Mearsheimer gives a 1 hours speech to the “European Parliment” sponsored by “Patriots for Europe”, on 11-11
Here is a one page summary, with full transcript below.
Mearsheimer – One-Page Summary
Main Point (Bold):
Great-power politics—not morality, democracy, or international law—determines world outcomes. The U.S. and China are on an unavoidable collision course, and the Ukraine war was driven primarily by Western strategic miscalculations, not Russian expansionism.
———————— One-Page Summary of John Mearsheimer’s Speech
Main Argument (Bold Summary)
John Mearsheimer argues **the West—primarily the United States—is principally responsible for provoking the Ukraine war** through NATO expansion, EU expansion, and efforts to turn Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy. He maintains that Russia’s invasion was a *preventive war* triggered by what it perceived as an existential threat.
Supporting Points
• **NATO Expansion as Root Cause:** Since 2008, NATO’s push to include Ukraine crossed what Russian leaders consistently described as their ‘brightest red line.’
• **Russian Security Concerns Ignored:** Western leaders were repeatedly warned—by diplomats, intelligence officials, and scholars—that Ukraine in NATO would be seen as an existential threat by Russia.
• **Evidence Russia Did Not Intend to Conquer Ukraine:** Before Feb. 2022, there was no evidence Putin sought to absorb Ukraine or create a new empire. Troop levels were far too small for such aims.
• **Russia Initially Sought Negotiations:** Multiple negotiation tracks (Belarus, Israel, Istanbul) indicate Russia was willing to settle for neutrality, not conquest.
• **War Became a War of Attrition:** After talks collapsed (under Western pressure), the conflict became a grinding war Russia is structurally advantaged to win.
• **Ukraine is Being Devastated:** Massive casualties, territorial losses, industrial collapse, and long-term demographic damage.
• **Russia Likely to Win an “Ugly Victory”:** Expected outcome: Russia holds 20–40% of Ukraine; Ukraine becomes a weak, dependent ‘rump state.’
• **Europe Will Be Weaker and Divided:** Economic harm, political fracturing, long-term hostility with Russia, and insecurity for decades.
• **NATO Will Be Damaged:** Losing a proxy war that NATO heavily supported will have political fallout and weaken confidence in the alliance.
• **US–EU Relations Will Fracture:** A major blame game is expected—Europe blames Trump for reducing support, Trump blames Europe for not carrying their weight.
• **Multipolarity Guarantees Long-Term Instability:** With the U.S. needing to shift focus toward China, Europe cannot rely on long-term American security support.
• **Final Conclusion:** Had the West not insisted on NATO expansion into Ukraine, the war likely would not have occurred—and Europe would be more secure, stable, and prosperous today.
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Thank you very much, Tom, for that kind introduction. It’s a great pleasure and an honor to be here today to speak at the European Parliament. I’d like to thank Patriots for Europe for inviting me and thank all of you for coming out to listen.
Europe is in deep trouble today, mainly because of the Ukraine war, which has played a key role in undermining what had been largely a peaceful region. Unfortunately, the situation is not likely to improve in the years ahead. In fact, Europe is likely to be less stable moving forward than it is today.
The present situation in Europe stands in marked contrast to the unprecedented stability that Europe enjoyed during the unipolar moment, which ran from 1992 – the year after the Soviet Union collapsed – until about 2017, when China and Russia emerged as great powers, transforming unipolarity into multipolarity.
We all remember Francis Fukuyama’s famous article “The End of History,” written in 1989, which argued that liberal democracy was destined to spread across the world, bringing peace and prosperity in its wake. That argument turned out to be wrong, but many in the West believed it for more than twenty years. Few Europeans imagined, in the heyday of unipolarity, that Europe would be in so much trouble today.
So the question on the table is: what went wrong?
