This guy has shouldn't have any credibility left even if you couldn't recognize his pro-Russian bias (actually more like awe than bias) from the beginning. Look at his appearances at the beginning of the war. His predictions are consistently wrong. He's been severely overrating Russian power from the beginning, and unlike others in the face of reality hasn't adjusted that take at all.
Mearshiemer was saying one fucking week before the invasion that the US was being hysterical, that there would be no full invasion, that Putin was, quote, "much too smart to do something like that".
He has been entirely wrong about Ukraine for years but still people pretend that no, actually he was right for some vague reason that has little basis in reality.
And lately he's resorting using "Moon of Alabama" (newspaper run by a religious cult) as if it was a legitimate citation, because his ego won't allow him to back down from his wild statements. Why does anyone take this guy as an authority?
This clown made amazing decisions like taking Bush et al words_ that NATO won't spread to the East, sincerely thinking that West is here to help and so on.
> that the second election of Yeltsin and the first election of Putin were fraudulent.
It was fraudulent since 75% voted for preserving USSR
at 1991.
> - He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
I mean I find these analysis absurd, they seem based on the ideas not just that Putin is irrational but also that he knows nothing about the very things we would assume he knows about, stuff like how treaties and military alliances work.
I could totally understand some guy on the street thinking hey Latvia is nothing, if they won't defend the Ukraine then they won't defend Latvia but why would a guy with supposed knowledge of military history and how alliances can often cause nations who are allied to come in to wars they would otherwise rather keep out of think such a thing.
In fact I would assume his kneejerk opinion would be to believe that the only way to get all these weak nations to actually go to war would be if an attack happened on a NATO nation.
Moscow mearsheimer.. Another Putin propaganda distributor pretending to be an academic. He has been totally wrong so far, including predicting there would be no war. So why give him more credit at the bank of public debate? It's just another troll..
I don't think his behaviour was particularly irrational, as much as he has been acting on a few pieces of intelligence that ultimately proved to have been incorrect.
1. He incorrectly assumed that he'd only be facing minor sanctions for starting a war of aggression. Given how many other countries have waged wars of aggression in the past few decades, this wasn't an insane assumption... given the information he had at the time.
2. He incorrectly assumed that Ukraine would fold in less than a week. Given how the first day of the invasion looked like the Russian army was driving westwards until there wasn't any gas in the tank, this wasn't an insane assumption... given the information he had at the time.
3. There is no 3, those were the two major contributors to the shit sandwich he's now serving to both Ukraine and Russia. All the crazy shit he says about eight-hundred year old history and nazis and so on and so forth isn't what he actually believes, it's intended for internal Russian media consumption.
So no, from the perspective of someone playing at empire-building, starting this war was only 'irrational' for him with the benefit of hind-sight.
> Mearshimer's claim to fame stems from accurately predicting this invasion would happen.
In the east, not around Kyiv. Less than a month before it happened – i.e. long after everyone else had predicted it would. And after, as shown above, he himself had spent his career claiming it wouldn't. Weak sauce, utterly weak.
Mearshimer's claim to any current fame stems almost entirely from spouting the same tired old anti-USA and anti-NATO propaganda we've heard from Russia since the Soviet era.
> The only way to "disprove" Mearshimer's prediction is mischaracterize Russia's military goals during the initial strike on Kiev (I am not certain what they were but I am 200% certain occupation wasn't one of them because the force was far too small for that task).
Oh holy shit, I never thought this infamous Twitter Copium would show up on HN too. How naïve of me.
Please note that this person has been arguing that Zelenskyy is to be blamed for the civilians that Russia is killing during their invasion, because he did not surrender to an invasion from a foreign power.
To give context to those who are unfamiliar, he basically predicted the Ukraine invasion before the Crimean Annexation and was proven correct again with Russias further attempt to invade the entirety of Ukraine this year.
The author of this blog is Fefe who is known for his strong pro-Russian bias.
He told the world up until February 23rd that everybody was dumb to believe that Russia would invade. I would not believe anything Fefe says on his blog, ever. He dips into conspiracy theories time and time again and when he gets proven wrong he just says that it was meant to be "media competency training".
#1 Putinversteher. The reason he's been right about some things is because he has aligned his theories with Putin's worldview so Putin does what he expects, but he hasn't accounted for any other actors like Ukrainian people or the EU. Some of these geopolitical academics are obsessed with USA, China, and Russia, noone else has agency and the only thing that matters about others is their relation to these 3
I don't think he "predicted" the Russian invasion. I think everyone denied it. Just remember a few weeks before this invasion, everyone was not believing the USA alarms about an imminent invasion; including high-ranking leaders in supposedly powerful EU countries. Just shows how blindness can affect anyone.
How can someone be proven so wrong about their life's work and still be called "one of your best thinkers in international politics."?
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