Ukraine Has Exposed Russia as a Not-So-Great Power
Kyiv’s success against Moscow forces us to reexamine our assumptions about what it means to be powerful. By Phillips Payson O’Brien
theatlantic.com
The best place to start is the widespread notion going into the war that we were witnessing a clash between a great power controlled by an experienced, savvy—some even said brilliant—leader and a small state weakened by national division and led by a second-rate former comedian. This great power–small power dynamic was accepted practically universally among a group of scholars and analysts who have proclaimed themselves “realists.”
Maybe the most famous realist in the world is Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state and a longtime believer in the notion of great leaders and great powers. Kissinger, who met regularly with Vladimir Putin, has been arguing for forcing Kyiv to make concessions such as the handing over of the Crimea, internationally recognized as part of Ukraine but annexed by Moscow in 2014, to the Russians. To Kissinger, it has been important that the United States treat Russia as a “great power” and that it accepted Moscow’s claim to have a special interest in Ukraine.
Academics, too, subscribe to this notion. In lectures, media appearances, and articles in the months before the invasion, well-known figures such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt described the Russia-Ukraine relationship as operating in the well-worn great power–small power framework. In this analysis, Putin was the clever strategist with a strong grasp on what he wanted, while the Ukrainians were weak, and it would be better for the world if their status was determined by the strong. Russia was, in Mearsheimer’s view, one of only “three great powers” in the world, and Putin was a rationalist, just wanting to secure a buffer state on his border, something Ukraine would have to deal with. Meanwhile, as Walt put it, Ukraine would have to accept the oppression and subjugation of its people to Russian interests because “great-power war is worse and brings much more suffering.” Other analysts, such as Samuel Charap, even believed that Russia was so strong, and would crush a weak Ukraine so easily, that the West should provide no support for Kyiv, because it would all be wasted when the Russian steamroller attacked.
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