The Ukraine war – which I will argue was provoked by the West and especially the United States – is the principal cause of European insecurity today. Nevertheless, there is a second factor at play: the shift in the global balance of power from unipolarity to multipolarity around 2017, which was sure to threaten the security architecture in Europe. Still, there’s good reason to think that this shift was manageable on its own. But the Ukraine war, coupled with the coming of multipolarity, guaranteed big trouble – trouble that is not likely to go away in the foreseeable future.
Let me start by explaining how the end of unipolarity threatens the foundations of European stability. Then I will discuss the effects of the Ukraine war on Europe and how those effects interacted with the shift to multipolarity to alter the European landscape in profound ways.
The U.S. “Pacifier” and European Stability
The key to preserving stability in Europe during the Cold War, and in all of Europe during the unipolar moment, was the U.S. military presence embedded in NATO. The United States has dominated that alliance from the beginning, which has made it almost impossible for the member states under the American security umbrella to fight with each other. In effect, the United States has been a powerful pacifying force in Europe.
Today’s European elites recognize that simple fact, which explains why they are deeply committed to keeping American troops in Europe and maintaining a U.S.-dominated NATO. It is worth noting that when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union was moving to pull its troops out of Eastern Europe and put an end to the Warsaw Pact, Moscow did not object to a U.S.-dominated NATO remaining intact. Like West Europeans at the time, Soviet leaders understood and appreciated this “pacifier” logic. However, they were adamantly opposed to NATO expansion. More on that later.
Some might argue that the EU – not NATO – was the main cause of European stability during the unipolar moment, which is why the EU, not NATO, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. But this is wrong. While the EU has been a remarkably successful institution, its success depends on NATO keeping the peace in Europe.
Turning Marx on his head, the political-military institution – NATO – is the base or foundation, and the economic institution – the EU – is the superstructure. Absent the American pacifier, not only does NATO as we know it disappear, but the EU would also be undermined in serious ways.
During unipolarity (1992–2017), the U.S. was by far the most powerful state in the international system and could easily maintain a substantial military presence in Europe. That unipolar world went away with the coming of multipolarity. The United States is no longer the only great power in the world. China and Russia are now great powers, which means American policymakers have to think differently about the world around them.
The New Distribution of Power
To understand what multipolarity means for Europe, we must look at the distribution of power among the world’s three great powers.
The United States is still the most powerful country in the world, but China has been catching up and is now widely regarded as a peer competitor. Its huge population, coupled with remarkable economic growth since the early 1990s, has turned it into a potential hegemon in East Asia.
For the United States – which is already a regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere – another great power achieving hegemony in East Asia or Europe is a deeply worrisome prospect. Remember that the U.S. entered both World Wars to prevent Germany and Japan from becoming regional hegemons in Europe and East Asia. The same logic applies today to China in East Asia.
Russia is the weakest of the three great powers. Contrary to what many Europeans think, Russia is not a threat to overrun all of Ukraine, much less Eastern Europe. It has spent three and a half years just trying to conquer the eastern fraction of Ukraine. The Russian army is not the Wehrmacht, and Russia is not the Soviet Union during the Cold War or China in East Asia today. In other words, Russia is not a potential hegemon in Europe.
Given this distribution of power, there is a strategic imperative for the United States to focus on containing China and preventing it from dominating East Asia. There is no compelling strategic reason, however, for the U.S. to maintain a significant military presence in Europe, given that Russia is not a threat to become a European hegemon. Devoting defense resources to Europe reduces the resources available for East Asia. This logic explains the U.S. “pivot to Asia.” But if a country pivots to one region, it necessarily pivots away from another – in this case, away from Europe.
There is another important dimension that has little to do with the global balance of power, but further reduces the likelihood that the U.S. will remain committed to a large military presence in Europe: the U.S. relationship with Israel. The United States has a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. That connection, due largely to the power of the Israel lobby inside the U.S., means that America will support Israel unconditionally and that American forces will be involved – directly or indirectly – in Israel’s wars.
In short, the U.S. will continue to allocate substantial military resources to Israel and the broader Middle East. This obligation creates an additional incentive to draw down U.S. forces in Europe and to push European countries to provide for their own security.
