John Mearsheimer: Is China the Real Winner of Ukraine War? (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Endgame podcast titled “Is China the Real Winner of Ukraine War?” where political scientist John Mearsheimer discusses various topics, including the ongoing war in Ukraine, the foreign policy of the US during the unipolar moment, the evolution of multilateral institutions and global order, and the consequences of NATO expansion. He argues that states are primarily concerned about the balance of power, and during the unipolar moment, the US pursued a foreign policy that was not realist, instead of liberal hegemony.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

GITA WIRJAWAN: Hi, today we’re honored to have Professor John Mearsheimer, a Political Science Professor at the University of Chicago. John, it’s such an honor and pleasure to have you.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

GITA WIRJAWAN: I want to ask one personal question about you. You were born in Brooklyn and you decided to go to West Point and all the way to Cornell and now you’re in Chicago. What hooked you to political science?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Actually, when I grew up as a kid, I was mainly interested in being a great athlete, and I had no interest in school work at all. And when I went to West Point, I was a terrible student up until my junior year. When I took a course in international relations, it was a mandatory course, and for some reason, I loved it. It was something that really attracted me, and I decided that in my senior year I would take a number of international relations courses, which I did.

And then I decided in my senior year at West Point that I was going to get a Ph.D. at some point in political science with a focus on international relations just because I loved it. And so, when I went into the Air Force after I graduated from West Point, I got a master’s degree. And then, after my five-year commitment in the Air Force, I left the military and went to Cornell to get a Ph.D.

And all along the way, I really loved the study of international politics. I loved being a scholar, I loved being an intellectual, I loved wrestling with big ideas and coming up with theories. And the system fortunately rewarded me all along the way. I think that the professors I dealt with when I was young appreciated the fact that I was good at doing social science and that I loved it. And they supported me in all sorts of ways, and it worked out for me.

I consider myself to be a very lucky person. My good friend, Steve Walt, who’s also been very successful. He and I often say that we both won the lottery in the sense that we’ve ended up with really terrific careers. And I would just add to this: I’m 75 years old today, and many people who are 75 years old are thinking about retiring or slowing down, but that would not be true of me. I like to behave like I’m 28 years old, not 75 years old. And I hope that I can continue writing until the day they throw me in the ground.

Realism

GITA WIRJAWAN: You have articulated in political science the notion of realism, and that seems to be based on what you have seen not only throughout your 75 years of history personally but based on the history of the world, right? And explain that. What does realism mean in political science terms?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Realism is a theory that basically says that what states are principally concerned about is the balance of power. And here, we’re talking mainly about great powers. And great powers care greatly about how powerful they are relative to other great powers, because they worry about their survival. If you’re weak in the international system, other great powers or great powers in general will take advantage of you.

Just consider the Chinese. They have this period from the late 1840s to the late 1940s that they refer to as ‘The Century of National Humiliation.’ Now the question you want to ask yourself is, why were the Chinese humiliated? They were humiliated for one very simple reason: they were weak, and therefore the European great powers, the United States, and Japan took advantage of them.

Another example that highlights this: the Russians, after the Soviet Union fell apart, were adamantly opposed to NATO expansion; they made it very clear from the beginning that NATO expansion was a threat to Russia. Nevertheless, the United States pushed forward NATO expansion in 1999, that was the first tranche; 2004, that was the second tranche; and then, in 2008, NATO said that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. What was going on here?”

What was going on was that Russia was very weak, and because Russia was weak and the United States was very powerful, the United States felt it could shove NATO expansion down the Russian’s throat. That’s what happens to you when you’re weak in international politics, so what you want to do is be very powerful. You want to be more powerful than all your rivals simply because that is the best way to survive. So that’s the first point I’d make about realism.

The second point is that realism does not discriminate between democracies and non-democracies, liberal states and fascist states, or communist states. Realism treats all states as black boxes. All states want to maximize their relative power, regardless of the political order on the home front.

That argument is one that drives most people in the West crazy; they don’t like that argument because they think that the democracies are the good guys and the authoritarian states of the communist states or whatever are the bad guys. Whereas realism says there are no good guys and bad guys; they’re just states competing for power because they care about their survival.

So I think in a nutshell, that’s a pretty good description of what realism is all about.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Why is it that a lot of what we’re seeing seems unrealistic by way of your definition of realism, right? And you’ve alluded to the fact that there’s this dichotomy between the old paradigm of balance of power and the new paradigm of balance of power. The Chinese way would be that of the 19th century; the U.S. way would be that of the 21st century.

It seems to just appear more and more unrealistic, by way of certain countries pushing for just democratic principles as opposed to pushing for certain things irrespective of whether or not it’s an autocracy or a democracy.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let’s just talk about American foreign policy with regard to your question. It’s important to discriminate between situations where the United States is really pushing for democracy and not behaving according to the balance of power politics versus situations where the United States is acting in a very realist fashion but disguising its behavior with liberal rhetoric, okay?

