John Mearsheimer in Athens: Why Realism Explains Better than Alternative Theories (Transcript)

Whether you’re talking about raising children and the theories that you have in your head for how you discipline your children when they misbehave, or whether you’re talking about running Greek foreign policy or American foreign policy. You can’t make decisions in terms of how to think about the world without a theory in your head.

Realism vs. Liberal Theories: The Case of China

Just to give you one example of this, when China was rising in the 1990s and into the 2000s, I said that the United States should not facilitate China’s rise. This is a huge mistake. You’re going to create a peer competitor. You want to keep China as weak as possible. This is realism 101.

But the United States of America was dominated by liberals — the foreign policy establishment was — and they had a series of liberal theories that they employed for thinking about China. Their idea was that if you get China hooked on capitalism and you integrate them into the global economy and you facilitate economic interdependence, you will have no problem at all. Furthermore, if you integrate them into international institutions, they will become, in Robert Zoellick’s famous terminology, “responsible stakeholders.”

And once they become responsible stakeholders, and once they’re hooked on capitalism, as happened with the Asian tigers, it will happen with China. It will become a liberal democracy. And once it’s a liberal democracy, it will be no problem for Japan or the United States, because they’re liberal democracies. And as you all know, liberal democracies never fight each other in the liberal story. That’s their story.

So it’s very important to understand that the policy of engagement toward China was based on the three principal liberal theories. And the critics of liberal hegemony — and there were not many of them — were people like me who were realists, who said that whether China is a democracy or not doesn’t matter. If it becomes powerful, it’s going to have a big appetite. And in my mind, it’s going to want to dominate East Asia the way we dominate the Western hemisphere. They’d be nuts not to want to dominate East Asia.

They want to be really powerful. They remember what happened the last time they were weak. It’s called the century of national humiliation.

Realism vs. Liberal Theories: The Case of NATO Expansion

So from a realist point of view, I was opposed. And by the way, just to go to NATO expansion, the realists — George Kennan being the most famous example — argued that NATO expansion was a ridiculous and foolish move. And it was going to end up causing a huge crisis with the Soviet Union slash Russia. And we should not expand NATO.

But there’s a whole set of liberal theories — I’m not going to go into this now — that underpinned our expansion of NATO eastward. They who were in charge, this is the Clinton administration to start, then the Bush administration, the Obama administration, they believed that NATO expansion was not going to lead to disaster because they had these liberal theories. Realists disagreed.

The only point I’m trying to make to you here is that you want to understand that there is no way you can formulate foreign policy. There’s no way you can think intelligently about foreign policy without a theory in your head.

Competing Theories in International Politics

But as my discussion points out, and you surely have all figured this out, what you see is there are competing theories in international politics. And of course, what he wanted me to do is talk about the virtues of realism, which I’ll do in a minute. But you all understand that realism is a hard sell.

It was especially a hard sell during the unipolar moment. Convincing people that NATO expansion was bad — that was difficult. Convincing people that engagement with China, that helping China to get rich made no sense — there’s an argument that was almost impossible to make. And I’ll say more about this as I go along.

But we live in a world where theory is God. And when you go to Washington or you come to a place like Athens and you talk to policymakers, they dis theory. They, in fact, in practice, use theories to think about the world. You have no choice, and you have no choice because the world is so complicated that you can’t make sense of it and you can’t make decisions unless you have theories in your head.

Why Realism Is the Best Explanatory Theory

Second set of points. I think that realism provides the best explanation for how the world works. It’s better than the liberal theories. This is not to say that it always works. Again, no theory is right all the time. I always tell students, if you hear somebody say, “I have a theory that is right all the time,” you want to dismiss that argument, because what it really means is that person doesn’t have a theory. You can’t be right all the time.

But realism does a really good job of explaining how the world works. If somebody said to any of you, what you have to do is go back to 1800 and ramp forward to the present, 1800 to 2026 — 226 years — and I want you to pick out a theory that can explain how the world works over that timeframe. This would mean: one, the Napoleonic Wars; two, World War I; three, World War II; four, the Cold War; five, the rise of China. And then it would involve the unification of Germany.

Bismarck, as you know, becomes chancellor in 1862. The first war is against Denmark in 1864, then against Austria in 1866, then against France in 1870. But then he stops expanding and he goes to great lengths to establish this structure of alliances in Europe.

I mean, how are you going to explain all those events — all those big events that I started with — German behavior, or it was actually Prussian behavior to start with in 1862? How are you going to explain the absence or presence of war in particular periods? For example, from 1815 to 1853, which is when the Crimean War starts, you had no great power war in Europe. What explains that?

Are you going to use democratic peace theory? Not close. You couldn’t even get to first base, as we’d say in the United States, using democratic peace theory. There were hardly any democracies back then, and democratic peace theory tells you very little. Economic interdependence? Not really.

The Best Alternative to Realism: Ideology

I think if you’re looking for an alternative theory, the best alternative theory would be ideology. I think ideology mattered in some conflicts. I think, for example, if you’re talking about Nazi Germany versus the Soviet Union, ideology really matters. But World War I — Imperial Germany versus the Triple Entente, France, Britain, and Russia — does ideology tell you much? Not at all.

Maybe the Cold War is another example: communism versus capitalism slash democracy. Again, maybe World War II, but not World War I. Bismarck, not much. Ideology occasionally pops up, it tells you some things, but I think that’s the best alternative to realism.

Measuring the Value of a Theory

I think realism is just a very effective strategy for describing the historical record. And by the way, this is how you measure how good a theory is. Most people measure how good a theory is because of its normative value — what they really want to believe. I have lots of friends who don’t like my views on realism because they’re liberals, and in their heart of hearts, they just don’t want to admit that the world works the way I say it does. “We’ve got to find a better way to do business,” right? That’s the argument.

And what you do is you come up with a normative theory. But we’re not interested in normative theories. We’re interested in explanatory theories. We’re interested in theories that explain the world, explain how the world works, because if we don’t have a theory that explains how the world works, you don’t have a theory that you can use to make policy decisions. So you need a theory that actually explains the world.

The Dark Picture of Realism

And one of the problems with realism, especially my variant of realism, is that it presents a very dark picture, and people don’t like that. They don’t like that dark picture. I don’t like it either. I’m basically a liberal. I think it’s tragic. My book is called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. I think it’s tragic that the world operates the way the world does operate.

But I’m a realist with a little r as well as a realist with a capital R. And you have to accept the way the world works and operate around that simple fact of life. People find that very hard to do.

But I think that realism, despite the fact that it tells a bleak story, a story of tragedy, is a very powerful theory and therefore one that people should pay great attention to. Now, why do I say that? What is it about realism that makes it such a powerful theory and so hard to defeat intellectually? And I do believe my argument — this is a self-serving statement — but I do believe my argument is hard to defeat intellectually.

The Five Assumptions of Realism

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: So what I want to do is I want to lay out my theory for you. And then I want to compare it to economic interdependence theory, and I want to also compare it to how most economists think about the world and show you the difference and show you why my theory is the most powerful theory of the three.

As you know, I basically start with a handful of simple assumptions about the world. And of great importance is my assumption that we live in a world where there’s no higher authority, number one. Number two, where states have some offensive military capability, and obviously varies from case to case, but you live in a world where states are the principal actors.

There’s no higher authority. You all know this is the anarchy argument. The system is not hierarchic. There’s no higher authority. It’s anarchic.

And all the states that are in the system have some offensive capability. Some have more than others. And then third, and this is of enormous importance, you can never know the intentions of other states.

When I was in the military back in the day, I was in intelligence, I worked in Air Force Intelligence, and we cared greatly about assessing the Soviet threat. And you always looked at two dimensions of the Soviet threat. One was capabilities, and two were intentions. We actually were very good at measuring Soviet capabilities. We could tell how many SS-18s they had, how many Foxbat aircraft, how many armored division equivalents in Central Europe, and so forth and so on. Because material capabilities are things that you can see and count.

You can just count armored divisions, you can count submarines. Intentions are in the heads of individuals and you can’t see them. They’re just very hard to know. They could also change overnight. Very hard to tell.

So even if you can tell what intentions are today of a particular country, you can’t tell for sure what they’re going to be in five years, 10 years. Intentions are very difficult to discern. And what that means is you tend to assume worst case about intentions if you can’t know. Or you look to their capabilities.

