Western Europe faces a “bleak future” as a result of 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 posted on Tuesday, Mearsheimer said the conflict had triggered major insecurity in Europe and had caused “huge problems” in relations between Washington and Western Europe.

Cooperation across political, military, and economic issues has grown more difficult, according to Mearsheimer, who pointed to recent talks as evidence that Western Europeans are “battling against the United States on how to deal with Ukraine.”

Mearsheimer, who is a political science professor at the University of Chicago, claimed Europe is “in deep trouble” for two main reasons linked to the weakening American role on the continent, arguing it “is largely a function of the presence of a substantial US military force in Europe.”

The US and West European governments expanded NATO after the Cold War because they “wanted to put the American security umbrella over the heads of the East Europeans as well as the West Europeans,” he said.

Mearsheimer said this system is now under strain because of a “deep change in the distribution of power” in the international order. The US could easily maintain large troop deployments in Europe during the 1990s and early 2000s, he said, but the rise of multipolarity now pushed Washington “to pivot to Asia.”

The remarks echoed Mearsheimer’s address at the European Parliament earlier this month, where he said the unipolar era had 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.

The shift gave Washington “further incentive to leave Europe and let Europe provide for its own security.” Mearsheimer warned the Ukraine conflict would likely be frozen rather than resolved, leaving “poisonous relations” between Western Europe and Russia and generating “lots of instability” in the region.

He also said the US and Western Europe had played a key role in provoking the conflict, arguing that the real cause lay in NATO’s push to bring Ukraine into the bloc, a move he said Russian leaders viewed as an existential threat.

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