THE SURREALISM OF REALISM: Misreading the War in Ukraine

Author(s): Alexander J. Motyl

Source: World Affairs , JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2015, Vol. 177, No. 5 (JANUARY /
FEBRUARY 2015), pp. 75-84
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM
Misreading the War in Ukraine

Alexander /. Motyl

Most general readers following events in Ukraine may not be aware

that much of the debate and many of the policy prescriptions among
"experts" have been dominated by a school of thought in internation-
al relations scholarship known as "realism." In a nutshell, realists have
argued that US policy toward the Russo-Ukrainian conflict should be driv-
en by pragmatic American interests and by the realities of Russia's region-
al great-power status - two propositions few would disagree with. Realist
arguments become more controversial, however, when they go on to insist
that Russia's behavior toward Ukraine is actually a reasonable response to
Western attempts to wrest Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence and
that the culprit behind the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is, thus, the West
in general and the United States and NATO in particular.
Realists can be found on the right (Henry Kissinger and Nikolas K.
Gvosdev), on the left (Stephen F. Cohen and Michel Chossudovsky) , and
in the center (John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt). At first glance,
it may be most surprising that leftists should have embraced a Realpolitik
view of the world. But only at first glance. Recall that Lenin, Stalin, Mao,
and a host of other Marxist leaders were no less realist in their conduct of

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University, Newark. He

blogs about Ukraine weekly for World Affairs.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015 75

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM

foreign policy than Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon. It is no surpri

that many policymakers come into office with grand ideals, discover tha
the realities of power militate against their easy transformation into policy,
come to appreciate that poli-
tics is, indeed, the "art of the
"Realist arguments possible," and embrace real-
ism as the worldview of the
become more controversial
sadder but wiser.
when they insist that Russia's
Realism rests on the aston-

behavior toward Ukraine ishingly

is bold claim that all
states at all times always pur-
actually a reasonable response
sue their own national inter-

to Western attempts to ests

wrestand struggle for power.
Underlying this empirically
Ukraine from Russia's sphere
unprovable tenet are several
of influence and that thekey assumptions. First, that
states are rational actors. Sec-
culprit behind the ongoing
ond, that their rationality con-
Russo-Ukrainian war is, cerns maximizing material
self-interest and minimizing
thus, the West." material risk. And third, that
all states share pretty much
identical rationality "functions" that reasonable individuals, such as real-
ists assume themselves to be, can easily divine and interpret. If states are
irrational, or their self-interest is non-material, realism implodes. After all,
the power of realism lies precisely in its claims about objective rationality
and objective interests. Any concession to subjectivity (such as leaders
who assess interests based on their historical memory, political culture,
or ideology) opens the door to realism's theoretical antithesis - "ideal-
ism" - and its theoretical nightmare - "constructivism," which claims that
rationalities and interests are "socially constructed" and, hence, fluid,
unstable, and anything but objective. A Theory of Everything such as real-
ism can be either right or wrong: there is no gray in between. As a result,
if they concede any ground to their idealist and subjectivist competitors,
realists can no longer claim possession of the intellectual Rosetta stone
that explains everything all the time.

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 Alexander J. Motýl

When it comes to the Russo-Ukraine conflict, the important dichot-

omy is not between realism and idealism but between the theory of
realism and the empirical knowledge generated by Ukraine studies. For
many Ukraine specialists, realist commentary on the Russo-Ukrainian war
appears to be so utterly and completely divorced from reality as to be sur-
real. Most Ukraine specialists would probably agree that there are three
reasons for realism's striking irrelevance to the current Ukrainian context.
First, realists may believe that the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is a
matter between two states, but Ukraine experts, in both Ukraine and the
West, know that the war is no less the result of important domestic devel-
opments within Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine has been in turmoil since
at least 2004, when the Orange Revolution reversed Viktor Yanukovych's
first attempt to seize power illegally. The Revolution in Dignity - a.k.a.
the Maidan or Euromaidan - that followed in 2013-14 entailed the "peo-
ple power" of millions of Ukrainians who, in late February, succeeded in
effecting Yanukovych's flight from Ukraine. As Ukraine experts know,
both pro-democracy uprisings were the products of domestic factors and
had absolutely nothing to do with Western agendas.
Just as Ukraine underwent these signal changes, so, too, did Rus-
sia - but in an opposite direction. Almost immediately after coming to
power in 1999, Vladimir Putin began dismantling democratic institutions
and civil liberties, seizing control of the media and economy, amassing
enormous power (and wealth) in his own hands, reviving a neo-imperial
rhetoric and agenda, and instituting a cult of personality centered on
his machismo image. Regardless of what one calls the resultant regime,
it marked a radical rejection of the inchoate democratic ethos that char-
acterized Russia under President Boris Yeltsin and a bold leap toward
authoritarianism, empire building, and possibly even fascism. As Ukraine
was rejecting the authoritarianism of Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Vik-
tor Yanukovych, Russia was embracing it under Putin. Realists are entitled
to believe these disparate trends are irrelevant to understanding the ongo-
ing war, but Ukraine experts suggest that downplaying or ignoring these
developments is foolhardy.
Second, focusing as they do on "interests," realists also prefer not to
take ideology, culture, and norms into account, while Ukraine experts do
not see how ignoring these matters can possibly enhance understanding
of the conflict. Putin's neo-imperial ideology, his stated determination