Capabilities vs. Intentions: The China Example

Just to give you an example on this, the Chinese, and Deng Xiaoping was the key player here, said what you want to do is you want to grow the Chinese economy. You can grow Chinese military forces. But you want to talk peace, love, and dope. You don’t want to talk in harsh ways. You don’t want to engage in wolf warrior diplomacy, because you’ll scare the United States and other countries like Japan.

My response to that was, it doesn’t matter whether you talk in wolf warrior diplomacy terms or not. All the United States will care about is how powerful you are economically. Because once the United States sees you growing economically, they’ll know, number one, you can translate that economic might into military might. Remember, economic might is the foundation of military might. You see China growing economically, you know they can develop formidable offensive forces.

And intentions are not going to matter. And when Deng Xiaoping was saying you can convey benign intentions, you can’t convey benign intentions because we can’t know what China’s intentions are today, and we certainly can’t know what they are in the future. So what we rivet on are their capabilities.

Just to go back to the Cold War, we were, as I said, very good at figuring out what Soviet capabilities look like. We could never agree on Soviet intentions. There was huge disagreement inside and outside of the intelligence community about what Soviet intentions were.

So the point that I’m making to you, the first three assumptions I start with: anarchy, no higher authority, one. Two, all states have some offensive capability. And number three, you can never be certain about the intentions of other states.

The fourth assumption, and this is going to be very important for what I say moving forward, the fourth assumption is that the principal goal of states is survival. You want to survive. For all the obvious reasons, that has to be your number one goal. You can’t pursue any other goal if you don’t survive. And then the fifth assumption is that states are basically rational actors, strategic calculators. Those are the five assumptions of realism that I start with.

Why Realism Produces a Nasty and Brutish World

And my argument is when you mix those assumptions up, you get a very nasty and brutish world. Why is that the case? First of all, you run the risk that another state will have malign intentions and lots of offensive capability. You run the risk that if Germany rearms in the 1930s, it will turn into Nazi Germany. You just never know. You help China to grow into a really powerful state.

As I said to Zbigniew Brzezinski when I debated him on this issue, can you tell me what China’s intentions are going to be in 20 or 30 years? You can’t even tell me who’s going to be in charge in China. You’re going to build up the power of a state, turn it into an offensive juggernaut, and you can’t be certain what its intentions are. From a realist point of view, this is crazy. I would never do this. But this is what we did.

So what I’m saying to you is the great danger that you run into is there’s a state that has malign intentions and a state that has a lot of offensive capability. Second problem is, second cause of fear — fear, a key word in Thucydides, a key word in Hobbes, a key word in my lexicon. Why do you get fear? Because if you get into trouble, there’s no higher authority that could pull your chestnuts out of the fire.

You’re in an anarchic system. You’re in an anarchic system where he gets powerful, and he turns out to have malign intentions. And I dial 911, as we say in the United States, there’s nobody at the other end.

The Imperative of Regional Hegemony

So then the question is, what’s the best way to survive in that system? The best way to survive is to be really powerful. The best way to survive is to be a regional hegemon, like the United States is in the Western Hemisphere. Do you think we go to bed at night in the Western Hemisphere worrying about any country attacking us in our region of the world? Absolutely not. We are by far the most powerful state in the Western Hemisphere. We have fish to the west of us, fish to the east of us, Canada to the north of us, and Mexico to the south of us.

And then further south, you run into weak countries like Guatemala and Bolivia and even Argentina and Brazil. There’s no country that can challenge us from a security point of view. This is an ideal situation. The point is you want to be really powerful.

I say with regard to the Chinese, the Chinese would be out of their mind if they didn’t try to dominate East Asia. They should want to take Taiwan. They should want to dominate the South China Sea. They should want to dominate the East China Sea. They should want to make sure they are far more powerful than Japan than they have been in the past. Why? Because that’s the best way to survive. There’s the key word. It’s the best way to survive.

You all understand that what happened in the middle of the 19th century when the Europeans and then later the Americans came to Asia, that Japan imitated the European countries and the United States. And Japan became a great power. The Chinese failed to imitate. There’s a whole literature on this, why China failed to become a powerful state in the middle of the 19th century forward and why Japan, starting with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, did.

But you know what the price that China paid for not imitating the European states is called? The century of national humiliation. Talk to the Chinese about the century of national humiliation, late 1840s to the late 1940s. This is what happens when you’re weak in international politics.

Lessons for Greece and the Self-Help System

You Greeks really sense that, I’m sure. I bet every one of you wishes that Greece was about 100 times more powerful than it is. And for good strategic reasons, you don’t want to be weak in international politics. You have lots of neighbors that make you very nervous. And over time, you’ve had lots and lots of neighbors who have made you very nervous. And some of them have done terrible things to you. You’ve disappeared from the map on a number of occasions. That doesn’t happen when you’re really powerful. That doesn’t happen when you’re a regional hegemon.

So my point is that if you’re interested in survival, and you’re in an anarchic system where you cannot know intentions, and where you’re going to end up fearing other states, and where you understand it’s a self-help system — it’s a self-help system. Again, there’s no higher authority. As my mother used to say to me when I was a little boy, “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s a self-help system. That’s what we’re talking about in international politics, taking care of yourself.

And what this means is that you want to dominate your region of the world the way the United States dominates its region of the world. And you want to make sure nobody else dominates its region of the world.

Why the United States Roams the Planet

And let me just say a word or two about that. Most of you have probably never wondered why the United States wanders all over the planet, sticking its nose in everybody’s business, building bases here, bases there, bases everywhere. Why do we do that? It’s because we are free to roam around the planet. And the reason we are free to roam around the planet is we have no threats in our own backyard.

I cannot emphasize this enough. The United States is a regional hegemon and that frees it up to roam into other areas of the world, including Europe, including East Asia. Well, what the United States fears with China is that if China becomes a regional hegemon, it is then free to roam into the Western Hemisphere.

And we all remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviets were not even a regional hegemon in Europe, because we prevented that from happening. But nevertheless, they were interested in roaming into the Western Hemisphere. And this did not make us happy. We do not want anybody roaming into the Western Hemisphere.

And by the way, you understand the Chinese today are not happy about the fact that we are in their face in East Asia, that we are in East Asia with large-scale military forces, that we run up and down the Chinese coastline in East Asia. They do not like that at all. I don’t blame them. We have a Monroe Doctrine. Same Monroe Doctrine logic should apply to them.

NATO Expansion and Russia’s Backyard

And for those of you in the audience who don’t think that NATO expansion into Ukraine was a threat to Russia, you should think about the fact that Ukraine is Russia’s backyard, just like the Western Hemisphere is our backyard. And we don’t like distant great powers coming into our backyard. Why do you think the Soviets should not be apoplectic about the thought of the United States of America moving right onto its doorstep and moving American forces and American weaponry into Ukraine? It’s the same basic logic.

Of course, this is why realists like me oppose NATO expansion. We said, do you seriously think the Russians are going to tolerate us moving right up to their border? I don’t think so.

But anyway, the point I want to make to you is you want to be a regional hegemon. You want to be really powerful. And you want to make sure that there is no other regional hegemon on the planet. And this logic is going to underpin the US-China competition moving forward. That’s my basic realist story.

Realism and the Historical Record

And I think if you take that logic that I laid out and you apply it to the historical record, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, I think it does a good job. It does a good job of explaining a great deal of what’s happened in the past. It does not do a perfect job. There are cases that don’t fit with my theory, which is very important you understand that. Theory is an imperfect instrument. But it’s the best instrument that we have for making sense of the world and therefore making policies. But I think realism, that structural realist variant that I laid out to you, I think actually does a quite good job explaining how the world works.

Economic Interdependence Theory: A Comparison

Now, I want to go to economic interdependence theory and talk about that. And I want to compare it to my realist theory and tell you why I think it is not as good a theory. It’s not to say that economic interdependence theory cannot explain anything. It’s not to say it’s totally useless. I’m not making that argument. I’m just making the argument that it is not nearly as powerful an argument as realism. And I’m going to explain why. And I’m going to do it on the basis of two words. But before I get to those two words, one of which I’ve talked about already, I want to tell you a bit more about economic interdependence theory.

I started, I wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, in 2001. Shortly thereafter, I went to China for the first time. And I’ve been to China many times, and I found almost immediately that I was something of a rock star in China. And this was despite the fact I was making the argument that China cannot rise peacefully and that the United States should do everything it can to slow down Chinese economic growth. And nevertheless, I constantly got invited back to China. And everywhere I went to speak, I faced huge audiences. And many people who I talked to would try to refute my argument.

