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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.
Appearances
What did the United States and its friends in Europe do?
They continued to push and push because we thought that we could push NATO expansion down their throat after 2008, the same way we did in 1999 and 2004.
But we were wrong, and it all blew up in our face in 2014.
And when it blew up in our face in 2014, what did we do?
Did we back off and say, well, maybe the Russians have some legitimate security interests?
No, that's not the way we operate.
We continued to double down.
And the end result is that in 2022, you got a war.
And as I've argued for a long time now, we, the West, are principally responsible for that, not Vladimir Putin.
Yeah.
To put it in more general terms, what we were trying to do was turn Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia's border.
And it really wasn't NATO expansion alone.
NATO expansion was the most important element of our strategy.
But the strategy had two other dimensions.
One was EU expansion, and the third was the color revolution.
We were trying to force Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the basic goal there was to turn Ukraine into a pro-Western liberal democracy.
And that meant that you'd have Ukraine, if it worked, as a pro-Western liberal democracy that was in the EU and that was in NATO.
This was our goal.
And the Russians made it unequivocally clear Ukraine was not going to become a Western bulwark on their border.
And most importantly, they made it clear that Ukraine in NATO was unacceptable.
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