John Mearsheimer: Russia & Iran – The West’s Escalation Trap (Transcript)

NATO expansion started during the unipolar moment. It started when the United States was at the height of its power, 1994. And what we did was — to get back to what I was saying a few minutes ago, Glenn — we took that Western order that existed in Western Europe during the Cold War. Think of the European Union, think of NATO, and we move that order eastward. This is NATO expansion, this is EU expansion, this is the unipole taking the Western order and trying to make it into a liberal international order. Although, as we well know, the United States did not want to bring Russia into NATO or into the EU for reasons we could talk about later if you want.

But the point is, that’s when NATO expansion started. That’s when the West began to think about making Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. And we know how that ended up, a total disaster. And that is the principal cause of the ongoing war in Ukraine. But that is a remnant of the unipolar moment. I believe the Ukraine war is a remnant of the unipolar moment. Remember, the crisis broke out in Ukraine in 2014. That’s when the really serious trouble started, 2014. That was during the unipolar moment, and it’s just continued on into this new multipolar era.

So what you see is that you have 3 great powers in the system. We’re now in a multipolar world, which we have not been in since 1945. When World War II ended, that was the end of multipolarity, and we quickly moved into bipolarity. So for the first time in my lifetime, we are in a multipolar world, and a multipolar world is just much more complicated.

And furthermore, you have all sorts of problems left over from the unipolar moment. And I just told you about Europe. Let’s talk about the Middle East. And of course, the main focus is on the Persian Gulf, but let’s just talk about the Middle East in general. What happened during the unipolar moment in the Middle East? What the United States decided it was going to do after 9/11 was it was going to adopt this policy called the Bush Doctrine. And what we were going to do is we were going to go in and knock off regimes and democratize the entire region. We started with Iraq, but we planned to democratize Iran and Syria. We’re going to democratize the entire region. This was part of the whole liberal hegemony project. Of course, it didn’t go very far.

GLENN DIESEN (00:10:00 – 00:10:00): Why?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:10:01 – 00:15:21): Because the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. But nevertheless, we remained committed to promoting democracy, to promoting regime change in the Middle East, even though we suffered a defeat in Iraq.

There’s another dimension to this which cannot be underestimated. As the Cold War was coming to an end, and this is just before the Soviet Union broke up in December 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq — excuse me, he invaded Kuwait, and we had this major war in January, February of 1991. I think it was August 2nd, 1990, is when Saddam invaded — excuse me, invaded Kuwait. And then the war broke out. I think it was January 15th. That was the air war. And the ground war was February 24th to February 28th of 1991. And we won this stunning victory against Iraq in this fight over Kuwait.

But what the United States decided to do after that war, and this was mainly a result of pressure from the Israel lobby, is we adopted a policy of dual containment, which meant that we kept forces in the Middle East, large numbers of forces, for the purpose of containing both Iraq and Iran.

You just want to think about this. You just want to think about US Middle East policy during the unipolar moment. At the beginning of the unipolar moment, we fight the Iraq War. And as a result of the Iraq War, we radically alter our foreign policy in the Middle East. We adopt a policy of dual containment. We say we are going to stay in the Middle East, we’re going to contain both Iraq and Iran. Then after 9/11, we go beyond containment and we say we’re going to do social engineering. This is the Bush Doctrine.

You just want to think about what we’re doing. And it’s possible for the United States to think in these terms because there’s no Soviet Union to balance us in the Middle East. We’re Godzilla. Plus, we have the Israelis on our side, and in fact, the lobby is pushing us very hard to do exactly these things. They’re perfectly happy that we’re pursuing dual containment. They’re perfectly happy when we decide we’re going to do regime change.

So very importantly, what happens is that the United States becomes deeply enmeshed in the Middle East in the unipolar moment, just as we become deeply committed to NATO expansion during the unipolar moment.

So what I’m trying to say to you, Glenn, is that we have a number of problems today that are basically a consequence of decisions that we made during the unipolar moment. So to elevate up to 60,000 feet, the point that I’m making to you is when you go from unipolarity to multipolarity, you’ve now got 3 great powers, and the competition between those 3 great powers is going to be very complicated.

Furthermore, the international order that existed during the unipolar moment that everybody misses so much is kaput, in large part because orders are based on the balance of power. And when the balance of power or the distribution of power changes, the order’s changed and the liberal international order is no more. And what’s taking place is we’re forming new orders. Then you add on top of that these residual problems from the unipolar moment.

And then finally, at the risk of getting overly complicated here, there’s Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is in a class all by himself. In many ways, he’s a one-man wrecking ball, and he’s interested in doing all sorts of things in the international system that have made a lot of these problems worse than they have to be. I think to be fair to him, a lot of his basic instincts regarding the order — or let me put it differently, regarding this new distribution of power — were correct. I think if you listen to him talk during the 2016 campaign and during the 2024 campaign, he said lots of things that made sense. But then when it came to executing foreign policy after he moved back into the White House in January of 2025, he’s not behaved in a strategically wise way. In fact, he’s behaved in a foolish way and he’s made a lot of these problems worse than they have to be.

Cold War Constraints Versus Today’s Recklessness

GLENN DIESEN (00:15:23 – 00:16:53): I get the desperation though and the difficulty in shifting from this unipolar to multipolar world. But still, if one takes a step back and look at how Washington then acted during the Cold War — this was when those 2 centers of power, in a fierce competition with 2 incompatible ideologies, essentially struggling for organizing the world — but despite all of this, there was a lot of constraint. And I would say a lot of common sense as well.