Survival vs. Prosperity: The Core Debate

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I once asked the Chinese why they kept inviting me back since I was making the argument that China cannot rise peacefully. And one of the arguments, which I always found quite amusing, was they said, you’re the first American we’ve met who admits that the United States is ruthless. Because my argument is that all great powers are ruthless, including the United States. And they were used to having all these liberal Americans come over and tell the Chinese that we’re a benign hegemon. I’m sure some of you in the audience believe this.

And I told them that that was nonsense. The United States is not a benign hegemon. If you’re an ally of the United States, most of the time, we treat you quite well. But the United States is a ruthless great power. And the Chinese liked hearing that.

But the second reason that the Chinese were very interested in talking to me, and the most important reason, is they said, they wanted to figure out how they could defeat my argument. And basically, they said, this is a very powerful argument, Professor Mearsheimer. We accept that you have a powerful argument, but we want to figure out how to defeat your argument. And anyway, the argument that they invariably turned to was economic interdependence theory. And let me just say a word about that.

Economic Interdependence Theory vs. Realism

I think of the liberal theories, the most powerful of the three liberal theories is democratic peace theory. I don’t think it is as powerful as realism. But I think democratic peace theory is the most powerful of the liberal theories. The Chinese could not turn to democratic peace theory because they did not intend to become a democracy. The argument, as you all know, is that democracies don’t fight other democracies.

And China was not a democracy and not planning to become a democracy. And therefore, they were not going to use that theory against me. So they went to economic interdependence theory. And this is the argument that they made. We are hooked on capitalism just like you.

We have been integrated into this global, international economic order that you created during the Cold War and have expanded now in the unipolar moment. And we’re part of it. And we are getting very rich. And you, the United States, are also getting very rich. And Japan is getting very rich.

Everybody’s getting very rich. And who would slay the goose that lays the golden egg? Or golden eggs. That was the argument. If you strip away all the layers of the onion, basically what they were saying is that prosperity is of enormous importance to all of these states.

And achieving prosperity would guarantee that you didn’t have any major crises or any wars among the great powers. And here we’re talking, of course, about China and Russia, so that China could rise and the United States could rise. And just to come at this from the American point of view, when John the realist would say to American liberals that China is getting more and more prosperous, and it could turn that economic might into military might. There are arguments that’s not going to happen, and who cares if they’re getting more prosperous or wealthier relative to us over time, right? Because we’re getting wealthy, too, right?

Everybody’s getting rich. This is a wonderful gig we have here, right? Who cares whether the Chinese are getting richer than we are? It doesn’t matter. From my point of view, if somebody cares about the balance of power, it matters enormously.

But it didn’t matter for them. Because everybody’s getting prosperous. And in the liberal story, which Americans believed, hook, line, and sinker, because of the importance of prosperity, you’d have no war between the United States and China. You see the argument here?

Now, what’s the difference between realism and economic interdependence theory? Two words. Survival sits at the heart of my argument and prosperity sits at the heart of their argument. And in a world where survival is your principal goal and you are worried about the balance of power, you will behave in aggressive ways that do not apply in a world where prosperity is your principal goal. Just for you to understand, the distinction here between prosperity, which is the core, core causal mechanism in economic interdependence theory, and survival, which is the core causal mechanism in realism.

The Lesson of 1914

To give you one example quickly to illustrate this, the period in Europe here before 1914, as many of you I’m sure know, there was a huge amount of economic interdependence in Europe before 1914. There really was. And it involved all countries. At the same time, there was an intense security competition that revolved around two alliances, the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. Triple Entente, of course, is France, Britain, and Russia. The Triple Alliance is Austria-Hungary, Imperial Germany, and Italy, right?

And you had this intense security competition, which leads to the July crisis in 1914, and ultimately on August 1, 1914, the World War I. And this is all happening in a world where there is a huge amount of economic interdependence and everybody’s getting prosperous. What happened here? Survival considerations trumped prosperity.

I believe that World War I was basically a preventive war started by Germany. And Germany was scared stiff that the balance of power was shifting against Germany. Russians, who had been defeated in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and 1905, were coming back from the dead. The French and the British were doing all sorts of things to prepare for a possible war. The Germans thought that the balance of power was shifting against them. They saw a window of opportunity. They launched a preventive war. That’s my view. It’s a security argument.

Putin going into Ukraine, that’s a preventive war. It’s a preventive war. Security, survival, you never can underestimate the extent to which survival, the idea that survival is of the utmost importance. You see this in Hobbes, by the way. It’s very clear. That’s the one natural law in Hobbes that every person should seek to survive. It’s of enormous importance.

So it’s survival that trumps prosperity.

Economists vs. Realists: Two Different Worlds

Now, let me conclude by just talking about economists and how economists think about the world, and contrast that with how realists like me think about the world. And I want you to keep in mind as I move forward here that there is some overlap between economic interdependence theory and how economists tend to think about the world. For the most part, economists in the West since 1945 have paid very little attention to geopolitics. Very little attention to geopolitics.

If you think in terms of two variables, here’s geopolitics, and here’s economics or the business world. Those were, in very important ways, two different worlds. Now, why do I say that? For those of us in the room who are old enough to remember the Cold War, there was obviously a profound geopolitical competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies. But there was actually remarkably little economic intercourse.

People talk about the liberal international order that was created in 1945. It was not an international order. That order that was created that involved things like the IMF, the World Bank, European Coal and Steel Community, and so forth and so on, which became the EC, then became the EU, all those institutions that were created were created in the West. The Soviet Union had their own set of institutions. They had their own order.

And there was remarkably little economic interaction between the two orders. This meant that geopolitics and economic considerations, business considerations, were not intertwined.

The Unipolar Moment and Its Consequences

Then comes the unipolar moment. And in the unipolar moment, there’s only one great power, the United States of America. So there’s no geopolitics. You all understand that? There’s no geopolitics in the unipolar moment. There’s no great power politics. There’s only one great power. You can’t have great power politics if you have only one great power.

So the business world that you grew up in, most of you in the audience, came of age in unipolar moments starting in 1992, after the Soviet Union collapses December 1991. The unipolar moment, which most of you grew up in, was a world in which geopolitics hardly mattered at all. And therefore, there was no discussion of how the business community, how the economic world, and the security world interacted with each other, just as was the case for different reasons in the Cold War.

Then in 2017, the unipolar moment ends, and we move into multipolarity. We have three great powers. And economic considerations and security considerations are intertwined in ways that we’ve never seen before. It’s very important to understand that. Economics really matters. You all understand we, the United States, are in an intense security competition with China that has a military dimension for sure, but also has an economic dimension involving sophisticated technologies, we pay enormous attention these days to supply chains and so forth and so on. So economics and geopolitics are inextricably bound up for the first time.

When Economics Clashes with Security

So the question you have to ask yourself is, what happens in the world that we now live in when economic considerations clash with security considerations? With those logics that are developed in economics departments where they pay virtually no attention to security. Do you think people in economics departments think about anarchy and survival and the balance of power? They do not. It’s not part of their lexicon. That’s part of the realist lexicon.

What they’re concerned with is generating prosperity. That’s how economists think about the world. What can we do to fix the system in ways that generate prosperity for everyone? And economists don’t care whether China is growing faster than the United States is. Realists certainly do, but economists don’t. Because economists, like people who do political economy or economic independence theory, those people focus on prosperity. Economists are interested in prosperity. Realists are interested in survival.

So the point I’m making to you, this will be my final point, is that moving forward, I am not arguing that economic interdependence theory is useless or that the theories that economists bring to bear in terms of thinking about how the international economy functions are useless. Not my argument at all. My point is that when those economic theories or economic interdependence theory clashes with realist logic, realist logic will win almost every time. And the main reason is because survival in an anarchic system where you cannot know the intentions of other states that may be very powerful forces you to behave in aggressive ways that have no place in those liberal theories like economic independence or the liberal theories that dominate in the economics profession.

Thank you.

Q&A: Defensive Realism, Offshore Balancing, and Trump’s Strategy

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: John, thank you. That was a powerful exposé. But the way that we describe realism, I mean, you describe one strain of realism, your strain. I mean, structural and offensive realism. And there is a debate within realism, let’s say classical realism or defensive realism and your version of realism. And this is not just academic, as you said, theories matter.

