Despite the blob's teeth gnashing, realists got Ukraine right

The Ukraine war has, since its outset, been fertile ground for a particular kind of intellectual axe grinding, with establishment actors rushing to launder their abysmal policy record by projecting its many failures and conceits onto others.

The go-to method for this sleight of hand, as exhibited by its most adept practitioners, is to flail away at a set of ideas clumsily bundled together under the banner of “realism.”

There is, of course, no monolithic “realist” approach to the Ukraine war or any other issue. Any analysis, as in the case of Andrew Chakhoyan’s recent piece, "How foreign policy realists lost touch with reality on Russia," which takes aim at “the realism of scholars like John Mearsheimer, Samuel Charap and Stephen Walt” as if these scholars share a unitary set of policy positions, is already off to a bad start.

But there is a set of problems raised here that merits careful consideration. The first and most serious among them centers on the issue of NATO enlargement and Russian threat perceptions. “Sequencing matters,” Chakhoyan writes. “NATO didn't expand — countries formerly occupied by Russia stampeded toward it the moment they could. If America sought to menace Moscow, why has Ukraine spent a decade begging for membership while Washington hemmed and hawed? In fact, NATO threatens the Kremlin only as a deadbolt threatens a criminal.”

Realism, as a values-free toolkit for analyzing and projecting outcomes, does not assign blame — it simply seeks to understand why things occur the way they do. A realist reading of the dynamic between NATO and Russia, if it’s of any help to anyone, is this: Russia, in all its historical incarnations, perceives a pacing, centuries-long security challenge from Western states.

This perception ebbs and flows depending on a large set of variables that includes an increase in Western offensive capabilities that can potentially accompany NATO enlargement. “Potentially” is the key operative word, as the accession of a strategically insignificant country like Montenegro, or a country like Sweden that was already tightly integrated into Western security structures, naturally will not be perceived with the same alarm as the potential accession of Ukraine, which everyone recognizes would drastically alter the balance of forces and security dynamics in the region.

Ukraine of course does not have to join NATO for this shift to occur. It can offer to host NATO assets on its territory and to integrate into NATO’s security infrastructure without benefiting from the alliance’s Article V collective defense provision, and that, too, is seen by Russia as posing an unacceptable threat.

Russia, at various points since the end of the Cold War, has taken steps that many realists would describe as trying to balance against this perceived threat. This can include military action, as in the case of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, but also hybrid measures like the ones employed toward Moldova with the conflict over the pro-Russian breakaway state of Transnistria.

In all cases, Russia has exhibited a clear overarching objective. It seeks to deny, deter, and preempt expansion of Western security structures in the post-Soviet space — put more simply, to balance against NATO. Realists tend to believe that we cannot develop an effective policy toward Russia and Eurasia unless we understand this dynamic, but that is not at all the same as blaming NATO for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022.

Realists fail to see, Chakhoyan argues, that Russia will go on to attack NATO countries if it is not defeated in this war, thus risking a larger conflict. “If we follow the realists’ advice and let Moscow have its way, then NATO’s Article 5 will be promptly tested. America and Europe will then face a choice: send troops to fight Russia directly, or watch the security architecture that delivered 70 years of peace collapse in real time,” he writes. Not only does this run counter to recent U.S. and European intelligence assessments, but it makes no sense in the context of Russia’s established NATO strategy.

What’s really at stake here is not an academic discussion on the merits of realism. Rather, this is part of a series of attacks intended to derail the White House peace initiative and to convince President Trump to return a failed Biden-era policy of enabling Ukraine’s war effort with no viable strategic end point.

Realism’s discontents insist there should be no rewards for aggression, but this claim rings hollow in the face of all the costs and setbacks suffered by Russia since 2022. The war has not been “rewarding” in the slightest, especially if one considers the steep opportunity cost of everything Russia could have achieved over the past four years if it didn’t go all in on prosecuting the most dangerous and destructive war in Europe since 1945.

Nor is there any basis for the long-discredited theory that pursuing a settlement in Ukraine gives other countries a green light to pursue wars of aggression across the world. The idea that China will base its decision to invade Taiwan on something as strategically recondite as who controls the remaining fifteen percent of one region in eastern Ukraine — and not, say, the balance of forces in the Pacific theater — is hardly deserving of sober commentary.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to soften the scope of Ukrainian concessions, in part by reframing the settlement as part of a larger framework deal between Russia and the U.S., but the fact remains that a negotiated settlement must contain points that are attractive to both parties in order to be implemented. This is no way a “reward” for Russia’s actions but simply the price of ending the war on the best possible terms for Kyiv and the West.

One need not be a realist to see that the alternative– enabling the indefinite continuation of an attrition war that Ukraine is slowly losing — is vastly worse for everyone.

Realism got the Ukraine war right, and the Trump administration, if it follows through on its realist instincts, stands on the cusp of securing a durable end to the carnage that advances U.S. interests and strengthens Europe’s security architecture.