The bottom line: powerful structural forces associated with the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity, coupled with America’s peculiar relationship with Israel, have the potential to eliminate the U.S. pacifier from Europe and NATO – which would obviously have serious negative consequences for European security.
It is possible to avoid an American exit – which is surely what almost every European leader wants. But achieving that outcome requires wise strategy and skillful diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic. That is not what we have gotten so far. Instead, Europe and the United States foolishly sought to bring Ukraine into NATO, which provoked a losing war with Russia and markedly increased the odds that the U.S. will depart Europe and NATO will be eviscerated.
The Causes of the Ukraine War
To understand the consequences of the Ukraine war, we have to understand its causes. The conventional wisdom in the West is that Vladimir Putin is responsible. The claim is that he aims to conquer all of Ukraine, incorporate it into a Greater Russia, and then move on to build an empire in Eastern Europe. In this story, Putin is a mortal threat to the West and must be dealt with forcefully. He is portrayed as an imperialist with a master plan.
There are numerous problems with this story. Let me spell out five.
First, there is no evidence from before 24 February 2022 that Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia. Proponents of the conventional wisdom cannot point to anything he wrote or said indicating that conquering Ukraine was a desirable and feasible goal that he intended to pursue.
When challenged, they point to his claim that Ukraine is an “artificial state” and to his view that Russians and Ukrainians are one people – themes in his well-known article of July 12, 2021. But those comments say nothing about a decision to invade and conquer Ukraine.
If you actually read that July 12 article, there is no evidence he was bent on conquest – in fact he says the opposite. He tells the Ukrainian people, “You want to establish a state of your own? You are welcome.” He writes that the only answer for Russia is to treat Ukraine “with respect.” He concludes: “What Ukraine will be is up to its citizens to decide.” That does not sound like someone determined to conquer the country.
In that article, and again in a key speech on February 21, 2022, he wrote that Russia accepts the geopolitical reality that emerged after the dissolution of the USSR. He reiterated that point when he announced the invasion on February 24. All of these statements are at odds with the claim that he wanted to conquer all of Ukraine.
Second, Putin did not have anywhere near enough troops to conquer Ukraine. Estimates put the invading force at 100,000–190,000 troops. There is no way such a force could conquer, occupy, and absorb all of Ukraine. By contrast, when Germany invaded only the western half of Poland in 1939, it sent 1.5 million troops. Ukraine is more than three times larger than western Poland and had nearly twice as many people. The Russian invasion force was a tiny fraction of that size.
Russian leaders were well aware that the U.S. and its European allies had been arming and training the Ukrainian military since 2014, and that Ukraine’s army was not a paper tiger. Putin and his lieutenants knew that they were facing a capable force with powerful Western backing. Their aim was to achieve limited territorial gains and force Ukraine to the bargaining table – which is exactly what happened early in the war.
Third, immediately after the war began, it was Russia – not Ukraine – that pushed for negotiations. Talks started in Belarus just four days after the invasion and later shifted to mediation through Israel and Istanbul. The available evidence indicates that Russia negotiated seriously and was not interested in annexing all of Ukraine, aside from Crimea and possibly Donbas. It was Ukraine – under pressure from Britain and the United States – that walked away from the negotiations, which were making real progress.
Fourth, before the war, Putin tried to find a diplomatic solution. On December 17, 2021, he sent letters to President Biden and NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg proposing a deal based on a written guarantee that: (1) Ukraine would not join NATO; (2) no offensive weapons would be stationed near Russia’s borders; and (3) NATO forces moved into Eastern Europe since 1997 would be pulled back. Whatever one thinks of the feasibility of these demands, they show he was trying to avoid war. The U.S. refused to negotiate seriously.
Fifth, putting Ukraine aside, there is not a scintilla of evidence that Putin planned to conquer any other countries in Eastern Europe. Russia does not have the military capability to overrun the Baltic States, Poland, or Romania – and those countries are NATO members, which would bring war with the United States.
