Other people can see where Mearsheimer contradicts himself. At times he’s made a fool of himself.
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‘According to John Mearsheimer, the influential University of Chicago political scientist most associated with the vital interests approach, “Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest for the West. It is a vital strategic interest for the Russians, they have made that perfectly clear, and not just Putin.”
But then Mearsheimer contradicts himself: “Putin is a 19th Century man. He does view the world in terms of balance of power politics … In the case of Europe, we were thinking like 21st Century people.” In other words, Mearsheimer appears to be saying that Ukraine matters to Putin, not because it has mattered, matters and will always matter to Russia in some objective way. Rather, it matters because he is a 19th century man, harking back to a period of imperial ambitions and rule by Russia, when it became the largest country in the world. By implication, were Putin a modern man or a 15th century czar, Ukraine would matter less or not at all.’
