Today, I celebrated Ukraine’s Independence Day here at the University of Notre Dame. With joy. National independence has been as directly and brutally violated in the case of Ukraine as have few other principles of the international order.
My sympathies are challenged by my fellow political scientist, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, the world’s most famous international relations scholar. Not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this past February, a lecture given by Mearsheimer in 2015 went viral in which he chastises the U.S. and its allies for provoking Russia by seeking to secure Ukraine’s alignment with the West. Speaking again in March 2022, Mearsheimer charged that the West bears primary responsibility for the war and repeated the same logic. The 2015 talk now has over 27 million hits on You Tube and many admirers.
Mearsheimer is the most widely known voice in the Realist school of international relations thought. He speaks and writes clearly and directly, telling it like it is, and enjoys an adulatory following inside and outside the academy. He is author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2014), now a classic in international relations thought. His advocacy of academic freedom and intellectual pluralism in political science and in the academy in general leave all scholars indebted. I think he is wrong about Ukraine, though. The reasons why point to a larger problem in the study of international relations in American political science today, one that hampers its ability to propose and assess policies and strategies in politics – such as whether to support the Ukrainians.
What is Realism? When Mearsheimer came to speak here at Notre Dame in the 2000s, he connected with the students by telling them that he had attended Catholic school as a boy and recalled the playground where, once the nun left the premises, the bully ruled the roost. Thus was borne Mearsheimer’s international politics. In a world of states without a common superior, an anarchic world, the relative power of states will determine the character of the international system. “The strong do what they will and the weak accept what they must,” in the words of Thucydides, whom Realists consider their great forebear. Upon the basis of these assumptions, Realists have devised numerous variants of theory: offensive realism, defensive realism and their many versions.
When it comes to action, when it comes to Ukraine, though, these theories cannot tell us what states ought to do and why. They cannot sustain Mearsheimer’s claim, that the West is chiefly responsible for the war. For to say that western states are responsible is to say that they acted wrongly, that they ought not to have made the moves, taken the actions, that they did. Thus we can blame them, criticize them, for this. But this kind of claim is one that Mearsheimer’s theory does not allow him to make and for which he does not provide the relevant kinds of reasons.
Aristotle distinguished between theoretical reason, that which describes the world, and practical reason, that which tells a person what she ought to do – that is, what possibilities she might bring into being through her actions. These are different canons of reason. It is a great logical error to derive conclusions about practical action from a description of the world. What practical reason tells us is what kinds of ends ought to be pursued, through what kinds of means these ends ought to be pursued, and what ways of pursuing them are justifiable. Critical for practical reason are moral norms – the norms that govern how states may behave towards other states, for instance. To say that there are such norms and that all human beings have access to them by virtue of their rationality is to posit a different kind of realism, what philosophers call moral realism. It is moral realism that equips us to make arguments and offer justifications about what we ought to do.
The other kind of realism, Realism as a school of thought in international relations, rose rapidly to prominence in the United States at the end of World War II. Great Realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan, Walter Lippman Robert W. Tucker, and Hans Morgenthau offered wisdom about the role of power in politics in order to caution against crusading idealism and to summon the U.S. to responsible world leadership in a period when the Cold War and nuclear weapons created dangerous realities that they thought had to be faced. Their thinking involved Realist tenets about anarchy and power, but they also engaged openly in moral argumentation, moving within and between theoretical and practical reason. Niebuhr and Kennan both invoked the Christian tradition.
The field took a turn, though, with the publication of Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics in 1979, now considered the defining classic of international realist thought. Waltz laid out an enduringly influential theory of international relations, focusing on the distinction between a bipolar and multipolar structure of power in the international system, but also, importantly, set a standard for doing scholarship involving the scientific building and testing of theories. That is, he focused solely on theoretical reason while setting aside practical reasoning. In one respect, this an advance, for previous Realists as well as other international relations theorists often mingled theoretical and practical reason, descriptive and moral knowledge, in a way that was confusing. The cost, though, of Waltz’s move toward a science, followed by other international relations scholars who were not Realist but who wholeheartedly endorsed the scientific approach, and followed in turn by later scholars and their students to the point where the field is now dominated by theory building and testing, is that that practical reasoning has been all but laid aside in the field’s monographs and journal articles. By and large, few scholars of international relations thought in American political science departments engage in the kind of reasoning that is properly oriented toward guiding the actions of people making the crucial political decisions.
This is not to deny that international relations theorists care about right action. They do, and they write about it in policy pieces and op-eds. Or, that they have principles and commitments. Of course, they do. Often their university press books and journal articles contain recommendations for action and policy based on their empirical analyses. The problem, though, is that these recommendations for action rarely involve a systematic consideration or application of the norms that rightly govern action, most importantly moral norms. Rather, scholars derive their recommendations from their empirical theories about how and why states pursue their interests and deploy power. These theories, though, cannot tell decision-makers – or anyone at all – what to do. They cannot tell us who bears responsibility for the war in Ukraine and whether the West ought to support Ukraine’s struggle on its Independence Day. Only practical reason can do that.