But now the Cold War is over. There is no overwhelming Soviet threat anymore. And still the willingness to essentially risk even nuclear war on the ideas that, well, NATO should be allowed to expand anywhere it wants — where should the border go in Donbas? And also ideology. I mean, global communism was a real threat, it was a real problem. But I remember during the Olympics in Russia, we had to go sanction them because — and boycott — because they didn’t have sufficient gay rights when they embrace this conservatism.

It just looks like the challenges we had during the Cold War versus now, we are making up problems where it didn’t have to exist, I guess. But yes, I’m sorry.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:16:54 – 00:29:05): I can give you my take on that because I think about the issue you’re raising a lot. And I think the problem today is that most of the Western elite just doesn’t understand basic balance of power politics. And that’s another way of saying — this is maybe a bit too extreme, but — they just don’t understand. Most people in the foreign policy elites in the West don’t understand great power politics. They don’t understand the essence of international relations.

Now, what exactly am I saying here? If you go back to the Cold War, it’s very important to understand that the elites who ran foreign policy during the Cold War came out of World War II. And for some of the older people, they grew up in the ’20s and ’30s. I think Paul Nitze, if my memory’s correct, was born in 1927. So someone like Paul Nitze, he knew the 1930s very well. He understood what happened in World War II very well. Robert McNamara, of course, cut his teeth in World War II working for Curtis LeMay in the bombing campaign against Japan.

In other words, the foreign policy elites during the Cold War were educated in a world where realism, basic balance of power politics, dominated the thinking about how the world worked. And of course, once you moved into the Cold War, your description of the Cold War was right on the money. And that was a realist world par excellence. There was no question about that. So we who studied international politics during the Cold War, and of course this is true of people who studied international politics in the ’30s and during World War II as well, were deeply steeped in balance of power logic. You just thought about the world in those terms. Not completely. It didn’t explain everything. But you just understood that great power politics was highly competitive and very dangerous.

Then the Cold War ends, 1989. Soviet Union collapses in December of 1991, and you’re into the unipolar moment. And as a good realist, I can tell you that all sorts of people were telling me that I was a dinosaur. That the world had fundamentally changed. We had undergone a revolution in international politics and realist thinking was no more. It was irrelevant.

And there was a certain element of truth in that, Glenn, in the sense that the United States was the only great power on the planet. And great power competition could not take place by definition. So it was easy to say we don’t have to pay attention to realist logic.

Now, where do you see this manifesting itself? You see it manifesting itself in NATO expansion. Realists — I think George Kennan is the most prominent example here. George Kennan, who is a realist to his core, sees NATO expansion as a really dangerous idea. The idea that you can expand NATO up to Russia’s borders and that Russia won’t take that as a threat was unthinkable to Kennan because Kennan was a good realist. But for people like Bill Clinton and many of the people around him who thought that realism was outdated, it was only a view that dinosaurs adopted, that was an argument that was easy to dismiss. They thought we lived in a liberal world.

And the best evidence of this, of course, is the power, the tremendous power of Francis Fukuyama’s very famous argument, “The End of History.” Just go back and read that article, which was a profoundly important article. And Frank was basically saying that realism is dead. Liberalism is the wave of the future. And huge numbers of people bought that argument.

I’ll give you another example. The United States played a key role in helping China to grow into the remarkably powerful and economically impressive country it is today. Letting China into the world — let me put it differently, welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 really juiced its economic growth. I said at the time, as a good realist, that turning China into an economically powerful country, into an economic powerhouse where it could translate that economic might into military might, made no sense at all from a realist point of view. I was one of maybe 3 or 4 people who made that argument in the West. And most people thought that I was crazy. “It’s just not the way the world works anymore, John. You are a dinosaur. Don’t you understand that?” So it was a debate in which I got zero traction. And I’m not exaggerating here. Nobody took it seriously in the West.

So what you have here is a situation where from roughly 1989, 1991, late ’80s, early ’90s, up until the present, I would argue, people have had a really difficult time coming to terms with basic balance of power logic. It’s a foreign way of thinking about the world for lots of people who were educated during the unipolar moment. Just look at the IR departments in European universities. How many realists, how many people who study balance of power politics do you find in those universities? Hardly any. You have all these different theoretical perspectives that are antithetical to realism. And I’ve discovered over the years going to Europe that most people who study IR in Europe hate realism and think that people like me are not only outdated, our ideas are not only outdated, but we are dangerous.

And that mentality is a prescription for really big trouble in a multipolar world. You could think like that in the unipolar moment, Glenn, and get away with it because there was only one great power on the planet and great power competition had been taken off the table. But once you move into a multipolar world, you’re in a fundamentally different world. That’s the world we’re in today.

Now, there’s one other huge dimension to this, and I’ll just mention it. I won’t go into it in any detail. That’s nuclear weapons and how to think about nuclear weapons and how to think about nuclear deterrence. If you grew up in the Cold War, or to put it differently, if you came of age in the Cold War like I did, you learned a ton about nuclear deterrence and nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons because the US-Soviet competition relied very heavily on nuclear deterrence. And we had to constantly be thinking about how you might fight a nuclear war. What’s the balance between nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence and so forth. It is just part of the warp and woof of daily life for anybody who was a strategist in the Cold War. But in the unipolar moment, that all went away.

