A decade ago, on one of his visits to the United States, I urged Jürgen Habermas to support the idea of a global democratic alliance that could replace the discredited United Nations Security Council and form a sufficient counterweight to rising threats from Russia and China. This idea, which is developed in my book, A League of Democracies, is based on the hopes of many reformers in the “Atlanticist” movement before the deep compromises of the UN Charter. But it also follows from the logic of Habermas’s own work on democratic theory, together with the central findings of game theory, which imply the need for reliable solidarity and cost-sharing among able nations for paramount goals such as securing the most basic human rights from the manifold threats of absolute tyranny. Continue reading →

This article, “Fear Mounts that Ukraine War Will Spill Beyond Ukraine Borders,” appeared in The New York Times a few days ago. I single it out as an instance of the collective gaslighting that now seems to prevail in “the West” regarding the war in Ukraine. The article starts out like this:

For nine weeks, President Biden and the Western allies have emphasized the need to keep the war for Ukraine inside Ukraine.

A better way of putting this might be to say that for nine weeks, President Biden and his allies have pretended to hope that the war for Ukraine stays within Ukraine, while hinting simultaneously at regime change for Russia, while dragging all of Europe into a proxy war with Russia, and while demanding that the rest of the world, Europe and beyond, join in an embargo of Russia. Having done this, the President and his advisers now express surprise and alarm that the war might be spreading beyond Ukraine.

In a post back on February 26, I recommended a pair of lectures and an article by John Mearsheimer, going on to make a series of inferences from them about the aims and character of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On reflection (and under some fair criticism), I’ve now come to think that Mearsheimer’s claims, though essentially right, were overstated and misleading, as were my inferences from them. Hence this follow up to that post, intended to clarify what I still think is right about Mearsheimer’s thesis, what I now regard as wrong, and what I take to be as-yet unclear.

I’ve also added links to material on the invasion that I found worth reading, mostly (though not entirely) in confirmation of my own views. I encourage others to post other readings, videos etc. in the comments, regardless of how those readings square with anything I say. I also encourage PoT authors to post anything they find worth posting, again, regardless of how their claims square with mine. Continue reading →