Great Power Politics

Now, during the unipolar moment, which runs from roughly 1990, maybe 1991, up until about 2017, the United States, in my opinion, did not act in a realist fashion; it acted in a liberal fashion. And it pursued a foreign policy that I would describe as liberal hegemony. Now, why did the United States pursue this liberal policy during the unipolar moment? It’s because the United States was the only great power on the planet; it was the sole pole. Therefore great power politics did not matter to the United States because there were no other great powers in the system.

So the United States, in a very important way, was free to pursue a liberal foreign policy. And just take China, for example, we pursued a policy of engagement towards China. Our basic view was that we should help China get rich, we should integrate China into international institutions like the WTO, and then it would become a responsible stakeholder. And as it became a responsible stakeholder and it got richer and richer, it would become a liberal democracy just like the Asian tigers did a few decades before.

And once China was a liberal democracy, it would live happily ever after with its neighbors and with the United States because the system would be comprised of good guys, because liberal democracies are good guys in the liberal view.

So what I’m saying to you is that during the unipolar moment, realism was taken out of the equation for the United States, and we pursued a liberal policy. And remember people like me who are always thinking in terms of realism. I argued that this was crazy to help China grow more powerful because as China grew more powerful, it would cause the United States all sorts of problems. It would try to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere.

So anyway, what you have during the unipolar moment is the United States acting in a very liberal fashion. Then starting in about 2017 or 2018, the United States understands that they have a problem and they adopt a containment policy, if not a rollback policy, against China. The United States, this happens under Trump, becomes very realist. Then Trump is defeated. Joe Biden comes to power, and Joe Biden, who had been a big supporter of engagement, now pursues realpolitik behavior towards China.

But he disguises that realpolitik behavior with liberal rhetoric. So, if you listen to Biden and his lieutenants talk, they talk the liberal game, but underneath that liberal velvet glove is the mailed fist, as the Chinese well understand. But that was not the case during the unipolar moment. And there the United States was pursuing, in my opinion, a thoroughly liberal policy.

GITA WIRJAWAN: What do you think might have explained that change of posture?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s very simple. China just grew so powerful that the United States began to fear it, as I predicted it would. I mean, many people would say that the Chinese acted in very aggressive ways; that it’s the Chinese fault for sort of violating Deng Xiaoping’s basic axiom, that you should lie low and don’t provoke. I don’t think that the Chinese were especially provocative.

I think what happened is that the Americans began to understand that China was growing bigger and bigger and they were spending more money on defense. And as soon as that begins to happen, the Americans think that the Chinese are a real threat and that threat has to be contained.

And of course, what that does is as the United States becomes more aggressive toward China. China becomes more aggressive toward the United States, which becomes more aggressive toward China, and on and on. And that’s what you see happening now: you have this ratcheting up of the security competition; you’re sort of going up the escalation ladder. And in my opinion, that was inevitable once China’s economic growth began to appear to be very impressive to the United States.

GITA WIRJAWAN: You know, by way of your analysis during a much more unipolar global order, multilateralism was hunky-dory, right? It was moving in a robust manner. As soon as it shifted to a much more multi-polar world, we’ve seen how multilateralism has sort of declined. What does that say about the future of multilateral institutions in the near foreseeable future, at least when the global order is likely to continue being multi-polar?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, if you talk about “in order”, you’re talking about the institutions that are so important for economic and political intercourse among states. And during the unipolar moment, the United States was in charge of the order. And that’s a way of saying the United States wrote the rules and enforced the rules, and everybody else obeyed the rules.

GITA WIRJAWAN: And judges the rules too.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Pardon?

GITA WIRJAWAN: He’s the police, he’s the judge, he’s the executive branch, and everything.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, that’s what the United States was. So you had a liberal international order, it was run basically by the United States. And by the way, that was originally the Western order from the Cold War. During the Cold War, you had two orders: a Soviet-led order and an American-led order.

And the United States won the Cold War, the Soviet Union disappeared, and what the United States did was it took that Western order and transformed it into a liberal international order, which it could do because it was the unipole. But once you move into a multi-polar world where you have two other great powers, China and Russia, and China is a pure competitor of the United States, Russia is not. Russia is the weakest of those three great powers.

Nevertheless, the Chinese, as they grow more and more powerful, are going to be unhappy with an order in which the rules were written by the United States. And the Chinese are going to want to write their own rules for that order, or they’re going to want to change the rules in a way that’s more favorable to the Chinese.

So what we have going on here now is that as the Chinese and the Americans clash at a geostrategic level, you see the Chinese working to create their own order: the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), Belt & Road (Initiative), and on and on. And the Americans, of course, are beginning to create their own order: AUKUS, the QUAD, and so forth and so on. So if you think about it, what’s happening here is that you’re reverting back to a situation that looks a lot like the Cold War, where you have a Chinese-led order and an American-led order. Just like you had a Soviet-led order and an American-led order during the Cold War.

And then, on top of these two orders, you have a weak international order, and this includes institutions like the United Nations and the non-proliferation regime. These are institutions where both the United States and China are deeply involved, and of course the Russians are as well. So we’ve left the liberal international order in the dust. There’s no liberal international order anymore. What we have are two emerging regional orders, and on top of that, an increasingly thin international order.