So I think if you listen to a lot of people talk about nuclear weapons today and nuclear deterrence and nuclear strategy, I find their commentary remarkably naive. And I don’t find it surprising because again, they were trained in the unipolar moment where you paid hardly any attention to this. And where I think lots of people therefore developed rather unsophisticated views about nuclear weapons.

And by the way, just one final point on this, Glenn. During the Cold War, at first we didn’t know what to make of nuclear weapons. We didn’t know really how to think about nuclear deterrence, nuclear strategy. First nuclear weapon is exploded in July of 1945. Then 2 of them are used against Japan in August of 1945. But then World War II ends and the Cold War slowly begins to develop. And remember, NATO’s not created till 1949. And very importantly, the Cold War is not militarized until 1950. It’s the Korean War that militarizes the Cold War. And at that point, we really begin to think long and hard about nuclear weapons. And how nuclear deterrence works, how we would use nuclear weapons in a war, what’s the difference between tactical nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear weapons, and so forth.

But at first, we were remarkably ignorant, and it took us a long time to sort of figure out how to think in smart ways about nuclear weapons. I’ll just point out to people that Albert Wohlstetter wrote a very famous article in Foreign Affairs in 1959 called “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” which if you look at now, for people who understand nuclear deterrence, looks like a rather simplistic article. But it was a revolutionary article at the time because Wohlstetter in that article, which was based on a RAND study, introduced all sorts of concepts, all sorts of different ways of thinking about nuclear weapons that nobody had really crystallized in their own mind. And therefore the 1959 Wohlstetter piece was enormously important when it came out.

And I bring that up because it just shows you that there was a real learning process that took place. We came to grips with just sort of the different ways you could think about nuclear weapons, what the strong points and weak points were of each perspective and so forth. But that all went away during the unipolar moment. And it went away because the idea of fighting a nuclear war was pretty much taken off the table. But then we move into a multipolar world, the one that we’re in today, and that subject is back in spades. And people have just not thought long and hard about this because they didn’t have to.

So what I’m saying to you is, if you look at the world today and you look at how most people who are studying international politics think about the world, there’s very little evidence that they understand balance of power politics, number one. And two, there’s very little evidence that they understand nuclear deterrence theory.

Power Politics Disguised as Universal Values

GLENN DIESEN (00:29:07 – 00:31:13): Yeah, I think this whole idea that power politics went away, it’s very convenient, I guess, when it’s the hegemon or the political West who sees it this way, as you said, that the rest of the world did not see power politics going away. But we kind of replaced power politics with ideas of globalization, humanitarian values, universal values. But I always found it a bit strange because when we said globalization, we meant an economy organized under Western leadership. When we said universal values, we meant managed by the West. When we said upholding humanitarian values, it was usually NATO.

And my point is that the universal values one spoke of in the ’90s and 2000s and onwards actually, as if universal values were divorced from power politics, but it never — it was fairly well linked to the hegemon. And it’s a bit strange that thinking, because I remember being at conferences in 2011 during the crisis with Libya, and people said, “Oh, let’s wait a little bit before we dust off our realist books.” And people talked as if we were living in a completely different era.

But you were on the topic of nuclear weapons though, and that kind of fits within what I wanted to ask about the seemingly unprecedented and reckless — that is, we now see the United States, which doesn’t face any real threat from Iran, definitely not an existential threat. And yet we now hear the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran because the US is running out of options. Again, these are at least the rumors being confirmed by many coming out of Washington. So I was wondering, how do you explain this? What would be the purpose of using tactical nuclear weapons? And the consequences?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:31:15 – 00:32:25): Well, first of all, it’s not clear that this issue is being seriously discussed. As best you can tell from what’s in the public record, it’s President Trump, who of course is desperate, who has a tendency to bring up the use of nuclear weapons as a way to solve his problem. But all the reports say that his advisors are adamantly opposed to this, and that’s especially true of General Caine.

Now, I don’t know whether this is actually true because again, you’re just depending on what you read in the media, but it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me that Trump would raise the possibility, and it makes sense to me that his advisors would have no interest in it. I think what is going on here, as I said, is that Trump is desperate, and he’s just looking for some magic formula, and he tends to think that tactical nuclear weapons will solve the problem.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Cold War Lessons and the Iran Scenario

GLENN DIESEN (00:32:27 – 00:32:55): But well, I guess, if you were advising Trump, what would be your view though? To what extent do you think nuclear or tactical nuclear weapons — which is, just to make it clear, very different from a strategic nuclear weapon, which would wipe out cities. So a tactical nuclear weapon, more as a battlefield weapon — would it have, I mean, what would it do that conventional weapons wouldn’t do?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:32:58 – 00:43:25): Well, the argument that was made during the Cold War when we first started thinking about tactical nuclear weapons is that they are much more effective than using conventional weapons to destroy the other side’s conventional forces. In other words, the scenario in which we thought long and hard about using tactical nuclear weapons in Europe during the Cold War involved a Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack into West Germany. And that attack was succeeding. So you had on the other side a massive armored force that was overrunning NATO forces. And the question is, how would you stop it? And this is a warfighting scenario, very important to understand it. How would you stop it using tactical nuclear weapons in the fight?

