{"id":39204,"date":"2022-03-04T07:46:56","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T15:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=39204"},"modified":"2022-03-04T20:09:49","modified_gmt":"2022-03-05T04:09:49","slug":"john-mearsheimer-ray-mcgovern-on-putins-invasion-of-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/04\/john-mearsheimer-ray-mcgovern-on-putins-invasion-of-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"John Mearsheimer &#038; Ray McGovern on Putin&#8217;s Invasion of Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.committeefortherepublic.us\/\">The Committee for the Republic<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an empire, everything looks like a crisis to justify a multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex as dictatress of the world. The crisis du jour for the American empire is Russia\u2018s aggression against Ukraine. The political establishment and the mainstream media assign responsibility to President Putin\u2019s megalomaniac ambition to recreate the Soviet empire. The Committee for the Republic welcomes Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer as a breath of fresh air. They shoulder the United States with a fair share of the blame: the never-ending expansion of NATO cheek by jowl to Russian borders provoked the invasion. Russia fears nuclear weapons on its borders as more menacing than the Cuban Missile Crisis was to the United States. Ray and John offer some thoughts regarding how to bury the hatchet and move forward.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ppD_bhWODDc\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>John Mearsheimer returns for the third time as a salon speaker. We hosted John for his trenchant analysis of the abject failure our quest for global dominance and for his courageous book with Steve Walt on the liability of American support for Israel. John is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point (1970), has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (1981), and has written extensively about security issues and international politics. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020, he won the James Madison Award, given by the American Political Science Association to \u201can American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.\u201d His principal work on Ukraine is \u201cWhy the Ukraine Crisis Is the West\u2019s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,\u201d appearing in September-October <em>Foreign Affairs<\/em> 2014. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&#038;t=0s\">video of his talk<\/a> has been viewed more than 14 million times.<\/p>\n<p>Ray McGovern is a long-time Russian specialist. After serving as an Army combat intelligence officer in the early 60s, Ray joined the CIA\u2019s analyst ranks. His first portfolio focused on the Sino-Soviet conflict, which was deftly exploited by Nixon\/Kissinger (with more than just interpreter assistance from our own Chas Freeman). As chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, Ray\u2019s analytical team supported the SALT negotiations and he was in Moscow for the signing of the ABM Treaty, cornerstone of strategic stability for the next three decades. Ray correctly predicted Brezhnev&#8217;s invasion of Czechoslovakia but incorrectly predicted Putin would not invade Ukraine. Ray thinks the new Russia-China entente helps explain Putin&#8217;s gamble. See Ray&#8217;s website <a href=\"http:\/\/raymcgovern.com\/\">RayMcGovern.com<\/a> and posts on <a href=\"https:\/\/original.antiwar.com\/author\/mcgovern\/\">Antiwar.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From The Committee for the Republic: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an empire, everything looks like a crisis to justify a multi-trillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex as dictatress of the world. The crisis du jour for the American empire is Russia\u2018s aggression against Ukraine. The political establishment and the mainstream media assign responsibility [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-39204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39204"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39228,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39204\/revisions\/39228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39204"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=39204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}