In sum, while it is widely believed – especially in Europe – that Putin is an imperialist determined to conquer Ukraine and then move west, the evidence does not support that view. The United States and its European allies provoked the war. This is not to deny that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. But the underlying cause was NATO’s decision to bring Ukraine into the alliance – a move nearly all Russian leaders saw as an existential threat.
NATO expansion was part of a broader Western strategy aimed at making Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. There were three prongs: (1) bringing Ukraine into NATO; (2) bringing it into the EU; and (3) engineering regime change to turn Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy. Russian leaders feared all three, but they feared NATO enlargement the most.
As Putin put it, Russia cannot feel safe, develop, or exist while facing a permanent threat from the territory of today’s Ukraine. He was not interested in making Ukraine part of Russia; he was interested in ensuring it did not become a springboard for Western aggression against Russia. To deal with that threat, he launched what I would call a preventive war.
Why NATO Expansion Was Central
What is the basis for the claim that NATO expansion was the principal cause of the Ukraine war?
First, Russian leaders said so repeatedly. Putin and others, including the defense and foreign ministers and the ambassador to Washington, publicly emphasized that NATO expansion into Ukraine was an existential threat. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it succinctly in January 2022: “The key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.”
Second, the centrality of NATO expansion is illustrated by events during the war. In the Istanbul talks, Russian negotiators made it clear that Ukraine had to accept permanent neutrality and renounce NATO membership. The Ukrainians actually accepted that condition. More recently, in June 2024, Putin again listed Ukrainian renunciation of NATO membership as a core demand for ending the war.
Third, many prominent Western figures understood all along that NATO expansion into Ukraine would provoke Russia. William Burns – now CIA director, then ambassador to Moscow – wrote a famous memo to Condoleezza Rice in 2008 after the Bucharest summit. He warned that Ukrainian entry into NATO was “the brightest of all red lines” for the Russian elite, and that not a single serious Russian figure viewed it as anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests. He predicted that it would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.”
At that same 2008 summit, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy opposed moving forward on bringing Ukraine into NATO. Merkel later said she was “very sure that Putin is not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.”
Supporters of NATO expansion sometimes argue that Moscow should not have worried because NATO is a purely defensive alliance. But that is not how Russian leaders see it – and their perception is what matters. Russians clearly regarded NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat, and as Merkel put it, as a declaration of war.
There is no question that Putin saw Ukraine joining NATO as a mortal threat and was willing to go to war to prevent it – which is exactly what he did in February 2022.
The Course of the War
After the failure of the Istanbul negotiations in April 2022, the conflict turned into a brutal war of attrition, bearing strong resemblance to World War I on the Western Front. During this period Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian oblasts, in addition to Crimea, and now controls roughly 22 percent of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory – all in the eastern part of the country.
The West has provided enormous support to Ukraine, doing everything but directly fighting. It is no accident that Russian leaders believe they are at war with the West. Nevertheless, political shifts in Washington have led to efforts to reduce U.S. support and shift the burden onto Europe.
Russia is clearly winning this war and is likely to prevail. In a war of attrition, the side with more soldiers and firepower usually wins. Russia has a significant advantage in both. Ukrainian commanders acknowledge that Russian forces outnumber them roughly 3:1 overall, and as much as 6:1 in some sectors. Ukraine does not have enough troops to man its entire front line.
In terms of firepower, Russia has long enjoyed a major advantage in artillery – estimates range from 3:1 to as high as 10:1. Russia also has a large inventory of highly accurate glide bombs and a growing edge in drones. Ukraine, by contrast, faces serious manpower shortages and relies heavily on Western weapons. But Western industrial capacity is not sufficient to match Russia’s output.
On top of that, Russia possesses a large arsenal of missiles and drones capable of striking deep into Ukraine, destroying infrastructure and weapon depots. Ukraine can hit targets in Russia with drones, but not at the same scale, and such strikes are unlikely to change the situation on the front lines.