And what you quickly discovered was that although the nuclear weapons gave you what people said at the time was more bang for the buck, you still had to use many nuclear weapons to stop the Soviet onslaught. It wasn’t like you could just use 1 or 2 or 3 nuclear weapons in a warfighting capacity to stop the Warsaw Pact forces. And what we quickly discovered is that we would end up killing well over a million people. I think the number that we concluded after the famous Carte Blanche exercises is 1.7 million Germans would die if we used tactical nuclear weapons to try to stop a Soviet offensive. And of course you would end up effectively destroying Germany, West Germany at the time.

And then furthermore, there was the escalation problem. It was very clear in that exercise, but then in subsequent exercises — there was a very famous exercise in 1983. It was called Proud Prophet. You can read about it in the New York Times. What Proud Prophet showed — this is a war game, Carte Blanche was the first war game in 1955, and that showed unequivocally that we would destroy Germany in the process of using tactical nuclear weapons. And then Proud Prophet came in 1983, and Proud Prophet is really good at showing the escalation potential here. The idea is that it would be hard to keep a tactical nuclear war at the tactical level, it would quickly escalate to the strategic nuclear level. In other words, you’d end up blowing up the world. So that’s sort of the history here.

The Iran situation though, you want to understand is different because Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. So we’re not talking about a situation where in the Cold War you had the Soviets who were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons against the Americans who were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. One of the reasons that you so thoroughly destroy Germany and you escalate to the general thermonuclear level during the Cold War is because both sides have nuclear weapons. So we’re not talking about using nuclear weapons against Iran and fearing that Iran will retaliate against the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons of its own, because the Iranians don’t have nuclear weapons. That’s one big difference.

The other big difference is you’re not talking about fighting a conventional war on the ground. Again, you want to remember the scenario where we first thought about using tactical nuclear weapons. It involved Central Europe and it involved a ground war. There’s no ground war in Iran. It’s an air and naval war. Remember all the talk there has been since February 28th of inserting American ground forces in Iran, a land option, a ground invasion? Well, that’s never happened. So there are no American forces who are fighting toe-to-toe against Iranian ground forces. It’s just not happening.

So that raises the question — all of this raises the question — what are the targets that you’re going to go after? How are you going to use those nuclear weapons? It seems to me — I mean, I’ve not thought long and hard about this because I think it’s a crazy idea, and I think most of Trump’s advisors think it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to me that the target set would be around the Persian Gulf. Our principal goal here is to open the Strait of Hormuz. Are we going to use nuclear weapons to open the Strait of Hormuz? I do not think so. First of all, you’d probably have to use a lot of nuclear weapons. You can’t use really small tactical nuclear weapons because they just don’t do enough damage. You’d have to use reasonably large tactical nuclear weapons, and you have to use quite a few of them, if not a lot of them, to open up the Strait of Hormuz. And then there are just all sorts of questions that come racing to the fore. What about all the radiation that’s going to be there in the Strait of Hormuz? What’s going to happen to countries like the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia that border the Persian Gulf in addition to Iran? So you see that this is not really a viable option.

So then you might say to yourself, well, let’s not use nuclear weapons against the Strait of Hormuz. Let’s strike targets deeper inside of Iran. Okay. But then the question is, how does that work? How does striking targets with nuclear weapons inside of Iran get the Iranians to surrender? Is just dropping 1 or 2 nuclear weapons in a rather remote area going to get the Iranians to surrender? I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on that. That’s for sure. And probably what you have to do is use lots of nuclear weapons. And the question you then run into is, number one, will that get the Iranians to surrender? Dropping a lot of nuclear weapons in the Iranian heartland, will that get the Iranians to surrender? Not clear it would.

But more generally, what would be the consequences internationally of doing that? First of all, you would be breaking what some people call the nuclear taboo. We would be using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear weapons state. What would that mean for proliferation? Wouldn’t that send a message to the world that you better get your own nuclear weapons when a nuclear powerhouse like the United States uses nuclear weapons against a state that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, that has signed the NPT? And then furthermore, don’t you — well, you do — legitimize the use of nuclear weapons. You say that it’s okay to use nuclear weapons. Is that a message you want to send to the Russians? Is that a message you want to send to the Chinese? Is that a message you want to send to the Israelis? I don’t think so. I do not think, from the purposes of thinking about proliferation and thinking about other countries actually using nuclear weapons, you want to use nuclear weapons at all. You want to stay far away.

So I don’t see how you could use nuclear weapons against Iran to achieve your ends, if you’re President Trump. And at the same time, I think if you did use nuclear weapons, the consequences on a global level, and even inside the region, as I said, if you try to open the Strait of Hormuz with nuclear weapons, the consequences for all the countries in that region would be devastating. So I don’t think that this is a viable option for one moment.

And that’s why I think President Trump’s advisors are telling him that he shouldn’t do it. Now, I have not thought long and hard about this, Glenn, but it may be the case that there’s a clever strategy out there for using nuclear weapons that I just don’t see. Maybe you see it. But I don’t see how it works. And it certainly doesn’t work to go back to Europe. Tactical nuclear weapons certainly don’t work when you’re fighting a major conventional war against an adversary that has tactical nuclear weapons of its own.

