The most useful thing about the conversation is that two serious people walk through, in calm voices, what a limited Russian nuclear strike on Europe would actually look like and what it would cost. Sergey Karaganov argues Russia can and should do it. John Mearsheimer argues the mechanics he describes would probably work as advertised — and then walks through the part Karaganov leaves out. Glenn Diesen mostly listens. What emerges is not a forecast. It is a record of how an intellectual close to the Kremlin now talks about Germany, about Europe, and about the end of the world Cold-War deterrence built. It is also a record of how a Western realist who shares many of Karaganov’s premises about NATO expansion nevertheless refuses to follow him into the conclusion.
↑ N° 10 · Continues themes from N° 10. The earlier reading covered Karaganov’s claim that his minority view had become the Russian majority view; this conversation is the same speaker one month later, sharpened by Mearsheimer’s pushback and by the June 2026 escalation around St. Petersburg.The threshold Karaganov wants to lower
Karaganov has been arguing the same proposition since 2023: nuclear deterrence has lost its credibility, and the only way to restore it is to use a small number of weapons in a way that the West cannot ignore. The new conversation reveals how that argument has matured and what it now sounds like in the voice of someone who claims to speak for the Russian majority.
The argument is structured in four moves. First, the world has entered a long period of escalating conflict — Karaganov dates it from around 2007 — in which the old guardrails are gone. Second, what has held the system together since 1945 is the fear of nuclear weapons; that fear has now eroded, especially in Europe. Third, restoring the fear requires a demonstration. Fourth, Russia is capable of making that demonstration without triggering all-out exchange, because the United States will not, in his view, retaliate in kind against a limited Russian strike on European targets.
The demonstration is not a war plan. It is a coercive act. The aim is not to defeat a NATO army but to scare European decision-makers badly enough that they stop authorizing the strikes on Russian territory that have intensified through 2025 and into 2026. Karaganov is explicit that he calls this “winning.” The West backs off, the rules of the road are restored, deterrence becomes credible again. He is also explicit that he hopes it will never happen — because, in his words, those who order it will “feel themselves sinners for the rest of their lives.”
The “fear of God” language is striking, and Karaganov keeps returning to it. He uses the phrase metaphorically — he is talking about the kind of dread that kept the Cold-War leaderships careful — but he means something specific. He believes the West, and particularly Europe, no longer holds nuclear use as a sin. The post-1945 settlement was a moral construction as much as a strategic one, and once the moral construction goes, the strategic one collapses with it. His proposed strike is, in his framing, an act of restoration: a reminder that nuclear weapons mean what they used to mean.
What he is not willing to say in the conversation, but what shapes everything he does say, is that he understands himself to have lost the argument inside Russia for three years and to be winning it now. He claims he is being “roughly criticized by the absolute majority” of his compatriots for not being effective enough in persuading the government to escalate. That self-description should be read with caution — it is the kind of claim a public intellectual makes to push policy — but the broad direction is real. The November 2024 doctrinal change, and the subsequent rhetorical normalization of nuclear threats in Russian political discourse, suggest the maximalist position has gained ground.
Why Mearsheimer takes the mechanics seriously
Mearsheimer is not endorsing Karaganov’s plan. He is doing something more uncomfortable: validating its internal logic and then refusing to follow it to its conclusion.
Mearsheimer’s contribution is to translate Karaganov’s argument into the vocabulary of Cold-War coercion theory. He explicitly invokes Thomas Schelling: the point of using a small number of nuclear weapons would not be to win a battlefield engagement but to put both sides “out on the slippery slope to oblivion.” The threat of escalation, not escalation itself, is what does the coercive work. The West would, in that scenario, back off rather than risk a general thermonuclear exchange. Karaganov accepts this gloss and pushes it slightly further: in his account, Russia wins by restoring the conditions under which the threat of escalation is taken seriously again.
Mearsheimer goes on to argue that two recent events show how far the Cold-War red lines have already eroded. The first is the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024 — an American-backed ally physically invading the territory of a nuclear power, with US military assistance for the operation. The second is the June 2025 Spider’s Web operation. Ukrainian drones, smuggled across Russia inside cargo trucks, struck the air leg of Russia’s strategic nuclear triad at airbases as far as Olenya in Murmansk Oblast and Belaya in Eastern Siberia. Both episodes, Mearsheimer argues, were unthinkable during the Cold War.
