The Leading Realist Theorist Ignores Reality to Depict Putin as the Victim

John Mearsheimer’s analytic framework blinds him to the Russian dictator’s real motives for invading democratic Ukraine

Response to Tom G. Palmer

There is a clarity in your critique that is both necessary and overdue.

The insistence that ideas matter—that ideology, language, and internal power structures shape decisions—is not a minor correction to realism.

It is a fundamental one.

And you are right to press that point.

Because any reading of this war that reduces it to geometry—
to borders, buffers, and “spheres”—
misses something that has been stated, repeatedly and explicitly.

The language of the “Russian World” is not a metaphor.

It is a claim.

And claims of that kind do not operate within the narrow logic of security.

They operate within something broader—and more dangerous.

At the same time, I would hesitate to discard realism entirely.

Not because it explains this war sufficiently—it does not.
But because it still captures something about the environment in which this war unfolds.

States are not billiard balls.

But neither are they entirely free-form.

They operate within constraints:

geography

capability

alliance structure

economic exposure

And those constraints still shape what is possible, even when ideology determines what is pursued.

So perhaps the difficulty is not that realism is wrong.

It is that it is incomplete.

It describes the board,
but not always the player.

And in this case, the player matters.

Your point about the divergence between a ruler and the state is particularly important.

Because once that divergence appears,
the concept of “national interest” becomes unstable.

What benefits the regime
may not benefit the system.

What sustains power
may degrade the state.

And that tension is visible in Russia today.

At the same time, I would add that the system-level effects you describe
extend beyond Russia itself.

When ideology drives action beyond what the system can comfortably sustain,
the pressure does not remain internal.

It propagates:

into energy markets

into alliance behaviour

into global risk calculations

Which is why this war cannot be understood solely as a clash of values,
even if values are central to its origin.

Your critique of the “threat” argument is well taken.

A democratic Ukraine was not a military threat.

But it was, as you argue,
a different kind of threat—
one that realism struggles to formalise.

An example.

And examples do not respect borders.

Perhaps, then, the most useful way to frame this is not as a choice between realism and its critics.

But as a layering:

systems constrain
ideas direct
and power decides within that interaction.

Remove any one of those,
and the picture distorts.

So yes—this is not billiard balls colliding.

And yes—ideas have consequences.

But what we are watching now is something even more complex:

an ideological project moving through a system that was not designed to contain it—
and in doing so, reshaping both itself and the system around it.

And that is why neither theory, on its own, quite manages to hold it.