For example, your analysis of international politics leads to prescription for the United States strategy of offshore balancing. Our colleagues that they call themselves defensive realism, including your co-author, what? But Mary Pozen, whatever, all these people that are defensive realism, they are restrained. So essentially, you have two strains of realism that produce different policy prescriptions that actually are very different. And now we are not talking realist versus Marxist or liberals. We are talking debate within realism.

And to continue this line of logic, knowing your arguments and seeing the American grand strategy, national security strategy, as it was published in the end of last year, it looks like you have written it. I mean, it’s placed emphasis on regions. He had a seminar in the Western Hemisphere. Which priorities? China. At the same time, it says, you know, US will act as a sort of balance, and it will beef up regional allies, like Korea, Japan, Australia. So it looks that your offensive realism and offshore balancing theory is the dominant theory.

At the same time, it says, you know, downplay Europe, try to solve the Ukrainian problem in order to distance Russia from the United States. So it seems that all your logic is in the new American national security strategy. At the same time, it’s ironic that you are one of the most powerful opponents. And you have criticized the Trump administration. So how you can reconcile this kind of divergence between theory and practice? You should have loved what you see.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’ll answer very briefly, because I want to go to questions from the floor. I talk too long anyway. But two sets of points. One is that, of course, he’s correct that there are these defensive realists out there who believe that the effects of the structure of the system that I described are more benign than I do.

I believe that the structure of the system that I described, anarchy, uncertainty about intentions, and so forth and so on, that that incentivizes states to maximize how much power they have. And it causes states, great powers, to be aggressive, highly aggressive, highly dangerous. My defensive realist friends believe that the structure of the system, when you look carefully at it, is much more benign, and that the only reason states behave as aggressively, as I say, is because of domestic political factors. I won’t go into any detail on this, but I think they’re wrong, and I do not think you can use their theory to explain much about how the world works.

And my good friend Charlie Glazer, who is a defensive realist par excellence, admits that his theory is a normative theory. It’s a normative theory because Charlie’s theory, he’s a defensive realist, cannot explain how the world works. My theory, I believe, explains, not perfectly by any means, as I tried to emphasize to you folks, but my theory does a good job of explaining how the world works. The defensive realists can’t do that. And that’s why what they ultimately have is a normative theory.

With regard to Trump, Athanasios likes to point out that Trump’s national security strategy document, which was issued in November of 2025, last November, is consistent in powerful ways with my theory of international politics and what policies the United States should pursue.

Q&A Session

MODERATOR: Well, let me open the floor for questions. Please identify yourself when you ask the question and try to get into the question and not giving a counter lecture.

Why Does American Foreign Policy Deviate from Realism?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Professor Papasotiriou, another prominent Greek realist. Just a pardoning request. I wanted to ask you, all right, you make a compelling argument about why your theory explains a lot of what happened in the last 2 and a half centuries. But given that you are sometimes a severe critic of American foreign policy, this means that your theory cannot explain these aspects that you criticize for American foreign policy. But why is American foreign policy not following a more realist road? Why not? Are the systemic pressures not so strong in the United States that they don’t fear as much as other states, and therefore, they can behave in a less realist way?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let me start with the Cold War and then talk about unipolarity.

During the Cold War, the United States did pursue a realist strategy for the purpose of containing the Soviet Union. And I think it clearly acted according to what my theory would predict. However, the United States also was deeply committed to intervening in what we used to call the third world or the developing world and doing social engineering. And this involved getting into wars in areas of the world that didn’t matter to the United States. And the best example of this was the war in Vietnam.

I don’t know whether you know this. Virtually every realist in the United States, except for Henry Kissinger, opposed the Vietnam War. And that was because it was strategically inconsequential who won the Vietnam War. And you all understand we suffered a decisive defeat when Vietnam collapsed in 1975, and in 1989 the Cold War ended, and we won a great victory despite having lost in Vietnam. Having lost in Vietnam hardly mattered at all, and we shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

So my criticism of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was not in terms of how we dealt with containing the Soviet Union in East Asia or in Europe. It had to do with our fixation on fighting wars in the developing world or the third world. And in fact, you want to know what my argument is. My argument is that if you’re involved in a security competition with another great power, what you want to do is you want to entice them, entice them to jump into a war in a third world or developing world country.

And let me give you an example of this. In 1979, as you all know, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Everybody in the United States national security community was apoplectic. “This is the end of the world. The Soviets are on the march. We’re in deep trouble.” I said, “You’re dead wrong. This is manna from heaven for us. They just jumped into a quagmire.” If you’re dealing with the Soviet Union, your arms racing with the Soviet Union, what you want them to do is to invade Afghanistan.

If you’re China today, you’re thrilled by the fact that the United States has got itself into a war in Iran. We’re pivoting away from Asia, which is remarkably foolish. So Vietnam was a perfect case in point. What were we doing in Vietnam? Do you think the strategic balance of power mattered in Vietnam? Do you think our survival was at stake in Vietnam? Of course it wasn’t. So my criticism in the Cold War was of these extracurricular escapades.

Then comes the unipolar moment. There’s no great power politics. So what I think we should do is stop intervening in all these countries and stop doing social engineering. Leave NATO where it is. And if anything, reduce your military footprint in Europe. Don’t help China grow more powerful. Just maintain the status quo. You’re the unipole.

But that’s not the way we operated then. We decided that we’re going to do social engineering all over the planet, right? Because there’s no geopolitics on the table, right? And we get involved in the forever wars. This is crazy. Afghanistan? We were in Afghanistan for 20 years and we lost. Ridiculous. Iraq — we invaded Iraq in 2003. By the way, every realist except Henry Kissinger opposed the Iraq war. By the way, every realist except Henry Kissinger was opposed to pulling out of the JCPOA. Maybe this tells you he wasn’t much of a realist. But anyway, so during the unipolar moment, that was the problem.

Then Trump comes into power. The unipolar moment ends in 2017. Trump comes to power. I think Trump does the right thing on China. Trump abandons engagement with China, and what he does is he goes to containment, and that’s the right thing to do. And Trump does not do much social engineering during his first term, and I think there was not much to criticize in terms of his foreign policy in his first term.

But the second term he’s back to social engineering. Regime change in Iran — oh my god, been there, done that, never works out very well, does it? Yeah, let’s invade Cuba. I mean, there’s a real threat to the United States. How many Americans even care about Cuba? The answer is probably about 5,000 Cuban Americans in Florida, including Marco Rubio.

So anyway, my criticism now, again, has to do with all of this extracurricular activity involving social engineering in weaker countries. And I think President Trump has gotten himself into a whole lot of trouble. You all understand we’re pivoting away from East Asia at this point in time, instead of pivoting to East Asia, which is what we should be doing.

China’s Economic Influence and the Monroe Doctrine

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Elias Melodiatas, work with the Department of War. Notice that Jason defends the war now. So this is a support to your group. And also, this is the war policy of Washington, I see. So on the National Institute of Strategy issued in November of 2015, I’d like you to see a record of that experience and maybe comment on the fact that I think you might believe this implemented in a way that it is targeting China’s economic resources. Take the example of the intervention in Venezuela, Panama, the attempts to bring them to the basis for approaching a position of Greenland. The deal in Ukraine with the rare earths, struck a deal and to my opinion were out, and also in the center of Africa, Botswana. All of these are attempts to cut off resources of China around the world, and weaken its supply chain, its economy, et cetera. So that’s my ending, of course, behind the strategy. It is Elbridge Colby that the unsecured defense in 2017, now unsecured defense, implementing his strategy of denial.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You have heard this argument before, right?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think so, yes.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah, yeah. I was pushing him along this argument. It’s a fight for the market, John.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Just as a general point, it’s very important to understand that the Western Hemisphere is the most important area of the world for the United States. And it’s because we are a regional hegemon and so secure in the Western Hemisphere that we hardly ever talk about that. And we concentrate instead on Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf. It’s those areas outside of the Western Hemisphere. But you want to understand that those three areas outside of the Western Hemisphere are not as important as the Western Hemisphere.

The second point is that President Trump, and this is reflected in the national security strategy, seems to think that we have a problem in the Western Hemisphere, that our dominance in the Western Hemisphere is being challenged by China. And the examples that you gave focused exactly on that point. I would note to you, you talked about Venezuela, Panama, and Greenland, but you forgot Canada, which President Trump intends to make the 51st state, although it may have to be the 52nd state, because Venezuela may be the 51st state.

But I think the only country there where Chinese economic influence — well, maybe two of them — really matters is Panama and Venezuela. Venezuela is the key because of oil, and Panama because the Chinese were playing a key role in managing the canal.