The implication Mearsheimer draws is not that the West should panic. It is that policymakers in Washington and Brussels appear to have lost track of where the danger actually lives. They have come to treat Russian threats as bluffing background noise. And they have treated each step up the escalation ladder as the new normal: first long-range missiles, then strikes from NATO territory, then attacks on the strategic triad, then, in June 2026, hundreds of drones over St. Petersburg during the city’s flagship economic forum. Mearsheimer does not say Karaganov’s strike is coming. He says it would not be irrational for Russia to consider it, and that this is precisely the situation Cold-War deterrence existed to prevent.
There is a deeper concession in his framing that is worth naming directly. Mearsheimer agrees with Karaganov that Russia’s calculation now hinges on whether the West would absorb a limited nuclear strike rather than retaliate in kind. He thinks the answer is probably yes. The United States would not exchange ICBMs over a tactical strike on a European target, and the French and British nuclear forces are too small and too vulnerable to make a credible counter-threat. This is the part of the conversation most likely to be misread as endorsement. It is not. It is a strategic prediction about how Western leaderships would behave under stress, made by someone who has spent a career studying exactly that question. The fact that Mearsheimer thinks Karaganov is roughly right about the mechanics is the reason he keeps pulling the conversation back to the question of what those mechanics would set in motion afterward.
The Germany problem they disagree about
The most charged exchange in the conversation is also the one that exposes the limits of Karaganov’s framework. The question is what happens to Germany after a Russian demonstration strike.
Karaganov’s position on Germany is unambiguous and worth quoting in his own words. Germany, he says, “should never even get close” to acquiring nuclear weapons; if it tries, “Germany will be should be evaporated from the face of the world, as well as Japan.” He acknowledges his affection for German culture, names friends in Germany, lists German contributions to Russian intellectual life — and then re-states the position. The reasoning is partly historical and partly anticipatory: Germany unleashed two world wars in a single generation; current German rearmament rhetoric and front-line posture in Ukraine read to him as revanchism; the appropriate response is to remove the option entirely.
“If they get close, Germany should be evaporated from the face of the world, as well as Japan.”
Sergey Karaganov, in the conversation
Mearsheimer’s pushback is the most important moment in the hour. He grants nearly everything Karaganov says about German conduct between 1941 and 1945; he is, as he points out, one of the few American international-relations theorists who has written seriously about the scale of German violence on the Eastern Front. But he refuses the inference. The argument Karaganov is making about Germany, Mearsheimer says, is structurally identical to the argument many Westerners now make about Russia: that aggression is in the blood, hardwired into the civilization, present in the mother’s milk. International-relations theorists call this essentialism. Mearsheimer thinks it is wrong in both directions. It cannot explain the Ukraine war if applied to Russia. It cannot explain post-1945 Germany if applied to Germany. When great powers start reasoning about each other this way, they end up in unnecessary wars.
The harder argument Mearsheimer makes is structural, not moral. If Russia uses a small number of nuclear weapons in Europe to restore deterrence, the country most likely to draw the conclusion that it needs an independent nuclear arsenal is Germany. The American security umbrella, which kept the German question dormant from 1949 to roughly 2024, is visibly receding. Trump’s reduction of the US footprint in Europe, the public uncertainty about the future of NATO commitments, and Germany’s own rearmament program have already put the question on the table. A Russian demonstration strike would supercharge it. Germany has the industrial base, the technical capacity, and increasingly the political constituency to build nuclear weapons within a small number of years if it chose to. Once Germany has them, the proliferation cascade — France’s adjustment, Poland’s interest, the Nordic recalculation — becomes very hard to stop.
Karaganov’s answer to the proliferation problem is to deny that it is a problem. Germany, in his account, is “a small pawn in the general game” — Russia should focus on India, China, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, the United States, and let Europe sort out its own decline. Mearsheimer points out, calmly, that geography exists. Germany is not in Indonesia. Eastern Europe will be unstable for a long time. Russia cannot push aside a continent that begins at its border. The disagreement here is not rhetorical. It is about whether the world Karaganov wants to build — one in which Russia’s relevant horizons are eastern and southern, and Europe is a managed problem rather than a defining one — is geographically possible.
