Some interesting material that's a direct critique of Mearshiemer and the realist position from Phillips P O'Brien re. the shooting down of the Kirzhal missle by Ukraine last week.
To understand why I believe this is really important, we need to step back to before February 24, 2022. At that point, major figures in the analytical community, were arguing that Ukraine should not be provided with such advanced systems. It was thought that the war would not last long enough for them to make a difference, that Ukraine could not stand up to Russia in a conventional war, that it would take too long for the Ukrainians to be trained up on them, etc, etc.
To understand why I believe this is really important, we need to step back to before February 24, 2022. At that point, major figures in the analytical community, were arguing that Ukraine should not be provided with such advanced systems. It was thought that the war would not last long enough for them to make a difference, that Ukraine could not stand up to Russia in a conventional war, that it would take too long for the Ukrainians to be trained up on them, etc, etc.
Such an argument seemed based in an overall ‘realist’ understanding of how power and war should be understood. For realists, such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and others, political systems and domestic politics are relatively unimportant factors in state behavior. Mearsheimer even defined realism in this way quite recently.
““Realism is a theory that basically says states care about the balance of power above all else. States want to make sure that they have as much power relative to other great powers as possible. It’s a theory that pays little attention to individuals and pays little attention to domestic politics.”
In this vision, all states regardless of type, work constantly to improve their relative position in the power structure, so spending much time wondering about how different political systems or individual leaders behave, its not terribly important.
Now, as I’ve said for a long-time now (and hopefully much of my published research backs this up) the type of system fighting a war actually matters hugely. Dictatorships are generally inefficient and prone to leader-worship, leading to really bad strategic decision-making. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan all were severely handicapped by being dictatorships in World War II. On the other hand, democracies can be more flexible and less prone to making terrible decisions based on the whims of their leaders, than dictatorships. They are also far more likely to create more advanced armed forces (partly because they actually dont want to sacrifice their populations if they dont have to).
One of the things that therefore seemed completely counter-intuitive going into Putin’s full-scale invasion was that fact that the Russian system seemed either relatively unimportant in assessing how the Russians would fight, or even in some cases even a positive. It was as if a dictatorship created armed forces should be seen as something that could make up for the fact that Russia was weak economically or suffering from a demographic timebomb...
Actually, this war has shown that regime-type matters very much—something that we can see, I would argue, in the Kinzhal-Patriot event. First, I have no idea how well the Kinzhal actually performs, but it seems that all the boasting of Putin acolytes that the Kinzhal would be very difficult if not impossible to shoot down because of its supposed high-tech performance characteristics—was nonsense. That the Ukrainians could shoot one down with a system they had just learned on almost immediately after they have made that system operational, shows that the Kinzhal cannot have been quite the amazing weapon that the Russian backers said it was. We should not have been surprised—dictatorships love to boast about wonder-weapons, partly to legitimate their rule domestically, but also to intimidate their opponents. Usually there is a great element of self-deception involved in this—and it seems that Putin’s Russia indulged in such self-deception.
To understand why I believe this is really important, we need to step back to before February 24, 2022. At that point, major figures in the analytical community, were arguing that Ukraine should not be provided with such advanced systems. It was thought that the war would not last long enough for them to make a difference, that Ukraine could not stand up to Russia in a conventional war, that it would take too long for the Ukrainians to be trained up on them, etc, etc.
To understand why I believe this is really important, we need to step back to before February 24, 2022. At that point, major figures in the analytical community, were arguing that Ukraine should not be provided with such advanced systems. It was thought that the war would not last long enough for them to make a difference, that Ukraine could not stand up to Russia in a conventional war, that it would take too long for the Ukrainians to be trained up on them, etc, etc.
Such an argument seemed based in an overall ‘realist’ understanding of how power and war should be understood. For realists, such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt and others, political systems and domestic politics are relatively unimportant factors in state behavior. Mearsheimer even defined realism in this way quite recently.
““Realism is a theory that basically says states care about the balance of power above all else. States want to make sure that they have as much power relative to other great powers as possible. It’s a theory that pays little attention to individuals and pays little attention to domestic politics.”
In this vision, all states regardless of type, work constantly to improve their relative position in the power structure, so spending much time wondering about how different political systems or individual leaders behave, its not terribly important.
Now, as I’ve said for a long-time now (and hopefully much of my published research backs this up) the type of system fighting a war actually matters hugely. Dictatorships are generally inefficient and prone to leader-worship, leading to really bad strategic decision-making. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Imperial Japan all were severely handicapped by being dictatorships in World War II. On the other hand, democracies can be more flexible and less prone to making terrible decisions based on the whims of their leaders, than dictatorships. They are also far more likely to create more advanced armed forces (partly because they actually dont want to sacrifice their populations if they dont have to).
One of the things that therefore seemed completely counter-intuitive going into Putin’s full-scale invasion was that fact that the Russian system seemed either relatively unimportant in assessing how the Russians would fight, or even in some cases even a positive. It was as if a dictatorship created armed forces should be seen as something that could make up for the fact that Russia was weak economically or suffering from a demographic timebomb...
Actually, this war has shown that regime-type matters very much—something that we can see, I would argue, in the Kinzhal-Patriot event. First, I have no idea how well the Kinzhal actually performs, but it seems that all the boasting of Putin acolytes that the Kinzhal would be very difficult if not impossible to shoot down because of its supposed high-tech performance characteristics—was nonsense. That the Ukrainians could shoot one down with a system they had just learned on almost immediately after they have made that system operational, shows that the Kinzhal cannot have been quite the amazing weapon that the Russian backers said it was. We should not have been surprised—dictatorships love to boast about wonder-weapons, partly to legitimate their rule domestically, but also to intimidate their opponents. Usually there is a great element of self-deception involved in this—and it seems that Putin’s Russia indulged in such self-deception.