My view on this is that the Monroe Doctrine says that a country like China, or a country like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, cannot move military forces into the Western Hemisphere or form a military alliance with any country in the Western Hemisphere. But economic intercourse is OK. So in other words, if China trades with countries in the Western Hemisphere, that’s not a problem for us. The problem comes if they were to put military forces in Cuba or Mexico or Canada, what have you. You know the argument. That’s what matters.

So during the Cold War, whenever the Soviets had economic interests in the Western Hemisphere, we were able to live with those economic interests. And that’s been the case in the Western Hemisphere with China today. And I think I differ from you and Athanasios in the sense that he, like you, worries about Chinese economic influence in the Western Hemisphere, and in a sense sees this as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, not in America’s strategic interests. I don’t see it that way.

And I don’t think that that’s the principal reason that the United States went after these countries. I think that there are other reasons in each case. I think, for example, with regard to Greenland, we’re concerned with the US-China competition and the US-Russia competition in terms of how it affects Greenland. And we should be, but that’s not a reason to take over Greenland. One might say that Greenland has rich resources that we need to get our hands on and prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on. But they’re not going to get their hands on Greenland, and we don’t have to take over Greenland for that purpose. But I don’t see the economic argument as being a powerful argument at this point in time. So I’m somewhat at odds with the two of you on that.

The Role of Foreign Policy Analysis in Structural Realism

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Professor Vangelokounos. My name is Vangelokounos. It’s the national relations here of the financial industry. So first of all, I would like to congratulate you for this excellent lecture. And for a second sentence, it said, “No theory is right all of the time.” It’s something that we hear a bit. Some theories actually tend to forget. And it is very important for us. So I am coming up with my question. You said that domestic politics really matters, but does not matter sometimes as the extent that capabilities of structures, according to your own theory matters, but they matter. So the question is, do you think that foreign policy analysis has a place as a supplementary theoretical tool for your theory in order to explain how states or other agents really behave in the national politics, or is structural realism a very deterministic theory, and it does not allow a place for such a duality actually. I remember that Kenneth Waltz has written a book on British and American foreign policy in 1967. And it’s a book that has been forgotten since. It didn’t come to conclusion. So I would like to have your opinion on that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let me just start by saying, for those of you who don’t know the international relations literature all that well, Kenneth Waltz, who was one of the great all-time international relations thinkers and is a realist par excellence, makes the argument that his structural theory of international relations cannot explain the foreign policy behavior of states. It can only explain what he calls outcomes — structural outcomes like wars or alliances. But Waltz says, “I cannot explain American foreign policy. I cannot explain Greek foreign policy.”

So in a funny way, Waltz said my structural realist theory has no room for foreign policy analysis. I want to be clear, I completely disagree with that. And I believe that I can take my realist lens and I can look inside states and how they behave. This is the foreign policy behavior. And I should expect those states to behave according to my theory. And if they don’t, the theory is contradicted.

But I believe you can do foreign policy analysis. And I believe in most cases, when you go inside the black box, you’ll see domestic politics. You’ll see it. I’m not foolish enough to argue domestic politics doesn’t matter, period, end of story. You’ll always see domestic politics. But my argument is that in the vast majority of cases, what will happen is that realist logic will trump those domestic factors.

Not always, because remember what I told you about the Israel lobby book. And there are other cases where my theory is contradicted. This gets back to the question that you were asking me, and I was telling you the United States behaved in foolish ways. That’s telling you that my theory didn’t do a really good job all the time. But anyway, I think with realism, you can do foreign policy analysis, but you will find examples where the theory is contradicted.

MODERATOR: John, his latest book on how states think — the rationality of foreign policy — tries to answer that. And the way that we deal with the issue of black box, we start with the assumption of rationality and what deviates from rationality, and how policies are being formed. I mean, but that’s a counter-lectural job, right?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, can I just say, I just want to say a word about this, because I find this to be a fascinating subject, and it dovetails with my lecture. I told you that I have a particular theory of realism. He told you that there are other theories of realism, which is true. And then I told you in the lecture that there are these liberal theories. So there’s this whole slew of theories out there.

Rationality, Theory, and Policy

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And we wrote this book on rationality. And what’s very interesting is we argue in the book that if a state employs a theory that has a certain amount of plausibility in the academic world, in other words, if it’s a theory like democratic peace theory or economic independence theory that lots of people like and think that there’s evidence to support, I don’t think that, right? But they think that. And it’s very hard to discriminate among theories that even if you have a policy of engagement with China that’s based on these liberal theories that I think are wrong, it’s a rational policy. Do you see what I’m saying here?

There are a lot of theories out there, and it’s very hard to discriminate among them. Right? So rationality, which is linked with theory, whether you have a policy that’s based on a plausible theory can be based on different theories. It’s very interesting, but lots of people who read the book in manuscript form, if you listen to them talk, they say, a state is rational if it adopts my theory. You get what I’m saying?

The argument we made in the book, as you know, is that you can adopt a different theory. Because there are lots of theories out there, and some of them are highly regarded, if not by me, but by other people, and they’re in charge. And if they pursue NATO engagement based on these liberal theories that they think are powerful, that’s rational.

So whether you’re right or wrong is different than whether you’re rational or not. Provided that you also follow a certain process of decision making, but that’s too esoteric. Next question. Please identify yourself.

Q&A: Technology and Offensive Realism

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you very much for the lecture. It’s actually an honor to have you here today. My name is Voskfantelos and I’m a PhD student in the University of Athens, Professor of History. So my question is, how does modern technology fit with your offensive realism argument? And if you let me elaborate what I mean. In today’s world, water technology, like Jim Jones, AI patho-manipulation system, offers the inorganic abilities of the small state actors to change the batch of power against the larger investors.

Yet, even great powers start wars, thinking that they will last only three days, like three days to kill or take a run or whatever. And instead of some bitter moments, they fell victim of an aboriginal warfare. So, do you think that a small state today using technology is still a viable option for it to pursue, to shoot for a regional area, or not? For a smaller state? To survive or to become regional?

It is still a viable strategy. I’m talking about Cuba. You mentioned that Cuba is supposed to offer to continental United States. Yet, the US adversary can very easily employ cheap long-range solutions to deal with violence and threat?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s different from what my take on it. Look, I think there has been only one technology that has fundamentally affected great power relations, and I’m choosing my words carefully, one technology that’s fundamentally affected great power relations since 1800, and that’s nuclear weapons, right? And nevertheless, I think offensive realism can be used to explain great power politics before 1945 and after 1945. And there’s nothing out there today that looks like it’s going to have anywhere near the effect on interstate relations than nuclear weapons had.

So I don’t see any technology out there that’s going to change international politics in a fundamental way and allow smaller powers to throw their weight around more so than in the past. I think the great powers will continue to dominate the system. I think the great powers write the rules. They force smaller states to obey them. And when the great powers don’t want to obey the rules, they either rewrite the rules or just disobey them and then hire a sophisticated lawyer to explain why they really didn’t violate the rules when they did violate the rules.

But great powers dominate in the system, and they’ll continue to dominate for as far as the eye can see. This is not to deny for one second that new technologies do matter in the conduct of war or in the conduct of economic intercourse. They do. Look at drones. Who would deny that drones haven’t affected events on the battlefield?

But in terms of the essence of international politics, I think we are today where we were in 1800.

Q&A: Europe’s Dependence on the United States

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, let’s take into account also artificial intelligence. My name is Mosten Modros, I’m a coordinator at the Center for Racial Transformation in Southern Europe and the Eastern European Racial Transformation. Thank you very much for your excellent lecture. I’m very honored to be here with you.

I would like to ask you a question about Europe. And it might be daunting to try to explain European policy. It makes sense to be here today. But we have seen here that Europe has shown a very continued dependence on the United States of America, despite the ambivalence of the American policies and its reliability, the threat from Russia, Europe’s own half-mast. How would you explain Europe’s persistence on utilizing America’s indispensable security government provider in this situation?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: OK. Yeah, this is a great question. What the United States does in Europe, mainly through NATO, is that it acts as a pacifier. The United States is the pacifier in Europe. Remember what I said in my lecture.

If you’re in an anarchic system, there’s no higher authority that sits above you. You’re in an anarchic system. You’re forced to compete for power and sometimes behave in very aggressive ways. As a result of World War II and then the coming of the Cold War, the United States stayed in Europe after 1945, built this formidable alliance called NATO, and played a key role in policing Western Europe, making sure that West Germany and France remained friendly, France and Britain, West Germany and Britain all had friendly relationships. We in a very important way created a hierarchical order in Europe.

