While I found it to be a decent analysis overall, I disagree with Mearsheimer regarding the long term outcomes. Mearsheimer makes the assumption that Russia and NATO will end up in a long term stalemate and a frozen conflict. Ukraine will get partitioned, and there’s going to be some sort of a frozen conflict akin to Korea.

However, I think that a more likely scenario is that NATO is going to start unravelling going forward due to the deteriorating economic situation in the west. Pretty much all western countries are now entering a recession, and the situation is particularly bad in Europe. NATO is pushing for increasing military spending already, and this will necessarily require further austerity on top of already unbearable material conditions. I expect that this will help harden public opinion against NATO and atlanticism where Europe continues to be subordinated to US. We’re already seeing the start of that in the polls right now.

The long term plan for Russia could be to continue putting increasing economic pressure on the west by encouraging countries to trade outside the west and further bifurcating the world economy. Once NATO starts to falter, Russia could propose a new security architecture for Europe.