Deterrence, Revisionism, and the Security Dilemma

GLENN DIESEN (00:43:28 – 00:47:04): No, I don’t see the logic either. Again, there’s no large Iranian brigades rolling forward. There’s no concentration of Iranian armored vehicles. So it doesn’t really make much sense. And even if — and this is only if the US and Iran was isolated, but of course, as you said, you have other countries around the world. You have nuclear powers who would then be concerned about the US being the only country who can throw these weapons around. You would have non-nuclear powers who would think they need more defensive capabilities. So it does seem like it would be opening up a box of uncertainty without a clear purpose, unless it’s meant to make Iran suddenly wave the white flag and surrender and allow their existence to be threatened. I’m not quite sure.

But I did want to ask though about the deterrence. If we’re using deterrence correctly here, because typically deterring also during the Cold War is very easy, simple. If the West or the East would attack the other, then this response would come. In other words, we seek to preserve the status quo by having a clear punishment for the revisionists if they cross a line. But a lot of what we’re trying to deter today seems to be us being the revisionists. Well, you can argue in Iran, given that it was the US and Israel that attacked, but also — if you look at China, it looks, if the purpose is to deter China from invading Taiwan, but then part of the deterrence means pumping Taiwan full of weapons, that would be revisionist in some way, because that would, well, first of all, break the One China principle, but it would also fuel secessionism in, well, the sentiments for secessionism, make the Taiwanese a bit bolder, with all these weapons. So if you try to deter the Chinese from invading Taiwan by giving weapons to the Taiwanese, then this would cross the red line of the Chinese, and then they would have to invade Taiwan so it won’t secede. So we’re trying to deter different things. That is, we don’t want them to invade Taiwan. They don’t want to see Taiwan secession.

But also — the last example, which would be Russia. That is, again, during the Cold War, if the Soviets attack us, we attack them, clear deterrence. But today, the deterrence was, okay, we expand NATO gradually, and we’re deterring Russia not to interrupt this revisionism by trying to hold on to the old status quo. And now, you see the British sending drones, long-range missiles, and the Russians just warned that we now have the right to retaliate against Britain. And Finland’s president also went out and said, listen, our goal, or the strategy, should be to strike deep inside Russia, take out civilian targets which hurt the economy and the Russian people. So we bring the war to Russia, and then the public will put pressure on the Kremlin.

I mean, if we want deterrence to be Russia not attacking us, does it work if we are the revisionists, we’re going up the escalation ladder, and we’re deterring them from responding? It just seems like we’re using these concepts in the way they weren’t meant to be. Sorry, that’s a very long question.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:47:05 – 00:54:29): No, no, no, not at all. Let me build on what you said, not contradict you or disagree with you, but let me build on what you said by coming at this from 2 different angles.

One is the security dilemma. As you know, the famous security dilemma in international politics says basically that anything that one country does to defend itself is invariably interpreted by the other side as an offensive measure, not a defensive measure. So to take as an example, a case where China begins to build up its ICBM force, its intercontinental ballistic missile force. It’s very clear that the United States has a much larger and more sophisticated ICBM force than the Chinese do. So the Chinese feel that they’re at a disadvantage and they want to catch up to the United States. They want to defend themselves. And from their point of view, it is defensive. So they build up their ICBM force. As you well know, the end result will be that the United States will interpret that as an offensive measure, even though the Chinese see it as a defensive measure.

To take the case of Taiwan, the United States is deeply interested in making sure that China does not conquer Taiwan and take it back. The United States wants Taiwan to basically remain quasi-independent and on the American side of the ledger. So what the United States is doing is it’s giving armaments to Taiwan to help Taiwan defend itself. So we see our assistance as defensive in nature. But that’s not the way the Chinese see it. They think this is a case of the United States acting in an offensive way.

So what you see, and this is a constant in international politics, is the security dilemma at play. And what one side does for defensive purposes is interpreted by the other side as offensive in nature. And that makes security competition extremely dangerous. Just very important to understand that because we cannot distinguish in any meaningful way between defensive and offensive moves. Security competition, which involves arms racing, looks to each side as if the other side is pursuing offensive strategies. And those offensive strategies are designed to attack the other side. That’s one cut.

Another cut at this is that when I first got into this business and we used to study American grand strategy during the Cold War and American strategy toward the Soviet Union, the emphasis was on containment. I remember John Gaddis’s very famous book, which everybody read many times over, called Strategies of Containment. And containment, if you think about that word, is a very defensively oriented word. In other words, the basic name of the game is just to contain or to deter the Soviet Union.

But as the Cold War wore on and we learned more and more about what was going on between the two sides, and especially the American side, it became clear that the Americans were not simply interested in containment. They were also interested in rollback. And rollback meant rolling back Soviet power. This is pure, unadulterated offensive behavior designed to weaken the Soviet Union.

Now, if you think about the United States dealing with China today, and of course the Chinese are well aware of this, I’m not saying anything that the Chinese foreign policy elites haven’t figured out. The United States is interested in containment. And this is my whole security dilemma story. But the United States is actually interested in more than containment. The United States would like to roll back Chinese power.

