John Mearsheimer
speaker
2,303 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2023
last heard 28 May
John Mearsheimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
This is our backyard, and we do not tolerate distant great powers coming into our neighborhood.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
And if we don't like...
Great powers coming into our neighborhood.
It's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.
They made that manifestly clear when the Cold War ended and they
exacted a promise from us that we would not expand NATO.
And then when we started expanding NATO, they made it clear after the first tranche in 1999 that they were profoundly unhappy with that.
They made it clear in 2004 after the second tranche that they were profoundly unhappy with that expansion.
And then in April 2008, when NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO, they made it unequivocally clear, not just Putin, that that was not going to happen.
They were drawing a red line in the sand.
And it is no accident that in August 2008—
Remember, the Bucharest summit is April 2008, and August 2008, you had a war between Georgia and Russia, and that involved, at its core, NATO expansion.
So the Americans and their allies should have understood by at least August 2008 that continuing to push to bring Ukraine into NATO...
was going to lead to disaster.
And I would note that there were all sorts of people in the 1990s, like George Kennan, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Paul Nitze, and so forth and so on, who argued that NATO expansion would end up producing a disaster, which it has.
I would note that at the famous April 2008 Bucharest summit where NATO said that Ukraine would be brought into the alliance, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the German and French leaders respectively, opposed that decision.
Angela Merkel later said that the reason she opposed it was because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war.
Just think about that.
Merkel is telling you that she opposed NATO expansion into Ukraine because she understood correctly that Putin would see it as a declaration of war.
Showing 961–980 of 2,303 · page 49 of 116
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