerce, diplomacy etc. This is what think tanks are and universities are capitalist think tanks.

 

Accepting Mearsheimer's version of events does not mean one supports Putin or the Invasion of Ukraine. But it does help one understand why we are at this point. The Ukrainians have every right to defend themselves and their country and ask other countries for weapons but I am not going to campaign for or against the US and the UK or the G7 arming them other than to say it will not save lives. This is a no win situation for workers in Ukraine, Russia or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world. It is a sad situation.

 

Mearsheimer’s analysis has limits. He is not a socialist. He does not see the working class playing any role at all in his worldview. He cannot really see a way out and it’s not clear to him that while this particular situation could have been avoided had the US played a different role, it would only be temporary. The tension with China will increase as the US will ferociously defend it global position. War is an integral part of the capitalist system, it cannot be avoided forever. The market dictates.

 

This trajectory toward the abyss and eventual ending of life on earth as we know it cannot be halted within the framework of capitalism. The most important factor that is missing is the conscious, active intervention of the working class. European workers, including Russian and Ukrainian are the victims here. The workers and poor in the developing world are suffering tremendously due to the sanctions and the shut-down of trade. Egypt for example is the largest importer of Russian and Ukrainian wheat and this will lead to starvation there.

 

The potentially powerful European workers movement and its organizations should intervene, call for a cease fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops and for direct talks. NATO must be disbanded and Russian security guaranteed as well as those countries that border Russia. There is nothing in this war between competing powers that benefits working people and the Ukrainians least of all.