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It seems like you and the rest of the world are coming around to Mearsheimer's point of view, 11 years late and with everyone in a much worse off position.
This dynamic could have been predicted! It was predicted! He predicted it! Mearsheimer predicted that if there was no sustained and sincere effort to keep Ukraine neutral post-2014 Russia would attack and wreck the country. He said that if we kept on with the 'Ukraine is totally going to be in NATO one day, let's arm and fund and encourage them' approach it was going to end very badly for Ukraine. He said that Russia would wreck Ukraine if NATO integration continued. He said they probably couldn't conquer the whole country but had the power to wreck it such that Ukraine was totally dysfunctional and bereft of the industrial centres in the East. He said that Russia wouldn't tolerate NATO expanding into Ukraine for geographical reasons, plus the large Russian minority that Ukrainian nationalists would feel emboldened to harass.
And based on his analysis of the situation, he proposed building Ukraine up economically as a neutral country without NATO or anything. Now it seems like that's what we're coming around to, after Ukraine has been wrecked, after the Russians have gotten very angry with the West, after trillions in economic damage to Europe, after hundreds of thousands of deaths, after arms stockpiles being depleted, after a message being sent 'if your invasion fails double down and try harder, fight on to victory'. This was predictable in advance!
Imagine if people just listened to the expert as opposed to the 'experts'!
Mearsheimer was right about Ukraine in 2014. He was right in 2023 when he said 'the counteroffensive is not going to work, Ukraine is still doomed'. He was right about not invading Iraq back in 2003. He was right about China becoming a major power with opposing ambitions to the US back in the 2000s.
In the past I had some very snooty, arrogant responses about how Mearsheimer was senile or retarded or some unsophisticated undergraduate-tier theorist. I would like to see how the predictive track record of these people compares with Mearsheimer.
International relations is like economics in that there are many schools of thought. Some are better than others, some actually work and others are popular and sound great but don't work. Realism works. Realists like Mearsheimer actually predict things correctly. There are distinctions within realism, different models of thought that can be applied in different circumstances but realism as a whole is generally superior. This liberal/constructivist 'we have to do the right thing' interventionist camp doesn't work and it's not even moral, it gets lots of people killed at great expense and usually makes the situation worse. If you want to read more about this, check out The Great Delusion by Mearsheimer.
We need to embrace realism just like how a chess player needs to think several moves ahead if he wants to win. You highlight how Option B, the 'most moral' option is unacceptable due to the potential for global catastrophe. It's the least moral option. Once you see that you start to understand why we need realism to achieve realistic goals in the most efficient and least costly way.
I have suffered wounds in online debates defending realism (and Mearsheimer's offensive realism) by liberal idealists seemingly oblivious to the failures of GWOT, confident that the Ukrainian proxies would succeed where the Iraqi ones failed. The world would have been much better off letting Russia quietly rot away in private, keeping its neighbors in post-Soviet dysfunction until it was too enervated to do anything. But the evil gremlins of the US State Department had their way, and the rest is history.
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