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Irrelevant Region?

GITA WIRJAWAN: You’ve alluded earlier to the United States’ strategic core interest being in three locations: the Western Hemisphere, Northeast Asia, and the Middle East/Gulf. Is that likely to change or is that likely to stay on as is?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I would add one other region, which is Europe. So it would be Europe, East Asia… The Gulf, and of course the Western Hemisphere. There’s no question that the Western Hemisphere is the most important of all the regions on the planet to the United States. But because we are a regional hegemon, we face no threats in the Western Hemisphere. We are Godzilla in the Western Hemisphere.

It’s those other three regions that matter. I think that for as far as the eye can see, East Asia and Europe will remain of enormous importance. With regard to the Persian Gulf, the Persian Gulf matters not because there are great powers there. They’re great powers in Europe and in Asia, but there are no great powers in the Gulf. The Gulf matters because of oil. And I would argue that as long as The Gulf is so important for the flow of oil around the world, the United States will care greatly about The Gulf as the Chinese are now discovering that The Gulf really matters to them.

So those three areas will remain of great importance to the United States. But what’s happened here, and it’s very important to understand, is that from the beginning of American history, when we got our independence in 1783, up until the early 21st century, Europe was the most important area of the world for the United States. And a fundamental shift has taken place. And for the first time in our history, East Asia or Asia more generally is more important strategically than Europe is.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Okay. Would you be in a position to revise that as to include Southeast Asia, or would some of us beyond those three or four regions, like Southeast Asia or Africa? There’s this sense of irrelevance by way of knowing that the core strategic interests of the U.S. are just those three or four regions.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, during the Cold War, we used to argue here in the United States that it was Northeast Asia that mattered; it was Japan and South Korea. And one of the arguments against the Vietnam War here in the United States is that Vietnam is of little strategic importance to the United States, and indeed, more generally, Southeast Asia is of little strategic importance to the United States.

What matters is Northeast Asia. Now why was that the case? It’s because the principal threat was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was not a threat in Southeast Asia; it was a threat in Northeast Asia because, as you know, the Soviet Union extends into Northeast Asia; in fact, it shares a border with North Korea, okay? So we cared about Northeast Asia not Southeast Asia.

What’s happened today is the threat in Asia is not Russia, the threat in Asia is China. And once China becomes the threat, Southeast Asia is just as important as Northeast Asia. So now the United States cares about East Asia to include Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. To the extent I think Southeast Asians feel that the United States is not paying them enough attention, I think that’s largely due to the fact that the United States has gotten bogged down in Europe, in the Ukraine war, and hasn’t had enough bandwidth to employ in East Asia.

But I think once the United States begins to focus laser-like on East Asia and focus much less on Ukraine, which I believe will invariably happen at some point in the distant future, the United States will pay great attention to Southeast Asia. And it will pay great attention to Northeast Asia, because now all of East Asia matters.

Ukraine Debate

GITA WIRJAWAN: I’m going to pivot to the topic of Ukraine. What made you so prescient about what was going to unfold in Ukraine? I mean, you started talking about this seven or eight years ago. That’s the first part of the question.

The second part is: to the extent that you were so prescient in painting the future of Ukraine seven or eight years ago, how is it that people in Washington were not listening or paying attention to the stuff that you were saying?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I believe, as a good realist, that if you take a military alliance like NATO that was a mortal foe of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and you take that alliance after the Cold War ends and you move it up to Russia’s borders, that the Russians are going to view this as an existential threat.

That’s just good old-fashioned realist logic. Here in the West, in the United States, we have the Monroe Doctrine; we do not want any other great powers in the Western Hemisphere. That’s what the Monroe Doctrine says. Great powers cannot form military alliances with countries in the Western Hemisphere, and they can certainly not move military forces into the Western Hemisphere. This is why we had the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The same basic logic applies to the Russians. The Russians are thinking like hard-headed realists. They see this alliance, which was once a mortal foe, moving closer and closer and closer. The Russians made it unequivocally clear after April 2008 that when we say that we are going to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, that we are going to incorporate Ukraine into the EU, that we are going to foster an Orange Revolution in Ukraine and make Ukraine a pro-Western liberal democracy, this is categorically unacceptable. This is what the Russians say. It makes perfect sense to me.

Therefore, I think what the United States should do or should have done was back off, because the problem is that if the United States persists, what the Russians will do is they’ll wreck Ukraine. And the Russians make it unequivocally clear that they will wreck Ukraine. Do the United States policymakers listen to them in the Bush Administration? In the Obama Administration? And the Trump Administration? And the Biden Administration? No, they ignore them, and they continue to push and push and push.

And in 2014, February 2014, the crisis breaks out. This is when the Russians take Crimea and you have the start of a civil war in the Donbass region of Ukraine. And then of course on February 24th of 2022, eight years later, you have a huge war that’s now going on. From my point of view, it was perfectly obvious that this was going to happen after we announced in April 2008 that Ukraine would become part of NATO. And there was just all sorts of evidence available to American policymakers that should have made them hesitant.

