Is It Only a Matter of Time for Ukraine?
with John Mearsheimer
The Ukraine War shows no signs of winding down, and neither does US involvement. President Biden has just asked Congress for an additional $60 billion in aid for the conflict. In an Oval Office address last Friday, he reiterated his earlier promise not to commit US troops to the war while at the same time suggesting that we will continue to send money and weapons until Russia is driven out of the country.
But what if money and weapons are not enough? According to my guest this week, the political scientist and international relations expert John Mearsheimer, Ukraine is outmanned and outgunned by Russia, and they will remain so even with more US funding. He believes that Russia will eventually whittle down Ukraine’s resources until the country is no longer able to defend itself.
If that happens, it’s easy to imagine Biden’s apparently unshakeable commitment to Ukraine taking us in a disastrous direction. He wouldn’t be the first president to break a promise or to lead the US into an interminable military boondoggle. Money and troops aside, the political cost of backing the losing side in a war and admitting defeat could be devastating to him and the Democrats (though Ukraine has support from both parties). We need an honest accounting of the incentives at work here. If the time comes for the US to cut its losses—that is, if the time hasn’t already come—will Biden have the will to put aside political self-interest and do what’s best for the country? If John’s analysis is correct, Biden may need to have an answer ready sooner rather than later.
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GLENN LOURY: Are you worried about escalation?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I am worried about escalation. In my opinion, it can take two forms. The one that scared me the most was one where the Russians were losing. Let's say that the American plan to bring the Russians to their knees was working. Yeah, let's assume it worked out. I believe the Russians would have used nuclear weapons. Or to put it in more qualified terms, it's highly likely that the Russians would have used nuclear weapons.
You want to remember, Glenn, that if the Russians were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine when they were losing, they would not be using nuclear weapons against the West, specifically against the United States. They would be using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians have no nuclear weapons of their own, So they would not be able to retaliate with nuclear weapons. And we have made it clear—Macron has been especially outspoken on this—we the West would not use nuclear weapons in response to Russian use inside of Ukraine.
Well, given that calculus, you can see where the Russians would be seriously tempted to use nuclear weapons to try to rescue the situation if they were losing, right? So the fact that the Russians are doing much better on the battlefield today, ironically, minimizes the prospects of of escalation. That's one scenario.
The other scenario, which is becoming the more likely—one more likely escalation scenario—is if Ukraine loses. If the Ukrainian military collapses or the Russians just simply start to overrun them because the Russians have larger numbers of troops and much more artillery and assorted other kinds of equipment, and the Ukrainians are being pushed back, what is the United States going to do? If, in a more extreme case and a possible case, the Ukrainian military collapses and the Russians are overrunning most of Ukraine, what are we going to do? It's very important to remember how deeply invested we are in this war. Can we really afford to lose? Can NATO afford to lose?
Anyway, I raise all of this because I think there will be a serious temptation for us to get directly involved. And given the number of foolish moves that the United States and its allies have made with regard to NATO expansion, I wouldn't be surprised if we got involved. Do I think it's likely? No. But I think it's a serious possibility. So I like to say, I think there's a non-trivial chance that we would get involved if Ukraine is losing in a serious way. And I think at this point in time, that's much more likely than the Russians losing and the Russians turning to nuclear weapons.
Well, I was going to ask you about that. You're scaring the hell out of me, by the way. I was going to ask you—because I read your blitzkrieg essay—about the consequences of this counteroffensive that the Ukrainians were mounting and what the war of attrition betting odds are, given the underlying fundamentals about the differences in the arrayment of forces between the conflicting parties.
Yeah, the counteroffensive which was launched on 4 June of this year was a blitzkrieg. It was a clever strategy. It was designed to deliver a rather quick hammer blow to the Russian military and force them to the negotiating table where we would, in theory, get a very good agreement. “We” meaning the West and the United States.
The counteroffensive has clearly failed. It's actually been a disaster. What that means is that we're now engaged in a war of attrition, which was the case before the counteroffensive was launched. It's important to understand that we launched the counteroffensive, or the Ukrainians launched the counteroffensive, to get out of a war of attrition. Because I think The Ukrainians and the Americans understood that if it was a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could not win.
But we're back into a war of attrition. So the $64,000 question is, who wins a war of attrition? And the answer is the Russians. And you say to yourself, “Why is that the case?” Well, what matters the most in a war of attrition is the relative population size of the combatant, because how big your population is determines how many soldiers you could produce. And second, the balance of artillery, how much artillery each side has. Because in a war of attrition, as we used to say when I was a cadet at West Point, what really matters is artillery. It is the king of battle.
Well, if you look at the population figures, the Russians have five people for every one Ukrainian. The Russians have a five-to-one advantage in population. That means they can produce five soldiers for every one soldier Ukraine can produce. That is terrible news for the Ukrainians in a war of attrition. In terms of artillery, the conventional wisdom is—almost everybody agrees on this, including people in the West and in Ukraine—that the Russians have somewhere between a five-to-one and a ten-to one advantage in artillery.
And moreover, that advantage is likely to grow in the future, because the Ukrainians cannot produce much artillery. We don't have much artillery to give them and can't spin up the industrial capacity to produce large amounts of artillery tubes and artillery shells quickly. Well, on the other hand, the Russians are pumping out artillery tubes and artillery projectiles like crazy. So this advantage, which is somewhere between five-to-one and ten-to-one in artillery, is going to grow with the passage of time.
The point is, when you look at the balance of artillery and you look at the manpower balance, it's hard to see how the Russians don't win. So my argument, Glenn, moving forward, is that as this war of attrition goes on, what will happen is the Russians will grind down the Ukrainians.
I read Mearsheimer years ago when I was exploring the origins and dictates of geo-political realism. I found his theories then to be idiosyncratic and compelling. He has not aged well in the Trumpian environment. He is a defeatist and one dimensional thinker and writer who will lot budge from his long standing views. He is wrong and dangerous, and, as is evident by the criticisms he’s received in the past several years, clearly out of step with the challenge of protecting democracy and liberty. To him, liberty is expendable.
Mearsheimer must be understood as an International Relations theorist who seeks in all world events confirmation of the theory that has garnered him academic success and influence, i.e. Offensive Realism. He takes something of an economist's view of the international system, in which the ordering principle is the relative military capability of the component states, which many international relations scholars regard as very reductive. In Mearsheimer's view, only a small number of states actually exercise any degree of agency. He essentially denies the agency of most European states, including Ukraine, the Baltics etc. His system of thought is not concerned with the messy details of history; values and human motivation do not count. He should not be considered an expert on Russia or Ukraine, because the internal working of these states, the motivations of these peoples, or the cultural identities at issue are not relevant to his view of international relations. What Mearsheimer said to you needs to be properly contextualized, in other words.