World
Posted by Charlie Kirk Staff - 12.03.22

Political Scientist Who Predicted Russo-Ukraine War Says World War III Could Be on the Horizon

Political Scientist Who Predicted Russo-Ukraine War Says World War III Could Be on the Horizon

World
Posted by Charlie Kirk Staff - 12.03.22

Highly esteemed political scientist Prof. John Mearsheimer, who predicted the current Russian invasion of Ukraine over eight years ago, said that the world is headed for a global conflict between the US, China, and Russia.

He made the comments during an interview with UnHerd.

Mearsheimer laid out his position to interviewer Freddie Sayers, by noting that he believes that the West is largely responsible for the war in Ukraine right now.

“The west had a three-pronged strategy involving Ukraine, all of which was designed to make that country a western bulwark on Russia’s border,” Mearsheimer explained.

“Three-pronged strategy first called for bringing Ukraine into NATO. Second, bringing Ukraine into the European Union, and third, promoting a color revolution—an orange revolution in Ukraine that would turn Ukraine into a pro-western liberal democracy. This three-pronged strategy the Russians unsurprisingly viewed as an existential threat,” he said.

Mearsheimer said that he believed that it was foolish for Ukraine to believe that it could defeat Russia in this conflict, but said that it was a “figment of the West’s imagination” to believe that Russia would invade a NATO country like Romania, Poland, or any of the Baltic states (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.)

“Let’s hypothetically talk about what would happen if Russia attacked those countries. The US would come to their defense; that’s a very different issue than talking about defeating the Russians in a particular country, wrecking their economy, causing regime change, and maybe even breaking Russia up. There’s a fine line out there that you don’t want to cross,” he said.

Mearsheimer then lays out what he believes will happen in the future. The forecast is grim, in his opinion, as China’s coming of age, mixed with Russia’s fading away and grasping at power, along with instability in the United States, will lead to a “multipolar world,” rather than a “unipolar” world led by the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991.

I think it’s more dangerous than the Cold War was. Let me tell you how I think about this; I was born and raised during the Cold War, and the world was bipolar at that point in time. Then, in 1989, with the end of the Cold War and certainly in December of 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we went from a bipolar world to a unipolar world.

“Then, around 2017, we transitioned from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. During the Cold War, you had the US and the Soviet Union during the unipolar moment, you just had the soul pole the United States, and today, you have three great powers; the United States, China, and Russia.

“Now, you could not have great power politics in the unipolar world because there was only one great power, and by definition, there were no two great powers that could compete with each other. What we have today, with the US-China competition in east Asia, and the US-Russia competition over Ukraine, is we have two conflict dyads, and in very important ways they’re separate dyads. US-China, US-Russia, no conflict dyad in the unipolar moment, and one conflict dyad during the Cold War, US-Soviet, involving great powers,” he continued.

“I would argue that not only do you have two instead of one, each one of those dyads is more dangerous than the conflict dyad in the Cold War,” he said.

“As we’ve talked about today, the United States and Russia are almost at war in Ukraine, and we can hypothesize plausible scenarios where the United States ends up fighting against Russia in Ukraine, and then we talked about the US-China competition and the problems associated with Taiwan, and Taiwan is not the only flashpoint in east Asian, there’s also the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Korean Penninsula. So, you could imagine, a war breaking out between the United States and China in East Asia, and a war breaking out in Ukraine involving the United States and Russia,” he said.

“I think more easily than you could imagine a war breaking out during the Cold War in Europe or in east Asia involving the United States and the Soviet Union. So I think we live in more dangerous times today than we did during the Cold War, and certainly, than we did during the unipolar moment, and I think if anything, the situation is only going to get worse for reasons that you and I have talked about regarding Ukraine as well as Taiwan.”

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