As professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago wrote long ago, in today’s chaotic world, hegemonic great powers redraw the picture of the world for us, telling us what we see and hear.
Case in point (once again): the National Review, its senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty and his article titled “Little Big Fella.” Mr. Dougherty is also the author of a book titled: “My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son's Search For Home.” As the title suggests, Mr. Dougherty, in his mind, owns Ireland, its history, politics, language, passion, nationalism and romanticism, in short – everything Irish. He knows its fight for independence by heart; he is in love with each and every political and military fighter. In his National Review article, Mr. Dougherty recounts the fight and the last days of Michael Collins (1890–1922), a known Irish revolutionary, soldier and politician who was a leading figure in the struggle for Irish independence. Collins had struck a treaty with the British Empire that established the Irish Free State on the condition it swore its allegiance to the crown. Those who rejected the provision accused Collins of being a traitor and killed him in an ambush during the Irish Civil War.
Mr. Dougherty tells us that Collins was a “great man" with a "stout and imposing frame.” He was known as “the Big Fella,” and “achieved what no Irishman had done, before or since – he gained an intelligence advantage over the entire British state,” killed hundreds of British spies and assassins and became the leader of the national resistance.
Now a century later, Dougherty writes, another “Big Fella,” in a different country, in a different war, is about to become a national hero. How is he doing it? “Like Collins,” Mr. Dougherty writes, this “Little Big Fella” leads a nationalist rebellion. According to Mr. Dougherty, this rebellion is the “one dedicated to establishing greater freedom of independence from a more powerful neighbor, and one devoted to promoting a distinct and somewhat endangered national language and culture from the political and commercial power next door.”
I think this is the point where Mearsheimer’s theory, known in academia as “offensive realism,” which describes the interaction between nations in the anarchic international system, comes in very handy to decipher the odes to this "Little Big Fella" filling Western media.
Mearsheimer explains to us that the great powers, in an attempt to preserve their own national security, act proactively in anticipation of their adversaries' moves. One of Mearsheimer's examples has to do with his own country: The United States has been pushing to expand NATO eastward and establish friendly relations with Ukraine and Georgia without paying attention to the fact that this increases the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers.
Mearsheimer outlines three points that should be taken into consideration when trying to analyze great-power politics:
When it comes to the British Empire, Mr. Dougherty is an apologist at heart, however, the bedtime stories his mother used to tell him created a warm spot in another part of that heart for Irish revolutionaries. Now, in that spot, he welcomes those who are sacrificing their lives and Ukraine’s national resources for a handful of U.S. politicians and their apparatchiks at the U.S. Defense and State departments. Those apparatchiks are also dear to Mr. Dougherty’s heart since th well-known neoconservatives are fascinated, like Mr. Dougherty, with correcting the international order created by France and the United Kingdom after World War II.
The international order during the Cold War (1945 to 1989) did not have a clear-cut influence on the behavior of states in either the economic or military realm, Mearsheimer explains. The most visible institution in the Cold War international order, the United Nations, did not work for the superpowers and made it impossible to adopt far-reaching policies. When the Soviet Union collapsed, what Mearsheimer calls a "unipolar moment" occurred, freeing the U.S. from the constraints of a bipolar world.
Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush had taken steps to create what Mearsheimer calls “the liberal international order” and briefly entertained the idea of incorporating the Russian Federation. However, as a hegemonic power, by nature, it needed to have an "other."
Thus, NATO and the (pre-French President Emmanuel Macron) European Union found their favorite opponent in Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Mearsheimer, the U.S. and its European allies share most of the responsibility for Putin’s aggressive position towards NATO’s expansion in Ukraine and Georgia in addition to the annexation of Crimea.
The fact that Putin is fundamentally motivated by self-preservation cannot be presented as such. The aggressive realism, as Mearsheimer puts it, requires rewriting the history: Putin wants to revive the Soviet Union, nay, he wants to recreate czarist Russia. The existential threat Russia felt when NATO "swallowed" almost all Warsaw Pact countries is never mentioned while the annexation of Crimean, the historic port the czarist, later Soviet and now Russian naval armada, is presented as the birth of a czar.
When you have a Goliath, then you need a David, hence the Little Big Fella. In the good days before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the politics department at King's College posted a videotaped presentation on YouTube by Mearsheimer. In it, Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate who served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force before joining academia, prophesied what would happen in the coming weeks.
Mearsheimer said the West's efforts to spread its values and democracy in Ukraine served as the final tool deployed to peel Kyiv away from Moscow. Victoria Nuland, then U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs (currently serving as undersecretary of state for political affairs), had confessed in December 2013 that the U.S. had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” The U.S. government has been monetarily supporting the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nonprofit U.S. foundation that provides assistance for more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine. NED’s head Carl Gershman called Ukraine “the biggest prize.” After the West-supported coup that toppled Ukraine's former President Viktor Yanukovych and five indecisive years of President Oleksandr Turchynov and Petro Poroshenko, the George Soros-sponsored political machine produced a president. That president was actually a comedian who trained as a lawyer, an Instagram star with 5 million followers, a millionaire thanks to his production company Kvartal 95 and a politician with links to oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky through his show on TV channel 1+1. Indeed, the Little Big Fella began running the show.
U.S. President Joe Biden thinks that the West is more solidified and galvanized than ever before. He proudly announces this while looking the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in the eyes. Shifting his feet and chuckling half-heartedly on the podium, Borrell, (as Martin Jay, an award-winning journalist who has worked for a number of international media, observed) “showed the world what the EU can’t engage in wars in itself.” As soon as he hit European soil, Borrell said that everybody is responsible for what’s happening in Ukraine, “because of the unfulfilled promises we made to Ukraine.”
NATO, the EU and all other democratization agencies bankrolled with Ms. Nuland’s billions can recreate histories, recast narratives and even pay the mercenaries; however, in the end, it is the Little Big Fella who goes to trenches, not those who put liberal delusions into his head.
