Remember when libs hated Mearshemeir for daring to say Putin had reasons other than Putler hating freedom lmao.
Basically by pushing Ukraine into joining NATO Ukraine becomes a major security risk for Russia. (Russian cities are now in shelling range of NATO weapons). He is realist brained so he also said Washington should prevent Moscow from allying with Beijing but even that isnt hawkish enough for libs.
Theres a plenty of reactions but this article is one of example of :LIB: reaction. Gems include stating that he is wrong because he treats democracies and dictatorships the same in geopolitics, as if the US need votes to put their troops all over the world lmao.
He also says in the same lecture that he doesn’t like lecturing in DC because none of the politicians care and don’t want to believe they’re vulnerable. But he likes lecturing in Beijing because despite his words being anti china, the politicians there aren’t cocky and try to understand the enemy.
The New Yorker interview is also hilarious. . You can sense the frustration in Mearshemir’s response. He just keeps repeating himself and basically saying “you don’t understand shit because you’re a fucking idealist who thinks the world runs on platitudes.”
interviewer: You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.
JM: It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.
I: The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.
JM: Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.
I: Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business.
JM: We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.
I: Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is behaving that way?
JM That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well.