And certainly after 2014, American policymakers should have backed off but instead we doubled down. And Joe Biden, it’s important to emphasize, has always been especially hawkish on Ukraine. He handled the Ukraine portfolio in the Obama Administration and he was a super hawk on Ukraine. So when he becomes president in January of 2021, what he does is double down, and the end result is that we have this war.

Now you asked the question why didn’t American policymakers listen to me or listen to the Russians and listen to all those other people. It’s not just me. You want to understand that in April 2008 at Bucharest, both Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the German and French leaders.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Recipe for a disaster.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yep. Angela Merkel has recently said, this is amazing, she has recently said that the reason she was opposed to what happened at Bucharest in April 2008 is because she understood that Putin would see, claimed that Ukraine would become part of NATO as a declaration of war. Just think about that. Merkel said that.

So it’s not just John Mearsheimer; it was Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy. Back in the 1990s, it was people like George Cannon; it was Bill Perry, who was the Secretary of Defense; it was General Mark Milley, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All sorts of people warned that if we expanded NATO too far eastward, this would blow up in our face. And of course, the end result is that Ukraine would be wrecked. It would be turned into a dysfunctional rub state.

But we refused to believe that this was a problem, and you asked me why. I think there are two reasons. First of all, it all started during the unipolar moment. And during the unipolar moment, we were pursuing a policy of liberal hegemony. And we believed that it was not a threat to the Russians to expand NATO eastward. Michael McFaul has said to me that when he was Ambassador to Moscow, he told Putin on numerous occasions that NATO expansion was not aimed at Russia, and it was not a threat to Moscow, and that Putin should relax.

Putin, of course, didn’t believe this. But I believe that many American policymakers believed that NATO expansion was not a threat to Russia, even though the Russians said it was, and they thought it was part of a benign strategy. The United States was a benign hegemon. So that, I think, is reason one: we pushed it.

And reason two, which I alluded to before, is that we were incredibly powerful and we thought we could just shove it down their throat. They may not like it, but that’s their problem, not our problem. The United States is so powerful that it can just push NATO expansion as far as it wants. It can support an open door policy no matter what, and the Russians can’t do much about it.

Geopolitics of Climate Crisis

GITA WIRJAWAN: How do you deal with the argument that there was no reason for Ukraine to ever consider joining NATO and/or the EU? And the second is how would you deal with the fact now that Finland and Sweden are in the process of joining NATO. What are your views with respect to these two observations?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, with regard to Ukraine, I think it is perfectly understandable why Ukraine wanted to be in NATO. I think it’s perfectly understandable that any country in Eastern Europe wants to be in NATO; they want to be underneath the American security umbrella. So I understand that.

But the question you have to ask yourself is: how are the Russians going to react, and how does this play out if you try to join NATO? And the fact is that if you try to join NATO, if you’re Ukraine and you try to join NATO, the Russians are going to crush you. They’re going to destroy your country. So you really have two alternatives here: one is you can try to join NATO and end up getting destroyed, or you cannot join NATO and be in a situation where you have to pay serious attention to Russian security concerns so that they don’t crush you and you will not have the American security umbrella over your head.

This is not an ideal situation, the second scenario. But in my humble opinion, it is infinitely preferable to being destroyed. So I think it would have made much more sense for Ukraine to remain a neutral state and to pay homage to Russian security concerns, and to not provoke the Russian bear. Again, this is not an ideal situation, but international politics is all about choosing among bad alternatives. And that’s the least bad alternative.

And if you look at what is happening to Ukraine today, it’s horrific; it’s absolutely terrible. So that would be my answer or my observation.

GITA WIRJAWAN: On the second part, where Finland and Sweden have considered joining NATO, which is a little different from how things would have been before February 2022, right? What’s your take on this? Does that make this more insecure for Russia? Does this entail a more difficult scenario going forward?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Just to start, there was no reason for Finland and Sweden to join NATO. They were not members of NATO during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was much more of a threat to them than Russia was, but then Russia is today. And indeed, Russia today is not a threat to either Finland or Sweden, at least, before they joined NATO. It was remarkably foolish, in my opinion, on their part to join the alliance.

And I think that you are correct when you say that Finland and Sweden joining NATO is going to make the Russians feel more insecure. It’s not the same as Ukraine joining NATO or Belarus joining NATO. If you look at the geography, Belarus and Ukraine matter enormously to Russia. Finland doesn’t matter that much, but it matters.

And it matters in very important ways because of global warming and the fact that you have melting ice in the North Pole area. And you have a number of countries that have claims on that region. And basically, the Russians are going to be up against seven other countries up in the Arctic. Unsurprisingly, the Russians are now beginning to talk to the Chinese about getting the Chinese to help them deal with any potential conflict situations or crises in the Arctic. And you are likely to have crises in the Arctic.

And here you have a situation where Sweden and Finland are no longer neutral. These two key players in the Arctic are now on the other side of the balance sheet, with the Americans, the Canadians, and so forth and so on. And the Russians are isolated. Furthermore, Russian conventional forces are pinned down in Ukraine. Their conventional forces have been weakened by this war, which means that for purposes of security all over but especially in the Arctic, they’re going to rely more on nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence, nuclear coercion are going to matter more for the Russians moving forward.