When the Cold War ended, the Europeans desperately wanted us to stay in Europe. They did not want us to leave. You may find this hard to believe, but the Soviet Union did not want us to leave. They did not want us to disband NATO when the Cold War ended. Remember, the Soviets pull out of Eastern Europe, and the Warsaw Pact crumbles.

The quid pro quo is not to let the same thing happen to NATO. The only thing the Soviets are concerned with, and then later the Russians, is no NATO expansion. But they want NATO intact. The Europeans want NATO intact. Why is that?

Because the Europeans, to include the Soviets slash Russians, understand we are the pacifier. You take us away and you’re in a self-help world. The Germans have to provide for their own security. Many of us in the room remember when the Cold War ended and there was talk about German reunification before it happened. The British and the French were scared stiff.

Oh my god, we’re bringing them back together? We’ve done that before, and it did not work out very well. World War I, World War II. But as long as you keep the Americans in, because the Germans were subservient to the Americans, we ran security in Europe. We decided what could be done and couldn’t be done.

And the Europeans were perfectly happy with this. I have never, over the course of my lifetime, heard a single European leader say that he or she wants the Americans to leave Europe. I’ve never heard a single leader. De Gaulle didn’t like us for all sorts of reasons. He pulled out of the military half of NATO, but he did not want the Americans to go home.

He understood that we were the pacifier. So this is the logic that underpins why Europe has been so peaceful.

NATO as the Foundation of European Prosperity

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let’s go to the EU. The EU is all about creating prosperity. NATO is all about survival, survival, prosperity.

You remember my argument from before? I raged when the EU received the Nobel Prize. Why did the EU get the Nobel Prize? NATO should have gotten the Nobel Prize. Without NATO, you wouldn’t have had an EU.

The reason you had the EU, the reason economics has flourished in Europe, is because the Americans are providing security for you. Your elites understood this. They just didn’t want to tell you that. Instead, they told you that with the end of the Cold War came the end of history. Peace, love, and dope forever and ever.

That’s what you were told. You were all disposed to believe that, right? But that’s not true. The key was the American military presence in Europe. If the Soviet Union left Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact crumbled, why didn’t Uncle Sam go home?

You ever ask yourself that question? Why didn’t we go home? Why didn’t the Europeans say, “Thanks, you did a great job, time for you to leave. Peace at times. War has been burned out of Europe.”

They didn’t say that. They wanted us there because they understood that we were the pacifier. And the great fear that the European elites have today, and many in the European public now, is that they understand because of the rise of China and the need to pivot to Asia. You know, when you pivot to one place, you pivot away from another place. The place we’re going to pivot away from is Europe, and we’re already doing that.

And given Trump’s hatred of Europeans, it looks like there may be nothing left of NATO by the time he leaves office, that the American military footprint might be tiny. What that means is you’re on your own. And when you’re on your own, there are huge collective action problems that the United States will not be there to solve. There’s the question of who’s going to provide nuclear deterrence for Germany. Have you thought about that?

The Germans are gaga over the Russian threat. They think the Russians are the second coming of Adolf Hitler. The Russian army is the equivalent of the Wehrmacht. We have to worry about a Russian attack into Europe. Therefore, we have to build up our defenses.

That’s the German view. Well, OK, if you believe that and you don’t have nuclear weapons and the Russians do have nuclear weapons, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? The answer is you’re probably going to get nuclear weapons of your own. Do you want to see that?

I don’t think anybody in Europe wants to see that, including the Germans themselves. But this is what happens when you have to provide for your own security. It was NATO that was providing security. It was NATO that was providing the foundation for the EU to grow by leaps and bounds over time. There’s no question that the EU is one of the most successful international institutions in the history of the world.

I don’t want to make light of that. I know Viktor Orban doesn’t like it, but nevertheless, a wildly successful institution. And that was only possible because of NATO. This is something most Europeans have never thought about. They just took it for granted.

The American Pacifier: Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: But the American pacifier was of enormous importance. By the way, just to go to East Asia, right, if you talk to some Chinese intellectuals, in a way they have a Monroe doctrine mentality. This is the Chinese. “Let’s push the Americans out beyond the first island chain, push them out beyond the second island chain, get them out of East Asia, and keep them out of East Asia.”

Which my response is, you better think about this, because the Japanese then have to provide for their own security. They have god knows how much plutonium that they could use more badly than I do. They could easily weaponize. The Koreans as well. The Koreans as well. The Taiwanese were even flirting with that idea during the Cold War.

If you’re the Chinese, do you want that? Now, you may want that. You may be willing to live with that, just to get the Americans out of your face. But you want to understand that the Americans serve as the pacifier in East Asia, the same way we do in Europe.

By the way, just on the Gulf, right, let’s talk about the Iran War just for a second. You know, the war started February 28. On February 27, we had in place a basing structure in the Gulf, and we had an alliance structure in the Gulf where we provided security for the Gulf states. We were the pacifier, and they loved it. And by the way, they were getting rich. You just think about this.

Think about the UAE. Think about Saudi, right? Qatar. You just think about all those countries. They were getting rich underneath the American security umbrella.

We had all those bases. We had agreements with all those countries. Then we went to war on February 28. Virtually all the bases were either badly damaged or destroyed. The alliance structure has fractured, and we’re in real trouble.

And we don’t appear to have a long-term future as a pacifier in the Persian Gulf, right? But you can see this logic at work around the world. And again, don’t forget, as I told you folks before, you just want to think about the big picture all the time. The reason the United States is able to stay in Europe after the Cold War, it’s able to create this alliance structure in the Persian Gulf, it’s able to stay in East Asia after the Cold War, it’s because we’re, number one, filthy rich. But two, we’re also a regional hegemon, and we’re free to roam. We’re free to roam.

And this played to your advantage. And the problem that you now face, I’m talking about Europeans, is that it looks like Uncle Sam is getting out of Europe in a major way. And then the question is, how do you provide for your security?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We have time for two more questions. Professor Keridis and then the last one. Professor Keridis.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Well, this is fascinating. But I want to go back to Paris’s original question.

Evaluating Theories: Explanatory Power and Marxism

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: If your theory cannot explain the failures and the extracurricular escapades of the US foreign policy, which theory can? Well, there are obviously other theories that can explain those cases. And probably some other cases as well. The question you have to ask yourself when you’re evaluating theories is how much explanatory power does each theory have? In other words, how much of the historical record can my theory explain?

How much of the historical record can his theory explain versus your theory or is his theory? That’s the question. Marxism, when I was young, a young graduate student, there were three big sets of theories in IR. You remember these days? Realism, liberalism, and Marxism.

And Marxism was replaced by constructivism. But Marxist theories, I used to teach Lenin’s imperialism. Yeah, Lenin’s imperialism. Lenin was a great writer, and he’s easy to teach, because you can understand his arguments and falsify his arguments.

But anyway, I’m getting off target here. The point is that a Marxist theory can explain a good number of cases. It’s not like a Marxist theory or a liberal theory is no good. The question is, which theory explains the most cases? That’s what you have to focus on.

And just to go back to the defensive realists, which was raised versus the offensive realists, people like me, I believe that their principal problem is they can’t explain many cases at all. And that’s why they have a normative theory. You need an explanatory theory. You need a theory that can explain how the world works. And they’re just sort of different theories.

Marxism, by the way, you know, Marxism is a theory that says the world works on the basis of class friction, right? There are these different classes. There are transnational classes and so forth and so on. It’s just a very different way of thinking about the world. But still, they take into account power and interest. So in some respect, close to our theories.

Yeah. I just want to make one quick point on this. I’ve become, over the years, very good friends with Perry Anderson, who’s a very distinguished historian. And he is a structural Marxist.

And I met him the first time when I went to UCLA and gave a lecture on the theory chapter in Tragedy of Great Power Politics, a more extensive version of the argument that I gave you tonight when I laid out my own theory. And he came. He was in the audience. And he loved to talk. He got himself invited to dinner that night.

He sat next to me at dinner. And he was just fascinated by the theory. And I think he was fascinated by the theory for the reasons that you out there are getting that. It was a structural argument. And furthermore, in my argument, and you want to remember this too, remember I said, economic might is the foundation of military might. It’s in a way, it’s very, as a march. The Marxists would love it. Yeah, yeah, right, right. So you see that or I give it. But anyway, so I became fast friends with him.

