When Henry Kissinger turned 100 years old, and Americans celebrated the arrival of summer with a vacation commemorating our fallen in war, Europe stood on the precipice.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the biggest conflict on the continent since the end of World War II.
In response to John Mearsheimer, a controversial academic whom many consider the dean of American foreign policy realists, it is an existential fight for Europe.
Kissinger may challenge that title. But while Kissinger devoted himself to practice, Mearsheimer gained fame as a theorist, especially along with his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Mearsheimer also received insults for his 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, co-authored by Harvard’s Stephen Walt.
More recently, Mearsheimer outraged Ukraine supporters with comments pointing to much of the responsibility for Russia’s invasion of American politics.
He claims that NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement and leaving membership open to Ukraine has ignited Russian fears.
And he rejects the concept that Putin has grand plans to rebuild the Soviet empire.
But when Mearsheimer recently arrived in Washington, his subject was not the origins of the war but its stakes and certain final result.
He spoke as a realist, and the reality he sees is that all sides of the fight has reasons to see it as an existential struggle.
In the case of Ukraine, it is obvious – it is fighting for survival.
Nonetheless, it means greater than just resisting destruction. Kiev’s goal is to regain all sovereign territory and ensure that Russia cannot resume aggression in the future.
Anything less could be just a short lived respite.
Mearsheimer reiterated his argument that the Russians imagine their existence as an awesome power is threatened by the development of NATO.
If Ukraine regains Crimea and is admitted to NATO, Russia will lose reliable access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean beyond.
For the tsars, the Soviets and Putin, Crimea was a significant security interest.
Putin’s goal, in response to Mearsheimer, is not the complete conquest of Ukraine. It will be like “swallowing a porcupine.”
The Ukrainian population as a complete is just too large and too hostile to Russia to soak up the whole country.
But Russia will proceed the war of attrition until it secures the oblasts it has occupied up to now.
And Mearsheimer believes Moscow wants 4 more oblasts until Russia controls greater than 40% of Ukraine’s territory.
The goal is also to capture Odessa and cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea.
A Russian victory means a crippled, unstable, commercially isolated, untenable Ukraine.
For all his criticism of US policy prior to the invasion, Mearsheimer now sees no possibility of American and Western European withdrawal.
For them, too, war is existential.
European security depends upon NATO. If the West invests all the pieces it might in Ukraine’s efforts without direct military intervention, and Russia continues to win, confidence in NATO can be shaken.
This doesn’t mean that the Russian armies are marching forward. What Mearsheimer predicts is fairly a disintegration of NATO from inside, a lack of strategic coherence that enables Russia and China to play different European nations and different factions inside those nations against one another.
As for the United States, our leaders see the final result in Ukraine as a harbinger of what is to return in East Asia.
Mearsheimer has all the time been a Chinese hawk. He argues that a rival hegemon in East Asia would limit our freedom of motion and harm our industrial and strategic interests.
If America cannot protect Ukraine from Russia and maintain NATO’s credibility in Europe, what likelihood do we’ve got of saving Taiwan from China or maintaining our alliances in East Asia?
Mearsheimer was in Washington to talk with the Committee of the Republic, a bunch founded by the late C. Boyden Gray, William Nitze (son of Cold War strategist Paul Nitze), and others to oppose the hawkish drift of U.S. foreign policy during the Iraq War.
Nonetheless, Mearsheimer’s evaluation contained little to comfort the pigeons.
He could also be improper.
What would stop Europe from making a latest security architecture if NATO were discredited – the assumption that failure in Ukraine, if it happened, would actually discredit NATO?
And might China really hope to hegemony with such large and cautious powers as India and Japan in its vicinity?
But Mearsheimer’s grim realism is harking back to how world wars begin.
In a war with an awesome power, the only hope of a smaller country could also be to win over one other great power.
And great powers act under the influence of fears based on perception, not only objective facts.
Once we grill hot dogs, we do not feel that a world war is about to start.
But for English-speaking peoples, that is how the first two began.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.