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So we are taking a bad situation and making it worse. And we have done this consistently since April 2008. We made a bad move then, and we have not corrected our behavior at any point. We continue to double down and make the situation worse. This is no sense of the limits of power here on the part of the Americans; no good sense of a balance of power politics. And what amazes me is the situation is so different from what it was in the Cold War.

Our leaders made mistakes; there’s no question about it. American leaders were hardly perfect during the Cold War, but they just had much healthier assets, a much healthier appreciation of the limits of power than American policymakers have had. Actually, since the 1990s, I find it quite stunning, and I actually think it’s a very dangerous situation. I think the situation we face today in the world is much more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.

GITA WIRJAWAN: You know, what’s concerning about this is we’re seeing increasing resilience on both sides of the border, on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side, which makes people like us think that the war is just going to get more and more protracted, it’s going to get more prolonged. I want to ask you if that’s the right assumption or presumption.

I want to ask you about the relationship between Russia and China. They met up some time ago. They indicated a very special kind of friendship or partnership between the two. Do you foresee the relationship between China and Russia as one of subordination or one of equal footing? And how would that impact the people of Southeast Asia and other parts of the world?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think there’s no question that American policy toward China and American policy toward Russia have pushed them closely together. I think that there’s no question that the Chinese have a deep-seated interest in making sure that Russia does not lose in Ukraine.

So if at any point it appears the Russians are losing, I think you can rest assured the Chinese will do everything they can to make sure the Russians don’t lose. I would not describe it. I would describe the situation as one where I think the United States has created a situation where there’s a lot of interdependence between China and Russia. It’s not so much that Russia is subordinated to China; it’s that Russia is dependent on China, and in a very important way, China is dependent on Russia. That’s why I say the Chinese cannot afford to allow the Russians to lose.

So you have this interdependence between them, and it’s somewhat asymmetrical. I think that’s what you’re getting at; I think the Russians are more dependent on the Chinese than the Chinese on the Russians. But I don’t think subordination is the word I would use. I think dependence going both ways is what is driving…

GITA WIRJAWAN: Asymmetric dependence.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, I think asymmetric dependence would be a good way to put it. Now, I think what this means is that the war in Ukraine is likely to go on for a long, long time. It’s likely to go on because the Russians and the Ukrainians… leave the Chinese out. The Russians and the Ukrainians don’t have a common set of objectives that would allow them to reach an agreement. They’re never going to agree on how to divide the territory in Ukraine, and they’re never going to agree on whether Ukraine is a neutral state or a member of the West.

So I think the best you can hope for, just focusing on Ukraine and Russia, is a cold peace. That you’ll get some ceasefire at some point, and you’ll get a cold peace; it’ll look like the 38th parallel in Korea, but you’re not going to get a meaningful peace agreement.

Then, when you factor in the Chinese, one could argue the Chinese have a vested interest in this war going on and on and on because, as long as the war continues and the United States is pinned down in Europe, the United States is limited in its ability to focus on East Asia. What the United States should be doing at this point in time is fostering good relations with the Russians and pivoting full force to East Asia because China is a pure competitor and Russia is not. Russia is the weakest of the three great powers.

So the United States should be: number one, forming some sort of close relationship with Russia; and number two, pivoting full force to East Asia. Is it doing that? No. It’s actually pushing the Russians into the arms of the Chinese, and it’s pinned down in Eastern Europe. That is good news for the Chinese. The Chinese are the winners so far in this war.

But this tells you that from China’s point of view, it’s not such a bad thing if the war in Ukraine continues for the foreseeable future.

Nuclear Paradox

GITA WIRJAWAN: Absolutely. But there is a concern amongst many in Asia, including those in Southeast Asia, that there is likely to be less of a balance of power in the Asia Pacific by way of the allocation of resources by the United States for an extended period of time into Ukraine on the assumption that the war in Ukraine gets prolonged. Is that the right way of thinking?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, there’s no question. In countries in East Asia, this again includes Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, to include Australia. All these countries should be nervous about what the Americans are doing.

GITA WIRJAWAN: I want to infuse into this a variable that a lot of people don’t talk about: It’s the cost of financing. We’ve seen interest rates going up in the last 11–12 months in the United States from 25 basis points to about five percent. That’s a 2,000 percent increase. That’s a more than four percent interest rate increase on the back of government debt in excess of 20 trillion dollars in the United States, and on the back of government debts in Europe in excess of 20 trillion dollars.

It’s got to have a pretty difficult impact on the people of both the United States and Europe, to the extent that the cost of things would have gone up and will continue to go up. This would inevitably change the politics or the political calculus, right? The domestic politics of these two regions. Do you see that as something that might change sentiments towards the war in Ukraine?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think there’s no question that the description of what is going on that you just laid out is true, and it doesn’t look like things are going to improve anytime soon. Just to add to your description, and I think that this is going to influence public opinion; there’s no question about that.