Q&A Session

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: OK, we are running out of time. Very brief questions. Yourself, Armanitopoulos, and Pasif. I’ll give short answers. I’m the problem here.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, you’re good.

Nuclear Deterrence and the Russia-Ukraine War

AUDIENCE QUESTION: My name is Yiannis Pateridis. I’m an engineer for the Cadet General. So the questions and answers. First, what was nuclear in the eastern Ukraine war? And what did you learn? In Air Force, the Guardia General, sought questions and sought answers. First, was the West nuclear-bitter in the Russian-Ukraine war? And what… I’ll show that again. What is the question? Was the West nuclear deterred? In recent Russia-Democratic war, did the West nuclear deter? Was we nuclear deterred? So two questions, nuclear weapons and the future of Europe.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: OK, just on Western nuclear weapons, I think that up till now, Putin has been very cautious in using military force against the West, because he understands that the West has nuclear weapons. And he does not, for obvious reasons, want to get involved in a nuclear war. I think one could argue that NATO’s nuclear deterrence has limited what Putin is willing to do, not in Ukraine, but in terms of attacking targets in Europe. And you know, the Europeans are supporting the Ukrainians. So I think nuclear deterrence has mattered there.

I would note, by the way, I do not think that people in the West pay serious attention, let me put it differently, pay enough attention to Russian nuclear weapons. And there are a good number of Russians who say that this is the case, that the West doesn’t understand, Western leaders do not understand we live in a nuclear world and we Russians have nuclear weapons. They think they can slap us around, people in the West. They think they can slap us around, and we will just take it. And the Russians are now talking about possibly using nuclear weapons in Europe against the European target.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So is this a 10% or 30% chance? Can you give a number?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, Sergey Karaganov, who’s been the principal proponent of this view, that Karaganov’s view is it’s time for Russia to start striking targets in Europe, in Europe, NATO, with conventional weapons. And if that doesn’t work, we turn to using a small number of nuclear weapons. And Karaganov says that when he first started making this argument, he was clearly in the minority. And most people thought he was crazy. He says now, the overwhelming majority of Russians agree with him.

There is no question, if you follow what’s going on in Russia today that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that it’s time to attack the West. And if we have to use a handful of nuclear weapons, so be it. As a good realist, you know when you back any country into a corner, you begin to threaten its survival. It will lash out in ways that you might not have expected.

And with regard to Karaganov, I would suggest anybody who’s interested in this issue, I’ve talked about it on a number of shows that I’ve been on, but Karaganov, if you just Google him, he’s written a couple articles on this, and it’s well worth looking at. This is a really big issue, right? Really big issue. All these strikes, all these strikes by Ukraine on Russia that the West is promoting, and we’re cheering and clapping and saying, it’s wonderful to see the Ukrainians clobbering the Russians?

You want to ask yourself, what do you think the Russians’ response is to that? Just want to ask yourself that question. And you want to remember that they have many, many nuclear weapons. And then go read Sergei Karaganov, and you’ll understand full well that we’re moving into dangerous territory. This is not to say you’re going to have a nuclear war. It’s just to say we’d better be very careful here.

Future of European integration, I’ll answer with one sentence. It’s bleak, because NATO is slowly dying, and NATO provided, that was my point, NATO provided the foundation for European integration.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Sorry, his lecture, John mentioned that realism was a pessimist theory. Now you see why, right?

Trump’s Foreign Policy: Promises vs. Reality

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Konstantinos. And Trump was elected. When it came to foreign policy, he was elected on the basis of three of his premises. When it came to China, he proposed to abandon engagement or containment of China. When it came to Russia, he talked about the rapprochement with Russia. And the third issue was that he vowed to abandon forever wars, wars of choice, and also regime change, something that the liberals or the neophones had done in the past. He has abandoned all these three premises. How do you account for his behavior? You mentioned you alluded to domestic factors, domestic variables, when it came to also choices in the regime change, i.e. Iran, Medenya, the Israeli lobby, and so on and so forth. What about the others? What about China? And what about Russia? Should we use domestic variables? Should we use agency? How would we explain the change?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, great question. I just want to repeat it just to set it up a bit more clearly for my own purposes. When Trump comes to office in 2017, and even again in 2025, right? But go back to 17. He’s going to abandon engagement and do containment. He’s going to have good relations with the Russians, and he is going to avoid the forever wars. No more regime change, okay?

In his first term, he succeeds on the first goal completely. He abandons engagement, we go to containment. And Biden comes in and follows in his footsteps. Okay. With regard to Russia, he tried to improve relations with Russia, but he never got far because of the Russiagate business. So Trump failed almost completely. I think it’s fair to say he failed completely to improve relations with Russia. And remember, Trump comes to power 2017. The war in Ukraine starts in 2022 on Biden’s watch. But anyway, he fails with the Russians. He basically succeeds on the forever wars. There are no new forever wars in his first term. First term, yeah.

But it is important to disaggregate the two terms, right, if you’re aware. So success on China, success on the forever wars, and failure here. He comes in the second term. He’s going to shut down the Ukraine war and have good relations with the Russians, right? And he what? OK. OK. And then the third thing is he says, no more forever wars. Even if, remember he gave that talk, I think it was in Saudi Arabia, no more forever wars, right? So it looks like all he has to do is fix the Ukraine war relations with the Russians, and he’s achieved all three of those objectives.

What happens? First of all, he fails to shut down — he says he tries, that’s correct, he tries to shut down the Ukraine war. He fails. He tries to improve relations with the Russians. He basically fails. Forever wars, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, what is he doing in Iran? Oh my god. So he’s got himself into a mess here. He’s not fixed this problem.

Now, this and this, this and this affect this, China. Because if you are fighting the war in Iran and expending huge amounts of weaponry and munitions in that war, as you’re doing, and then you’re deeply involved in Ukraine. You can’t get yourself out. Yeah, you’re not giving weapons to the Ukrainians, the Europeans are, but they’re just the Europeans are just buying them from you. They’re still the weapons going to Ukraine. So given that Ukraine and Iran are siphoning off all sorts of weapons, we’re pivoting away from East Asia, right? This is what’s happening. We’re pivoting away from East Asia.

So when he goes to see Xi Jinping last month, he plays kissy face with Xi Jinping. And he plays kissy face with Xi Jinping, because the last thing we need is a crisis in East Asia that leads to a war. It makes perfect sense. So in a very important way, it looks like he’s abandoning his goal of containing China. He’s pivoted away, and then he’s nice to Xi Jinping. But that’s because of these two problems. This one he didn’t solve, the Russian one. And this one, which he had solved the first time around, he’s created a colossal disaster.

So I would just say to you, I was on Indian TV recently, CNN 18, which is a news station in India. I occasionally do interviews with them. But their view is the Indians want to have good relations with the United States for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is China. As you know, the Indians have a border with China, which is contested up in the Himalayas. They worry about China building a blue-water navy and projecting power into the Indian Ocean. They worry about China supporting Pakistan and a war against them. So the Indians, they want to have good relations with Uncle Sam. And then Trump turns on them, right?

But anyway, then Trump goes to Beijing. I was on the other day. They asked me the same question that you did, what’s going on here? We thought that Trump is interested in containing China, now he’s abandoning that thing, that containment policy, and he’s engaging China. And this is a disaster for India. That’s the implication.

Realism as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: A Critique

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: And the last person goes to Vassilis.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Yeah, thank you very much. First, to congratulate Professor Mearsheimer for a talk that made realist theory even more seductive than it can be. It is very seductive as a theory, and your talk made it even more seductive. But one can, of course, poke many holes in that theory, as well. As you said, no theory can explain everything, and theories are by nature imperfect.

For example, there are those who say that realist theory can be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes. Instead of describing or explaining the security dilemma, they are fueling the security dilemma. And that’s because of the way they structure the relationship between capabilities and future intentions. Some would say they predetermine that relationship because of the way they structure that relationship. Anyway, that’s not my question. That’s a comment.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s a very important comment. I have to address that.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But my question is actually something that refers to the sociology of knowledge in the discipline a little bit when it comes to realism. Realism, as we all know, was born as a theory, classical realism at least. The Morgenthaus and the Kennans of this world wanted to speak truth to power, but they also wanted to speak to the ear of the prince. So they wanted to do both.

