John Mearsheimer

I don't know if you know this, but in 1993, I argued that Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons.

I was probably the only person in the West who made that argument.

And my argument in 1993, this is in foreign affairs, was that there may come the day when Russia thinks about invading Ukraine.

And should that day come, it would be very helpful for preventing war if Ukraine had nuclear weapons.

Well, if you're interested in deterring an adversary, if I'm worried about you coming after me, the best way to deter you is to have military might.

And if you're Russia and I'm Ukraine, I'm far weaker than you, right?

And having a nuclear deterrent would be very effective at convincing you not to attack me.

Because if you attack me, you're threatening my survival.

And that's the one circumstance where it is likely that

that I would use nuclear weapons to defend myself.

And given the consequences of nuclear use, you would be reluctant in the extreme to attack me.

So that's why I argued in 93 that if Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons, that made war down the road much less likely.

And I believe I was correct.

And in fact, Bill Clinton,

who played the key role in forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, now says, he has said it publicly, you can find it on YouTube, that he made a mistake doing that.

Furthermore, I argued in 2014 that it made eminently good sense not to continue to push to bring Ukraine into NATO, because the end result is that Ukraine would be destroyed, and Ukraine is being destroyed.

So I was deeply interested at the time in making sure that that didn't happen for the good of the Ukrainians, not to mention because stability in Europe is a net positive for almost everybody involved.

But people did not listen to me then either.

There's no question that the presence of nuclear weapons makes it much less likely, I'm choosing my words carefully here, much less likely that a great power would aggress against another great power.

It doesn't take that possibility off the table, but it makes it much less likely because of the reasons that you articulated.