The problem is there’s a disjuncture between the elites and public opinion. And in the West, especially in the United States, the elites have not paid much attention to public opinion. And the question is: can they continue to do that? You know, I’ve been following this whole question of whether or not the Ukrainians will launch a major offensive this spring against the Russians. And it’s very clear that what the Americans are thinking is that if Ukraine launches an offensive this spring, given the weaponry we’ve given the Ukrainians, they will not defeat the Russians decisively. But they will deliver a really serious blow to Russia that will lead the Russians to the negotiating table.

The Americans will put pressure on the Ukrainians to go to the negotiating table, and remember, the Americans have a lot of leverage over Ukraine because we’re bankrolling them and providing them with weapons. We’ll get both sides to the negotiating table, we’ll reach a deal, we’ll shut down the Ukraine war. And that will alleviate a lot of the economic and political problems that you were describing, and it will allow the United States to focus on China.

This is a pipe dream. This is not going to happen. The Ukrainians, if they launch a major offensive, are going to get clobbered. I could lay out the reasons for that. And even if I’m wrong and the Ukrainians gain substantial territory against the Russians, the Russians are not going to roll over and play dead; they’re going to fight back. This is a war to the death for the Russians. So this war is not ending anytime soon.

But the point I’m making in response to your description of the situation is that we’re beginning to think about how we can bring it to an end because we recognize the problems you’re describing. But what I’m saying is we don’t understand just how much trouble we’re in. The United States made a mistake of colossal proportions in starting this war in Ukraine in April 2008.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Bucharest.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: In the Bucharest Summit, right? This was a colossal miscalculation, and we have doubled down at every point. Remember what we said in our discussion about Finland and Sweden joining the alliance? Here we are again doubling down, and now we may have trouble in the Arctic. Well, we have trouble in the Arctic, and we’re having trouble in Ukraine. What does that say about our ability to focus on East Asia?

So the United States has gotten itself into one heap of a lot of trouble, and it’s now looking for ways out, and my view is that there is no way out.

GITA WIRJAWAN: I want to switch to Asia, but the last question on Ukraine is: what’s the possibility of this going tactically nuclear?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think that the only likely scenario where nuclear weapons are used is when the Russians are losing. In other words, let’s assume that the Ukrainians launch an offensive this spring and they inflict a massive defeat on the Russian army. And it looks like they’re going to end up reconquering Crimea and, in effect, destroying the Russian army in Ukraine.

I think once it begins to look like that is happening, the Russians will think about turning to nuclear weapons, and I would bet a good sum of money they will use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. And the good news is I don’t think that scenario is at all likely because I don’t believe the Ukrainians have the capability to deliver a decisive defeat on Russian forces inside Ukraine.

As I’ve said on a number of occasions, there’s a real paradox here. And the paradox is that America’s policy or the West’s policy in Ukraine is to basically knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers. Our goal is number one: to defeat the Russian army inside Ukraine; number two: to cripple its economy with devastating sanctions; number three: to affect regime change; and number four: to put Putin on trial.

Now, if we were to come close to accomplishing those goals, the Russians would almost certainly turn to nuclear weapons. All this is to say that there’s a perverse paradox here, which is that the more likely we are to succeed in our policy goals, the more likely it is that the Russians will use nuclear weapons. So we should hope that the Ukrainians don’t defeat the Russians decisively in Ukraine. But as I said to you, I don’t believe that’s going to happen.

East Asia’s Instability

GITA WIRJAWAN: Let’s switch to Asia. I’m still puzzled by the fact that your thinking just seems logical to a lot of us in Southeast Asia, but I’m puzzled by the fact that the policies of the United States do not reflect upon your thinking to the extent I think they should be. And now in Asia, you’ve expressed your views about Taiwan, and you’ve expressed your views about the South China Sea. Which do you think is a higher risk scenario between the two?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Very hard to say. I mean, there’s also the East China Sea.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Right. The Senkaku.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. The Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands, which the Chinese care about greatly. I mean, you can easily hypothesize a conflict breaking out there. I mean, I think Taiwan is the issue that we talk about the most because it’s so obvious why that is a dangerous flash point. I mean, for China, Taiwan is important not simply for strategic reasons, but it’s important because it’s sacred territory; this is nationalism.

I have never met a single Chinese person in my entire life who wasn’t deeply committed, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, deeply committed to getting Taiwan back. And they view the West, especially the United States, as the principal obstacle to that happening. And of course, as the strategic competition between the United States and China heats up, it becomes more important than ever for the United States to keep Taiwan as a close ally. So the United States is now and for the foreseeable future will be tightening its relations with Taiwan.

This drives the Chinese crazy, which is understandable because they view Taiwan as Chinese territory. We view it as a great strategic asset that we have to keep on our side of the ledger. So you can imagine a situation where a war breaks out between the United States and Taiwan on one side and China on the other side quite easily. At the moment, I don’t think it’s likely, in large part because China doesn’t have the capability to launch an amphibious assault across the Taiwan Straits and invade Taiwan and conquer it at some reasonable cost.