Initially, early classical thinkers were very suspicious of public opinion, of democratic majorities. They wanted to speak to foreign policy elites. So initially, realism was a conservative theory, I would say, or it is perceived as a conservative theory. Then we had Waltz, who democratized the argument, basically. He said that you can be a liberal, you can be a conservative, as long as you know how the international system works, you can do realist theory.

Who Is the Audience for Realist Theory?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It doesn’t matter whether you are conservative or liberal. And I think you fall into that category because you said you declared yourself a liberal, not party-wise, classically liberal in that sense. Everybody’s a liberal in the United States in that sense. So if that is true, and we are in an era now where the realists are speaking to the masses, they are not worried or apprehensive about democratic majorities anymore like the early realists who seem to be elitists in their contact of foreign policy. Who seems to be the audience nowadays of realist theory?

Because the liberal establishment is not listening to you. The neocons are not listening to you. The Trump administration seems, they seem not to be listening to you. So who are the audience? Are they the foreign policy elites, again?

Is it the people? You seem to be interested in engaging in the role of public intellectual. So you want to address the masses. You want to address the public. But I wonder exactly who is the audience of the realist argument nowadays, if no one in the political establishment seems to be listening to the realist argument.

VASILIS: Many questions, Vasilis. Many issues. Yeah, I’ll address two issues. I’ll address two issues.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Revisited

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: First, I just want to talk about the self-fulfilling prophecy. And as you pointed out, that is a criticism of my theory. My theory says you should behave aggressively and you should maximize your power. And of course, once states adopt that policy, then you get this highly competitive and dangerous world. It is a correct criticism. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the point is you have no choice. And you have no choice because you cannot be sure what the future holds. You would like me to do, I’m a state, you’re a state, you’re growing, I’m still the most powerful state in the system, this state is growing. And his point is that if I begin to arm and try to contain his growth, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the argument.

OK. But the alternative is I say, I recognize the logic of your argument, and I’m going to be a nice guy, or a nice state. And I’m going to let you rise. And I’m not going to do anything provocative. And then you grow and grow and grow.

And you’re 1 and a half times more powerful than me. And all of a sudden, one day, you turn your gun sights on me, and you take aim, and you shoot me out of the water. I can’t afford to let that happen. It’s an anarchic system. There’s no higher authority.

It’s a self-help system. I have to protect myself. I have to assume worst case. Am I happy about this? No, I’m not happy at all.

I just have to assume worst case. And again, this is my point about capabilities. It’s because I can’t get inside his head now. And when he’s up there, I have no idea what’s going to be inside his head when he gets up there. Maybe I can make a guess now, but when he gets up there, I can’t know his intentions. So I’m looking at his capabilities and he’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger and I can’t know his intentions and there’s no higher authority. So I treat him badly. I start smacking him around when he’s down here, because I don’t want him to grow up.

Self-fulfilling prophecy, he says. He’s correct. But what’s the alternative? Century of national humiliation? I let him get really powerful, and then he dukes me out, and it’s all over with for me.

I can’t take that chance. You, of course, assume that process doesn’t matter. Process doesn’t change behavior. Interactions don’t change behavior. Structure makes it impossible to change behavior. It’s a structural argument.

Mearsheimer’s Reach: From Elites to the Public

VASILIS: This, by the way, is another whole subject that I know you want. He’s probably starving to death.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You know, I do intermittent fasting and have not eaten a single thing all day. And I’m 78 years old.

VASILIS: All right. We should, but you owe him the second point. Yeah, the real who’s the audience. Who is the audience? And to finish with that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The problem here is people ask good questions. You have to stop asking good questions. All right, who’s the audience? This is a question I think about all the time. Let me make a couple of points. Just stream of consciousness mode. You’ll have to bear with me.

I have never once in my entire lifetime been consulted by anyone in the US government about a foreign policy decision. And just despite the fact I know lots of people who have been in important positions. Condi Rice was in my academic cohort, just all sorts of people. I knew Paul Wolfowitz, you name it. I have never once been consulted. And I have been very vocal on almost every issue that the US has been involved with since the Vietnam War. I’ve never been once consulted.

And I think that what you do is you talk to the public, you talk to students, and you do your best to influence people indirectly in the United States. And by the way, the same thing is true in Europe. I hardly ever get invited to Europe, because Europe is just an extension of the United States at this point in time.

And when I go to China, I usually start my talks in China by saying, “It’s good to be back among my people.” I do not speak one word of Chinese. I can’t even recognize my own name in Chinese. And when I go to China, it’s one of the few times in my life I feel like I’m an American. I’m never conscious of the fact that I’m an American, really. I just go out and just behave normally and don’t think about being an American. But the culture is so different in China that I feel American, not in a chauvinistic way. But I say, “It’s good to be back among my people.”

Now, why is that the case? Because the Chinese are realist to the core. And I talk to people very high up in the Chinese chain of command. I’m very good friends with the president of Indonesia. I have been to Indonesia twice. I’ve stayed at his house. I had a three-hour conversation with Viktor Orbán, one on one. And then another time I went to dinner at his house, and he made sure I sat right across the table from him. He was very interested in my views. And I don’t agree with Orbán on all sorts of issues.

And we had a big debate about how to think about liberalism versus nationalism, whether the two can coexist. But nevertheless, he was very interested in what I had to say, as is the president of Indonesia, as are many Chinese leaders, and so forth and so on. And I could tell you other examples. So outside of the West, I actually believe I have an audience at the top. I have an audience at the top.

VASILIS: But in the West, it’s really quite remarkable. The extent. But if we really look how many clicks do in your presentations, you have an influence on public opinion, John, and you know that.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree completely. And I believe I can tell you from my emails that there are huge numbers of Europeans who write to me, who watch. So I have an influence on public opinion.

Democratizing the Debate: The Role of Alternative Media

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Look, here’s my basic view. People all around the world, this is going to sound somewhat idealistic, but this is my view. People all around the world understand that we live in a remarkably complicated and fast moving world, and that it is very difficult to make sense of what’s going on. So we’re all sort of feeling our way around in the dark, me included.

And what many people, and I mean many people, feel is that the mainstream media and the elites are not giving them all the information and are basically not allowing alternative views to be heard. And therefore, in this alternative media space that has popped up, what you find is that all sorts of people are, yeah, it’s Substack, right, but you know, Judge Napolitano and all these shows that are mine.

VASILIS: Danny Davis, exactly.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: People are just interested in hearing alternative opinions. It’s not like people say, “John’s a genius. He’s got it right. He’s the only person we have to listen to.” It’s just that when you listen to John, or you listen to Jeffrey Sachs and people like that, these smart people who fought long and hard about these issues have a different perspective. And I think in most cases, we have a more compelling explanation for what’s going on in the world than people in the mainstream.

VASILIS: A very great debate. They before last, I believe, were the neocons, Victoria Nuland and the…

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, Steve Walt and I had a debate with Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland, which was quite interesting. But you know, as I said to Steve before we did it, the beauty of the debate was not what actually happened in the debate and how the people in the audience voted. What really mattered was that it was a public event where two people, Steve Walt and I, who are by and large blackballed in the mainstream media, not completely, Steve less than me, but nevertheless don’t really have much of a platform in the mainstream media. We were able to get on this platform with these two people. And I think that that’s very valuable.

So I see myself, this is going to sound kind of goofy, but I do see myself as doing a public service, as helping people who are searching around try to figure out in their own minds what’s going on. And by the way, people write to me. I get emails or text messages from people, and I actually learn from those messages. When I give talks like this, people will ask questions. And I often am forced to think about things that I hadn’t thought about before or challenged on an issue where I’ll change my mind, sometimes not completely but partially.

But this sort of dialectical process that you have with audiences, I think is very useful. And all of this is to say the mainstream media has failed us. The elites have failed us. And people understand that, and they want to hear different voices. And if you look around the world, and you see how much trouble we’re in, how much trouble we in the West have caused, you would think that they would be willing to listen to alternative voices.

Closing Remarks

VASILIS: But John, as I said in the beginning, your contribution in the academic world, it stayed in a small circle. But what you did as a public intellectual did something very important for international relations, for strategy, and geopolitics. Because you democratized this debate, and a lot of people participated. And that’s a huge contribution. And I think we should all thank you for that. And we should also thank you for spending two hours with us, philosophizing on international relations and I think the audience. This was a historic lecture next to the Acropolis, below the Acropolis, on bringing realism back and the virtues of realism back to the place of origin. Thank you so much, all.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Thank you. Thank you.

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