And you see this very clearly in the case of the Russians. The United States, as you and I have talked about on numerous occasions, wants to knock the Russians from the ranks of the great powers. If you listen to the recent commentary inside Russia, where they’re complaining about Britain and Britain giving these sophisticated cruise missiles to the Ukrainians that can hit Russia, they’re referring back, the Russians are referring back to rhetoric from earlier in this war where the United States and the Europeans were talking about greatly weakening Russia, knocking it out of the ranks of the great powers, inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia. Remember those words, strategic defeat. This is rollback.

So the point I’m making to you, Glenn, is anytime you have a security competition, whether it’s the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the United States and Russia today, or the United States and China today, you’re not going to get just plain containment. You’re going to get containment plus rollback. That’s what security competition is all about. It is a very nasty, and dangerous business.

And at the same time, even when you get a heavy emphasis on containment, even when you just focus on the containment dimension of the relationship, the security dilemma kicks in. And what you’re doing for defensive purposes vis-à-vis containment looks to be offensive in nature from the other side. And this is what makes the situation that we’re now in so dangerous. And this is why when you’re in a situation like the one we’re in now, you want cooler heads to prevail and you want really smart strategists in control. You want people who understand balance of power politics. And this gets back to where we started our conversation.

The fact is that we have elites in the West who don’t understand balance of power politics, who don’t understand the security dilemma, who don’t understand the difference between containment and rollback, who don’t understand the essence of great power competition. And when you don’t understand the essence of great power decision, you get cockamamie ideas like NATO expansion in your mind. You get these ideas in your mind that you can go out and do social engineering all over the planet and get away with it. But that’s not the way the world works. And my bottom line is it’s important to understand how the world works.

Reassessing the Post-Cold War Era

GLENN DIESEN (00:54:31 – 00:55:54): Well, how would you explain then the post-Cold War era? Because when the Soviet Union came to an end, well, one could argue there was no real security dilemma. If you would assess the threats, the capabilities, and intentions of the Russians — well, the capabilities was, well, Russia was weak, it was getting weaker. If you want to assess its intentions, it seemed like its only foreign policy was to integrate with the West. I mean, at the most in its entire history, it was the, I guess, the best time ever in history to create some peaceful relations with the West. And the Russians kept asking for something like Gorbachev’s Common European Home. They kept asking for indivisible security when we initially walked away from this pan-European security architecture or agreements. Yeltsin said, oh, we could join NATO. Putin suggested we could join NATO. And this kind of continued through the 2000s, this idea of trying to find a common security architecture with the West.

How can we then, I guess, explain — do you see this through the security dilemma as well? Because this is a bit of a puzzle. How can one make sense of essentially refusing to take yes as an answer? I mean, this was, again, there was — the West was the only game in town. The Russians wanted to be part of the West. Everything was in place.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (00:55:56 – 01:04:38): Well, let me make 2 points. One is that again, the opponents of NATO expansion in the 1990s, and as hard as it is to believe today, there were lots of opponents of NATO expansion, but they understood the security dilemma. They understood that the Russians would see NATO marching up to Russia’s border as a mortal threat.

If you talk to people like Mike McFaul, who was the American ambassador to Russia, he will tell you that he told Putin on numerous occasions that NATO was not an offensive alliance. It was not a threat to the Russians, and that Putin had nothing to worry about. This is evidence of my point that people like McFaul, and McFaul represented the majority for sure, didn’t understand basic realist logic. Of course, Putin was going to see NATO expansion into Eastern Europe as a threat to Russia. Even Gorbachev saw it as a mortal threat. But people didn’t think the security dilemma applied anymore.

They really did believe that the United States was a benign alliance, that we were a benign hegemon. It’s not like people thought that the United States was this vicious great power that now dominated the world, and here was our chance to really dominate the world, take over, and what we have to do is come up with fancy rhetoric to disguise our behavior, and liberal hegemony is the fancy rhetoric. That’s not what happened. These people genuinely believed in what they were doing. They believed that realist logic was dead. Concepts like the security dilemma no longer mattered. And the United States could move the EU, it could move NATO eastward, it could promote the color revolutions, and it could do it in a way that did not alienate the Russians.

I think it’s quite amazing. But if you go back and look at the 1990s when liberal hegemony came to the fore and was fully developed by the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration did not have an antagonistic relationship toward the Russians, towards Boris Yeltsin. They wanted to work with Yeltsin to make NATO expansion, EU expansion, and so forth work. They did not want to have a hostile relationship with Russia. The fact is they thought they could have their cake and eat it too. What people like Kennan were saying is you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you expand NATO, you’re going to end up alienating the Russians. They did not believe that. But I think it was done in good faith. My good friend Steve Walt has written a book called The Hell of Good Intentions. And I think that does apply in this particular case. I don’t think that people like McFaul had malevolent intentions, whatever you think of their views at the moment. I think going back into the 1990s and in the early 2000s, we thought that we had a magic formula for making for a new world.

And this gets to my second major point. We did believe that we could build a security architecture in Europe. We thought we could build a security architecture that encompassed the entire globe. It’s called liberal hegemony. Just think about those words, liberal hegemony. The United States is the sole pole in the system. It’s the sole great power in the system. It is a thoroughly liberal state. And it is completely dedicated to spreading liberalism all over the planet. And by the way, Frank Fukuyama has told us, and many people believe it, that liberalism is the future. That fascism was defeated in the first half of the 20th century, communism was defeated in the second half of the 20th century, and what the default ideology is now, is liberalism. So all we have to do is just start pushing. We’ve got the wind at our back, and what you’re going to get is liberalism here, there, and everywhere. And then we’ll globalize the international economy. We’ll build all these powerful institutions and integrate states into these institutions. They will become responsible stakeholders, and we will live happily ever after.