Europe as a civilizational argument
Beneath the strategic argument, Karaganov is making a civilizational one. It deserves to be heard clearly, even when it is hardest to read.
The most uncomfortable language in the conversation is not the language about nuclear weapons. It is the language about Europe. Karaganov calls Europe “the embodiment and the source of all major wars” and “the source of most of the evil things in history of human society.” He extends the list to colonialism, racism, serial genocides. He says — multiple times, in different formulations — that Europe should be “pushed aside” from any leading role in world affairs; that southern and central Europe may eventually rejoin a healthy international community while north-western Europe, the “Calvinist” Europe in his usage, should not. He insists that this is not anti-European. He says he loves German culture, he names Goethe, Bach, Hölderlin, his Russian-cultural lineage of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky alongside the European canon. He frames the argument as one about saving the human in humanity from a particular European pathology that, in his reading, is winning again.
Two things should be said about this, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that Karaganov is rehearsing a recognizable Russian Eurasianist position. He is not improvising. The argument that Russia is not a European country but a Eurasian one with European elements, and that its eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeanization was a strategic mistake that should now be undone, is a real intellectual tradition with serious thinkers behind it. Karaganov, who founded the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, is in effect saying that the institute he founded was studying the wrong continent. This is a serious position. It explains a great deal about the direction of Russian foreign policy under the current configuration of power, including the depth of the pivot to China, India, Iran, and the Gulf. It is not just rhetoric.
The second is that Mearsheimer is right that essentialist claims about civilizations are how avoidable wars start. The same argument, with the geography reversed, is currently being used in Eastern Europe to explain Russian aggression as a fixed national trait; Karaganov would recognize the structure of the argument and reject it as nonsense, which it is. He does not appear to see that he is making the symmetrical version about Germans and “Calvinist” north-western Europeans. The fact that he can hold both positions without noticing the contradiction is itself part of the story of where Russian elite thinking has moved during this war.
What the article should not do is launder the framing. Karaganov’s civilizational claims are claims, not facts, and they sit inside a project. The project is the strategic and intellectual reorientation of Russia away from Europe and toward Eurasia; the rhetoric helps that project domestically by giving Russian elites a moral story to attach to a geopolitical pivot they were going to make anyway. Reading the conversation this way clarifies what is being argued and what is being smuggled.
What the conversation actually reveals
The point of reading two analysts at length is to see where their agreements end. That is where the actual information is.
Karaganov and Mearsheimer agree on a great deal. They agree that NATO expansion is the principal cause of the war. They agree that the Cold-War red lines have been allowed to erode. They agree that the August 2024 Kursk incursion and the June 2025 Spider’s Web operation were category errors on the Western side. They agree that a limited Russian nuclear strike on European targets would probably not produce an American nuclear response in kind. They agree that the United States is in the process of stepping back from Europe and that the German question is reopening. They disagree, sharply, on what follows from all of this.
Mearsheimer’s position is that Karaganov’s plan would work as a coercion exercise — and then immediately set in motion a sequence that would leave Russia and the world significantly worse off than the present, however bad the present is. The sequence: German nuclear acquisition, proliferation cascade, normalization of nuclear use globally. Karaganov’s position is that the present is already worse than is widely recognized in the West, that the current trajectory leads to a general war anyway, and that the moral catastrophe of a controlled demonstration strike is preferable to the slower catastrophe of letting the system collapse without one. Both positions take the nuclear question seriously. Only one of them has a theory of what comes after the strike. That asymmetry is the most useful single observation a reader can take away from the hour.
The other observation is about the moral seam in Karaganov’s own argument. He says repeatedly that Russia would win a limited nuclear exchange and that he hopes Russia never does so, because the people who order it would carry the sin for the rest of their lives. The hope is sincere, as far as one can tell. So is the calculation. He is asking the world to take both seriously at once. The political reading is that he is establishing himself as the figure whose hard line preserves a moral remainder — the maximalist who still knows what a sin is. The strategic reading is that the country which arrives at his policy has already accepted the sin in advance. The conversation does not resolve which reading is correct. It does make plain that Russia’s nuclear doctrine has moved closer to the position he was almost alone in arguing three years ago, and that no one in the conversation, including Mearsheimer, thinks the West has yet understood what that means.