Compare Mr. Timothy Garton Ash’s gentle but firm anti-intellectual attack on John Mearsheimer: ‘Professor Realist’ to the certifiable intellectual bumpkinry of former Air Force General Charles Wald.

First Mr. Ash’s attempt to discredit Mr. M.’s realism, better to call it a self-serving rhetorical cartoon version  of that ‘realism’. Notice that Mr. Ash’s rhetorical frame to the whole is the notorious Yalta surrender to Soviet imperial adventurism!

‘Moscow’s law of the jungle confronts Brussels’ jungle of law. Who’s winning? “Russia is winning” answers the well-known American “realist”, John Mearsheimer. So what should we do about it? “The west should seek to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and Nato. It should look like Austria during the cold war. Toward that end, the west should explicitly take European Union and Nato expansion off the table.” Well, thank you Professor Realist. Perhaps you would like to seal the deal yourself? We have the perfect location for your realpolitik summit: Yalta, where in 1945 Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave an ambiguous legitimacy to the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. That’s Yalta in now-annexed Crimea.’

Now former General Wald’s inept dismissal of Mr. Mearsheimer’s ‘realism’:

‘I think it’s a smart argument that a professor would make, but it’s wrong.’

One must watch and listen to the former General’s argument, and also his consistent inability to pronounce Mr. Mearsheimer’s name, that makes him seem clueless, like another garden variety anti-intellectual. See the debate here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/10/playing_with_fire_a_debate_on
The Ukrainian Coup and it’s American and EU backers has brought to prominence the Neo-Con, Neo-Liberal and R2P zealots, Mr. Ash among the most prominent, of The New Cold Warriors whose target is Putin as the New Stalin. Mr. Ash degrades his status as one of most prominent supporters of the dissidents in the Soviet Union and it satellites: a writer of conscience now supports blackwidow Victoria Nuland and her allies Right Sector and Svoboda!

Political Cynic