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1
e.g. in the Question & Answer portion of a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago: ‘Why is Ukraine the
West’s fault?’, 25 Sept. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 (at 47:00).
2
Timothy Bella, ‘Kissinger says Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end war’, Washington Post, 24 May
2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/24/henry-kissinger-ukraine-russia-territory-davos/.
(Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 4 Aug. 2022.)
3
George F. Kennan, ‘A fateful error’, New York Times, 5 Feb. 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/
opinion/a-fateful-error.html.
4
Anne Applebaum, Twitter post, 1 March 2022, https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1498623804200865792.
International Affairs 98: 6 (2022) 1873–1893; doi: 10.1093/ia/iiac217
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. This is
an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited.
the Russia–Ukraine war could end’, New York Times, 18 March 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/
opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-emma-ashford.html.
14
e.g. in this short video appearance, in which Mearsheimer introduces his understanding of structural realism
and its policy implications, and describes himself as a ‘structural realist, like Ken Waltz’: John J. Mearsheimer,
‘Structural realism’, The Open University introduction to International Relations, 3 Oct. 2014, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=RXllDh6rD18.
15
Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
16
John J. Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 403, n. 5.
17
Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics, p. 40.
18
Paul Poast, Twitter post, 4 April 2022, https://twitter.com/profpaulpoast/status/1511075001897693188; John J.
Mearsheimer, The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2018).
19
G. Lowes Dickinson, The European anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
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Dominic Johnson and Brad Thayer offer yet another way to think of the
behavioural micro-foundations of structural theory. They suggest that the three
core assumptions about behaviour made by Mearsheimer and other offensive
realists—self-help, power maximization and out-group fear—are not only evolu-
tionarily adaptive but also empirically common in primate and human societies.
States behave the way offensive realists predict, not because of an anarchical inter-
31
Annette Freyberg-Inan, What moves man: the realist theory of international relations and its judgment of human nature
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 4.
32
Dominic Johnson and Bradley Thayer, ‘The evolution of offensive realism’, Politics and the Life Sciences 35: 1,
2016, pp. 1–26.
33
Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘International politics is not foreign policy’, Security Studies 6: 1, 1996, pp. 54–7.
34
Andreas M. Bock, Ingo Henneberg and Friedrich Plank, ‘“If you compress the spring, it will snap back hard”:
the Ukrainian crisis and the balance of threat theory’, International Journal 70: 1, 2015, pp. 101–109.
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35
Alexander Korolev, ‘Theories of non-balancing and Russia’s foreign policy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41: 6,
2018, p. 889.
36
Stephen Sestanovich, ‘Could it have been otherwise?’, The American Interest 10: 5, 2015, https://www.the-
american-interest.com/2015/04/14/could-it-have-been-otherwise/.
37
Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev, ‘Measuring national power: is Putin’s Russia in decline?’, Europe–Asia
Studies 73: 2, 2021, pp. 291–317.
38
See e.g. Andrej Krickovic, ‘The symbiotic China–Russia partnership: cautious riser and desperate challenger’,
Chinese Journal of International Politics 10: 3, 2017, pp. 299–329.
39
Robert Gilpin, ‘The theory of hegemonic war’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18: 4, 1988, p. 613.
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48
Ted Hopf, ‘“Crimea is ours”: a discursive history’, International Relations 30: 2, 2016, pp. 227–55.
49
Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, ‘Bad world: the negativity bias in international politics’, Inter-
national Security 43: 3, 2018, pp. 96–140.
50
This is the central premise of applications of prospect theory in IR. See Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, ‘Prospect theory
and foreign policy analysis’, in Robert A. Denemark, ed., The international studies encyclopedia (Hoboken, NJ:
Blackwell, 2010).
51
Tuomas Forsberg and Christer Pursiainen, ‘The psychological dimension of Russian foreign policy: Putin and
the annexation of Crimea’, Global Society 31: 2, 2017, p. 229.