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM

to make Russia great again, his conviction that all Russian speaker
Russians deserving of the Russian state's protection, and his belief th
Ukraine is an artificial state with no right to exist appear to be part
parcel of his pursuit of authoritarianism and empire and his adoption
a hegemonic policy toward Russia's "near abroad." The realist case
ignoring ideology would be stronger if Putin's ideological message we
not so openly rooted in Russia's cultural heritage. As his high popula
ratings suggest, Putin's ideology resonates with, and may even be a p
uct of, Russian political culture.
Realism's disregard of norms also leads it to misunderstand the Rev
tion in Dignity. That, Ukraine experts will insist, was overwhelmingly abo
self-respect and self-empowerment. Participants assert that they took
in the mass marches or manned the barricades because they objected
the Yanukovych regime's daily assaults on their humanity and identity. Ec
nomic issues were irrelevant to their struggle. Today as well, most Ukr
ans will insist that their struggle against Russia is not about the econo
advantages of being associated with the European Union but rather a
their right to self-determination, both as individuals and as a people.
Once again, in ignoring ideology, culture, and norms, realism appe
to be ignoring the two most important developments within Russia
Ukraine. The former abandoned democratic norms at precisely the t
that the latter embraced them. Can these parallel and intersecting m
ments be considered as irrelevant to the war?

Finally, Ukraine experts are not so sure about the bedrock assump-
tion of the realists that states-: - or, more precisely, their elites - always act
rationally. Yanukovych seemed determined to undermine his own power
and did littìe to promote Ukraine's state interests. Putin appears obsessed,
sometimes bizarrely so, with Russian state interests, but it's not at all
clear just how annexing Crimea made Russia stronger. Nor is it clear how
destroying one-third of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine benefited Russia or
Putin. Nor, finally, is it clear just how Russia's interests have been enhanced
by the imposition of Western sanctions. If this is rationality, then the term
is evidently so broad as to encompass self-destructive behavior.

Another salient factor of realism's flawed approach to the Rus-

so-Ukrainian war is this: ignorance about Ukraine.

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 Alexander J. Motýl

Realists are not the only scholars who have been, or are, ignorant about
Ukraine. That ignorance is wide and deep, affecting virtually every aspect
of American - and more generally Western - intellectual life. Knowledge
about Ukraine has been, and to a large degree still is, confined to a small
coterie of specialists, almost none of whom specializes in international
relations theory or is committed to the realist worldview.
Until recently, realists had good reason to ignore Ukraine. After Kyiv
gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994, Ukraine became at best a second- or
third-rate power in the shadow of the significantly larger, richer, and more
powerful Russia. Russia was interesting to realists, all the more so as it had
nuclear weapons and posed a threat of sorts to the United States. Ukraine
was boring - at least until Russia's invasion of Crimea in March 2014 and
the outbreak of war a few months later. As soon as Ukraine became a secu-

rity issue for Russia, it also became a security issue for realists.
The war confronted realists with an explanatory and policy task for
which they were wholly unprepared. Few could read Russian; my guess
is that none knows Ukrainian. The number of realists with an adequate
understanding of Ukrainian history, politics, culture, and economics
could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand - if that. Nonethe-
less, there was a need to stake out a position concerning its conflict with
Russia that affirmed the realist position.
As a result, realists evinced a woefully embarrassing ignorance about
elementary facts regarding Ukraine. Consider the following, from Henry
Kissinger's March 5th op-ed in the Washington Post

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be

just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called
Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has
been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were inter-
twined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian
freedom, starting with the Battìe of Poltava in 1709, were fought on
Ukrainian soil.