But as time goes by and the Chinese economy grows and their military capabilities grow, their ability to conquer Taiwan will increase. And if the Americans or the Taiwanese do anything to provoke the Chinese, the Chinese will launch an attack even if they don’t think the chances of success are very great. And the Chinese make that clear. So this is a potentially dangerous situation of the first order.

And then there’s the South China Sea. The Chinese are actually militarizing islands in the South China Sea. They view the South China Sea as a giant Chinese lake, a big Chinese body of water, they think they own it. The Americans don’t agree, most of their neighbors don’t agree. And the potential for a minor incident which then escalates into a major incident is great. At some point, the Americans are going to put their foot down and say, “Enough is enough.” You do something that is provocative against, let’s say, the Philippines.

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And the Philippines, we know, can’t defend themselves against China, but we can defend the Philippines, and our credibility is at stake. And we’re not going to allow you to militarize the South China Sea any more than you’ve already done. So we’re drawing a line in the water, and you have a major incident there.

And once you have a major incident and it begins to escalate, it’s very hard to see how you shut these things down. So I think one could argue that the South China Sea is even more dangerous than Taiwan because it’s easier to imagine a conflict breaking out in the South China Sea than it is to imagine a conflict breaking out over Taiwan, which is not to say it’s difficult to imagine a conflict breaking out over Taiwan.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Is that also because you think that as we’re seeing the increasing amphibious capabilities of the Chinese, you’re seeing that there are enough military capabilities in South Korea, Japan, and the United States around Taiwan as an adequate deterrent?

Incalculable Coefficient of War

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think that the Chinese will go to great lengths to build up their ability to isolate Taiwan and launch an amphibious assault. And at the same time, the United States and its allies, especially the Japanese but also the Australians, will go to great lengths to build up our capabilities to counter Chinese capabilities. And amphibious operations are remarkably difficult to make work. It’s easy to cross…

Let me put it differently: it’s much easier to cross a piece of land than it is to cross a large body of water. So it’ll be very difficult for China to develop the capability to launch an invasion of Taiwan that has a high degree of success. We, especially the Americans, will go to great lengths to make sure they don’t have that capability. But they will go to great lengths to make sure they do, we’ll see what happens.

The point I would make is that we know from studying deterrence situations over time that you often see such… Let me take that back. You sometimes see situations where states have a political incentive to go to war that is so powerful that they will pursue a military strategy that has little chance of working because the politics of the situation dictate pursuing a remarkably risky strategy.

And the canonical example is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It is very important to understand that the Japanese policymakers were rational actors of the first order; they were first-class strategists. These were not wild and crazy people. The Japanese strategists who decided to attack the Americans at Pearl Harbor understood that there was only a sliver of a chance that Japan would win. They were not under any illusions about who they were attacking, okay?

The question is, Why did they attack? Why did a country that had one-tenths of the gross national product of the United States attacked the United States? In fact, they didn’t want to attack the United States. They were trying everything they could to avoid an attack, but they attacked, and the question is: why? And the answer is the politics, and the fact is that the United States was strangling the Japanese economy. We had cut off scrap iron exports to Japan in 1940, and we’d cut off oil in 1941. And the Japanese were being strangled, and they tried to end those embargoes, and the United States refused to end the embargoes.

They were doing everything they could to avoid war, but in the end, they thought that their survival was at stake and they had no choice. So, even though there was only a small chance, a sliver of a chance they would win militarily, they attacked. So, when you fast forward to the present situation involving Taiwan, you can imagine situations, for example, where the Taiwanese government declares independence, knowing the Americans will protect them. And the Chinese say, “This is unacceptable. We may suffer enormous costs; we may even lose in the short term, but this is unacceptable, and we are launching the boats.”

So you see, it’s not just military calculations; it’s also the political calculations that matter in a deterrent situation. And you have these cases from the past. I could point to other cases as well where states pursue highly risky military strategies. So we, the United States, have to be extremely careful that we don’t put the Chinese in a situation where they feel that despite the military balance, they have no choice but to attack Taiwan or to attack the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

GITA WIRJAWAN: I have two more questions. I know you’ve got to go, but with what’s going to happen next year politically in the United States, do you see prospects of things changing with respect to both Ukraine and Taiwan from a posture standpoint?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I believe that if things change with regard to Ukraine and with regard to Taiwan it will not be because of American politics. I think it will be because events involving those two wars would be a consequence of changes in the international system. The fact is that the American foreign policy elite is actually quite homogeneous in its views on what American policy should be.

The argument that the Republicans and the Democrats think about foreign policy in different ways is not true. This is Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. It’s very important to understand that both President Obama and President Trump got elected on a platform that said they were going to fundamentally change American foreign policy. In both cases, the so-called blob, the foreign policy establishment defeated them.

Remember, Trump was committed to improving relations with Putin. He was interested in getting out of Europe and putting an end to NATO, and so forth and so on. None of that happened. And the reason is the blob, the foreign policy establishment, is so powerful. So even if Trump gets re-elected in 2024, he’s not going to be able to change things very much at all. American policy is set in stone at this point.