No Realistic Peace Settlement
There has been much talk about a diplomatic settlement, but the sad truth is that there is no hope for a meaningful peace agreement. The war will be settled on the battlefield, and Russia is likely to win an ugly victory – not a decisive conquest of all of Ukraine, but a victory that leaves Russia controlling perhaps 20–40 percent of pre-2014 Ukraine and leaves the rest as a weakened rump state.
Russia is unlikely to try to occupy the entire country because western Ukraine is heavily populated by ethnic Ukrainians who would fiercely resist and turn it into a quagmire. Thus the likely outcome is a frozen conflict between a greater Russia and a dysfunctional rump Ukraine backed by Europe.
Consequences for Ukraine, Europe, and Russia
Ukraine has been effectively wrecked. It has already lost substantial territory and is likely to lose more. Its economy is in tatters, with no prospect of recovery in the foreseeable future. It has suffered enormous casualties – on the order of a million people, by my estimate – in a country already in demographic decline.
Russia has paid a significant price too, but nowhere near what Ukraine has suffered.
Europe will almost certainly remain aligned with rump Ukraine because of sunk costs and pervasive Russophobia. But this continuing relationship will not work to Ukraine’s advantage. It will incentivize Moscow to keep Ukraine weak and dysfunctional so that it cannot join NATO or the EU or threaten Russia.
Relations between Europe and Russia, meanwhile, are likely to remain poisonous and dangerous. Europeans will try to undermine Russia’s hold on annexed territories and look for ways to cause economic and political trouble for Moscow. Russia, for its part, will look for opportunities to cause trouble inside Europe and to fracture the West.
There are multiple flashpoints where a wider war could break out even after the fighting in Ukraine freezes: the Arctic, the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad, Belarus, Moldova and Transnistria, and the Black Sea. In other words, the threat of a major European war will not disappear when the current fighting stops.
Inside Europe and Across the Atlantic
A Russian victory in Ukraine – even an ugly one – will be a stunning defeat for Europe and for NATO, which has been deeply involved in the conflict and committed to defeating Russia. NATO’s failure will lead to bitter recriminations among member states and within their domestic politics. The debate over “who lost Ukraine” will occur in a Europe already racked by internal divisions.
Some will question NATO’s future altogether. Any weakening of NATO will in turn undermine the EU, because NATO’s security umbrella has been the foundation on which the EU has flourished. The war has also severely disrupted the flow of Russian gas and oil to Europe, hurting major economies and slowing overall growth in the Eurozone – with recovery likely to be slow even after the conflict freezes.
Across the Atlantic, a defeat in Ukraine will fuel a blame game between Europe and the United States. Many in Washington will argue that Europeans did not do enough; many in Europe will argue that Washington abandoned Ukraine at a critical moment. Given that U.S.–European relations were already contentious, this will make a bad situation worse.
More fundamentally, the historic shift from unipolarity to multipolarity has already pushed the United States to pivot to East Asia, which effectively means pivoting away from Europe. The Ukraine war – and its outcome – will reinforce that trend and eat away at the fabric of the transatlantic relationship, much to Europe’s detriment.
Who Is Responsible?
The Ukraine war has been a disaster and is almost certain to keep giving in the years ahead. It has had catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, poisoned relations between Europe and Russia, made Europe more dangerous, damaged European economies and politics, and badly hurt transatlantic relations.
This calamity raises the inevitable question: Who is responsible? That question is not going away. The answer, in my view, is that the United States and its European allies are principally responsible. The decision at the April 2008 Bucharest summit to bring Ukraine into NATO – a decision relentlessly pursued thereafter – is the main driving force behind the war.
Most European leaders and publics will continue to blame Putin. But they are wrong. The war could have been avoided if the West had not decided to bring Ukraine into NATO, or even if it had backed off from that commitment once Russia made its opposition unmistakably clear.
Had that happened, Ukraine would almost certainly be intact today within its pre-2014 borders, and Europe would be more stable and more prosperous. But that ship has sailed, and Europe must now deal with the disastrous results of a series of avoidable blunders.
Thank you.