Any Ukraine expert could have told Kissinger that Russian history
did not begin only in Kyivan (or Kievan) Rus. It began in many places,
including Russia itself. The Russian religion did not spread from "what
was called Kievan-Rus." What spread was Orthodox Christianity, and it
spread from Constantinople. True, Ukraine "has been part of Russia

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM

for centuries," but it has been no less a part of the Mongol empire, the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish Commonwealth, the Habsbur
Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The Battìe of Poltava was fought by tw
empires, the Swedish and Russian, and had nothing to do with "Russian
freedom" or independence.
In addition, realists grasped at prefab analytic approaches to Ukraine.
Two examples will convey the point. Ukraine is allegedly "deeply divide
into two irreconcilable and homogeneous blocs: western Ukraine spea
Ukrainian, supports the West, and detests Russia; eastern Ukraine speak
Russian, detests the West, and supports Russia. That there are gradations
shadings, and nuances in these divisions is irrelevant. That "deep div
sions" must be politically decisive is also taken for granted.
Another bromide is that Ukraine is "artificial," consisting of territo-
ries and populations that were cobbled together in the course of several
decades. Just what makes Ukraine more artificial than France, Italy, Ger
many, the United States, Russia, or Great Britain remains unarticula
ed. Just why Ukraine's ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity should be
more of a problem than any other country's also remains unexplore
in realist accounts.

Stephen F. Cohen nicely illustrates both clichés in a Nation article

about "fallacies" concerning Ukraine:

Fallacy No. 2: There exists a nation called "Ukraine" and a

"Ukrainian people" who yearn to escape centuries of Russian influ-
ence and to join the West.

Fact: As every informed person knows, Ukraine is a country long

divided by ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, economic and
political differences - particularly its western and eastern regions,
but not only. When the current crisis began in 201 S, Ukraine had
one state, but it was not a single people or a united nation. Some
of these divisions were made worse after 1991 by corrupt elite, but
most of them had developed over centuries.

Unlike realists who come out of international relations, Cohen should

know better. He's a lifelong student of the Soviet Union and Russia; he
speaks Russian. Alternatively, it may be his lifelong "Russocentrism" that
blinds him to the Ukrainian side of things.

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 Alexander J. Motýl

Finally, given their ignorance about Ukraine and inability to read its
native texts, and given their susceptibility to bromides as a substitute for
knowledge, realists naturally tend to accept the "narratives" of the coun-
try they believe matters most in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict - Russia.
Thus, realists generally accept at face value Russian claims that NATO is
a threat to Russia. Just how a feeble alliance that lost its sense of purpose
after the end of the Cold War and that consists of countries that have

slashed their defense budgets, cannot imagine going to war anywhere,

and would almost certainly never send troops to save Estonia, say, from a
Russian takeover could be a threat to anybody is unclear. Faced with that
obvious objection, most realists say that, although the alliance may not
be objectively threatening, the Russians perceive it differently and their
perception is itself a reality.
To illustrate this point, consider John Mearsheimer's empirically
preposterous claims, in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, about why Ukraine
is "the West's fault" when he says that "the taproot of the trouble is NATO
enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine
out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West." What larger strategy?
Western policymakers have certainly been open to Ukraine's efforts to
move westwards, but they have at best been consistently noncommittal
about Ukraine's actually joining any key Western institutions such as the
European Union and NATO.
Mearsheimer goes on to claim that "the EU's expansion eastward and
the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine - begin-
ning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 - were critical elements, too."
Ask Ukrainian democrats and they'll tell you that the West's "backing" of
Ukrainian democracy has been lackadaisical and spotty. Who in the West
refused to cooperate with President Kuchma when he turned authoritar-
ian? Who in the West denounced the criminal Yanukovych regime? And
who in the West did not succumb to Ukraine fatigue after 2008 - precisely
the period when Ukrainian democracy most needed Western support?
Mearsheimer doesn't stop there. "Since the mid-1990s," he writes,
"Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in
recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while
their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion." Bas-
tion? Can Mearsheimer be serious? Ally or partner perhaps. But bastion?
He continues: "For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's demo-
cratically elected and pro-Russian president - which he rightly labeled a

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM

'coup' - was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsu-

la he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabili
Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West." The ignoran
in these two sentences is simply astounding. For starters, democratic the
ory - and especially its Lockean variant, which served as the justificatio
for the American "coup" against the British crown in 1776- easily justifi
popular rebellions against dictators. "Coups" are never the handiwor
of hundreds of thousands of people, as every political scientist shoul
know: they are the results of secret plots by small cabals, usually based
in the military. As any Ukraine expert could tell Mearsheimer, there w
no such thing in Ukraine. Most disturbing is the second sentence, which
reveals Mearsheimer's ignorance of elementary facts about NATO. Ho
could NATO establish a base in Crimea when Ukraine is not a member of

NATO - and has zero chances of becoming one anytime soon?