One of my favorite books about international relations is Five Days in London, May 1940 (2001), in which the historian, George Lukacs, recounts the deliberations of the British Cabinet in late May 1940 about whether to fight Hitler’s Germany or sue for peace at a time when Britain was evacuating the beaches just across the English Channel at Dunkirk. Lukacs shows how close the Cabinet came to suing for peace with Germany. Through an agreement by which the British would recognize German control of the continent while Germany would refrain from attacking the United Kingdom or its empire, Britain could save hundreds of thousands of the lives of its young men, nearly a million of whom had lost their lives just over twenty years earlier in the Great War. Winston Churchill, though, persuaded the government to continue war with Germany. In the film based on the book, Darkest Hour, a key scene has Churchill riding the subway on the way to a Cabinet meeting, where he speaks with an ordinary citizen who voices readiness to fight for Britain’s independence. Encouraged, Churchill persuades the Cabinet that the British should fight.
Under Prime Minister Churchill, the United Kingdom fought because its heads judged that goods and principles were worth fighting for. These were the independence of the country, a continent of free and independent states, and, as events became clearer over time, the human rights and religious freedom of the people under Germany’s control. No amount of balance of power theory could have told the Cabinet whether these goals were worth the British lives that would certainly be lost and the empire that might be diminished. The Cabinet officials could only act upon reasons about what ends were worth pursuing and whether and how these could be pursued justly. Much the same was true across the Channel, where Frenchmen faced the conquest of the same state from the outside. Some gave their loyalty to a government that allied with Germany; others chose to join the resistance and struggle against Germany. Facing the same conquest from the outside, each chose according to reasons about what sort of political order was worth having. They made their decisions through practical reasoning.
So it goes with Ukraine. The question is not whether western states could or should have predicted that their actions would provoke Russia’s invasion. That is an interesting and important question for theoretical reason. The questions for action are whether it has been just and worthwhile to take measures to guard Ukraine’s independence against a power that has sought to control it for decades, and whether it is just and worthwhile now to support the independence of a state that has been invaded by that power.
The relevant norms here are those that developed according to what is called the just war tradition. Its grandfather is the medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, who, drawing on Aristotle, building on Augustine, affirmed the distinctiveness of practical reason and its appropriateness for action and set forth moral norms that governed lethal action in the affairs of persons and political communities. The norms are ones of natural law, the morality that every person may grasp through his reason. Developed through later philosophers, the just war tradition eventually supplied the ground norms for international law. The most central of these in the current United Nations system is the crime of aggression, the invasion of one state by military force by another, an action which attacks the common good of a political community,
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine stands as one of the past century’s most blatant violations of this basic moral and legal norm, resembling Germany’s invasion of its neighbors from 1939 through 1942 and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Russia was not even close to being under attack or a military threat of attack in February 2022. Even if Ukraine were to have joined NATO – and there is no evidence that this was close to taking place – such a decision would have done nothing to threaten Russia, for NATO is by definition and agreement a defensive alliance, one formed in response to the threat of the Soviet Union, one that has never supported an act of aggression, which would have been precisely contrary to its founding purpose, over the course of its nearly 75 year history. Ukraine has every right to establish economic relations with other European states.
Ukraine is a threat to Russia only if Russia looks upon Ukraine as rightfully a part of its territory. Putin has offered evidence that he looks upon Ukraine this way in espousing Russky Mir ideology and in speaking of a return to the greatness that was lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian-dominated Soviet Union incorporated Ukraine into its empire from 1922 to 1991, and Russia has interfered to control Ukraine’s government in the 2000s and 2010s. Russia’s claim to control Ukraine, though, fails to be justified for the same reason that its invasion does: It violates the common good of a polity that is separate from its own.
Realism’s insights are not denied. They can tell us the likely effects, costs, and probably success of a policy. In the classical tradition of practical reason, these are properly incorporated into the virtue of prudence, which, as a counsel of what we ought to do, only finds its place in a set of principles that tell us what we ought to seek in the first place. Scholars can reasonably debate whether a settlement to the war in Ukraine ought to be concluded, and what such a settlement would involve, on the basis of costs and risks, but only within a right judgment about Russia’s aggression and Ukraine’s right to its independence. International relations ought to combine principles of practical reason with the recommendations that they derive from their empirical findings about the balance of power and the like if they are to make defensible judgments and recommendations about foreign policy. On these considerations, my sympathies are with the Ukrainians’ struggle. May it succeed and may Ukraine’s independence be long lived.