And Glenn, as you know better than I do, in the 1990s, it looked like the Russians were moving toward liberal democracy, where at least lots of people could tell themselves a story that that’s where Russia was headed, that its authoritarian past was behind it. So in the ’90s, when this whole enterprise was set in motion, it looked like we didn’t need the kind of security architecture you’re talking about. It looked like the alternative security architecture, which was liberal hegemony, was the winning strategy for the United States. And people who argued against that really couldn’t get to first base. They were just badly outnumbered.

And because it looked like it was working at first — want to remember the first NATO expansion, first tranche of NATO expansion is 1999, and we get away with it. The second tranche is 2004, and that even includes the Baltic states, which are adjacent to Russia, and we get away with that as well. And this is why in 2008 people think you can get away with NATO expansion into Ukraine. We think that we are the hegemon. We are a liberal hegemon. Liberalism is the wave of the future, and we can spread liberalism and international institutions and globalization all over the planet.

And by the way, just to come at this from another angle, as you know, again, better than I do, Glenn, Putin was interested in working with the West. That just gave us more cause early on in the 2000s to think that we could work with the Russians, work with the Chinese, to make this happen. The Chinese were perfectly happy to go along with liberal hegemony. From China’s point of view, this was a gift from heaven. We were helping the Chinese economy grow. I remember times when I went to China and — this didn’t happen all the time, but occasionally — Chinese interlocutors would say to me, “Why is the United States helping us to grow into such a powerful state?” Because my Chinese interlocutors understood that this was not exactly the smartest strategy from America’s point of view. So I would say to them, “It’s because America is run by liberals who don’t understand balance of power politics. And they really do believe that when you get powerful, we’re going to live happily ever after.” And the Chinese would say to me, “I don’t believe that.” The Chinese would say, “The United States must have some sort of magic formula for thinking they can damage China over the long term, that they can still dominate China.” Because the Chinese understood that if we helped China grow into an economic behemoth, we, the United States, would not be able to dominate China the way we had been able to dominate China during most of the unipolar moment, because we were just so powerful. But once you lose that dominant position vis-à-vis China, then you can’t dominate the Chinese. So the Chinese were saying to me, “Why would you do this?” And I just said, “It’s because the people who are running American foreign policy are basically fools.” And they would say, “No, no, no, can’t be. These are clever people. They must have a strategy that we just don’t understand.” So I used to say to them, “Well, when you figure out what that strategy is, let me know.”

Ratcliffe’s Moscow Visit and the Danger of the Storm Shadows

GLENN DIESEN (01:04:40 – 01:07:01): Well, kind of has been my thought though, that is that all these leaders who think that they can transcend the balance of power logic supported by the Fukuyama ideologies, which you outlined, that they end up instead of transcending it, they just ignore it at their own peril. And then you see the problems building up.

But I’ll just squeeze in a last short question. That is, now though, in the ’90s, you can argue there were benign intentions, they believed in these ideas, but now that there’s an actual war, NATO is deliberately escalating. You hear it in the rhetoric, you see it in their actions. And I guess my main concern is that the Russians see themselves as being under great pressure. That is, they have to retaliate at some point. Otherwise, you can’t deter the West if you don’t actually push back. So they will have to set an example, and the Baltic states seem like an opportune target. That is, not invasion, but strike, maybe something. I’m not saying that’s the plan. I’m saying there must be — it must be on the board somewhere as a consideration, as a possibility. But the problem then would be that the NATO countries would likely do something to Kaliningrad. And at that point, I think, yeah, we would be very close to a nuclear exchange.

Now, I say this because the CIA director Ratcliffe, as you know, he just went into Moscow for a few hours, a very short trip. And according to Politico, this was to convince — again, this is Politico, I’m not sure if they’re speculating, but they said the purpose was to convince Russia not to go after NATO or test NATO or retaliate, however one wants to frame it. But I guess my question is then, how, again, we don’t know what he said, but how do you think this played out? Is he arguing — did he go to Moscow and say, to address this issue, we have to de-escalate, we’re not going to attack you anymore, or we’re going to reduce attacks on Russia, and you don’t attack the Baltic states? Or does he go there to deter? That means, we have the right to attack you, but don’t you dare to respond as we go up the escalation ladder. Don’t go up there with us. How do you see the logic playing out in Washington based on this logic of deterrence?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (01:07:03 – 01:10:53): Well, it appears from reports, and I was reading about this in the Kyiv Independent, which had a number of stories which I found very helpful. It appears that Ratcliffe went to tell the Russians not to attack into the Baltic states. And the Kyiv Independent also said that Ratcliffe delivered a message about Iran and told the Russians to cut off economic intercourse with Iran. I thought that would be part of the story, and according to the Kyiv Independent, it is part of the story.

