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John Mearsheimer: Russia’s Existential War & the Rise of a Post-Western World (Transcript)

In this wide-ranging interview, Professor John Mearsheimer joins Glenn Diesen to explain how the post-Cold War promise of Fukuyama’s “end of history” gave way to multipolarity, great power rivalry, and a crisis of Western moral authority. They discuss Europe’s uncertain place in the new world order, the US-Russia diesel deal and the latest Trump-Zelensky clash, why Russia is winning the war of attrition in Ukraine, and the escalating conflicts involving Iran, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia. This interview was premiered on October 17, 2026. Read the full transcript of this insightful interview below:

From the “End of History” to a Multipolar World

GLENN DIESEN: (00:00:00 – 00:02:02): Welcome back. Today is October 17th, 2026, and we have the pleasure of being joined by Professor John Mearsheimer. Thank you for coming back on the program.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: My pleasure, Glenn.

GLENN DIESEN: We see that a lot of things are happening in the world. That is the US-Russia diesel deal. We see the subsequent conflict between Zelensky and Trump. Russia seems to be escalating in a big way in Ukraine to put an end to the war. New strikes against Iran might be coming. Yemen might defeat Saudi Arabia.

But before we get into this, I wanted to start off with a big question for context. That is, if we take a step back at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama argued that this was “the end of history.” The world would essentially unite under liberal, universal liberal democratic values and US leadership. And this didn’t only become an ideology, it almost became a religion, at least for the European politicians, but also, yeah, among the wider Western political class.

But now this is all falling apart, though. We see power has shifted to the East in a spectacular way. The former source of legitimacy is weakening. Our moral authority, that is, of the political West, especially after Gaza, has weakened significantly. Alliances are falling apart. Domestic governance is becoming more authoritarian. Also within the West, we have wars on our left and right, even with nuclear powers like Russia. So everything that’s going wrong, could be going wrong, appears to be going wrong.

So how do you, again, I know a big question, a lot of packed in there, but how did we go from all these promises of perpetual peace under the US liberal hegemon to the worst chaos we’ve seen now in, well, as long as I can remember. How do we explain this in a, I guess, a theoretical context?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: (00:02:03 – 00:08:15): Yeah, I’ll give you my simple view on this, Glenn. Frank Fukuyama wrote his famous piece in 1989, just before the Cold War ended. And then 2 years later, in December 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. So you want to understand that there was this one-two punch. One is the end of the Cold War, and then 2 is the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the principal replacement state for the Soviet Union was, of course, Russia. Which was an economic and political basket case during the 1990s.

So when Fukuyama wrote this piece, right, the Cold War was ending, but then the Soviet Union disappeared, and that just juiced up his argument. It made it look more important, more powerful than it sounded in 1989 because we were then in unipolarity. And unipolarity really reinforced the Fukuyama argument. Remember, the Fukuyama argument is made as the Cold War is coming to an end. It’s still a bipolar world. The Soviet Union is still there. But then the Soviet Union goes away, and of course the Cold War has ended. So Frank looks like he has the wind at his back, that history is on his side until it ends, that is.

But anyway, so you get unipolarity, and for much of unipolarity, it looks like Fukuyama’s argument is correct. But then what happens is the United States after 9/11 gets involved in the forever wars, and that really begins to make the unipolar moment look like a less promising world situation than many people thought it would be in the 1990s. The 1990s was the height of optimism about the Fukuyama argument. But after 2001, people began to have serious doubts, in good part because of the forever wars, but also the 2008 economic crisis, which is a significant blow to the Fukuyama vision.

But more important than all that, what happens in roughly 2017 is unipolarity goes away and we get multipolarity. And the 3 poles or the 3 great powers in the system are the United States, China, and Russia. And you want to remember that 2 of those poles are not liberal democracies. There’s only one of the 3 great powers that is a liberal democracy. That is the United States.

So this liberal international order that the United States created during the unipolar moment, and I want to be clear here, we did create a liberal international order. It was destined to fall apart. There could be no other outcome because the United States is no longer the unipole. And in a multipolar world where you have 2 out of the 3 great powers who are not liberal democracies, you’re not going to be able to sustain liberal international order. So it went away, the liberal international order. And furthermore, you got great power competition back on the table. And the end result is we are in a world today where it’s almost impossible to make the argument that we have reached the end of history. If anything, The world today looks like a giant contradiction for the Fukuyama thesis.

One final point on this. There was always a very important moral dimension to the Fukuyama argument because the idea is that liberal democracy is a positive end and liberal democrats or countries that are liberal democracies are the good guys and everybody else is the bad guys. We have moral virtue on our side.