52
Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Putin’s no chess master’, The Atlantic, 26 Jan. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/
archive/2022/01/russia-ukraine-putin-nato/621370/; Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’,
1 March 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-ukraine-invasion-military-strat-
egy/622956/.
53
Stephen M. Walt, ‘An International Relations theory guide to the war in Ukraine’, Foreign Policy, 8 March
2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/08/an-international-relations-theory-guide-to-ukraines-war/.
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54
Forsberg and Pursiainen, ‘The psychological dimension of Russian foreign policy’, p. 223.
55
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among nations: the struggle for power and peace, sixth ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1985), pp. 7–8.
56
See Andrew A. G. Ross, ‘Realism, emotion, and dynamic allegiances in global politics’, International Theory 5: 2,
2013, pp. 273–99.
57
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), pp.
34–51.
58
On the underlying logic, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain (London: Pan,
2018).
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59
Morgenthau, Politics among nations, p. 94.
60
Tuomas Forsberg, Regina Heller and Reinhard Wolf, ‘Status and emotions in Russian foreign policy’, Commu-
nist and Post-Communist Studies 47: 3–4, 2014, p. 267.
61
Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, Quest for status: Chinese and Russian foreign policy (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 233.
62
Forsberg et al., ‘Status and emotions in Russian foreign policy’, p. 267.
63
T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson and William C. Wohlforth, Status in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), p. 19.
64
Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the idea of Europe: a study in identity and international relations, 2nd edn (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2016).
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Fear of revolution
A literal reading of structural realist theory might suggest that threats are objective
phenomena, emanating from attempts to alter the balance of power. Failures to
interpret threat (or what might appear threatening to the other side) correctly are
down to systemic ‘fuzziness’ or ineffective communication. Theoretical innova-
Conclusion
Did Russia invade Ukraine because structural factors acted on it, or because of its
leader’s aggressive tendencies? In all likelihood, a mix of both sets of variables was
at play. A diligent reading of Mearsheimer and other structural realists suggests
that structure does not explain everything. In fact, depending on the case, precipi-
tating factors may do most of the explanatory work. The vigorous debate gener-
ated by Mearsheimer’s analysis of the Ukraine crisis has highlighted some frequent
misunderstandings accompanying both academic and public discourse on applica-
tions of realist theory:
Misinterpretation. Mearsheimer sets out a coherent case of western responsibility
for the Ukraine crisis. That is laudable in and of itself, if only because few others
in academic IR have been willing to make that argument and stick to it. However,
a look beyond the headlines suggests that while US designs to turn Ukraine into
a western bulwark on Russia’s doorstep constituted the root cause of the crisis, a
host of other factors—including economics, demographics and Putin’s mystical
notion of Russian–Ukrainian unity—also feature in his explanation.
Misapplication. Conventional wisdom holds that IR theory offers simple,
uniform lessons for interpreting a crisis such as the war in Ukraine and deriving
policy responses. Liberal theory is thought to view Russian foreign policy as
an outgrowth of Putin’s increasingly authoritarian domestic rule. Accordingly,
it promotes a tough and unwavering stance to counter the Russian leader’s
88
Gerard Toal, Near abroad: Putin, the West, and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017), pp. 46–7.
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91
John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Realism, the real world, and anarchy’, in Michael Brecher and Frank P. Harvey, eds,
Realism and institutionalism in international politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 29.
92
Stephen M. Walt, ‘Why do people hate realism so much?’, Foreign Policy, 13 June 2022, https://foreignpolicy.
com/2022/06/13/why-do-people-hate-realism-so-much/.
93
Morgenthau, Politics among nations, p. 12.
94
See e.g. Ivan A. Gobozov, ‘Istoriya i moral’, Filosofiya i Obshchestvo 1: 57, 2010, pp. 10–11, https://www.socio-
nauki.ru/journal/files/fio/2010_1/istoriya_i_moral.pdf.
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