But let’s just focus on the Baltic states. First of all, there’s no evidence to me that the Russians are thinking about attacking into the Baltic states. And the Kyiv Independent has a big story where the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and especially Latvia — the prime minister is speaking — have said that the threat level from Russia has not gone up. And what they’re talking about here is the threat of invasion. The Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and again, especially the Latvians, are making it clear that they don’t see an imminent threat from Russia in terms of an invasion. Yes, they’re worried about cyberattacks. Yes, they’re worried about Russia influencing public opinion in their countries. Yes, they’re worried about an occasional drone coming over their territory. But there’s no sense in the Baltic states that the Russians are going to invade. And again, this is in the Kyiv Independent.

So I say to myself, what’s Ratcliffe doing? I mean, where’s the threat here? Are the Russians really likely to do that? And then I say to myself, well, maybe things are going terribly on the battlefield and the Sergei Karaganov logic is beginning to kick in. They understand they can’t win on the battlefield, therefore they have to bomb some countries in Eastern Europe and they’ll start with the Baltic states. But as you know, Glenn, the Russians are actually doing very well on the battlefield. Their air campaign is working very well. They’ve turned Ukraine into a landlocked country, which is having devastating economic consequences. So it’s hard to see the Karaganov argument kicking in at this point in time and therefore motivating Ratcliffe to go to Moscow.

So I don’t know what the threat is he sees. Now, I think the most dangerous situation at the moment is the case of Britain and the cruise missiles that Britain has given to Ukraine that Ukraine is using against Donetsk. And the Russians in today’s media reports have made a big deal over an attack that Ukraine made using British Scalp, or I guess the French version is the Scalp, and the British version is the — what is the British version?

GLENN DIESEN (01:10:55 – 01:10:56): Storm Shadow?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (01:10:56 – 01:13:51): Storm Shadow. Yeah, the Storm Shadow. I can’t tell whether they used the Storm Shadow or a Scalp. The picture that I saw in RT was of a Scalp. It was French. And the story involves Storm Shadows, but they’re effectively the same missile. So let’s just say Storm Shadow.

The Russians were enraged by this Ukrainian attack with a Storm Shadow on Donetsk yesterday. And Maria Zakharova, who’s the foreign policy spokesman, said explicitly that the Russians might very well attack British targets inside of Ukraine. And then she used the words “and beyond.” Think about those words, “and beyond.” That means maybe targeting British sites outside of Ukraine, maybe Britain itself. Maybe a British ship at sea. And I thought the Russians were sending a very clear message to the West, especially to Britain, that if they’re going to continue to support attacks by these sophisticated cruise missiles on Russian territory, they should be prepared for a possible Russian retaliation, not simply against British targets inside of Ukraine, but outside of Ukraine as well.

So what I’m saying to you is there’s 3 ways of thinking about escalation to the nuclear level. One is what the Ratcliffe visit seemed to be all about, where the Russians are just getting ready to attack into the Baltic states. And that doesn’t seem plausible to me. Then there is the Karaganov scenario. That doesn’t seem plausible to me. And with regard to the whole question of these cruise missiles, these British cruise missiles, that was not raised in the visit by Ratcliffe, as best I could tell. Nobody’s saying that Ratcliffe was talking about these British slash French cruise missiles. So I don’t know exactly what’s going on here. That’s my bottom line on this. I’m curious what you think. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. What’s Ratcliffe talking about? Do you see any evidence that the Russians are getting ready to go into the Baltic states? Do you see any evidence that the Karaganov argument is kicking in?

GLENN DIESEN (01:13:53 – 01:15:16): No, well, I think that the Russians are getting very confident now, as you said, that things are going very well on the front lines. And I think they see Ukraine crumbling a bit on the front lines, the political stability, the economy. So I think it’s undoubtable that Russia is winning now, but as Ukraine begins to crumble, I think the prediction is that NATO will begin to panic and will escalate in some way, do something foolish. And the Russians would like to set a clear warning that they can back up with force, that if NATO steps over the line, that there will be retaliation. In other words, not invade anything, but restore its deterrence.

But no, I don’t think an attack is pending on the Baltic states, so I’m not quite sure. It could be he was there for, as you said, primarily about Iran though. But again, why wouldn’t Russia support Iran? They can’t afford to see Iran fall. And also the US is currently attacking inside Russia. Why wouldn’t they assist the Iranians? I don’t know. But again, that’s why I was wondering, is it about mutual de-escalation or is it just pushing one side to stand down. It’s very hard to tell though.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (01:15:17 – 01:16:38): But yeah, again, if you read the newspaper reports, it looked like deterrence. We were trying to deter the Russians from invading the Baltic states. But as I’m saying to you, there’s no evidence that the Russians were getting ready to invade the Baltic states. And in fact, if you look at the Kyiv Independent today, it says that the leaders in the 3 Baltic states do not see any evidence that the Russians are getting ready to attack. And in fact, they’re trying to assure their publics to relax, that World War III is not going to start tomorrow.

So I don’t understand what Ratcliffe was doing. And as I said, I think the one scenario to worry about, not too much, but somewhat, is the whole question of the Storm Shadows and the Scalps, these sophisticated cruise missiles that the British are giving to the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians used yesterday and the Russians are enraged about. And you had Maria Zakharova come out and say that the Russians may strike outside of Ukraine. That obviously would not be good.

Closing

GLENN DIESEN (01:16:39 – 01:16:46): I agree. Well, thank you for taking time, and I’m sorry we went a little bit over time there today. So thanks again.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER (01:16:47 – 01:16:49): You’re more than welcome, Glenn. It was a pleasure being here.

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