Finally, realists engage in the worst kind of evidentiary cherry-pick-
ing, citing only those Russian claims that support realism, while ignoring
the many others that do not. Most egregious is their misinterpretation of
Putin. As the above quotation from Mearsheimer demonstrates, realists
insist that Russia's annexation of Crimea was a defensive reaction to the

West's attempts to transform Ukraine into a bastion. But Putin, in all his
explanations of the annexation, has consistently emphasized first, that
Crimea is historically Russian; second, that it holds a revered place in
Russian memory and culture; and third, that the Russian population in
Crimea was under direct threat from the "fascists" who had engineered
the "coup" in Kyiv and therefore needed protecting. Indeed, Russia's
Federation Council explicitly authorized on March 1st the use of force
in defense of Russians and Russian speakers anywhere. Are Putin's
anti-realist justifications delusional? Is he really a realist, as the realists
insist, who doesn't know it? Or is he, as Ukraine experts would claim,
being quite frank about his imperial intentions and aspirations to rees-
tablish Russian glory?
The reason realists feel that they have the authority to pronounce on
a country like Ukraine, with which they are only slighdy acquainted, lies
in their belief that realism holds the answers to all inter-state relations

in all places and at all times - from Thucydides to today. As a Theory of

Everything, realism doesn't need to know the unique facts about countries
and their people. All it needs to know is what it assumes to be a priori true:
that all states are rational actors pursuing their materially defined nation-

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 Alexander J. Motýl

al interests and no contrary fact about Ukraine or Russia could possibly

place that assumption in question.

No. surprisingly, realists and Ukraine experts differ on what Western

policy toward Ukraine and Russia should be. And their disagreements are
anything but academic. Realists generally reject all appeals to justice, fair-
ness, liberation, and the like and insist that Russia will and should have its
way in a struggle that affects its immediate national interests more than it
does those of the West. As a result, the West should seek to accommodate
Russia and convince Ukraine to accept some form of subservience to its
neighbor. As Mearsheimer's writing partner, Stephen Walt, wrote for For-
eign Policy in March:

It's easy to understand why Ukraine wants to jump in bed with the
European Union and NATO; what is not so obvious is why sharing
the covers and pillows with Ukraine is something we should want to
do. A country with a bankrupt economy, modest natural resources,
sharp ethnic divisions, and a notoriously corrupt political system is
normally not seen as a major strategic asset.

Furthermore, the fact that US courtship of Ukraine happens to

make Russian President Vladimir Putin angry is not a good argu-
ment for embracing Kiev either - simply put, Russia is the more
important country. And a long-term squabble isn't in Washington's
or Moscow's long-term interest.

Such a statement is diametrically opposed to the assumptions of

Ukraine experts, who generally emphasize that the roots of the conflict lie
in the clash between Russian and Ukrainian regime types, and their histo-
ry, culture, ideology, and values; that Russia's regime, imperial ambitions,
and ideology pose a threat to the West as much as they threaten Ukraine;
and that Russia cannot be accommodated - not because that's normative-

ly bad, but because doing so would upend the world order and affect the
security and survival of the West. Russia can only be stopped, by means of
the West's support of Ukrainian independence, security, and stability - not
because that's the morally right thing to do, but because it's easier to stop

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 THE SURREALISM OF REALISM

Russia in the Donbas than in Silesia.

The choice for policymakers is simple: Whom should they trust more -
area specialists who claim to know their country of interest well or grand
theoreticians who believe that their theory is, was, and always will be right?
The megalomania of realism should caution policymakers against hewing
too closely to a Theory of Everything that rests its boastful claims of omni-
science on empirical knowledge of nothing. Theory should inform and
enlighten; it should suggest new ways of seeing and understanding. But
it can be useful if and only if it is grounded in actual facts. Assumptions
about reality cannot trump knowledge of reality. ©

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