Maxim Trudolyubov writes:

Geopolitics cannot but attract those political leaders who cultivate various historical injustices as the basis for their revanchism. This is a political program not only of the Russian president but also of politicians with similar attitudes, including, to various degrees, the leaders of Cuba, China, Hungary, Iran, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. All of them constantly complain about past humiliations, the lack of international recognition, the hostility of certain external forces, and wrongly drawn borders.

What is less clear is why versions of geopolitics still retain currency in many international academic arenas. Those who try to understand or even justify Russia’s war against Ukraine often speak the language of “great power politics.” Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, a favorite of the Russian authorities, never tires of repeating that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”

In Mearsheimer’s words, NATO expansion is the heart of the West’s strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well, and it “includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.”

One response to this sort of reasoning is that Russia’s behavior is proactive rather than reactive. “Way before NATO existed, in the 19th century Russia looked like this. It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism,” says the historian Stephen Kotkin. “It is not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the 1990s, it is not a response to actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.” [Continue reading…]