And of course, Obama admitted in an exit interview he gave to the Atlantic Magazine in, I believe it was 2009, as he was leaving the White House that the blob had defeated him. So I don’t think that domestic politics will matter. I might be wrong. Going back to your description of the economic consequences of these various policies and how the United States spends like a drunken sailor, it may lead to a situation where there is domestic unrest.

I think, by the way, just to add one point to this. I think where you’re likely to see domestic unrest matter is in Europe. It’s more likely. Less likely in the United States.

GITA WIRJAWAN: But do you see things moving more to the right over time in Europe?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, I just see a lot more dissatisfaction. And one could argue that people on the left that represent workers will be as dissatisfied as the populist right, so you could see widespread support for changing our policy.

By the way, just to go back to this spring offensive that the United States is trumpeting as a way of delivering a powerful message to the Russians that they should come to the negotiating table and we should put an end to this war, you want to think about what the consequences will be if the Ukrainians lose. And I think a very good case can be made that the Ukrainian forces will be battered badly damaged if they launch an offensive, and this will present a huge crisis for Ukraine.

But what that will tell your average citizen in the West is that all of this support has been futile. And if anything, this is just going to go on and on forever and ever. Many people describe this Ukrainian army that’s now facing the Russians as the third Ukrainian army that we’ve helped to build. Well, what if this third Ukrainian army is defeated? Are we going to build a fourth Ukrainian army, a fifth Ukrainian army? Are you going to spend all those dollars or euros on bankrolling the Ukrainians when you have Americans and Europeans who are paying electricity bills that they can’t afford, and so forth and so on? So it may be the case that domestic politics matters a lot more than I said before.

China Matters

GITA WIRJAWAN: Well, the Chinese are laughing to the bank by way of whatever we’re seeing. This is my last question: You’re very popular in China, right? Is that because they think your theory is right or because they know people are not listening to your theory?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s an interesting question. I started going to China in the very early 2000s when “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” was first published, and it was translated shortly thereafter into Chinese. And in that book, of course, I argued that China could not rise peacefully, and I was absolutely surprised that the Chinese invited me. And then when I went to China I was treated like a rock star. But my explanation goes like this:

First of all, I think the Chinese are very theoretical. The Chinese like IR (International Relations) theory. It’s really quite interesting. I’ve had many conversations with Chinese students and, of course, Chinese faculty members and policymakers about sort of basic realist theory, how it works, and so forth and so on. And they often challenge me. You know, in the old days, when I would go over there, Chinese elites would talk about economic interdependence theory as a challenge to my realist worldview, and we would go back and forth. So I think the Chinese liked me because they liked theory.

Second reason I think they liked me is: I took China seriously. I said, “China is going to rise to the point where it is a pure competitor of the United States.” And I think the Chinese wanted to hear that.

Third reason I think they liked me is: I described the United States as a ruthless great power, and they would say to me, “Finally an American who tells the truth about the United States.”

But the fourth and, I think, most intriguing reason that the Chinese liked me, and wanted me to come, and wanted me to speak to wide audiences is that the Chinese understood that there was a lot of power in my argument. They understood that as they grew more powerful, there was a real danger that a security competition would set in. So quite a few Chinese interlocutors told me what they wanted to do was they wanted to hear my theory so they could figure out why it was wrong and how they could show that China could rise peacefully, to which I would always respond, “You can’t defeat my theory. China and the United States are doomed to have an intense security competition if China continues to rise peacefully.”

But for a long time, I would say up until about 2018, they refused to believe that. Most of my interlocutors, they thought that the deterioration of U.S.-China relations after President Trump moved into the White House was an aberration. And then when Biden came in, I know a lot of people thought we’d go back to the old days, the days of the unipolar moment. But I always told them that was not going to happen. There’s just no way.

Well, look, from China’s point of view, it makes eminently good sense to dominate Asia. From China’s point of view, it makes eminently good sense to push the Americans out of Asia to have their own Monroe Doctrine. If I were the National Security Advisor in Beijing, I would tell Xi Jinping, “We got to work overtime to figure out how to establish hegemony in Asia because it is clearly the best way to survive in the international system. We have to imitate the Americans. We’ve got to get them out of here.” Okay?

So, from the Chinese point of view, that makes sense, but from the American point of view, and certainly from the point of view of China’s neighbors, it does not make sense to have China as a regional hegemon. So almost all the neighbors; not all of them, but almost all the neighbors; and the Americans are going to push back and they’re going to try to contain China. And that makes eminently good sense for the Americans and China’s neighbors, just like it makes eminently good sense for China to try to dominate Asia.

But the end result of all these actors pursuing what is a strategically rational policy is that you end up in this intense security competition where, as we discussed before, there is a serious possibility of war. And to put out the bottom line very clearly this is the tragedy of great power politics.

GITA WIRJAWAN: Wow. Thank you so much, John.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It was my pleasure.

GITA WIRJAWAN: for your time.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Glad to do it.

GITA WIRJAWAN: That was Professor John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago. Thank you.

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